The Best Way to Create Jobs - Cut the Work Week

[maryf]

The Best Way to Create Jobs

Cut the Work Week

By EUGENE P. COYLE

We have been trained to think of unemployment and stagnant pay as a
shortage of jobs. That fits the neoliberal sales message of endless
growth and expansion. If we think of our problem as shortage of jobs and
stagnant wages, the policy is always stimulus, more production, more
consumption, more growth. In short, the treadmill the economy has been
on for years. The stimulus is a high-energy drink to get us back on the
treadmill. But if we think of the problem as a surplus of workers
instead of a shortage of jobs, then a third tool beyond monetary and
fiscal policy emerges – cutting the workweek. From that good things
unfold. The policy becomes more jobs, environmental cleanup, and a
transfer of income from the richer to the poorer. Most important, it is
scalable to fit the problem. Standard working hours can be cut again as
needed, while monetary and fiscal policies are exhausted and at the
limit of how low interest rates and how high the deficit can go.

A pay squeeze was going on for years before the current collapse in the
economy made it worse. The economy crashed because for years workers in
the U.S.A. have been unable to buy, out of income, what they produced.
Real wages have hardly grown, even for well-trained and well-educated
workers. Bureau of Labor Statistics data show a drop in real money
earnings for every educational group, from high school dropout through
college graduate, over the period 2000 - 2005. Even master’s degree
holders showed a drop, unless the degree was a professional one. Only
those with an M.D., M.B.A., J.D. or Ph.D. saw gains in money earnings,
as Scheve and Slaughter showed in Foreign Affairs in 2007. While pay
stagnated, per capita GDP soared, meaning the gains were going to
profits rather than pay. The picture is not better now.........

full: http://www.counterpunch.org/coyle12242010.html

[FreakinDJ]

1. Cut the Work Week = Cut in Earnings for most Americans

[katnapped]

2. Yep

No way business or the government will make up for lost earnings. Bad enough there's going to be a huge push in the not-t--distant future for the currently employed to accept lower earnings and no benefits.

[alphafemale]

4. No. It's an imaginary land where you can hire two people and have enough to pay both.

They each get paid for a full week. But they work half of it.

Just like we could just print more money. Hand it out and then everyone would be gazzilionaires and would never be hungry!

[lumberjack_jeff]

18. It's not imaginary.

Cutting the workweek constrains the supply of labor. Anything that constrains a supply raises its price.

With massive unemployment, there's considerable slack, but once that slack is taken up, wages will rise.

I'd start by making overtime double or triple time instead of time and a half. Encourage employers to hire enough people to do the jobs instead of making a few do it.

[alphafemale]

20. And where is all this imaginary money coming from?

This Utopia stuff?

Where everyone has all the magic money they want and they don't really have to work all that hard???

No so much at all...really.

[Oakland]

26. Plenty of money,

priorities are just screwed up. End the wars, tax the rich, put tariffs on imports, tax offshoring, create jobs.

[lumberjack_jeff]

29. It is more profitable to overwork 1 person than to spread the labor between two.

The average German worker works 1300 hours per year or 32, 40-hour weeks.
The average US worker works 1777 hours per year or 44 1/2, 40-hour weeks.

The EU has a mandatory 48 hour weekly cap. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Working_time_directive

Throughout the OECD, productivity is inversely related to working hours. Those who work the hardest (defined as getting the most done per hour), work the shortest hours.

Yes, those who work 60 hour weeks would have their work spread among the currently underemployed. If the labor available to do jobs became inadequate to do them, the value of labor would go up.

You'd still get paid well, but so would the Joneses. But that's the rub, isn't it? Americans measure our social fitness not by our own Mercedes, but by our neighbor's Buick. A situation in which the neighbor can afford a Mercedes too, despite being not quite as socially fit as me, is intolerable.

That belief fucks up our society from top to bottom, and was shown in bas relief during the healthcare debates. "If my money can't buy a better, happier, longer life than my neigbor, it threatens the entire society."

[blindpig]

42. Take the profits out and there's work at fair pay for all.

Who needs the asshole Capitalists anyway? Like we couldn't preform our jobs without them? What do they do that is so great that they are allowed to steal from all of us?

[maryf]

43. +1000

:applause:

[maryf]

6. Kellogg's did it in the 30's, one article on edit

correction, it did cut pay some, people were more relaxed and worked better...one article:

One of the least-known flirtations with the 30-hour work week was by the cereal giant, W.K. Kellogg Company. In 1930, the company announced that most of its 1500 employees would go from an eight-hour to a six-hour work day, which would provide 300 new jobs in Battle Creek. Though the shorter work week involved a pay cut, the overwhelming majority of workers preferred having increased leisure time to spend with their families and community.<16>

New managers who began running Kellogg had no enthusiasm for the shorter work day. They polled workers in 1946 and found that 77% of men and 87% of women would choose a 30-hour week even if it meant lower wages. Disappointed, management began examining which work groups liked money more than leisure and began offering the 40-hour week on a department-by-department basis.

How long did it take them to get rid of the 30-hour week? Almost 40 years! The desire to have more time to themselves was so strong that it was not until 1985 that Kellogg was able to eliminate the 30-hour work week in the last department.

