Capitalism and the Political Economy of Work Time

Christoph Hermann

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317596332
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

John Maynard Keynes expected that around the year 2030 people would only work 15 hours a week. In the mid-1960s, Jean Fourastié still anticipated the introduction of the 30-hour week in the year 2000, when productivity would continue to grow at an established pace. Productivity growth slowed down somewhat in the 1970s and 1980s, but rebounded in the 1990s with the spread of new information and communication technologies. The knowledge economy, however, did not bring about a jobless future or a world without work, as some scholars had predicted. With few exceptions, work hours of full-time employees have hardly fallen in the advanced capitalist countries in the last three decades, while in a number of countries they have actually increased since the 1980s.

This book takes the persistence of long work hours as starting point to investigate the relationship between capitalism and work time. It does so by discussing major theoretical schools and their explanations for the length and distribution of work hours, as well as tracing major changes in production and reproduction systems, and analyzing their consequences for work hours.

Furthermore, this volume explores the struggle for shorter work hours, starting from the introduction of the ten-hour work day in the nineteenth century to the introduction of the 35-hour week in France and Germany at the end of the twentieth century. However, the book also shows how neoliberalism has eroded collective work time regulations and resulted in an increase and polarization of work hours since the 1980s. Finally, the book argues that shorter work hours not only means more free time for workers, but also reduces inequality and improves human and ecological sustainability.

1Introduction

 

 

 

The Great Recession, which shook the world economy in 2007, and despite some signs of recovery still causes widespread unemployment in 2014, has brought the contested nature of capitalism back to the center of academic and political attention. Two observations are particularly revealing for the relationship between capitalism and work time: we are far away from the 15-hour week predicted by John Maynard Keynes in his well-known essay “Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren,” written in the midst of the last major crisis – the Great Depression. What is more, and in direct contrast to the Great Depression when trade unionists and progressive politicians in the United States and elsewhere fought for a 30-hour week to limit unemployment, shorter work hours were not on the political agenda during the recent crisis – even though short-time working has proved a viable tool to avoid job losses in countries such as Germany. If anything, the crisis has increased pressure on those who still have a job to work longer and more flexible hours – and, ultimately, for more years before retirement.

The starting point of this book is the observation that despite the partial move to the 35-hour week in France and Germany, work time reductions have slowed down markedly since the 1970s. In some countries (full-time) work hours started to increase in the 1980s and 1990s, but more often it was per capita hours that have grown during the last three decades – after decreasing during the postwar period. Given the end of the secular decline in work hours, this book raises a number of questions regarding the role and nature of work time in capitalist societies: why did work hours not decrease to the extent one might have expected from the dramatic gains in productivity and living standards achieved over the past 150 years? Why did work hours decrease up to the 1970s, but thereafter stagnated in most countries and even increased in some cases? Why did work hours become more flexible, and why did flexibilization promote polarization? Why is unpaid domestic labor still mainly carried out by women in spite of the major increase in female employment rates since the 1960s? Finally, why are shorter work hours no longer on the political agenda despite high unemployment and a looming ecological crisis?

This book argues that in order to understand the development of (paid and unpaid) work time in the past 150 years, it is essential to understand the contradictory and contested role of work time in capitalist societies. The book, hence, takes a political economy perspective on work time rather than a purely economic, sociological, or political scientific approach. Following the traditional political economy approach of Karl Marx, and others, it combines theoretical reflections with historical enquiries and a thorough examination of the present situation. Specific attention is paid to the development of production and reproduction systems, as well as to the struggle for shorter work hours and the impact of neoliberalism on working lives. The different perspectives on work time are also reflected in the structure of the book. Capitalism and the Political Economy of Work Time encompasses four major parts: the first part deals with work time theories; the second part explores the links between work time, production, and reproduction; the third part captures major struggles for shorter work hours, including the struggle for the eight-hour day and 35-hour week; the fourth part concludes with an examination of the impact of neoliberalism on work hours and discusses the role of work time in capitalist societies, including the link between shorter work hours and human and ecological sustainability.

The first part of the book presents major theoretical approaches and their explanations for the length and distribution of work time. Chapter 2 covers the neoclassical, Weberian and institutionalist schools of thought. Despite different explanations for the length and distribution of work time, they share the assumption of that capitalism is characterized by a certain degree of rationality and stability. In contrast, the approaches covered in Chapter 3 – “Marxist, post-Marxist and feminist theories” – point to major contradictions in capitalist social systems. Chapter 4 provides a discussion of the different views of major controversies such as the self-chosen or socially constrained nature of work time; the role of living standards, productivity, and the search for surplus labor; the impact of institutions and social struggles on the development of work hours and the emergence of country-specific differences in work time; the role of work sharing in the fight against unemployment, as well as the tension between paid, unpaid and socially necessary work time.

The second part explores changes in production and reproduction systems and their impact on work time. Chapter 5 describes changes in industrial production following from the shift from Fordism to post-Fordism and lean production and consequences for work hours, while Chapter 6 analyzes the various fragmentations in work time spurred by the highly diverse character of the service economy. Chapter 7 leaves the world of paid work and explores the transformation of household labor, which affects the hours women spend in paid employment.

