The Interwar Period as a Machine Age:

Volume 31, Issue 3 (Interactions of Interwar Physics: Technology, Instruments, and Other Sciences)
September 2018 , pp. 263-292

The Interwar Period as a Machine Age: Mechanics, the Machine, Mechanisms, and the Market in Discourse
Richard Staley (a1)


DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0269889718000236
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 September 2018

Argument


This paper examines some of the ways that machines, mechanisms, and the new mechanics were treated in post-World War I discourse. Spengler's 1919 Decline of the West and Hessen's 1931 study of Newton have usually been tied closely to Weimar culture in Germany, and Soviet politics. Linking them also to the writings of Rathenau, Simmel, Chase, Mumford, Hayek, and others, as well as to Dada and film studies of the city will indicate central features of a wide-ranging, international discourse on the machine and mechanization. I argue that machines were so thoroughly integrated into social and economic experience that we can treat this as a distinctive new phase in the cultural history of mechanics, what some contemporaries called the “machine age”: a period in which rather than the hand mill or steam engine, the city stands as an appropriate realization (and sometimes symbol) of the significance but also ambiguities and tensions of mechanical life; and concepts of mechanization were extended to encompass the economy and market mechanisms.

The Intellectual Appropriation of Technology: Discourses on Modernity, 1900-1939

 Paperback – Oct. 27 1998

by Mikael Hård (Editor), Andrew Jamison (Editor)

The Intellectual Appropriation of Technology: Discourses on ...

https://books.google.ca › books

Mikael H°ard, ‎Andrew Jamison, ‎Professor of Technology and Society Andrew Jamison - 1998 - ‎Technology & Engineering

The Intellectual Appropriation of Technology Discourses on Modernity, 1900-1939 edited by Mikael Hard and Andrew Jamison Starting around 1900, technology ...

The American Dream — A 16 hour work week

The American Dream — The Four Hour Day

We want to work less. We have to work less. We should work less. Let’s work less?

May 2, 2017 ·

The idea of shortening the workweek has gone mainstream: Forbes ran a piece advocating a 4-day workweek, The New Yorker, a 3-day week. Though it was anarchists and socialists who originally fought for the 8-hour day, it became mainstream, too. The vision for a four hour day is quite old itself — the economist John Maynard Keynes predicted in 1930, that in 100 years, we’d be working 15 hour weeks thanks to technology.

Yet, the utopian reduction in working hours is not playing out how Keynes foresaw. Instead of working less, we’re working more! “Nearly 86% of American men and 67% of women work more than 40 hours in any given week,” reports Forbes. Yet, the unemployment rate stood at 9.4% in January 2017(using the U-6 measure, which includes discouraged workers and involuntary part-time workers).

It’s a pretty sensible idea. Productivity has increased by 80.4% between 1973 and 2011 — shouldn’t our wages and working hours reflect that? Along with the rise of productivity, work has been disappearing and is doing so ever more rapidly. A study at Oxford University found that 47% of US jobs are at risk of being automated in the next 20 years. Machines are already replacing 90% of workers at some factories in China, and the iPhone manufacturing giant Foxconn plans to automate at least 30% of its jobs by 2020. Touchscreens are replacing cashiers; artificial intelligence is replacing translators, analysts, and actuaries; even managerial tasks are being automated. And this doesn’t have to be a bad thing.

4 Hour Day/Day Week — And no wage cuts!


“Automation and other innovations result in our productivity (output per work hour) doubling every 25 years or so,” writes Jon Bekken in his essay, “Arguments for a Four Hour Day,” published by the IWW. “We now [in 2000] produce about three times as much in an hour of work as we did in 1947, but are we living three times as well or working a third as much? Far from living better, average wages (adjusted for inflation) are only slightly higher than they were 25 years ago. And we’re not putting any fewer hours in on the job either, in fact we’re working longer and harder — somebody’s benefiting from the fact that our work is producing more; but it’s not us.”


In case you need convincing, Bekken goes on to provide rationale for the four hour day/four day week he proposes:


“The most important reason to fight for shorter hours is quite simple: Our time is our life. The time we spend at work is not our own, and far too much of it is squandered on useless production, the support of parasites (bosses, supervisors, investment bankers, marketers and the like), the construction of the means of our annihilation, and so forth.”

Make unemployment a thing of the past


“We could use that time to nurture our families and rebuild our communities, to make art or music or to study subjects that interest us. We could socialize, party, reflect, relax. We could use some of the free time we so richly deserve to get together with our fellow workers to discuss the kind of society we would like to live in, and to begin a campaign to create it. More free time (for too many of us, any free time at all) would provide us the means to lead more fulfilling, truly human lives.”

The philosopher Bertrand Russell joins the club of advocates. In “In Praise of Idleness”, he not only advocates the four-hour-day but gives many a reason why. Russell envisions that freedom from work will free us to pursue science, art, and writing, without the pressure to make a living from it.


“In a world where no one is compelled to work more than four hours a day, every person possessed of scientific curiosity will be able to indulge it, and every painter will be able to paint without starving, however excellent his pictures may be. Young writers will not be obliged to draw attention to themselves by sensational pot-boilers, with a view to acquiring the economic independence needed for monumental works, for which, when the time at last comes, they will have lost the taste and capacity.”

“ Above all, there will be happiness and joy of life, instead of frayed nerves, weariness, and dyspepsia.”

