Robert,
For information about the legislation and its defeat, see Benjamin
Hunnicutt's Work without End. For a longer term history of the struggle for
shorter work time see Roediger and Foner's Our Own Time. For an account of
the disappearance of serious worktime theory from economics see Nyland's
Reduced Worktime and the Management of Production.
For an upcoming expose of how these events leave a trail of clues that lead
to an indictment of the logical and mathematical integrity of mainstream
post-war economics, stay tuned to Futurework. I'm working on it.
A sketchy preview for those who have followed my earlier lump-of-labour
postings: Paul Samuelson's _Foundations of Economic Analyis_, more
specifically the social welfare function described in that book, turns out
to stand on a "lump-of-labour fallacy" committed in 1908 by Enrico Barone in
the construction of a social welfare calculus and then uncritically
appropriated in 1938 by Abram Bergson in his social welfare function.
Talk about having "feet of clay". Mainstream economics stands on the
foundation of a lump. The section in edition after edition of the Samuelson
textbook on the lump-of-labour fallacy may perhaps be seen as a kind of
"stop me before I kill again" plea for someone to excavate his own untenable
foundational myth.
Hunnicutt, Benjamin Kline.
Work without end : abandoning shorter hours for the right to work / Benjamin
Kline Hunnicutt.
Philadelphia : Temple University Press, 1988.
Roediger, David R.
Our own time : a history of American labor and the working day / David R.
Roediger and Philip S. Foner.
New York : Greenwood Press, c1989.
Nyland, Chris.
Reduced worktime and the management of production / Chris Nyland.
Cambridge [England] ; New York : Cambridge University Press, 1989.
At 08:11 PM 4/20/99 +0200, Neunteufel Robert wrote:
>I found the following short informations about a thirty-hours legislation
in the USA in the 1930s in Juliet B. Shors book "The Overworked Amerikan"
(page 74 /75).
>
>Can anyone on the FW-list give me more information about that legislation
and the story of its failure? Are there any informations on the internet
about this?
>
>Thank you for any comment,
>
>Robert Neunteufel, Styria, Austria, Europe
>personal homepage: http://members.EUnet.at/ro.neunteufel
regards,
Tom Walker
http://www.vcn.bc.ca/timework/covenant.htm
