Shorter Hours of Work

Report Outline
Union Drive for Shorter Work Week
Progressive Reduction of Working Hours
Unemployment and Length of Work Week

Union Drive for Shorter Work Week

Organized labor, concerned about automation and persistently high unemployment, is putting pressure behind a drive to shorten the standard 40-hour work week. Curtailment of working time is labor's traditional answer to joblessness; almost all progress toward the present eight-hour day and five-day week was made in periods of economic distress. Now labor officials, led by A.F.L.-C.I.O. President George Meany, are reviving the familiar argument that a shorter work week, without loss of take-home pay, would increase employment and mass purchasing power and thereby stimulate the whole economy.

The White House does not share this view. President Kennedy went on record in the 1960 election campaign against shortening the work week, and he has held to that position since he took office. The President nevertheless is fully aware of the need to find “25,000 new jobs every week to take care of those who are displaced by machines and those who are coming into the labor force.” That task, he told reporters at a news conference last Feb. 14, is “the major domestic challenge …of the '60s.”

Spreading Demand for Work Week of 35 Hours

Recent weeks have witnessed a sharp upsurge of demands for shorter working hours. The Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America, meeting in convention in mid-May, called for provision of a 35-hour week in contracts to be renegotiated next year and in 1964. A fortnight later, on May 29, the convention of the International Ladies' Garment Workers Union went on record unanimously for “congressional action to establish a 35-hour week.” And the executive board of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters made the same demand, June 6, as a step toward easing chronic unemployment, which it termed “one of the most serious dilemmas facing this nation.”