The experience at Kellogg indicates that it is absolutely false to say that all workers all of the time crave more stuff and will sacrifice anything to get it. Karl Marx made a similar observation when writing about “The Working-Day”. Quoting results of a poll of those who had laboured excruciating hours at a Lancashire factory, “They would much prefer working 10 hours for less wages…” <17>

the whole article is worth a read http://links.org.au/node/1077

[DeadEyeDyck]

19. In the 30's you could pay two people for a half weeks work

the same as paying one person for a full week. But that is not the case today.

[lumberjack_jeff]

30. Define "You".

Employers will hire people to do tasks that they can resell profitably. Period.

If the cost of everyone's wages goes up, they find ways to operate more efficiently or they raise prices.

Employers "can" do anything they are required to do. Businesses that can't survive changing conditions are unfit.

[NNN0LHI]

22. Is that what happened when we went from a 6-day to a 5-day workweek?

Or are you just spouting bullshit that someone told you?

Don

[FreakinDJ]

35. Over Time Pay Laws created the 5 day work week

We need MORE enforcement of existing State Over Time Pay laws and perhaps Federal Over Time Pay Laws

[Oakland]

25. Incentivize Social Security instead of cutting it.

If you encourage people to retire, it will free up a whole lot of jobs. Instead, Obama is going to cut Social Security and cause older workers to hang onto their jobs as long as possible. What we need is a Democrat in the White House.

[soryang]

3. Lower the social security retirement age

Increase marginal tax rates on corporations. Business investment tax credits and deductions don't work if there isn't a progressive increase in marginal rates of taxation. This is hornbook tax policy but the "efficient market" ideologues and their media allies have done everything to obscure and censor the truth.

Target tax penalties and tariff increases on major users of the US markets who offshore labor, tax and environmental costs to level the playing field. US manufacturers who move tangible capital investments offshore should be specifically targeted.

Increase the penalties on multinational corporations who engage in conspiracy to violate US tax laws. Fines levied by the federal government are typically less than ten percent of the billions robbed from the treasury each year by big banks.

Increase the estate tax to stop the permanent alienation of wealth from commerce. An economy of speculators, hoarders, and hedge funds is not a healthy economy with growing commerce.

The current US tax structure and economy is a neo-feudal economy of a permanent class of aristocrats that don't give a damn about commerce but only how much unearned income they can garner by virtue of birth.

[maryf]

5. Yep, thanks!

[RUMMYisFROSTED]

11. +2

[maryf]

7. Study on work hours for Americans

http://web.arizona.edu/~vas/459/isittime.htm


September 1996
Is It Time to Dump the Forty-Hour Week?
by Dennis Kaplan and Sharon Chelton

You know the drill: those mornings when the alarm clock can be the cruelest sound in the world, when the end of the work day — the part that comes after commute, dinner, cleanup and trip to Radio Shack to replace your pager batteries — can seem a lifetime away. Want to hear a joke? How about that hiking group you were thinking of joining? How about reading a book?

The problem seems both entirely individual and as impersonal as a summer heat wave. What politician or party or ballot measure could offer relief? These days, those of us lucky enough not to have been “downsized” or “restructured” out of our jobs altogether find our work schedules crowding out everything else. More of us are working overtime. Yet others, such as San Francisco office manager Merriam Luskin, believe that even 40 hours is “too much.” When she adds up the lunch preparations, the wait at “the world’s ugliest bus stop,” and travel time, she feels she is “never far away from work.”

Lack of quality time is a painful daily reality for many. It affects people more directly than the majority of concerns expressed in opinion polls, but as an economic and political issue, the problem goes unacknowledged and ignored. In recent years, however, some economists have once again opened the issue of work time, and are re-examining the 40-hour week as the unchallenged standard.

Harvard economist Juliet Schor is one of these new voices, and her book The Overworked American is among those which have rekindled the debate. Schor contends:

~ Americans work longer hours and have less vacation time than their European counterparts.
~ Work hours are increasing (up 163 hours annually since 1969).
~ If the present trend continues, in 20 years the average person will be working over 60 hours per week.
~ Employers reap an economic benefit from longer hours and any attempt to reduce them will be met with stiff opposition.

more at link

[GreenPartyVoter]

8. Thank you for posting this Mary.

[maryf]

12. My pleasure

makes a lot of sense to me...so long as folks maintain health benefits et al...I'd like to see the pay stay the same, doubt very much productivity would go down; the days of the Monday or Friday cars might be gone!

[Historic NY]

9. He sound the the county executive where I live, cut the work week...

lopped off the lunch & breaks from the clock and pays them for 35 hour week. A few more hours and they will be considered part timers w/o benefits. It might be grand 4 day work week but for less money. I understand schools in Kentucky are on a 4 day week too.

http://stats.bls.gov/opub/ted/1998/dec/wk5/art04.htm

[RegieRocker]

10. I have already initiated this due to the fact I am contracted.

No need to work 5 days when I can do the work in 4. Until more work is available it seemed the logical thing to do.