Bekken cites several examples of economists who have already found that a shortened workweek is feasible. A study by engineers at Columbia University in 1932 demonstrated that workers could live comfortably on four-hours per day if industry were arranged differently. In her book The Overworked American Harvard economist Juliet Schor argued that a four-hour day could have been implemented in the 1990s without any decline in living standards.

In 2010, the New Economics Foundation published a report, “21 Hours: The Case for a Shorter Workweek”. Their rationale:


“Overwork, unemployment, over-consumption, high carbon emissions, low well-being, entrenched inequalities, and the lack of time to live sustainably, to care for each other, and simply to enjoy life.”

Why work pointless jobs?

Not only are we working too much, but our work has become meaningless. In “Why Capitalism Creates Pointless Jobs,” David Graeber lists off the administrative and managerial positions that dominate the US workforce.

From personal experience, Graeber claims that even those who work these jobs often find them pointless, to the point where they harbor jealousy towards those that hold meaningful jobs, such as in teaching or medicine.

“Huge swathes of people, in Europe and North America in particular, spend their entire working lives performing tasks they secretly believe do not really need to be performed,” he writes.

This hunch is supported by several studies.

“In a 2013 survey of 12,000 professionals by the Harvard Business Review, half said they felt their job had no ‘meaning and significance,’” reported Rutger Bregman in a recent article in Wired. “Another poll among 230,000 employees in 142 countries showed that only 13 per cent of workers actually like their job. A recent poll among Brits revealed that as many as 37 per cent think they have a job that doesn’t even need to exist.”

We’re tired of working. Put on your party hats.
Aside from meaninglessness, we have to question the notion of “productivity” as a positive thing. What is the point of productivity if it has no benefits for the working classes, no benefits for the world at large outside of profit for the ruling class? Moreover, greater productivity means productivity in creating not only that which is unnecessary, but in that which is harmful. Building oil pipelines that will endanger our water supply, or cars instead of public transit. Aside from stayin’ alive, what incentive is there to participate if our economic activity is ultimately harmful? And does that not make those absent from the job market somehow ethically superior?

Russell, the liberal philosopher, nails it again, almost 100 years ago:


“Owing to the absence of any central control over production, we produce hosts of things that are not wanted. We keep a large percentage of the working population idle, because we can dispense with their labor by making the others overwork. When all these methods prove inadequate, we have a war: we cause a number of people to manufacture high explosives, and a number of others to explode them, as if we were children who had just discovered fireworks. By a combination of all these devices we manage, though with difficulty, to keep alive the notion that a great deal of severe manual work must be the lot of the average man.”

Think of all the pointless or redundant jobs that exist under capitalism but wouldn’t be necessary in a socialist one. For example, while socialism may still require banking services, perhaps in the form of credit unions or nationalized banks, we certainly don’t need so many bankers. And twenty different phone and Internet companies? Why? Fifty multinational toy manufacturers making cheap plastic crap? Unnecessary.

Yet getting rid of unnecessary work isn’t even necessary to reduce the workweek dramatically. The future is here, automated.

21 Hours: The Case for a Shorter Working Week

Of the necessary, non-automated work that sticks around, we can divvy it up evenly, solving unemployment immediately.

How can a shorter workweek be achieved?

The “21 Hours” report suggests that a number of conditions would be necessary to realize this goal. They propose “reducing hours gradually over a number of years in line with annual wage increments,” along with policies that encourage employers to shorten hours, training programs for the previously unemployed, and regulations that would standardize a shorter workweek and discourage overtime.

These conditions seem reasonable. From my point of view, the most direct way to achieve a shorter workweek would be to 1) legislate a 21 (or whatever other magic number) hour work week (discouraging overtime by legislating that it be paid extra), as FDR mandated the 40-hour-week in the Fair Labor Standards Act, and 2) to double or triple the minimum wage so that fewer hours would not have an effect on income.

We can expect that employers would scoff at such a wage increase. Recently, when American Airlines raised employee wages (certainly not doubling them), investors protested. “This is frustrating,” Citi analyst Kevin Crissey wrote in a note to clients, as reported by the LA Times. “Labor is being paid first again. Shareholders get leftovers.”

While it makes technological, economic, environmental, and social sense, implementing the shortened workweek would likely prove challenging politically. Wage increases at this level may require unrest, revolts, or even revolution and a total overhaul of the economic system.

Though, while corporations may pay more per hour, they will not have to pay the robots with which they have replaced most of these hours, thus profiting from an increase in productivity, and so some concession on their part would be reasonable, if not easy. Yet we should still expect protest on their behalf, for they are profit-addicts. If we are to take the movement for a four-hour-day seriously, this should be our main concern.

With automation doing rote tasks and the elimination of unnecessary work, there is space to nevertheless increase employment in the necessary work that we’ve been slacking on: teaching, developing renewable energy, environmental restoration, mass-scale recycling projects, R&D, public transit, etc. Even with work disappearing, we still have a lot of work to do to save the planet, which is why we still need a green jobs program.
What if we don’t organize for a 15 or 20 hour work week?

There won’t be work for all of us — so will we mostly be unemployed, and fighting over freelance scraps?

“Workers of the future will need to be highly adaptable and juggle three or more different roles at a time,” said Anand Chopra-McGowan, head of enterprise new markets for General Assembly, as reported by The Guardian in its article, “Will Jobs Exist in 2050?”.

