With all signs pointing to a sluggish recovery, the challenge of the times is to spur job growth, with Democrats generally backing government spending to stimulate the economy and Republicans favoring tax cuts to spur investment.

Against this backdrop, Eugene Coyle, an independent economist living in Berkeley, argued in a recent edition of the political newsletter CounterPunch that the surest way to increase the demand for labor would be to shorten the workweek.

Coyle, whose professional credits include work for the California Public Utilities Commission and the U.S. Department of Justice, writes:

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"At the end of the Great Depression, when the nation similarly faced a severe job issue, a new Wages and Hours law in 1940 cut the work week from six to five days, the now standard 40 hours. Hours have not been reduced in the 70 years since, despite the relentless gains in productivity."

To some extent the workweek is being shortened by a combination of government action and market forces. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, a group of 31 industrialized nations including most of Europe, the United States, Canada and South Korea, reported in 2009 that "in a large majority of OECD countries hours worked have fallen over the period from 1994 to 2007."

South Korea holds the record for length of workday among the OECD nations, according to survey data from 2002, when South Koreans worked 2,390 hours per year. U.S. workers put in an average of 1,777 hours, while the French logged a leisurely 1,346 hours and Norwegians built one of the world's strongest economies on 1,328 hours of work per year.

But China is not an OECD country, and there is no way to know how hour-shortening legislation works when labor is increasingly globalized, whether that means moving service jobs to low-wage areas or importing goods from cheaper locales offshore.