What Happened to the 20 Hour Work Week and the 8 Vacation Weeks?

A half century or so ago futurists and the popular press predicted that the proportion of work in our lives would be decreasing. Machines would do more and more, producing more and more, and so people could do less and less.

Machines are doing more and more, producing more and more. Why aren't people working less and less? What did the futurists get wrong?

The chief thing that they got wrong was where the benefits of productivity increases were going to go. Some of the benefits have gone to all of us, including, of course, workers, through lower prices. The rest could, conceivably, go to the working population in higher wages or shorter hours, and some benefits of productivity have done so, during certain favorable economic and political periods. But the benefits of productivity can also go to the bottom line, and from thence into the pockets of the owners, or, increasingly, the upper management. Not too surprisingly, the owners or managers think that is exactly where productivity benefits belong. After all, the workers didn't bring those efficient new machines with them in their lunch pails. (The workers did, however, sometimes expend considerable time and effort towards building their own intellectual capital to operate those machines.)

What we are getting is increased inequality income and wealth. What we are not getting is shorter work weeks and longer vacations.

Could things be different? Not easily in a lightly regulated private ownership economy. When unions were strong, things were a little different, with workers getting a larger slice of the of the productivity pie. Fewer jobs are now unionized and unions are weaker.

Worker owned and consumer cooperative firms have a good record of bringing productivity gains to workers, but in the US these institutions are rare and endangered. Wages and hour legislation has historically been a chief means of moving some of the benefits of productivity from owners to workers. There may be a little of this at state and local levels. It will not happen in the national level in the US even though it would have majority support.

In focusing on what would make for broad human good in world of rapid technical progress, the futurists missed the question how broadly distributed would be the effective power to make decisions about such matters as the length of the work week and the number of vacation days. If we want to move towards shorter work weeks and longer vacations, we are going to have to think a little outside the economic/political box.