Monthly Review
06-29-2011, 09:45 PM
Today, there is almost no memory of shorter hours as a road not taken on the way to Johnson's Great Society. What ever happened to the idea of a shorter workweek? What ever happened to the future in which progress was to be marked by growing abundance and diminished work? What ever happened to organized labor's perennial demand for shorter hours and higher wages? . . . [T]he logic of shorter hours was unique in its capacity to articulate a vision of diminished job competition on the basis of less work for all rather than protected work for the anointed. . . . But what happens when the desire for less work is obstructed and repressed? . . . The eclipse of the shorter hours movement within the American labor movement was one of the central manifestations of the triumph of corporatist labor relations in the United States.
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