Work Without End: Abandoning Shorter Hours for the Right to Work

Labor and Social Change

by Benjamin Kline Hunnicutt

For more than a century preceding the Great Depression, work hours were steadily reduced. Intellectuals, labor leaders, politicians, and workers saw this reduction in work as authentic progress and the resulting increase in leisure time as a cultural advance. Benjamin Hunnicutt examines the period from 1920 to 1940 during which the shorter hour movement ended and the drive for economic expansion through increased work took over. He traces the political, intellectual, and social dialogues that changed the American concept of progress from dreams of more leisure in which to pursue the higher things in life to an obsession with the importance of work and wage-earning.During the 1920s with the development of advertising, the "gospel of consumption" began to replace the goal of leisure time with a list of things to buy. Business, which increasingly viewed shorter hours as a threat to economic growth, persuaded the worker that more work brought more tangible rewards. The Great Depression shook the newly proclaimed gospel as well as everyone's faith in progress.Although work-sharing became a temporary solution to the shortage of jobs and massive unemployment, when faced with legislation that would limit the work week to thirty hours, Roosevelt and his New Deal advisors adopted the gospel of consumption's tests for progress and created more work by government action. The New Deal campaigned for the right to work a full time job and won. Benjamin Kline Hunnicutt is Professor of Leisure Studies at the University of Iowa.

Genres: History, Economics

416 pages, Hardcover

First published May 10, 1988

Reviews

[Emily · Rating 4 out of 5]

I had always assumed that 8 hour days and 40 hour weeks were some kind of natural law, and I never questioned this assumption until I read Work Without End. In the 1920s, lots of smart people thought that we'd be working 2-4 hour days by now. Why that never happened is the focus of this book. While it's an academic text and not exactly a "fun" read, I found it fascinating even though I'm far from a scholar of history. The book mostly focuses on the 1920s and 30s, leaving me wondering what happened later. Although Work Without End was published in 1988, it remains very relevant given our current economic woes.

[Andrew · Rating 4 out of 5]

Nicely done but slightly uneven study; some chapters go deep in the weeds of Congressional hearings and legislative battles, while others are almost wholly extended readings of single books. I also think that some of the distinctions that Hunnicutt draws are overdone; the participants in his debates probably did not see each other as quite so far apart as he makes out. Still, his focus on the issues of fewer hours, leisure and idleness, and abundance and technological unemployment are both massively important and enormously valuable, providing a distinctive vantage for reading through the 1920s and 1930s.