ABSTRACT
Working time is central to the political economy of any society: to live people must produce, and this takes time. Other things being equal, the volume of production is determined by the volume of aggregate working time, and for any given level of aggregate working time the number of people employed is determined by the average duration of individual working time. This implies that if there is not enough work to go around, unemployment will be lower if the available work is shared out among more people: the shorter individual working time is, the more people are employed. The idea is that a reduction in hours for those in employment will create a shortage of labour, so that employers will take on extra workers in order to maintain production – or at least avert dismissals if demand is low. Working time reduction as an anti-unemployment policy is thus a response to a situation in which either the volume of work is insufficient to employ everyone, or is not growing fast enough to maintain full employment (Blyton 1989: 161). To the extent that working time reduction can reduce unemployment, the political and economic dynamics of working time reduction are closely connected with what is arguably one of the principaldysfunctions of welfare capitalism in the 1990s: the persistence of mass unemployment. An effort to understand the political and economic dynamics of working time reduction as an employment policy is therefore important if we are to improve our understanding of the political economy of welfare capitalism as a whole.
