Work Without End: Abandoning Shorter Hours for the Right to Work (Labor And Social Change) [Paperback]

Benjamin Hunnicutt (Author)

Book Description

Series: Labor And Social Change | Publication Date: May 10, 1990

For more than a century preceding the Great Depression, work hours were steadily reduced. Intellectuals, labor leaders, politicians, and workers saw this reduction in work as authentic progress and the resulting increase in leisure time as a cultural advance. Benjamin Hunnicutt examines the period from 1920 to 1940 during which the shorter hour movement ended and the drive for economic expansion through increased work took over. He traces the political, intellectual, and social dialogues that changed the American concept of progress from dreams of more leisure in which to pursue the higher things in life to an obsession with the importance of work and wage-earning.During the 1920s with the development of advertising, the "gospel of consumption" began to replace the goal of leisure time with a list of things to buy. Business, which increasingly viewed shorter hours as a threat to economic growth, persuaded the worker that more work brought more tangible rewards. The Great Depression shook the newly proclaimed gospel as well as everyone's faith in progress. Although work-sharing became a temporary solution to the shortage of jobs and massive unemployment, when faced with legislation that would limit the work week to thirty hours, Roosevelt and his New Deal advisors adopted the gospel of consumption's tests for progress and created more work by government action. The New Deal campaigned for the right to work a full time job and won. Benjamin Kline Hunnicutt is Professor of Leisure Studies at the University of Iowa.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"An extraordinarily informative scholarly history of the debate over working hours from 1920 to 1940."
—New York Times Book Review

"Work Without End presents a compelling history of the rise and fall of the 40-hour work week, explains bow Americans became trapped in a prison of work that allows little room for family, bobbies or civic participation and suggests bow they can free themselves from relentless overwork. [This book] is a sober reconsideration of a topic that is critical to America’s future. It suggests that progress doesn’t mean much if there is not time for love as well as work, and liberation is an empty achievement if the work it frees one to do is truly without end."
—The Washington Post

"Hunnicutt, with this excellent book, becomes the first United States historian to examine fully why this momentous change occurred."
—The Journal of American History

From the Publisher

Tracing the political, intellectual, and social dialogues that changed the American concept of progress in terms of labor

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 416 pages
• Publisher: Temple University Press (May 10, 1990)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0877227632
• ISBN-13: 978-0877227632
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,709,430 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Very Important Book, November 24, 1999

By 

Charles Siegel "Preservation Institute" (Berkeley, CA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Work Without End: Abandoning Shorter Hours for the Right to Work (Labor And Social Change) (Paperback)

This is a very important and readable book that has not gotten the attention it deserves. Hunnicutt describes how the movement toward shorter work hours ended in the 1930s. He includes historical details that are almost forgotten today, such as the Black-Connery bill to shorten the work week to 30 hours, which passed the Senate and almost passed the House.

Shorter work hours are a key to dealing with global ecological problems, and they have been ignored for too long by the environmental movement. Hunnicutt is the most important writer on this issue.