Time for a four hour day!!!

“This is either going to be very good or very bad — and either way there’s not going to be much in the way of work,” added author Richard Newton in the same article.

Certainly, no matter how you slice it, if we don’t restructure jobs and the economy to fit the times, we are heading towards a future of unemployment.
My proposal? A tripartite economic program
Creating and destroying jobs. While we destroy pointless jobs and they destroy themselves through automation, we’ll create green and socially beneficial jobs through a green jobs program. This is not just a feel-good idea but must be taken seriously as a real and urgent priority and policy point if we are to save the planet — or rather the human race from the environmental havoc we have wreaked under 150 years of capitalism.
Drastic reduction in the workweek. Perhaps we could start with 20 hours, with an eventual goal of 10.
How would these hours be remunerated? Would we all be poorer? The reduction in work hours must be met by some increase in the minimum wage. Alternatively, or additionally, these hours could be traded in exchange for basic goods and services: food, housing, energy, education, health care, and transport, and/or a universal basic income.



WRITTEN BY Mary Lorax
Some reveries, memories, and tonterias

https://medium.com/@marylor/the-american-dream-a-16-hour-working-week-95594e36fe54

THE EVOLUTION OF INDUSTRIAL DEMOCRACY ABNER WOODRUFF C.E.

THE MACHINE PROLETARIAT

With the development of the machines there also developed the grooms of the machines—the machine proletariat (workers possessing no specialized skill). These workers have always been denied recognition by the craftsmen, because the craft attitude was one of contempt for the unskilled; and further, the craftsmen have always had an instinctive knowledge of the difference of the proletarian outlook upon industry and life, and feared that the machine men would refuse to accept the "God-given" leaders and would rule the labor organizations by reason of their superior numbers. However, these workers are now organizing on their own account and, since they are now the most numerous and most militant class in production, with the most urgent need to be served, they must in the end become the dominant force within the working class and their form of organization become the prevailing form.

The machine proletariat recognizes itself as the product of the machine, and, just as the craftsmen organized into craft unions on the basis of the hand tool, because it was the source of their living, so do the proletarians organize into industrial unions, on the basis of the machine—that being the source of life. They do not recognize skill as a property, giving anyone an aristocratic standing in labor, for the conquering machine rapidly destroys such skill as yet survives. Manual training, industrial schools and shop experience quickly fit the worker for his place at the machine, so the industrial union practices no exclusion, but accepts all who enter at only a nominal fee. It regards the wages system as a passing phase and, instead of offering "a fair day's work for a fair day's wage," inscribes on its banner "the abolition of the wage system" and endeavors to build up the co-operative and communal instincts of its class. It demands the full product of its collective toil, declaring that modern conditions and modern needs have set aside all the rights of private property that may have existed heretofore, and that the modern absentee owner is a parasite, doing nothing to earn his keep. It accepts collective bargaining, but sets no time limits to its agreements and holds no contract sacred—in fact, it abhors the contract with a master—and stands ready to disregard all contracts when an observance of the same would force it into the attitude of a strike breaker, or compel it to give countenance to organized scabbery.

The machine proletariat, recognized its subject position in modern class society, stands squarely on the class struggle, organizes to carry on the class struggle, and prepares itself to direct industry and administer society when that struggle shall have been won.

In all the various social systems of the past, the wealth and power of the ruling class has depended upon the wealth producing capacity of the working class and the degree to which it could be exploited. If the tools were simple and the portion of the wealth remaining after the workers were provided for was small, then the master class which took this surplus was relatively poor. But when modern machinery is used and the working class is highly productive, then the surplus of wealth is vastly increased and the master class actually wallows in a glut of wealth. The gulf between the workers and the masters yawns wider and deeper, and the workers, increasing in intelligence, grow ever more bitter and impatient with their poverty.

The chattel slave and feudal serf might well have toiled and suffered in silence—they knew no better—ignorance, superstition and bestial conditions held them in thrall, but not so the machine proletarian. He must be quick of body and alert of intellect—only as a trained man is he useful to the masters—therefore his reactions on his environment are more intelligent and more vigorous than those of any servile worker that has preceded him. He takes up the cudgel to defend himself. All the knowledge of the world is at his command and he quickly learns that labor power applied to the materials of the earth is the source of all wealth, and that the source of the master's riches lies in his appropriation of the surplus of wealth remaining after the workers are miserably fed, clothed and housed. Conversely, he learns that the worker's poverty arises from the fact that he does not retain the surplus of his own labor for himself, but allows it to be taken by another. The proletarian learns that governments and laws are used to awe him into submission to the looting of his labor; and that school and church and press are used to lull him into quietness. Is it then strange that he despises governments, despises courts, rebukes teachers, loathes editors, abhors priests and seeks only to seize the materials and machinery of production, that thereby he may turn them to his own advantage and, through them, destroy the domination of class and the governments, laws, schools, presses and pulpits that uphold class domination?

The machine proletariat attacks private property as a human institution. It recognizes the fact that through that institution all the other institutions of modern society have their force and effect, and nothing short of its destruction as an institution will ever be satisfactory. The proletariat knows that it can build a better society—a society, into which poverty, with all its hideous concomitants, can never come—and it is thoroughly determined to build it.

