Elevator Pitch

The final passage of "Time on the Ledger":

In 1866, the Congress of the International Working Men's Association, meeting in Geneva resolved that, "the limitation of the working-day is a preliminary condition without which all further attempts at improvement and emancipation must prove abortive…" Karl Marx drafted the resolution. The language is unequivocal: in the absence of the effective regulation of working time all attempts at improvement must fail.

Forty-three years later, Sydney J. Chapman, a neoclassical economist, star pupil of Alfred Marshall and future chief economic adviser to the British government wrote, "The ideal working day of the future cannot be eight hours, for it must be essentially a progressive ideal. As a community advances, agitation for shorter hours will be constantly breaking out anew."

A new outbreak of agitation for shorter hours is long overdue.