If AI will handle many of the modern “jobs” of the future, perhaps we might consider policies which share the uniquely human work that remains
“Above all, pleasure is limited by the time to enjoy it. In enjoyment, time is more than money.”
– Epicureans
“The article of consumption most often neglected is leisure. Leisure is an indispensable element to all enjoyment. It is the thing in which the American, despite his overflowing wealth, is poorest.
-Thorstein Veblen, “The Theory of the Leisure Class”
One way we can adapt to the current and future job uncertainty resulting from artificial intelligence is to consider a policy from our last bout with technological unemployment (when technological innovations, or machines, inevitably replace human jobs faster than they create them.) This policy was known as work sharing, or “share the work”, and stemmed from the immense overproduction, underconsumption, and unemployment which were considered the worst symptoms of the Great Depression. For a very brief period, this policy was under serious consideration by present Franklin Delano Roosevelt as a potential solution.
Work sharing, in short, is a policy in which an economy acknowledges that, due to gains in technological and industrial efficiency, there is simply not enough “human” work available to employ the entire working-age population for the accepted, “full-time” schedule of work, which in our case has been eight hours a day, five days a week with hardly any vacation for the past century. In other words, the total number of useful, productive hours labor needed from humans per week divided by the number of working-age humans seeking to work “full-time” results in a number of hours far lower than the current, acceptable notion of a full-time job, rendering the 40-hour work week as archaic and futile. (This is also assuming that we will no longer accept “productivity theater” or “task-masking” – terms for the immense amount of time and effort many Americans spend making themselves appear busy at work during their standard 40-hour work weeks, even when they have nothing to do – as normal parts of our daily life.)
A logical reaction to this scenario would be to simply modify the socially acceptable notion of a full time job: instead of eight hours a day, five days a week, twelve months a year remaining the standard, perhaps we acknowledge that we’ve progressed a bit as a species and can remain as economically productive, if not more productive, by utilizing the “machines” we’ve created to do more work, while the rest of us divide and conquer the remaining hours within the realm of shorter work days, shorter work weeks, and/or seasonal employment arrangements that are more aligned with the phases of our lengthening lifespans. In other words, we can slowly begin to live in a way that does not revolve around work as the dominant, human obligation.
Maybe this starts with a 6-hour work day, a 4-day work week, or an 9-month work year. Or perhaps this is legalized (but optional) reduced work hours for parents with young children, or opportunities for adult education built into the old notion of the “work” day. Whatever path we choose, doing so would reduce technological unemployment, increase work/life balance, and strengthen job satisfaction and loyalty while also strengthening families, communities, and the non-pecuniary aspects of American life that are now in decline (community, civic and religious engagement, for example).
A century ago, this policy worked. To combat the effects of the Great Depression, and with government encouragement and support, several major industrial firms voluntarily cut weekly hours to 30, including Kellogg’s, Sears, General Motors, the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, and Standard Oil, all in an effort to avoid layoffs and maintain productivity while providing relief to a broader workforce. Nationwide, work sharing provided 25% of the nation’s workforce by 1933, and created upwards of three to five million jobs at the height of the depression.[1]
H.I. Harriman, president of the National Chamber of Commerce, praised these efforts and policies, stating that “it is better for all of us to be at work some of the time than for some of us to be at work all of the time while others are not at work at all.”[2] And Walter Gifford, the 1925-1948 president of AT&T, one of the largest US corporations of the 20th century, predicted that “the final, best achievement of business and the free market need not be perpetual economic growth, eternal job creation, and everlasting consumerism, but ‘a new type of civilization,’ in which ‘how to make a living becomes less important than how to live.’”[3]
Workers agreed with these sentiments. In the late 1980’s, professor and historian Benjamin Hunnicutt and many of his students interviewed hundreds of the Goodyear and Kellogg’s beneficiaries of this 6-hour work day. Similar to the 19th century Lowell factory girls seeking a life “beyond the influence of factory bolts and locks”[4], these employees spoke “in terms of freedom – of being able to, having the opportunity to, getting to do things that were important to them.”[5] They also spoke of their children and a future nation in which people “would have more time to spend with their families and communities; in nature, education, and sports; and on culture and the myriad free activities they were finding to do,” things that had value in a realm beyond the newest consumer goods and material standards of living.[6] In today’s jargon, they described being able to have “a life”.
According to economist W.S. Jevons, this progression – the gradual reduction of human labor hours – is natural. Even though most work is a combination of both pleasure and pain, overall it has “a net pain sum.” Work is a “cost incurred”, but this cost is now counter-balanced by a utility with modern value, “the right to consume.” But according to the laws of marginalism, this utility loses value as more income is gained: once the most valuable needs are addressed, the urgency and necessity of additional wants hold decreasing value, especially when weighed against the cost of additional work. As Hunnicutt summarized, “a worker would stay at work from dawn to dusk when he was starving, but would see the point in taking off early when he was assured a big supper.”[7] Time eventually becomes more valuable than money.