THE PROCESS OF TRANSFORMATION

The historic mission of the proletariat is to overthrow the present master class and to replace this civilization with a new and better civilization. In the meantime it is under the necessity of making growth and developing itself within the framework of modern capitalism in preparation for this great transformation. Let us see what are the transforming processes going on in modern society which promote the growth of the proletariat and on which we may predicate the structure of its new society.

The greatest of these processes are: First, the perfecting of the machinery of production and distribution, which goes on by means of invention; second, the perfection of the processes of manufacture, which goes on by means of chemical and engineering experimentation; third, the perfecting of management, which goes on by means of the study of cost data and automatic systems of superintendence; fourth, the centering of wealth in the hands of a few great Plutocrats, which goes on by means of manipulation and stock jobbery; fifth, the development of the proletariat, which goes on by means of the intimate contact of the workers with the machinery of production and management; and sixth, the awakening of the proletariat to a realization of the fact that it must take over and operate the industries in order to save itself from an impending condition of Industrial Serfdom and preserve such culture as the genius of man has handed down through the ages.

So great is the inventive faculty of the human animal, that, in all of the civilized countries, great bureaus are maintained for the examination and classification of the inventions; and each great industrial plant keeps a corps of trained men constantly at work trying to perfect the machines and make them truly automatic. Prizes and bonuses are paid to workmen, who suggest valuable changes or bring in useful hints; and so great are the improvements, that, at times, entire plants are scrapped to make way for new devices that have actually revolutionized the methods in a particular line of production.
New combinations of chemical elements and new facts in regard to the qualities of old materials are constantly being discovered, with the result that new industries spring up to make and supply new wants of the people. The craftsmen are constantly threatened by the machines and whole crafts are, at times, swept off the boards to be replaced by an automatic device that can be operated by unskilled labor.

When the machines seem to be perfected, the workers themselves are experimented upon to discover new ways of doing old tasks. Motion studies are made to develop methods for increasing the output and efficiency of individuals. Rearrangement of plants and team work are devised to get the most and best work out of gangs and working forces. Automatic systems of management, by which the workers practically drive themselves, are introduced; and profit sharing, piece rate and bonus systems of payment, which are intended to induce the slaves to work themselves to death for a supposed increase of pay, are instituted.

Although the middle class, which is being consistently wiped out, screams with agony and uses every possible reactionary device, the process of the centering of wealth goes steadily forward. The personnel of the Plutocracy may change from time to time, but the number grows beautifully less and the control of industry centers into fewer hands. So also, the real government centers into these same hands; through a show of democracy is maintained to keep the ignorant and patriotic deceived as to the true state of affairs. Salaried managers, engineers, chemists and accountants, together with the workers specialized at the machines, carry on production, while the Plutocrats thimblerig the middle class with Stock Exchanges, Boards of Trade and other similar gambling devices.
skill is no longer needed, and by members of the middle class, who have lost out altogether in their efforts to buck the gigantic brace game that the Plutocrats maintain for their special benefit.

The tendency of the machines toward perfection, naturally causes the great majority of the workers to become machine attendants to the approximate a level, so far as skill is concerned; thus breaking down the craft and other artificial barriers that formerly divided them. The machine process of production prevents the separating out of individual outputs and results in a practical equality of wages. This equality of wages naturally standardizes the livings of the various workers and causes them to flow together as a class. They find themselves subjected to almost identical conditions in all sections and begin to recognize themselves as a class, regardless of races, nationalities or creeds. Recognition of class generates that sense of duty known as the social conscience—the moral sense of the working class. They study their class needs and, through their identity of interest, associate so that they may harmoniously promote those interests.

The workers now become critical of their environment. They tear it to pieces and examine its parts—they study its effects upon themselves—and see to what depths of degradation they have been reduced. They perceive the growing numbers of the unemployed (displaced by the perfecting of the machines and the long hours of labor) and the steady operation of the law of wages towards further reductions of the standard of living. They learn also that there must be a constant effort to raise the rate of pay to keep pace with the increased production and cheapening of gold, on which the prices of all commodities, including labor power, are based.

The proletariat is at bed rock. It views the world and the institutions of society from the standpoint of utter disillusionment. Everything is naked before it and its attitude is one of absolute disgust and uncompromising hostility. In fact, it is at bay—its back is against the wall—it has turned upon its tormentors. The "social revolution" is on.

TO READ OR DOWNLOAD THE FULL SET OF PDF IMAGE FILES GO HERE
YOU WILL NEED TO OPEN EACH PAGE, CLICK ON PRINT AND SAVE
YOU CANNOT DOWNLOAD THE PDF ON THE SITE
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Page:The_Evolution_of_Industrial_Democracy_(Woodruff).pdf/1

THE REAL MOVEMENT

• ABOUT

Communism is free time and nothing else!

