In The Arena Why Do Republicans Want Us to Work All the Time?

Benjamin Kline Hunnicutt is professor of leisure studies at the University of Iowa and author of The Forgotten American Dream.

This week, America’s political class has been consumed by an intense, vitriolic debate over a single number: 2.5 million.

That’s the amount by which, according to the Congressional Budget Office, President Obama’s signature health care law will effectively reduce the U.S. work force over the next decade.


The initial Republican reaction was predictable: Pundits filled the airwaves, Cassandra-like, to paint Obamacare as the ultimate job killer. Never mind that, reading the fine print, it’s clear the CBO was talking about workers voluntarily reducing their hours in response to the law—not getting laid off or seeing their shifts scaled back.

And anyway, isn’t that supposed to be a good thing?

The president’s critics, in high dudgeon, are fulminating about lay-abouts and scofflaws actually choosing to work less than what God intended, predicting a host of ills that will supposedly befall the nation, from moral turpitude to economic ruin.

The fuss will doubtless soon die down, but this bit of political theater has resurrected a very old debate about working hours, and could conceivably reawaken what I have called the forgotten American Dream. That dream has not always been just about striving to consume bigger houses, fancier clothes, faster cars. The idea that “full time” work is something foreordained and the bedrock of morality is new, mostly a product of the last century.

During the Industrial Revolution, Americans worked incredibly long hours. It was common for people to work from dawn to dusk, often into the night, six days a week—better than 60 to 70 hours a week with no vacation and few holidays. It was all very Dickensian— remember Bob Cratchit’s appeal to Scrooge for Christmas day off? That was America in the 19th century.

The birth of the labor movement changed that. Beginning in the 1820s, laborites began pressing for higher wages and shorter hours. For more than a century, and until about 40 years ago, unions, supported by numerous economists, pressed for shorter hours as one of the primary ways to deal with unemployment. They argued that as the economy improved, workers would need higher wages to buy what they produced and more free time to use all the new products.

For more than a century before 1930, the average American’s working hours were gradually reduced—cut nearly in half. Labor played a part in these reductions, but they were largely a product of the free market, reflecting individuals’ choices to work less and less.

Most Americans approved, counting work reductions as the better half of industrial progress (higher wages and shorter hours). No one expected this progress would end. Quite the contrary. Through the last century, observers such as John Maynard Keynes, Julien Huxley, Dorothy Canfield Fisher and Eric Sevareid regularly predicted that soon America would enter an age of leisure in which we would chose to devote more and more of our lives to the “pursuit of happiness” promised in the Declaration of Independence. As technology created “labor-saving” machines and the economy grew, they reasoned, we would gradually be able to buy back more of our time from our jobs, preferring leisure to new goods and services that we had never needed, or even seen before.

Then real progress would begin. Humane and moral progress. Instead of perpetual consumerism and the infinite increase in material wealth, we would naturally turn to improving the human condition, learning how to live together “wisely, agreeable, and well,” as Keynes put it. Progress would then take the form of healthier families, communities and cities—the increase of knowledge, the enjoyment of nature, history and other peoples, an increasing delight in the marvels of the human spirit, the practice of our beliefs and values together, the finding of common ground for conviviality, expanding our awareness of God, wondering in Creation.

These lofty sentiments mixed with the ordinary delights: slow meals together (Ralph Waldo Emerson), conversations in the evening (Henry David Thoreau), dancing the night away (William Ellery Channing), singing in the choir (Jonathan Edwards), “observing a spear of summer grass” (Walt Whitman), reading and talking about books (Robert Hutchins), playing amateur sports (Fannia Cohn) and walking around Central Park in the dead of winter (Elizabeth Hasanovitz). Even Abraham Lincoln believed that the steam plow and other agricultural technologies would free farm workers from steady toil for more opportunities to learn, socialize, govern themselves and pursue happiness.

And prominent businesspeople often led the way: In 1930, W. K. Kellogg introduced the six-hour day to their cereal plants in Battle Creek; soon afterward, Paul Litchfield of Goodyear Tire introduced a six-hour day at his plants in Akron Ohio; and most famously Henry Ford, who in 1926 established the five-day week in his automobile plants. Ford claimed that shorter hours were as essential as higher wages to assuring adequate consumer demand, and to warding off chronic unemployment. As industry became more efficient, he thought, more free time was inevitable, and the only choice was “unemployment or leisure.”

Walter Gifford, president of AT&T for most of the second quarter of the twentieth century, recognized in 1928 that “industry … has gained a new and astonishing vision.” The final, best achievement of business and the free market might well be “a new type of civilization,” in which “how to make a living becomes less important than how to live.” Gifford predicted:

Machinery will increasingly take the load off men’s shoulders … Every one of us will have more chance to do what he wills, which means greater opportunity, both materially and spiritually. … [Steadily decreasing work hours] will give us time to cultivate the art of living, give us a better opportunity for … the arts, enlarge the comforts and satisfaction of the mind and spirit, as material well-being feeds the comforts of the body.

But instead of increasing leisure, since World War II, Americans have seen their average work hours stabilize at around 40 per week. Economists such as Juliet Schor have made a convincing case that our hours have lengthened recently, and that we now average about five weeks longer on the job each year than we did in 1976. Median incomes are stagnating, even as we work harder than ever.

What happened?

I have spent years trying to answer this question, one of the great mysteries of the modern age. Economists and historians have offered various explanations, from the rise of consumerism to changing technology to globalization to our fixation with economic growth above all else. I have argued that a new ideology, a new set of beliefs about work’s everlasting centrality, emerged with Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal. Work is now viewed as an economic end in itself rather than a means to better purposes. Work for more work has become the organizing principle of society, embodied in public policy and in the politician’s mantra: JOBS, JOBS, JOBS.

The best explanation for the advent of work without end, I now believe, is a failure of imagination. We’ve forgotten that the purpose of life is to be happy, and to pass that happiness on to future generations—not simply to keep acquiring more stuff. Our forebears understood that.

Perhaps the prospect that the Affordable Care Act would result in the reduction of working hours by a modest 2 percent might rekindle the old debate and resurrect the forgotten American Dream. We might even find in our recent history a more practical road to “full employment” and a sustainable alternative to perpetual economic growth. We might then rediscover what Whitman called “higher progress,” and spend less time banging the keyboards in our office cubicles and more time working on humanity—our families, our hobbies, our faiths. Even Republicans might enjoy that.