BROKEN PROMISES

As New Age-y as Sinclair's ideas may seem, they are part of a long tradition. In the United States, progressive movements and the enterprising politicians backed by them were fighting for shorter workdays as far back as the 1830s, when a six-day work week and 12hour days were common.

Mid-19th-century supporters of a reduced workday offered a number of rationales. Artisans and mechanics in Baltimore, Boston, and Philadelphia who pushed for a 10-hour day cited their own perfectibility as healthy, educable citizens as one reason. Employers predictably hated the idea, saying shorter days would lead to "idleness and debauchery." Nevertheless, by 1840 those workers had won a two-hour daily reduction. President Martin Van Buren bought into the idea and issued an executive order establishing a 10-hour day for people working on federal projects. But such victories were few; the 12-hour day prevailed throughout most of the country until after the Civil War.

In 1866, a group of unionists held a convention in Baltimore where 77 delegates from around the country formed what would later be called the National Labor Union. They backed an eight-hour day, which they said would raise the social and economic status of workers. Some strikes over the next few decades garnered public support for the idea, although there were setbacks such as the Haymarket riot of 1886 in Chicago, during which one policeman was killed (and after which four labor organizers were hanged). Toward the end of the century, labor leaders such as American Federation of Labor President Samuel Gompers began to tap into the concept of full employment, arguing that the unemployed could take up the slack hours from workers who toiled fewer of them. (Congress of Industrial Organizations President Walter Reuther took up the baton in 1961, calling for shorter hours to guarantee jobs for every able-bodied American. Jeremy Rifkin, in 1995's The End of Work, heralded the idea, citing the likelihood that most jobs would be taken by machines.) The high-water mark of the movement came with the passage of the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, which institutionalized the eight-hour daily shift, but few have pushed for going beyond that,

And that has remained the standard, with a bit of backsliding in recent years. In 1969, the average working American toiled 40 hours a week. Over the next 20 years, that rose another three-plus hours the equivalent of an extra four weeks at the office or assembly line over the course of a year. Things may have improved in some sectors of the flush 1990s economy: Numbers from January compiled by the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics show that goods-producing workers in private industry were working 40.4 hours per week.

But few have pushed to go below 40. The AFL advanced a proposal for a 30-hour workweek in 1937 to combat a Depression-era unemployment rate that would go as high as 25 percent. Two decades later, AFL-CIO President George Meany talked of reducing the week to 35 hours, to no avail. As Harvard economics professor Juliet B. Schor noted in her 1991 book The Overworked American, leaps in worker productivity did little to help workers gain free time, although incomes in many industries sharply increased. Given the doubling in productivity from 1948 to 1991, she wrote, "every worker in the United States could now be taking every other year off from work--with pay. . . . But between 1948 and the present we did not use any of the productivity dividend to reduce hours."