contrast, if we adapt to the windfall of productivity that the new smart machines will offer by enjoying it, taking its fruits in greater leisure and shorter working hours, the work which will still require human skills and human input can be shared by many more people. Seeking instead to create millions of new jobs at the old forty hour standard will create the intense pressure to grow that leads to heedless rather than beneficial growth, a situation we already know places severe strains on our air, water, and climate. The price of “succeeding” in replacing all of those jobs with new ones may be even higher than that of failing. The pursuit of a shorter workweek is not some radical idea that has never been tried. It was for much of the modern era the thrust of history, a powerful force that for millions of people contributed to making life better in the twentieth century than it was in the nineteenth and that could make life better in the twenty-first century than it was in the twentieth. Somewhere in the last century, after having successfully reduced the standard workweek from eighty to sixty to forty hours a week, we lost our momentum, and we have been stuck around forty for a very long time. Many circumstances converge on the wisdom of resuming this stalled historical trend.
The Question of Distribution
A significant reduction in the typical work week would give us leeway to make the necessary changes to achieve a dynamic yet sustainable way of life, reducing the compulsive pressure to grow that threatens the very viability of our planet. It would enable us as well to assimilate the extraordinary technological advances of our era so that their primary impact is experienced as enhancing our lives rather than threatening our jobs. And, very importantly, it would provide a path toward a way of life that was less pressured and harried, more rewarding and enjoyable.
But for reduced working hours to become an accepted and pursued social goal, we will need to address an important challenge: How will we ensure that reduced working hours do not mean a reduced standard of living; that working (say) half as much does not mean having only half as much access to the goods and services the economy provides? There would be little enthusiasm for a shift to shorter working hours if we do not clearly address this issue.
In thinking about this question, it is useful to begin by looking back at the history of the progressive reduction in working hours that for so many years characterized the dynamics of industrial societies. This significant reduction in the workweek over the years did not lead to a decline in living standards, even though it meant people were working less. Quite the opposite. The reduction in working hours was more than compensated for by technological advances that enabled workers to turn out more product per given hour of work, and thus the decline in working hours proceeded side by side with an increase in living standards. (When Ford adopted the forty-hour week at his company in 1914, he doubled workers’ pay at the same time).
It is conceivable that even more could have been produced if people continued working sixty, seventy, or eighty hours a week,* but in essence workers took some of the fruits of increasing productivity in time rather than only in material goods. Time is a much more scarce and precious commodity, and it is consistent with the central theme of this book that, at our society’s level of economic development, our once again beginning to take some of the dividends from increasing productivity in time will be much more humanly satisfying than just being able to buy more and more. Indeed, as noted in the witty quotation I cite in Chapter Seven from Swedish economist Stafford Linden, there are limits to our very ability to consume; consumption takes time, and time is the very commodity we deprive ourselves of in our otherwise ever expanding economy.
Nonetheless, it is important to understand that a significant reduction in the standard workweek—especially when it is a response to technological advances that enable much of the work formerly done by people to be effectively done by intelligent machines—need not mean that the populace now enjoying shorter working hours will lose access to the package of goods and services to which they had become accustomed. But for this to happen, we will need to rethink some of our familiar assumptions.
Useful perspective on some of the rethinking that could lead to maintaining current standards of consumption while reducing the workweek is provided by returning to the example of the truck drivers whose jobs may be threatened by the adoption of driverless vehicles. It remains important to notice that if this happens, the amount of goods being delivered will not diminish one iota. The driverless vehicles will be able to deliver the exact same amount of goods as before (indeed, more, because they will not need to stop for sleep, food, or bathroom breaks). The question then is how to enable the people who once drove trucks to have access to the goods they once delivered. The same total supply of goods will still be there, so in principle the former truck drivers could continue to consume the same share of that total without anyone else having less.
Framing it in this way, of course, does not take into account that we are not comfortable with just “giving” it to them, and they would likely not be happy with simply getting a “handout.”* Thus, ultimately, the challenge remains one of helping them find alternative jobs—and an important purpose of transitioning to a shorter workweek through most of society would be to make that easier to accomplish. But such a shift to new lines of work for millions of people is no small matter. The purpose of my odd thought experiment—asking why, if the same stuff is still there, they can’t continue to get the same stuff—is to invite us to step back from our familiar assumptions and confront anew questions we had long thought were settled.
Much the same questions just raised about the delivery of goods can be asked regarding their manufacture. There is a similar prospect in this realm of intelligent machines taking over more of the work once done by people—and we can include here as well medical diagnoses offered by computers, programs that generate wills or tax returns, online search sites for booking flights and hotels, and other such substitutions of technology for human work that we are already seeing emerging. Such technologies do not totally do away with the need for doctors, lawyers, accountants, or travel agents—and as discussed earlier, they can potentially create the need for whole new categories of work. But they certainly disrupt the professional lives of those who had previously been doing what the program now does. And once again, we confront a situation (especially clearly evident in the manufacture of actual physical products) in which the same total output is available to the public even if the same input of labor is not required. Thus, here too the problem can be translated into one of finding a way to get the very same product to the very same set of people.
Casting the question in this very basic, concrete, and purposefully naive way has the potential to make room for fresh ways of thinking about access to the economy’s output and about the foundations for an economy organized around goals other than the frantic, environmentally hazardous pursuit of growth. It enables us to view the problem less exclusively as one of increasing production and points toward the task of creatively devising new rationales and strategies for distribution.
None of this means that we do not need to be concerned about ensuring that people can find jobs. Loss of income is not the only reason that unemployment is consistently found to be one of the most stressful experiences a person can undergo. For many people, their jobs are a central source of meaning, identity, and belonging. What people see as threatened by the prospect of unemployment is not just their access to material goods but their place in society and their way of life.
Indeed, it is the very importance of maintaining high levels of employment that leads to my interest in the shorter workweek as a key element in a way of life that is sustainable on both human and environmental grounds. Reducing the standard workweek would enable more people to have jobs for any given level of demand for work, and it would thus enable more jobs to be available without requiring that the demand for work continue to grow unceasingly, as in an economy characterized by the imperative of growth. If full time work became consensually understood as twenty hours a week, that would begin to be experienced as the norm, and people working that number of hours would experience themselves