ABOUT

A blog devoted to considering the real movement of society as described by Karl Marx:

This “alienation” (to use a term which will be comprehensible to the philosophers) can, of course, only be abolished given two practical premises. For it to become an “intolerable” power, i.e. a power against which men make a revolution, it must necessarily have rendered the great mass of humanity “propertyless,” and produced, at the same time, the contradiction of an existing world of wealth and culture, both of which conditions presuppose a great increase in productive power, a high degree of its development. And, on the other hand, this development of productive forces (which itself implies the actual empirical existence of men in their world-historical, instead of local, being) is an absolutely necessary practical premise because without it want is merely made general, and with destitution the struggle for necessities and all the old filthy business would necessarily be reproduced; and furthermore, because only with this universal development of productive forces is a universal intercourse between men established, which produces in all nations simultaneously the phenomenon of the “propertyless” mass (universal competition), makes each nation dependent on the revolutions of the others, and finally has put world-historical, empirically universal individuals in place of local ones. Without this, (1) communism could only exist as a local event; (2) the forces of intercourse themselves could not have developed as universal, hence intolerable powers: they would have remained home-bred conditions surrounded by superstition; and (3) each extension of intercourse would abolish local communism. Empirically, communism is only possible as the act of the dominant peoples “all at once” and simultaneously, which presupposes the universal development of productive forces and the world intercourse bound up with communism. Moreover, the mass of propertyless workers – the utterly precarious position of labour – power on a mass scale cut off from capital or from even a limited satisfaction and, therefore, no longer merely temporarily deprived of work itself as a secure source of life – presupposes the world market through competition. The proletariat can thus only exist world-historically, just as communism, its activity, can only have a “world-historical” existence. World-historical existence of individuals means existence of individuals which is directly linked up with world history.

Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. The conditions of this movement result from the premises now in existence.

Share this: 

https://therealmovement.wordpress.com/

Yours for Industrial Freedom”: Women of the IWW, 

1905–1930
Article (PDF Available) in Women s Studies 43(2) · February 2014 with 141 Reads 
DOI: 10.1080/00497878.2014.863105Cite this publication

Anne Mattina
Stonehill College

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/263460236_Yours_for_Industrial_Freedom_Women_of_the_IWW_1905-19301

1912 LAWRENCE STRIKE BREAD & ROSES

Fab: Personal Fabrication, Fab Labs, and the Factory in Your ComputerApril 2005

April 2005

Read More

• Author:
 
• Neil Gershenfeld

Publisher:

• Basic Books, Inc.
• Division of HarperCollins 10 E. 53rd St. New York, NY
• United States

ISBN:978-0-465-02745-3

Who Stole the Four-Hour Workday?

The Humongous Fungus Among Us Issue

Who Stole the Four-Hour Workday?

A four-hour workday could solve a lot of our problems. If everyone worked fewer hours, there would be more jobs for the unemployed to fill. The economy wouldn't be able to produce quite as much, which means it wouldn't be able to pollute as much...

By Nathan Schneider
30 December 2014, VICE

All illustrations are re-creations of four-hour-workday flyers from the 1930s and 40s. Original images courtesy of Industrial Workers of the World

Alex is a busy man. The 36-year-old husband and father of three commutes each day to his full-time job at a large telecom company in Denver, the city he moved to from his native Peru in 2003. At night, he has classes or homework for the bachelor's in social science he is pursuing at a nearby university. With or without an alarm, he wakes up at 5 AM every day, and it's only then, after eating breakfast and glancing at the newspaper, that he has a chance to serve in his capacity as the sole US organizer and webmaster of the Global Campaign for the 4 Hour Work-Day.

"I've been trying to contact other organizations," he says, "though, ironically, I don't have time."

But Alex has big plans. By the end of the decade he envisions "a really crazy movement" with chapters around the world orchestrating the requisite work stoppage.

A century ago, such an undertaking would have seemed less obviously doomed. For decades the US labor movement had already been filling the streets with hundreds of thousands of workers demanding an eight-hour workday. This was just one more step in the gradual reduction of working hours that was expected to continue forever. Before the Civil War, workers like the factory women of Lowell, Massachusetts, had fought for a reduction to ten hours from 12 or more. Later, when the Great Depression hit, unions called for shorter hours to spread out the reduced workload and prevent layoffs; big companies like Kellogg's followed suit voluntarily. But in the wake of World War II, the eight-hour grind stuck, and today most workers end up doing more than that.

The United States now leads the pack of the wealthiest countries in annual working hours. US workers put in as many as 300 more hours a year than their counterparts in Western Europe, largely thanks to the lack of paid leave. (The Germans work far less than we do, while the Greeks work considerably more.) Average worker productivity has doubled a couple of times since 1950, but income has stagnated—unless you're just looking at the rich, who've become a great deal richer. The value from that extra productivity, after all, has to go somewhere.

It used to be common sense that advances in technology would bring more leisure time. "If every man and woman would work for four hours each day on something useful," Benjamin Franklin assumed, "that labor would produce sufficient to procure all the necessaries and comforts of life." Science fiction has tended to consider a future with shorter hours to be all but an axiom. Edward Bellamy's 1888 best seller Looking Backward describes a year 2000 in which people do their jobs for about four to eight hours, with less attractive tasks requiring less time. In the universe of Star Trek, work is done for personal development, not material necessity. In Wall-E, robots do everything, and humans have become inert blobs lying on levitating sofas.

During the heat of the fight for the eight-hour day in the 1930s, the Industrial Workers of the World were already making cartoon handbills for what they considered the next great horizon: a four-hour day, a four-day week, and a wage people can live on. "Why not?" the IWW propaganda asked.

It's a good question. A four-hour workday with a livable wage could solve a lot of our most nagging problems. If everyone worked fewer hours, for instance, there would be more jobs for the unemployed to fill. The economy wouldn't be able to produce quite as much, which means it wouldn't be able to pollute as much, either; rich countries where people work fewer hours tend to have lower carbon footprints. Less work would leave plenty of time for family and for child care, ending the agony over "work-life balance." Gone would be the plague of overwork, which increases the risk of heart disease, diabetes, and Alzheimer's.

