5 October—In 1930, British economist John Maynard Keynes predicted that technological advancement would reduce the workweek to a mere 15 hours by 2030. He reckoned that people would work two days and have five-day weekends.

In 1965, a U.S. Senate labor-oriented subcommittee of publicity-seeking ignoramuses, talking through their hats as usual, one-upped Lord Keynes, predicting that Americans would be working 14-hour weeks by 2000—and, in the bargain, having seven-week annual vacations in addition to five-day weekends. Not that it matters, but one wonders from what absurdist (but politically expedient) fiction they plucked those figures.

Anyway, fast-forwarding to present-day reality, the first five-day workweek in the United States was instituted by a cotton mill right here in New England in 1908 so that—incredible as it may seem—Jewish workers wouldn’t have to toil from sundown Friday to sundown Saturday. So as not to offend gentile workers by having the Jews make up the work on Sunday (which day all good Christians spent in church and doing nothing productive in all events, of course), the (possibly Jewish) mill owner gave all his employees the whole weekend off.

It wasn’t until 1926 that Henry Ford, a noted antisemite who had opened his first plant in 1904, reduced the then-standard six-day workweek to five days for Ford employees, actually shutting down plants (so the story goes) for all of Saturday and Sunday, while naturally reducing the workers’ pay—although some sources claim he didn’t reduce pay.

In 1929, just in time for the Great Depression, the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America was the first union to demand and actually receive a five-day workweek.

But it wasn’t until 1938, during the Great Depression, that the federal Fair Labor Standards Act was amended to mandate a maximum 40-hour workweek for most—but far from all—workers in America, with a two-day weekend, which went into effect in 1940. Most of the world has followed in drips and drabs, usually to harmonize with international markets rather than to be nice to workers.

The International Labour Organization [sic—mid-Atlantic speling] currently defines a workweek exceeding 48 hours as excessive. In all events, well over a half-billion poor souls around the world are known to be working excessive hours. And in inhumane conditions.

That takes us to the four-day, 32-hour, workweek with the same pay as a 40-hour week the unions striking the big three automobile manufacturers are demanding in addition to better pay, security, and other generally reasonable benefits, as compared to the high and mighty suits who—as in all industries—tend to compensate themselves far too generously for doing whatever they may or may not do in the worship of mammon.

There should be no problem with 32-hour workweeks—just so long as the workers are as productive in 32 hours and four days as they’d be in five days and 40 hours. Fair is fair, after all. But if the reduced workweek is merely an excuse to grow the workforce and increase union membership while also increasing overtime, that’s a totally different story . . .