The third part of the book focuses on struggles for shorter work hours. Chapter 8 describes the struggles that led to the introduction of the ten-hour day between the middle and the end of the nineteenth century, the eight-hour day after the First World War, and the 40-hour week in the interwar period and after the Second World War. Chapter 9 presents the main features of the introduction of the 35-hour week in Germany and France in the 1990s and early 2000s, as well as the rise of part-time work as an alternative to collective work time reductions and the introduction of paid leave periods in Sweden and Denmark.

The fourth part of the book provides some conclusions with respect to the role of work time in capitalist societies. Chapter 10 explores the impact of neoliberalism on the length and distribution of work hours. It argues that in the last decades the granting of concessions and exemptions from collective work time norms, the erosion and decentralization of collective bargaining, the flexibilization and individualization of work hours, as well as the workfarist restructuring of welfare states, have caused a surge and polarization of work hours. Chapter 11 brings together the insights from preceding elaborations and discusses the relationship between capitalism and work time. By doing so it specifically addresses the persistence of long work hours, the need to strengthen solidarity against the market, the simultaneous compression, extension, and variation of work time in capitalist societies, the challenge to promote worker as opposed to employer flexibility, the role of more free time as an alternative to more consumption, and the question of necessary social labor time. The book ends with a list of arguments for a 30-hour week.

Part I
Work time theories

2Neoclassical, Weberian, and institutionalist perspectives

Introduction

This is the first of two chapters that deal with theoretical approaches to work time. Work time plays an important role in the history of political economy and in social theory more generally. The leading question that this and the following chapter attempt to answer is how different theoretical schools explain the length of the work day and the development of work time. The presentation of major ideas necessarily implies some extent of condensation and simplification as it is impossible and perhaps unnecessary to follow every single strand of the respective approaches. It also means that the approaches are constructed, and that not all scholars cited in the respective schools of thought would actually agree with the labeling; some, perhaps, unconsciously, use arguments from different theoretical backgrounds. There is also some overlapping of arguments between different schools of thought, such as between the Weberian and the institutionalist approaches, or between institutionalist and feminist debates. However, in spite of all the difficulties and shortcomings the construction of labels is indispensable to reconstruct a debate.

This chapter covers three major perspectives on work time from the neoclassical, Weberian, and institutionalist schools of thought. As a common ground the neoclassical, Weberian, and institutionalist approaches assume a certain degree of rationality and stability in capitalist social systems, even though they disagree over where the length of the work day is determined: on the individual or the collective level. In contrast, the three approaches presented in the following chapter all assume that capitalist social systems are characterized by major contradictions which have an important effect on the dynamic of work hours. The chapter starts with the neoclassical approach and then proceeds to the Weberian and institutionalist perspectives on work time. The chapter ends with a summary of the main arguments.

Neoclassical perspectives

Neoclassical economists assume that the length of the work day or work week is determined by individual choice.¹ Workers choose their work hours in order to maximize personal utility. The rational behavior of utility-maximizing individuals makes it possible to make some predictions about the development of work hours even though they are the result of individual preferences. There are several competing explanations in the neoclassical school of thought when it comes to the factors determining those individual decisions. On the whole the view prevails that average workers tend to reduce work hours with growing incomes or living standards.

In the neoclassical discourse the question of work time is discussed as the problem of labor supply. Stanley Jevons argued that workers choose between the utility of consumption and the disutility of work. While workers derive pleasure from the consumption of commodities purchased by the wages obtained for working a certain number of hours a day or week, work itself is perceived as “painful exertion” or “negative utility.”² Yet the utility of consumption and disutility of work do not increase proportionally with the duration of the work day. Instead, the marginalist strand within neoclassical economics, of which Jevons was a leading representative, argued that marginal utility – which is the utility derived from the consumption of an additional unit of the same good – only rises up to a certain point, after which is starts to fall. Maximizing utility in this framework means consuming until the point of the highest marginal utility – or, as common sense would phrase it, consuming until one is satisfied.³

Jevons thought that the disutility of work develops in the same manner. The pain first increases and then diminishes after a certain point in the work day. In Jevons’s words, “[a]t the moment of commencing labor it is usually more irksome than when the mind and body are well bent to the work.”⁴ The combination of the utility of consumption and the disutility of work must henceforth result in a particular instance where the marginal utility of consumption and the marginal disutility of work add up to the highest possible degree of pleasure for the individual worker. According to Jevons this is the point where workers naturally stop working – “if we pass the least beyond this point, a balance of pain will result: there will be an ever-decreasing motive in favor of labor, and an ever-increasing motive against it.”⁵ Jevons acknowledged that the painfulness or disutility of work can vary with the nature, content, and intensity of work, but he insisted that in general “fatigue always rapidly increases when the speed of work passes a certain point.” He therefore recommended working at “such a rate . . . to recover all fatigue and recommence with an undiminished store of energy.”⁶

While sharing the view that “the exercise of our powers is usually attended by the painful feeling of distress and ...