Benjamin Kline Hunnicutt, a historian at the University of Iowa, has devoted his career to undoing the "nationwide amnesia" about what used to constitute the American dream of increasing leisure—the Puritans' beloved Sabbath, the freedom to ramble that Walt Whitman called "higher progress," the Big Rock Candy Mountain. Hunnicutt's latest book, Free Time, traces how this dream went from being thought of as a technological inevitability, to becoming the chief demand in a century of labor struggles, to disappearing in the present dystopia where work threatens to invade every hour of our lives.

Hunnicutt himself has the bearing of a Whitmanesque sage, with a thick gray beard and a full-bellied chuckle. "These dreams seem to be completely forgotten, lost in a mad scramble for work and money," he laments. 

There's a hint of what happened in an essay that the renowned British economist John Maynard Keynes wrote in 1930, titled "Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren." By 2030 he expected a system of almost total "technological unemployment" in which we'd need to work as few as 15 hours a week, and that mostly just to avoid losing our minds from all the leisure. In the meantime, however, "avarice and usury and precaution must be our gods for a little longer still," Keynes believed. "For only they can lead us out of the tunnel of economic necessity into daylight."

With this, he proposed a deal with the devil: Trust in greed for a while more, and it would save us from itself. To illustrate, Kenyes made the rather anti-Semitic observation that, just as the Jew Jesus brought access to eternal life into the world, the Jews' genius for compound interest would produce so much plenty as to deliver us all from wage slavery forever. Keynes didn't expect, however, that like most deals with the devil, the devil had the upper hand: Greed managed to suck up most of the benefits of almighty progress for itself.



Hunnicutt has spent much of his career detailing exactly how. Over the course of the Depression, pressure from the captains of industry turned President Roosevelt against shorter hours. He made sure that the Black-Connery Bill for a 30-hour week, which had passed in the Senate, would die in the House. With the help of Keynes's own notion of deficit spending, FDR's New Deal set the goal of employing everyone "full-time," and the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 enshrined the eight-hour day as the norm. That was to be the last in a century of reductions. The onset of the Cold War meant that those in the labor movement who kept calling for shorter hours were derided as subversives and communists. Fewer and fewer workers were able to join a union at all. Every hour of work became more and more productive, while the owning class gobbled up an ever greater share of the benefits.

A new American dream has gradually replaced the old one. Instead of leisure, or thrift, consumption has become a patriotic duty. Corporations can justify anything—from environmental destruction to prison construction—for the sake of inventing more work to do. A liberal arts education, originally meant to prepare people to use their free time wisely, has been repackaged as an expensive and inefficient job-training program. We have stopped imagining, as Keynes thought it so reasonable to do, that our grandchildren might have it easier than ourselves. We hope that they'll have jobs, maybe even jobs that they like.



The new dream of overwork has taken hold with remarkable tenacity. Hardly anyone talks about expecting or even deserving shorter workdays anymore; the best we can hope for is the perfect job, one that also happens to be our passion. In the dogged, lonely pursuit of it, we don't bother organizing with our co-workers. We're made to think so badly of ourselves as to assume that if we had more free time, we'd squander it.

The more we are told to value work, meanwhile, the less it's actually worth. When women began entering the workforce, two incomes started to be necessary to support a family, and women are still stuck doing the bulk of housework and child care. Overtime has become mandatory for many people, and having a part-time job usually means having to work one or two others.
"Some workers got shorter work hours, but what they didn't get was stable pay," says Karen Nussbaum, who directs the AFL-CIO affiliate Working America. In what's left of the labor movement, nobody is even bothering to ask for shorter workdays; it's hard enough to win a living wage, paid sick days, a bit of vacation time, and parental leave. Compared with when she began organizing women workers in the 1970s, Nussbaum says, "the crisis is different—more acute and more widespread."

You've heard of The 4-Hour Workweek, surely. Or at least you've seen it in an airport bookstore, with businessmen glancing sidelong at the cover as if it were a lingerie catalog. It's a lonely yet best-selling fascination, the hope that by working smarter, not harder, one might join author Timothy Ferriss among the "New Rich" with some solid investments and a modicum of maintenance. And it can happen—but only to a lucky few among the million-plus suckers who've bought the book.

The idea of the four-hour workday that workers imagined a hundred years ago was different. It was for everyone—the natural consequence of advancing technology. But in the decades since World War II, capitalism has not handed over a shorter workday freely. The coming kingdom of leisure used to be considered a mainly technological problem; it has turned out to be a political one.

The Industrial Workers of the World considered shorter workdays with no cut in pay to be, in the words of one pamphlet, "THE Revolutionary Demand." The so-called Wobblies recognized that fewer hours would make sure workers reap the benefits of progress rather than let them trickle upward. To win an eight-hour day around the time of the First World War, IWW-organized loggers in the Pacific Northwest blew a whistle and walked off the job when eight hours had passed. A recent IWW pamphlet suggests another tactic to highlight the impact of long workdays on families: Have workers' children picket outside the job, carrying signs about how much they miss their parents.

