It's High Time We Focused On Down Time

It seems ironic that a day to honor labor is actually a day of leisure. But, perhaps it's not. Labor Day actually had its origins in the push for a shorter working day and better conditions for working men and women. The popular Eight-Hour Movement that emerged in the 1860s had as its slogan, "eight hours for work; eight hours for rest; and eight hours for what you will!" One justification for limiting working hours to eight was the type of jobs most people had in those days: manual labor jobs, only partly assisted by technology. The toll on the body and spirit was enormous.

One hundred years later work for the average American is less back-breaking and more enjoyable. One reason is that productivity in sectors like agriculture, mining, fishing, forestry and manufacturing has grown faster than in other sectors, like health care or retail. The result is fewer workers needed to produce more food, minerals, fish, wood or manufactured products.

Having foreigners do some of the hard work also helps. The downside though, is that the U.S. is now running a big manufacturing trade deficit. Still, we can't keep running a trade deficit forever, so pretty soon we will need to start manufacturing more. And a liberal immigration policy, particularly for immigrants with lower levels of education, means that fewer native-born Americans have to do jobs like work in meat packing plants, pick crops from the field, or clean our buildings and wash our dishes.

And this trend will only continue even if we reduce the manufacturing trade deficit (which we should). Most of the jobs of the future are going to be in sectors focused on taking care of people (education, health care, social services), providing people with direct services (retail, tourism, restaurants), or helping businesses operate (computer software workers and managers).

But if work has gotten easier for most, it sure hasn't gotten shorter. Over two-thirds of workers work 40 hours or more per week, while 8.5 percent regularly put in truly marathon work weeks of 60 hours or more. Managers and professionals in particular have been putting in progressively longer hours on the job: and as these occupations grow overall work time goes up. According to MIT economist Dora Costa, at the turn of the 20th century those in the bottom 10 percent of income worked 600 hours a year more than those at the top. Today's top earners are the ones putting in the long hours, working 400 hours more per year than low earners. And overall, Americans now work almost two weeks a year more than Japanese, who only recently were derided as workaholic "salary men." This explains why 95 percent of workers say they worry that work is taking too much time away from their families.

One reason people work so much is that they want the income. But rather than support measures to increase productivity, many today oppose them. One real time example is in California where the legislature is poised to pass legislation on behalf of grocery store workers to limit the use of self-service checkout in supermarkets. Do we really to make people work more for less while raising prices for consumers? That's what this and other similar well-intentioned, but ill-advised measures would do.

After more than 100 years of celebrating labor on Labor Day, perhaps we need to start celebrating leisure. Rather than fight to preserve work, we should be fighting to create wealth and more leisure. This means that we should all be supporting measures that will let organizations (private, non-profit and government) boost productivity and at the same time, putting productivity growth at the center of our nation's economic policies.

Eighty years ago John Maynard Keynes wrote in an article entitled "Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren" that the steady increase in productivity would one day lead to a day when we would be led "out of the tunnel of economic necessity into daylight."

Let's get that productivity train roaring forward, for I can make out the daylight ahead.