Is a 40 hour workweek really necessary? Or could people get by on 20 hours a week?

Most people assume that the members of the Shoshone band worked ceaselessly in an unremitting search for sustenance. Such a dramatic picture might appear confirmed by an erroneous theory almost everyone recalls from schooldays: A high culture emerges only when the people have the leisure to build pyramids or to create art. The fact is that high civilization is hectic, and that primitive hunters and collectors of wild food, like the Shoshone, are among the most leisured people on earth. [Nathan - This matches up with what I remember reading in that book about life on some remote Pacific island.]

"In all, the adults of the Dobe camp worked about two and a half days a week. Because the average working day was about six hours long, the fact emerges that !Kung Bushmen of Dobe, despite their harsh environment, devote from twelve to nineteen hours a week to getting food. Even the hardest working individual in the camp, a man named =oma who went out hunting on sixteen of the 28 days, spent a maximum of 32 hours a week in the food quest."

In the 1800s, many Americans worked seventy hours or more per week and the length of the workweek became an important political issue. Since then the workweek's length has decreased considerably. This article presents estimates of the length of the historical workweek in the U.S., describes the history of the shorter-hours "movement," and examines the forces that drove the workweek's decline over time.
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It seems reasonable to accept two important conclusions based on these data [NW - see below] -- the length of the typical manufacturing workweek in the 1800s was very long by modern standards and it declined significantly between 1830 and 1890.

Table 1
Estimated Average Weekly Hours Worked in Manufacturing, 1830-1890

Year - Weeks Report - Aldrich Report
1830 - 69.1 - X
1840 - 67.1 - 68.4
1850 - 65.5 - 69.0
1860 - 62.0 - 66.0
1870 - 61.1 - 63.0
1880 - 60.7 - 61.8
1890 - X - 60.0

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Hours of Work during the Twentieth Century
[T]here is a fairly consistent pattern, with weekly hours falling considerably during the first third of the century and much more slowly thereafter. In particular, hours fell strongly during the years surrounding World War I, so that by 1919 the eight-hour day (with six workdays per week) had been won. Hours fell sharply at the beginning of the Great Depression, especially in manufacturing, then rebounded somewhat and peaked during World War II. After World War II, the length of the workweek stabilized around forty hours. Owen's nonstudent-male series shows little trend after World War II, but the other series show a slow, but steady, decline in the length of the average workweek.
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Broader Trends in Time Use, 1880 to 2040
In 1880 a typical male household head had very little leisure time -- only about 1.8 hours per day over the course of a year. However, as Fogel's (2000) estimates in Table 5 show, between 1880 and 1995 the amount of work per day fell nearly in half, allowing leisure time to more than triple. Because of the decline in the length of the workweek and the declining portion of a lifetime that is spent in paid work (due largely to lengthening periods of education and retirement) the fraction of the typical American's lifetime devoted to work has become remarkably small. Based on these trends Fogel estimates that four decades from now less than one-fourth of our discretionary time (time not needed for sleep, meals, and hygiene) will be devoted to paid work -- over three-fourths will be available for doing what we wish.
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Causes of the Decline in the Length of the Workweek
Supply, Demand and Hours of Work
The length of the workweek, like other labor market outcomes, is determined by the interaction of the supply and demand for labor. Employers are torn by conflicting pressures. Holding everything else constant, they would like employees to work long hours because this means that they can utilize their equipment more fully and offset any fixed costs from hiring each worker (such as the cost of health insurance -- common today, but not a consideration a century ago). On the other hand, longer hours can bring reduced productivity due to worker fatigue and can bring worker demands for higher hourly wages to compensate for putting in long hours. If they set the workweek too high, workers may quit and few workers will be willing to work for them at a competitive wage rate. Thus, workers implicitly choose among a variety of jobs -- some offering shorter hours and lower earnings, others offering longer hours and higher earnings.

Economic Growth and the Long-Term Reduction of Work Hours
Historically employers and employees often agreed on very long workweeks because the economy was not very productive (by today's standards) and people had to work long hours to earn enough money to feed, clothe and house their families. The long-term decline in the length of the workweek, in this view, has primarily been due to increased economic productivity, which has yielded higher wages for workers. Workers responded to this rise in potential income by "buying" more leisure time, as well as by buying more goods and services. In a recent survey, a sizeable majority of economic historians agreed with this view. Over eighty percent accepted the proposition that "the reduction in the length of the workweek in American manufacturing before the Great Depression was primarily due to economic growth and the increased wages it brought" (Whaples, 1995). Other broad forces probably played only a secondary role. For example, roughly two-thirds of economic historians surveyed rejected the proposition that the efforts of labor unions were the primary cause of the drop in work hours before the Great Depression.
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Cross-sectional Patterns from 1919
In 1919 the average workweek varied tremendously, emphasizing the point that not all workers desired the same workweek. The workweek exceeded 69 hours in the iron blast furnace, cottonseed oil, and sugar beet industries, but fell below 45 hours in industries such as hats and caps, fur goods, and women's clothing. Cities' averages also differed dramatically. In a few Midwestern steel mill towns average workweeks exceeded 60 hours. In a wide range of low-wage Southern cities they reached the high 50s, but in high-wage Western ports, like Seattle, the workweek fell below 45 hours.