In the past few months there have been small indications of progress. After much pressure from organized labor, President Obama announced stricter federal rules on overtime pay; meanwhile, the government estimated that millions of workers might switch to part-time rather than full-time jobs because they can buy their own health insurance through the new system. Congressman Paul Ryan quickly expressed fears that, with affordable coverage, "the incentive to work declines." Just the thought of the non-rich working less than all the time, and still having health insurance, was an affront to his idea of the American way. He actually said, "It's adding insult to injury."

In this way, the most practical approach to winning shorter workdays may be to detach necessities, like insurance, from employment. Peter Frase, an editor of Jacobin magazine and one of the shorter workday's most capable advocates, calls for a universal basic income. People able to cover their essential needs could choose for themselves how much they want to work as a supplement to that. But unless there are powerful, disruptive movements demanding such measures, politicians and other elites will keep on claiming that there isn't enough to go around.

Workers in countries with stronger labor organizations know better. Gothenburg, Sweden, is experimenting with a six-hour workday for municipal workers, while in France, where a 35-hour week is already common, unions are trying out a rule against checking work email after hours.

The time-saving gizmos that Benjamin Franklin hoped for are here. But rather than liberating anyone, they've become a clever disguise for corporate greed to sneak ever more into our days and nights. Few subcultures revel in staying at the office after hours so much as Silicon Valley engineers. But who really benefits from their late nights of coding?

It's probably the same people who prevent Silicon Valley's underlings from forming a union, who don't mind a single mother working two jobs, who expect you to check email at all hours, who say we need more growth rather than let the unemployed lighten whatever work already needs to be done. Those who believe these profiteers from on high, and who neglect to organize with their co-workers, are stealing the four-hour workday from themselves.

ANOTHER VICTIM OF POLICE BRUTALITY IWW FREE SPEECH FIGHT 1910

http://www.weneverforget.org/tag/james-p-thompson/

Hellraisers Journal: From the Industrial Worker: Spokane IWW Gives Impressive Farewell to Free Speech Fighter F. J. Ferry

18th April 2020 Janet Raye Free Speech Fights

———-

Hellraisers Journal – Monday April 18, 1910
Spokane, Washington – Impressive Funeral Honors Free Speech Martyr F. J. Ferry

From the Industrial Worker of April 16, 1910:

Once again the Grim Reaper Death has visited the ranks of the gallant band of men who valorously defended their principles during the recent Spokane free speech fight, and has claimed as its latest victim Fellow Worker F. J. Ferry, a member of L. U. No. 222.

Fellow Worker S. O. Chinn, the first martyr to Spokane police brutality, who died four weeks ago as a result of the hardships suffered in jail, was a young man not yet in the prime of life. He was a mere youth-the prospect of life stretched before him full of possibilities; he hadn’t begun to live yet. He had just started on “Life’s fitful dream” when he was cut off. He was out of place in this capitalistic world, as is every man of principle, so he had to be sacrificed. Not for him was the boon of life enjoyed by all animated nature; he was an intruder, a revolutionist; he interfered with the smooth working of the well-laid plan of the master class to hold the workers in subjection; his presence in life was a danger to their organized system of exploitation; therefore he, the merest stripling, with every natural right to life, was ruthlessly murdered.

In the mad career of the suicidal capitalist class, not only is the seed of the future society thus wantonly, but the old and storm-twisted oaks of the working class-men who have earned every right to peaceful old age-are also destroyed on the slightest pretext when the interest of the modern juggernaut demands it. Fellow Worker Ferry was an old man 62 years of age. He was a life-long veteran of the cruelest struggle in history-the struggle for existence in a capitalist society. Ever since early boyhood he has been robbed and abused by an insatiate parasite. In common with his fellow-slaves of the working class, he was denied the luxuries and necessaries that make life worth living. He was reduced to the condition of a machine, being given only enough of the product of his labor to simply keep life in his body. After many years of killing slavery as a baker, he became worn out and was cast aside to make room for a younger victim-like an old machine he was “scrapped.”

An old and battle-scarred victim of capitalism-deprived of home and family and all the natural attributes of a worthy old age-he earned his scanty living as best he could with seemingly no other goal in store for him than that of so many workers-an apologetic exit from life-a hurried trip to Potters’ Field.

But he became imbued with the philosophy of the new society; he joined the I. W. W.; he became a rebellious slave. For this he was made a social outcast-even more so than simply as a discarded slave-he became an object of loathing and hatred to his masters-a creature to be eradicated if possible.

Continue reading “Hellraisers Journal: From the Industrial Worker: Spokane IWW Gives Impressive Farewell to Free Speech Fighter F. J. Ferry”→

Hellraisers Journal: Fellow Worker Ferry is Second to Die Due to Brutal Treatment at Spokane’s Franklin School Prison

11th April 2020 Janet Raye Free Speech Fights

———-

Hellraisers Journal – Monday April 11, 1910
Spokane, Washington – FW Ferry Dead Due Brutal Treatment at Franklin School

From The Spokane Press of April 8, 1910:

—–

34 DAYS ON BREAD THE CAUSE
—–

F. FERRY, AN INVALID AFTER JAIL EXPERIENCE,
SUCCUMBS TO PNEUMONIA.
—–

Another death is chargeable to the brutality of the system of Chief of Police John Sullivan and the members of the Spokane police department.

Another agonizing face will await the coming of these men in the Great Beyond, where they will face the responsibility that they so shrewdly shift here below, in the name of the majesty of the law.

