Time to Kill: The Fall of the 30-hour Week in the United States

• In Event: 40420 - Section on Political Sociology Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 22: Worker Resistance

Abstract

Why do U.S. workers not work 30 hours a week? In the early 1930s, a 30-hour workweek seemed imminent as a response to mass unemployment, yet it was ultimately abandoned. This paper traces the fall of the shorter workweek proposal, explaining both why and how it was defeated.

Regarding why, I argue that the shorter workweek lost momentum because its rationale—reducing worktime to address unemployment—was displaced by the rise of demand-driven growth as the dominant policy response. This shifts the study of working hours away from the conventional framing of leisure versus wages and toward its connection with employment debates. More broadly, this paper highlights an understudied moment in labor history when reducing worktime was a mainstream macroeconomic policy option.

Regarding how, I emphasize the role of temporality in policymaking during crises. I argue that delays in the legislative process enabled alternative policies to emerge, demonstrating that how long a solution remains on the agenda can be as consequential as what is on the agenda, because it allows opponents of default solutions to counter-strategize and generate viable alternatives. Critical juncture scholarship often assumes decision-makers select from predefined alternatives without interrogating how these emerge or become viable. For its part, the policymaking literature has typically framed temporal control as a variant of binary veto power. This paper builds on both by arguing that temporality is an essential element of policymaking, constraining or permitting development of alternatives during crises. Within a critical juncture, extending the decision-making timeframe allows opponents of a default solution to formulate and advocate for alternatives, while shortening it forces choosing readily available solutions. The fall of the 30-hour workweek depended on a particular use of this power: extending the timeline to allow for countermobilization, or what I call, the creation of time to kill.

Author

• Andres Rodriguez-Caceres, Northwestern University