The 40-Hour Work Week Refuses To Die
Does work give life meaning?
The world loves to whisper that Americans live to work. Is it true? Is it possible that we can have a six, or even a three-hour workday, but we just don’t want it?
In 1930, John Maynard Keynes infamously predicted that his grandchildren would eventually work a mere 15 hours a week. As far as I know, we only ever got as far as a six-hour day at Kellogg (yes, the cereal) in the post-Depression years. Maybe Keynes was just talking about Britain, but they seem to work a lot too.
Between higher efficiency and fewer accidents, Kellogg’s policy was a success. But by the late 1950s, nearly all departments were back to an eight-hour day.
Today the average full-time employee in the United States spends 47 hours a week at work. A quarter of us even admit to regularly working over 60 hours per week.
That’s better than the near 70 hour weeks factory workers endured in the mid-1800s, but not by much.
We don’t need to work 40 hours a week
Widening inequality ensures that a sizable amount of the population will always have to work to barely get by, but the dark truth is that society’s material human needs on aggregate could be satisfied several times over and that’s been…