The latest victim of police inhumanity to man is an aged man named F. Ferry, a resident of Spokane for years, who died last night at the Spokane general hospital, Third and Washington, following a brief but deadly attack of pneumonia.

—–

Ferry took part in the free speech fight last fall and was among the first arrested and sent to the Franklin school. There, by order of chief Sullivan, he was placed on bread and water for 34 days and left the prison a physical wreck. He has since been an invalid, unable to work, and barely able to crawl around. Wednesday night he took suddenly sick with pneumonia, which found in his worn and emaciated body an easy victim, and all that medical science could do to save him was of no avail.

True, Ferry was an I. W. W. Yet he was an American citizen, a resident of Spokane for many years, whose only offense was that he thought the right of free speech should be accorded his fellow workingmen. He was a quiet, inoffensive man, past 60 years of age, and even in a Russian prison his gray hairs would have been respected and less harsh treatment shown than was manifested by the cowardly police force of Spokane.

Continue reading “Hellraisers Journal: Fellow Worker Ferry is Second to Die Due to Brutal Treatment at Spokane’s Franklin School Prison”→

Hellraisers Journal: From the Industrial Worker: Funeral of S. O. Chinn, Spokane Free Speech Martyr, Largely Attended

8th April 2020 Janet Raye Free Speech Fights

———-

Hellraisers Journal – Friday April 8, 1910
Spokane, Washington – S. O. Chinn Gets Grand I. W. W. Send-Off

From the Industrial Worker of April 2, 1910:

—–

CHINN’S FUNERAL LARGELY ATTENDED
—–
Many Watch Procession on Riverside Avenue
-Strains of the Marseillaise Heard-I. W. W.
Members Who Attend Funeral Wear Red Neckties.
—–

Funeral services for S. O. Chinn, age 27, which were held from the I. W. W. hall proved a magnate as the procession of men, women and children following the hearse and the brass band moved down Riverside Avenue. The last tribute was paid by James Thompson, national organizer of the Industrial Workers at the I. W. W. Hall at 616 Front Avenue, in which he declared that the man had given his life in the interest of the working class.

Three hundred Fellow Workers packed the hall to capacity and after the services followed the hearse and band to Riverside Avenue and Monroe Street, from which point the hearse and pall bearers proceeded to Greenwood cemetery, where Chinn was buried. The casket was draped with the flag of the organization of which Chinn was a member and an officer. Chinn came to Spokane last fall to participate in the free speech fight. His home was originally at Hutchinson, Kansas.

The funeral proceedings attracted a great deal of attention. Before the hearse walked four officers of the I. W. W. with red neckties and red badges of the organization in their buttonholes, while the band before pealed out the martial strains of the “Marseillaise.” Stretching behind for four or five blocks marched the members of the organization, who came out to pay their last respects to the man that had sacrificed his life for the cause of  Free Speech.

 Continue reading
http://www.weneverforget.org/hellraisers-journal-from-the-industrial-worker-funeral-of-s-o-chinn-spokane-free-speech-martyr-largely-attended/#more-14037
“Hellraisers Journal: From the Industrial Worker: Funeral of S. O. Chinn, Spokane Free Speech Martyr, Largely Attended”

The Revolutionary I. W. W.

---

What kind of an organization is the Industrial Workers of the World? Why is it organized? Where is it organized? How is it organized?

These are questions that are being asked all over the country today by workers, students and men and women from all walks of life.

Thousands of columns of newspaper publicity have been given to the Industrial Workers of the World as a result of its activity. Countless magazine articles have been devoted to it and its alleged principles. Still the reading public has at best but a hazy conception of what the organization really is or what it stands for.

These questions the writer will try to deal with in his own way. First of all, however, it is necessary to show a few of the things "which we are not."

The I. W. W. is not a political organization in the sense that political organizations are today understood. It is not an anti-political sect. It is not a reform body. Its membership is not made up of anarchists, as some writers have stated. Its ranks are not exclusively composed of socialists, as others have asserted. True some of its members may have accepted the anarchist philosophy. Others may have accepted the socialist faith. However, to the organization of the Industrial Workers of the World they are known only as workers, as members of the working class.

What "One Big Union" Means

The Industrial Workers of the World is a labor union that aspires to be the future society. It is a labor organization that holds that craft, district, or other forms of division are harmful to the workers. It teaches that an industrial system of organization must replace the antiquated forms.

Every man, woman or child who works in a given industry must be organized into the one big industrial union of his or her industry. The "ONE BIG UNION" slogan of the I.W.W. does not mean mass unionism. It does not mean that the railroad worker, the plumber, the teamster and the baker will be all in the same local union. That form of organization has been proven a failure. It has been shown to be unsound. Mass organization, irrespective of industrial needs, is too unwieldy to produce results.

The "one big union" slogan of the I. W. W. means CLASS organization according to industry. It has been proven practical by the capitalists themselves. All the great trusts and monopolies are organized according to industry. The steel trust, for example, not only own the mills wherein steel rails and other products are made, but also the mines from which the iron ore is taken. It owns the railroads leading from the mines to the lakes. It owns the steamship lines that haul the ore. It owns the blast furnaces that smelt the ore. In short, the steel trust is an industrial organization, covering every branch of the industry. The I. W. W. proposes to follow the boss' plan and scope of organiz­a­tion for the benefit of the worker.

READ ON 
https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/unions/iww/1913/perry.htm