[maryf]

14. I'd actually like to teach a 4 day week with Wednesday's off...

I think the kids would learn more...and get more homework done...

[RegieRocker]

16. Good idea

except for the parents finding someone to watch kids in the middle of work week. But it can be done. Some schools around be are 4 weeks on 2 weeks off all year.

[maryf]

23. 4 weeks on, 2 weeks off...

seems pedagogically unsound, some subjects require regular practice...might be better than 2 months off in the summer though...and, as a teacher, I'd be less stressed for sure...

[RegieRocker]

27. I looked it up it's actually 9 weeks on 3 weeks off

I am a proponent of all year school with students graduating at age 16. 2 years off working, then on to college at 18. This would give them a better grasp of what is ahead in life and many kids drop out of school once they start driving. Hopefully after having worked for minimum wage for 2 years they would see the benefit of getting further education. There is much lost in the minds of summer vacation. Maybe a 8 week on 2 week off would be best.

[Brickbat]

28. My kids are on a four-day week. I have mixed feelings about it.

[maryf]

32. I'd be interested in hearing about that

but it gets a bit far afield of the topic, perhaps...

[Brickbat]

37. Oh, I'll drift away...

The main reason I'm annoyed is that the switch was made to save money through cutting bus service and support staff salaries. I object to balancing a school district's budget on the backs of support staff and bus drivers, before considering things like bus and activity fees, cutting extracurriculars, and so on.

I work at home, and so my family was more flexible than most when it came time to have the kids at home on the fifth day. My kids are also pretty good about keeping themselves entertained. On the other hand, that's 20 percent of my work week where the kids are at home. I write and edit from home, and sometimes have to do interviews on the phone or in person.

The day is longer, and this is a very rural and wide-flung district. If my kids were to ride the bus in the morning, I would have to have them up before 6 a.m. I understand that for high-schoolers, but it's hard on elementary-school kids. They ride the bus home and it is dark out in the winter by the time they get to our house. First-world problems, I know, but it is an annoyance.

I was hoping there would be more intensive homework on the fifth day, or more projects that could be worked on over the weekend, but so far that has not been the case.

One nice thing about the fifth day is that you can schedule appointments for that day, and so the kids miss less school.

[maryf]

38. good reasons

and I hate to see workers get the short shrift (and often be told it's for the kids)...especially support staff who usually work so hard for so little...thanks for drifting! While so many envy work at homers, it takes a lot of discipline to make it work, kudos.

[Lady President]

36. My college did that

My college had Wednesdays off, except for labs. It was great. I went to school back when you still needed to go to the library for research, so that was an extra day to get things done. Also, having labs primarily on Wednesdays made it much easier for the science students to schedule classes. I know that some people have problems with college athletics, but it allowed us to have sporting events on Tuesday and Wednesday nights without falling behind in our courses.

That said, I don't think I would like it as a worker. Every week parents would want to "work from home" to avoid childcare costs. Realistically, those of us without kids would have to shoulder the burden, attend their meetings, etc. My already long work week would end up increasing.

[stray cat]

13. Mandatory furloughs cut deficits but do not create more money for job creation

[maryf]

15. This isn't about mandatory furloughs...

though you are right about that...

[stray cat]

17. No - but the result seems the same - shorter work week

[maryf]

21. No necessarily shorter work week...

could just be shorter hours..7 vs. 8...

[Skink]

24. Already done.

we've come to know it as under employed.

[maryf]

31. I think this can be done in a way

To give people jobs while current workers don't lose...of course tearing down the whole system and rebuilding would be best...

[Obamanaut]

33. More discussion at this earlier thread. ->

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=439x70732

[maryf]

34. Thanks so much, I'm blushing...

I usually search harder to make sure I don't duplicate...couldn't ask for a better poster to duplicate though...

[Motown_Johnny]

39. best way to cut American's standard of living = cut the work week

all it will do is force people to get the same done in less time




This approach is so over simplistic as to be laughable, if it weren't so sad that is.

[maryf]

40. but what about those people (getting close to depression stats)

who have no income whatsoever? Tax the rich is the first step anyway, then make them pay better than slave wages for fewer hours.

[OnionPatch]

41. I recently went from 30 to 40 hours a week.

Coincidentally, so did a close friend of mine, so we compared notes. After being on 40 for about a year, we've both come to the conclusion that that extra 10 hours of free time each week made a HUGE difference in our lives. There was time for family outings and to spend one-on-one time with our kids, to help with the homework (without feeling tired and stressed), more time to spend on our own projects/hobbies (some of which actually made us a little money) and more time to keep ourselves and our families healthy through exercise, cooking healthy meals, growing our own gardens, getting a decent night's sleep. The quality of life for us and our families was so much better when we worked 30. Since we've been back on 40, we've both gained weight and feel stressed and tired much of the time. We're eating fast food again and feeling snappy with the kids more often. Hobbies? Gardens? PTA? Volunteer? Who has time for that? That extra ten hours of pay is not worth it for us but....we need our jobs and it's required by most all employers. I'd love to see that change. For it to become the norm would be a great thing for Americans in more ways than one.

[maryf]

44. +300,000,000 potential

happy working Americans!! Thanks so much!