If eight hours costs the stockholders nothing, seven will cost them little, six will only make them sick, five will make them hungry, and four will put them to work!–The Industrial Loafers of the World will put in their four hours with the rest. And to Society as a whole the change will still be “an economy.” It will “increase efficiency.” It will “cost nothing.”
— Max Eastman, “Knowledge and Revolution,” The Masses Vol. 5 Issue 5, February 1914
Not to mention, now, everyone who wants to work but cannot find someone who is hiring.
It should go without saying that the wages for a four-hour work day must be adequate to sustain a person. Not to subsist, but to sustain, healthy and dignified.
I am lucky. Nonetheless, I wish to register a complaint. It is not that the eight-hour workday and forty-hour workweek are sufficient to suck up all the energy I would rather partially expend on my own projects. It is not even that so many are forced to work sixty hour weeks or cannot work at all. It is more or less that it feels like any power we ever had to change the situation has been taken away. By what? Well, *puts on tinfoil hat…*
All That Beside Which We Are Small 