The oddness of this pattern is particularly evident if we narrow our focus to manufacturing. It was the organized workers of that sector who, in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, pushed for a reduction in work time, first militating for the ten-hour day and then for the eight-hour day. Examining the change in average full-time manufacturing hours per week across the entire century we see a drop from fifty-three hours in 1900 to forty-two hours in 1999—a 20 percent reduction (Fisk 2001). But once again, almost of all of this reduction in hours took place between 1900 and 1940. Between 1950 and 1999 manufacturing labor productivity increased by an average of 2.9 percent per year, for a total increase of 417 percent (Cobet and Wilson 2002). Yet over this period the length of the working week in manufacturing barely budged at all. There was thus a marked deceleration in the rate of decline of manufacturing working hours in the postwar years at the same time that there was a pronounced acceleration in both manufacturing productivity and hourly earnings.
The extent to which increasing productivity was converted into more output, rather than fewer hours, is made clear by the following calculation. As we have seen, productivity in the United States increased by at least 433 percent (5.33 times) between 1929 and 2007. In 1929, work hours averaged forty-eight per week, while by 2007 this number had fallen to about forty. If a quite moderate proportion, say 20 percent, of the increase in productivity experienced by the United States over this period had been converted into less working time, rather than higher output, then between 1929 and 2007, there would have been close to a 50 percent reduction in the length of the working week—such that by 2007 Americans would work for twenty-four hours per week, rather than close to forty. Even a very modest 10 percent conversion of increased productivity into fewer working hours over that period would have yielded a 33 percent reduction in the working week, from forty-eight hours (in 1929) to thirty-two hours.15 If we take 1940 as a base year, rather than 1929, the results are even more striking. By 1940, the working week was just over forty hours per week. This followed the passing of the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, which made time-and-a-half pay compulsory for hours worked in excess of forty per week. Once hours stabilized at around forty per week in 1940, they simply failed to fall much further. Yet labor productivity increased by about 5 times between 1940 and 2007. A 20 percent conversion of increased productivity between 1940 and 2007 into fewer hours rather than more output would have reduced the workweek to twenty hours, while a 10 percent conversion would have reduced it to twenty-eight hours.
Empirical Pattern in the United States
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