British economist John Stuart Mill elaborated on this concept, attracting a large American following, by describing the “stationary state” that could be achieved once sufficient economic and industrial output and efficiency was met. In this state, people would have “sufficient leisure, both physical and mental…to cultivate freely the graces of life”. Furthermore, this stationary condition by no means should imply a “stationary state of human improvement. There would be as much scope as ever for all kinds of mental culture, and moral and social progress; as much room for improving the Art of Living…when minds cease to be engrossed with the art of getting on.” Even the “Industrial Arts”, he adds, could be made more efficient, yet with one key difference: “instead of serving no purpose but the increase of wealth, industrial improvements would produce their legitimate effect, that of abridging labor.”[8]
The alternative, of course, was to view this leisure as lost productivity and growth and instead embrace the “Gospel of Consumption”, which is essentially the belief that “enough new markets could be found, enough ‘luxuries’ transformed into necessities by advertising and the spending example of the rich, that overproduction could be averted, and workers, finding new horizons of work, could escape the scourge of unemployment.”[9] Americans could always be convinced, through advertising, to purchase material goods which they had never needed before in accordance with an endlessly “improving” standard of living. The key, according to leading businessmen such as Charles Kettering, general director of General Motors Research Laboratories, was the importance of keeping “the Consumer Dissatisfied” through artificial marketing and advertising narratives of scarcity.
Furthermore, many businessmen fundamentally disagreed with the entire concept of leisure and reduced work hours to begin with. Thirty-two “prominent” business leaders were asked about their opinion of the 5-day workweek (adding Saturday to the weekend), and all but two were in opposition. George L. Markland, chairman of the board of the Philadelphia Gear Works, declared that “any man demanding the forty hour week should be ashamed to claim citizenship in this great country,” warning that “the men of our country are becoming a race of softies and mollycoddles.” [10] George F. Reynolds was convinced that rather than having extra time, “the average working man…is much happier and more contented to be working, earning money, than he is to be loafing.” James. C. Martien added that “mankind does not thrive on holidays. Idle hours breed mischief.” John E. Edgerton closed the argument, stating that “nothing breeds radicalism more quickly than unhappiness unless it is leisure. As long as the people are kept profitably and happily employed there is little danger from radicalism…Study the sources of radicalism today and you will find them for the most part in the discontented houses of leisure and the leaky tents of the unemployed.”
To these portions of American society, work had taken on a new meaning, based “less on necessity and more on privilege. Work was seen more as an end in itself – an intrinsically rewarding experience that developed the personality and provided workers with a purpose in life and a place in the community.” The Protestant notions of the past, of being called by God towards certain vocations, were now replaced with the simple, secular goal of eternal economic growth.[11] Work in other words, was “identical with social well-being,” as was the “most important part of life…to be useful and valuable to others…to have purpose and meaning.”[12]
And in contrast to sharing the work that was available with reduced hours, the government could choose instead to focus on “idleness reemployed”, or work creation, through stimulus/deficit spending and public works programs, creating jobs that would otherwise never exist, jobs which were intentionally inefficient, labor intensive, unskilled, and focused on employing large-scale man-power, slowly, rather than materials and equipment efficiently. To critics, this was like re-enslaving man to forms of labor long outgrown by industrial innovation; for example, the shovel and pick-axe were nearly synonymous with many of the public works programs. Yet by becoming the nation’s employer of last resort, the government could redefine freedom not as happiness on our own time and outside the grips of the marketplace, but as perpetual economic growth, full-time employment, and a forever expanding standard of living, regardless of the impact on our families, our communities, our faith, or our environment.
Against this opposition, and despite initial momentum for a federal, share-the-work, 30-hour workweek (the legislation passed in the Senate), pressure from business leaders and influential advisors pivoted Roosevelt away from the share-the-work plan, fundamentally changing the direction of America, our ability to reap the benefits of progress, and our relationship with work. The main concerns, it appears, were the threat this arrangement presented not only to the tax base necessary for government growth and spending, but to “the spirit of capitalism” itself.
And here we are, a century later, continuing to work more or less the same way despite even greater technological changes than those during the Industrial Revolution. However, cracks are emerging once again.
Juliet B. Schor is an author and lead researcher at 4DWG, an international NGO that aims to make a four-day workweek the new standard. After studying 245 businesses and non-profits which adopted the four-day-week pilot programs for over 8,700 workers in countries such as the U.S., U.K, Brazil, Portugal, Germany, and South Africa, she and her team concluded the results to be outstanding: average ratings of the 4-day workweek trials were 8.2 out of 10, with only 20 companies, or less than 10% of the total, deciding to discontinue the shortened workday. Results in performance metrics “such as revenue, absenteeism, and resignations” were also consistently excellent.
Furthermore, there is a sense of urgency now with regards to our current work model. Microsoft says it will continue to lay off thousands of workers, Amazon predicts a much smaller workforce (with robots nearly outnumbering humans in its factories already), and CEOs across the board are predicting AI to “wipe out jobs”. Industries which traditionally rely on crews of manual laborers, such as agriculture, are envisioning a not-too-distant future with limited to nearly no human involvement.
If working less is indeed working for most companies, and there is soon to be less work available for humans to do, shouldn’t more of us be talking about it?
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Samuel Gompers’ famous 1880’s labor movement rallying cry was that “so long as there is one who seeks employment and cannot find it, the hours of labor are too long.”
Perhaps, today, we should modify his salient point to highlight that so long as we continue to grow old and die with skills unlearned, knowledge unacquired, experiences unattempted, goals unattained – all because we were “too busy” with work – the hours of labor, indeed, are too long.
You’re spot-on, Chapdaddy. Great thinking going on here.