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Economy
The six-hour work day solves the problem
By Conrad Schmidt
Technological efficiency is the root of the economic crisis, and over-production can be solved by sharing the remaining work
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The best way to get a grip on the current financial crisis is to look at a few past recessions and depressions. The most famous is the Great Depression of the 1930s, but more revealing for our case today is a much smaller recession that happened in England following the invention of the spinning jenny.
James Hargraves invented the spinning jenny in 1764. It could spin yarn eight times faster with the same amount of labour. The initial economic impact was that the price of yarn dropped and many yarn spinners lost their jobs. Violent riots ensued, many of the new machines were smashed, and Hargraves was forced to flee for his life.
Eventually the demand for yarn grew and because textiles were now significantly cheaper, people started to consume more. Wild radical consumerist ideas such as changing your underwear weekly started and soon a whole regular change of clothes became possible for the common man. The industrial textile industry of the late 18th century was the fastest growing segment of the economy and was one of the driving forces that lead England into the industrial revolution.
Industrial technology increases the efficiency with which we can produce more goods and services. But if we do not consume more as technology wends its way, we end up with a surplus of labour and people lose their jobs.
The same pattern repeated itself in the early 20th century. There were more new technological inventions in the late 19th and early 20th centuries than ever before. Combustion engines, production lines, transatlantic flights, radio and many other inventions increased productivity. The biggest increase in output as a result of technological efficiency was in the automobile sector where output of automobiles increased ten fold. Tractors and mechanization of farms increased the efficiency of food production. Between 1923 and 1930, output per labourer increased 25%. However take home pay only increased 8%.
The first person to predict the coming of the depression in the thirties was Henry Ford. He pointed out that even though technology now enabled factories to produce so much more, the average person could not afford to buy all the goods being manufactured.
In 1933, when throwing his support behind the Industrial Recovery Act, Henry Ford stated, “The factories are not stopped for the lack of money, but the lack of orders. Money loaned at the top means nothing. Money spent at the bottom starts everything.”
Eventually the world economies got out of their financial crisis because people started to consume more. Initially it was in the form of a wartime economy. More bombs, tanks and planes were produced, but after the war, a new and much heightened consumerist culture emerged.
The National Industrial Recovery Act instituted by President Roosevelt empowered consumers by ensuring a minimum wage, preventing labour exploitation, and actively providing employment in government-funded construction projects. Corporations that recognized the power of marketing constantly encouraged new forms of consumption. For the next 70 years consumption more or less kept up with the ability of technological efficiency to produce more and more goods.
The relationship between technological efficiency and consumption continued into the 1990s when the economy started to slow down again. In an attempt to reinvigorate the economy, large amounts of money were loaned to consumers in an attempt to get them to purchase more. This strategy did not work and ten years later, the effort culminated in the sub prime mortgage crisis.
Today the average worker is approximately 400% more efficient than a worker in the 1950s. In just eleven hours a worker can produce the same amount of goods and services as someone working 40 hours in the 1950s. It also means that 400% more stuff has to be consumed or people will loose their jobs.
The present economic problem is two fold. Firstly, once adjusted for inflation, wages in North America have barely risen. In a global context, the situation is much more serious. When jobs are exported to third world countries with minimum labour standards, it creates a labour force that can’t afford to buy all the goods and services being produced. This is a virtually identical repeat of the problem that caused the Great Depression.
Secondly, what we have been consuming is the planet itself. According to the UN Millennium Report, 60 percent of the world’s ecosystems are in substantial decline. According to a study done by Dalhousie University, the world’s stock of large fish has decreased by 90 percent. Even the US intelligence agency is warning that we will be facing serious water shortages by 2025. What got us out of previous depressions and recessions is that people started to consume more. But now, if current surplus production capacity is balanced with increased consumption, our ecological footprint will increase faster than it has ever done before. World leaders are frantically trying to find new ways for consumers to return to their dutiful roles of spending more and more. If they succeed, we are going to have a much bigger problem to deal with.
So what’s the solution now? One potential solution is what was implemented in 1933 by President Roosevelt during the Great Depression, a measure to reduce the workweek from ten hours a day to eight hours a day. Instead of having a high unemployment rate, the work was shared so that more people could remain employed.
Technological efficiency gives us a choice: we can either continue to work just as hard and exponentially consume and grow the economy, or we can translate those gains in efficiency into other more meaningful activities such as child rearing, education, arts and holding elected leaders accountable. It is not surprising to learn that countries that do have lower workweeks such as Norway, Holland and Germany, are more egalitarian and have lower crime rates. This might be coincidental, but I suspect that when people have time to invest in other types of work besides trying to endlessly fill up landfills with junk, we create the opportunity for a healthier and wiser society.
In 1933 we changed from a ten hour day to an eight hour day. Maybe its now time to change to a six hour day.
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