Whaples (1990a) finds that among the most important city-level determinants of the workweek during this period were the availability of a pool of agricultural workers, the capital-labor ratio, horsepower per worker, and the amount of employment in large establishments. Hours rose as each of these increased. Eastern European immigrants worked significantly longer than others, as did people in industries whose output varied considerably from season to season. 
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Economists have given surprisingly little attention to the determinants of the workweek. The most comprehensive treatment is Robert Whaples' "The Shortening of the American Work Week" (1990), which surveys estimates of the length of the workweek, the shorter hours movement, and economic theories about the length of the workweek.

How do you show that the lives of people 10,000 years ago got better when they abandoned hunting and gathering for farming? Until recently, archaeologists had to resort to indirect tests, whose results (surprisingly) failed to support the progressivist view. Here's one example of an indirect test: Are twentieth century hunter-gatherers really worse off than farmers? Scattered throughout the world, several dozen groups of so-called primitive people, like the Kalahari bushmen, continue to support themselves that way. It turns out that these people have plenty of leisure time, sleep a good deal, and work less hard than their farming neighbors. For instance, the average time devoted each week to obtaining food is only 12 to 19 hours for one group of Bushmen, 14 hours or less for the Hadza nomads of Tanzania. One Bushman, when asked why he hadn't emulated neighboring tribes by adopting agriculture, replied, "Why should we, when there are so many mongongo nuts in the world?"

While farmers concentrate on high-carbohydrate crops like rice and potatoes, the mix of wild plants and animals in the diets of surviving hunter-gatherers provides more protein and a bettter balance of other nutrients. In one study, the Bushmen's average daily food intake (during a month when food was plentiful) was 2,140 calories and 93 grams of protein, considerably greater than the recommended daily allowance for people of their size. It's almost inconceivable that Bushmen, who eat 75 or so wild plants, could die of starvation the way hundreds of thousands of Irish farmers and their families did during the potato famine of the 1840s.

Are twentieth century hunter-gatherers really worse off than farmers? Scattered throughout the world, several dozen groups of so-called primitive people, like the Kalahari bushmen, continue to support themselves that way. It turns out that these people have plenty of leisure time, sleep a good deal, and work less hard than their farming neighbors. For instance, the average time devoted each week to obtaining food is only 12 to 19 hours for one group of Bushmen, 14 hours or less for the Hadza nomads of Tanzania. One Bushman, when asked why he hadn't emulated neighboring tribes by adopting agriculture, replied, "Why should we, when there are so many mongongo nuts in the world?" [NW - but how many hours do they spend doing chores other than looking for food?]
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The evidence suggests that the Indians at Dickson Mounds, like many other primitive peoples,took up farming not by choice but from necessity in order to feed their constantly growing numbers. [NW - So the same pressure might be increasing the number of hours people need to work nowadays.]

The authors begin with the great economist John Maynard Keynes. In 1930 Keynes predicted that, within a century, per capita income would steadily rise, people’s basic needs would be met, and no one would have to work more than fifteen hours a week. Clearly, he was wrong: though income has increased as he envisioned, our wants have seemingly gone unsatisfied, and we continue to work long hours. The Skidelskys explain why Keynes was mistaken.

Gary Becker says Keynes based his predictions on the behaviour of the rich gentry of Britain, who tended to hold their wealth in the form of land, property or financial assets. When the value of these assets rose, they could earn the same income by working less hard. Wealth creation in the modern world, by contrast, has more to do with the use of human capital, and there is a price - lower earnings - when that human capital is left idle. Becker says that rich individuals in the Gulf states, who live off revenues from oil, are the only group that conforms to Keynes's ideal of a 15-hour working week.

Robert Frank's explanation is that Keynes failed to spot the importance of context. We consume more because technical progress has vastly improved the quality of goods on offer, and as we get richer we want the luxury car with the satnav or the meal cooked by Gordon Ramsay.Contrary to belief, Frank says, those on middle and low incomes are not influenced greatly by what the super-rich get up to. Instead, they tend to measure themselves against people in their own peer group.
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A greater degree of income equality would help, for two reasons.

Firstly, there is evidence that those on low pay have no choice but to work long hours. In his essay, Richard Freeman notes that more Americans than Europeans say that they want to increase hours worked than to decrease at given wage rates, and that's probably a function of a lower minimum wage and stagnant real incomes for all but the highest earners.

The second reason is that the widening earnings gap creates an incentive to put in longer hours, since the rewards for doing so are considerable. [NW - In other words, the marginal benefit of each extra hour worked is higher when there is a lot of income inequality, and lower when there isn't a lot of income inequality. That's an interesting observation that I hadn't thought about.]

