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Soumitra Shukla's avatar

Excellent stuff!!

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Zerkan's avatar

It's unlikely you'd find even a Marxist historian or economist who would argue that productivity increases were not a necessary condition for a reduction in the working day. I don't think your analysis counterposing unionization with productivity as causes makes much sense. The argument that unions 'gave us the eight our workday', is that class struggle, or the threat of it, created the conditions in which productivity gains in the form of wage increases. and a reduction of necessary labor time, were distributed in a greater proportion to wage laborers than they otherwise would have been. It isn't hard to see the game theory of how this worked.

There are potentially negative consequences to higher union density to the economy as a whole, and by extension employees, that you could point to that result from this same game theory: employers engaging in labor hoarding because of increased costs/risk from firing, even in unionized enterprises, which would lead to procyclicality of productivity. But, overall, with higher union density, the benefits of productivity would be split more in favor of employees.

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Kristoffer O’Shaugnessy's avatar

Yes, their efforts led to the 8 hour day and 40 hour work week. It’s amazing that Americans work more than most others in the industrialized world even with increased productivity due to technological and communications improvements thanks to weak labor unions and ‘business-friendly’ labor policies.

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Sam's avatar

check out figure 1 of this paper by Arash Nekoei for some countervailing evidence. in france, the decline in de facto hours lines up very closely with changes in de jure labor law, from 1820-2020

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3893099

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Citizen Penrose's avatar

Does the poll labelling economic growth the primary cause mean that unions were the proximate cause or that they weren't causal at all? Obviously growth is a necessary condition for lowering working hours but unions might have also have necessary on top of that. The poll doesn't seem to differentiate those two claims.

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Cremieux's avatar

It means that they were not primary, not that they didn't do anything. If someone thought they were necessary but not sufficient, they would agree with provisos, i.e., conditionally agree.

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Ackermann's avatar

Have you considered that threat of strikes may drive down working hours? Not unionization rate itself?

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Sep 4
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Cremieux's avatar

He certainly wasn't the first to do eight hours, but he is well known for championing some ideas that were becoming more popular at the time.

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