ABSTRACT
From Adam Smith and J. S. Mill to the Luddites and the followers of Captain Swing, commentators on work in industrial society have noted the tendency for machinery to replace and displace human labor. B. K. Hunnicutt has provided an engaging account of how American workers achieved reductions in working hours during the latter part of the nineteenth century, and the first two decades of the twentieth. Daniel Bell suggested that 'The themes of play, of recreation, of amusement are the dominant ones in our culture today'. This super-structural development was a reflection of the fact that 'The vast development of automatic controls and the continuous flow creates the possibility of eliminating the workers from production completely'. This vision of a society polarized around the fulcrum of work is a common one. The tendency for working hours to increase, even in the face of increased productivity, was seen by Rosenberg as a trend characterizing the 1980s.