A thinktank, the New Economics Foundation (NEF), which has organised the event with the Centre for Analysis of Social Exclusion at the London School of Economics, argues that if everyone worked fewer hours – say, 20 or so a week – there would be more jobs to go round, employees could spend more time with their families and energy-hungry excess consumption would be curbed. Anna Coote, of NEF, said: "There's a great disequilibrium between people who have got too much paid work, and those who have got too little or none."
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Robert Skidelsky, the Keynesian economist, who has written a forthcoming book with his son, Edward, entitled How Much Is Enough?, argued that rapid technological change means that even when the downturn is over there will be fewer jobs to go around in the years ahead. "The civilised answer should be work-sharing. The government should legislate a maximum working week." [Nathan - I'm skeptical of this reasoning]
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Parents of young children already have the right to request flexible working, but the NEF would like to see job-sharing and alternative work patterns become much more widespread, and is calling on the government to make flexible working a default right for everyone.

Ms. Coote says her foundation is not promoting a mandatory approach by government, but prefers cultural change. You may gasp at a 21-hour work week today – or even a 30-hour week – but you may have been equally unbelieving in the past that smoking could be curtailed, seat belt restraints and cycling helmets become common, and voluntary recycling become widespread. “We want to influence the climate of opinion and then change thinking. If in time we need a regulatory underpinning, that can be done, but first we need a change in attitudes,” she says.

The report notes that the Factory Acts at the end of the 19th century first limited the paid working week and by the beginning of the Second World War the eight-hour day and the five-day week were beginning to be seen as normal. “Fewer workers clock in and out of their jobs these days, but the logic of industrial time still ticks away in our heads, shaping how we understand our lives,” the researchers state.

Leisure is a poorly defined concept. Economists tend to think of it as any activity that isn’t work. But that just raises the question, what is work? For our purposes we can think of work as an activity in which you would not engage if all your “absolute needs” had been met. A professional painter would likely paint even if he didn’t have to make a living, but he probably wouldn’t engage in bookkeeping, marketing and the other necessary aspects of his business.

What do I do for a living? Essentially I read a lot, I talk to a lot of interesting people, and I blog, tweet, and write articles like this one. Don’t tell my employer, but aside from some mildly unpleasant things like going on TV or talking to politicians, I’m doing exactly what I would do if I was a billionaire and didn’t have to work. That is, what counts as work for me might as well be leisure. For all intents and purposes, I am indeed working only 15 hours a week just as Keynes predicted. [NW - This is something that I'd thought about: what we call "work" has changed a LOT in the past 200 years.]

As the Skidelskys note, we are pretty nearly on target for the standard of living that Keynes forecast, yet, they say, he was mistaken about the amount of work. “The central puzzle remains: we in the rich world are four or five times better off on average than we were in 1930, but our average hours of work have fallen only a fifth since then.” They supported this passage with a chart showing that weekly hours worked, which, by Keynes’ estimate, should have fallen from fifty to about eighteen by now, are still stuck at forty.
The Skidelskys review three possible explanations:
First, that people take joy in their work. They find that plausible for artists, skilled artisans, and authors but not for most people.
Second, that the capitalist system forces people to work because employers, not workers, get to call the tune. They approvingly quote sociological theories supporting that view, but in the end, they do not find it entirely persuasive.
Third, that wants are insatiable. Although that sometimes seems to be the case, they think that insatiability is not a fixed feature of human nature, but a flaw of our economic system. Keynes, they say, “did not understand that capitalism would set up a new dynamic of want creation that would overwhelm traditional restraints of custom and good sense. . . . Capitalism has achieved incomparable progress in the creation of wealth , but has left us incapable of putting that wealth to civilized use.”

I did not realize this until a friend told me that the Obamacare law requires businesses employing 50 or more workers to provide health-care coverage if these employees average 30 or more hours a week. (See 26 USC § 4980 H.) A fine is imposed if the employer fails to provide such coverage. This is an incentive for employers to reduce working hours in order to avoid the cost of the coverage or the cost of the fines.

The reality of this new requirement came home when a tenant in a duplex I own told me that she was looking for a second job to make ends meet. She manages a pizza delivery operation in a Minneapolis suburb. Her hours were being cut to below 30 hours per week, with a commensurate reduction in pay. To make up for the lost pay, she was looking for a part-time position with a similar business in another suburb. I understood that she would be working at least one fewer day in the week; and she would use that day to work at the second business establishment.

What to make of this? The woman was not happy about the change but was taking it in stride. The bottom-line reality was that she would not receive health-care coverage in either job and, presumably, would be earning about the same amount of money, though from two different employers.

As a long-time advocate of shorter working hours, I see a silver lining. I have long thought that the U.S. Government might amend the Fair Labor Standards Act to create a 32-hour standard workweek. This would bring weekly work time down to 32 hours from 40 or more, producing many new jobs. Now, it seems, we have a federally mandated 30-hour workweek (same as what would have happened if the Black-Connery Act of 1933 had been signed into law) under the back door of health-care reform.