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- Get "flexible"
Providing a rare economic bright spot, the firm SurePayroll reports a slight increase in hiring among small businesses in 2009. The catch? They're paying lower salaries and hiring contractors, who, not incidentally, pay their own payroll taxes, don't draw benefits, and can be fired in a nano-second. Similarly, FedEx now classifies about 13,000 drivers as independent contractors and pays them per delivery, yielding 30 percent less in labor costs than UPS's unionized workforce. Some see our workforce splitting, as Japan's did after its decade-long recession, into two tiers: coddled salarymen and hustling freelancers. - The four-day week
After laying off 5.1 million workers since December 2007, companies such as Winnebago and Gannett are experimenting with furloughs, trimming hours to save more jobs. They join states like Utah and Washington, which have switched some or all of their workers to four-day weeks. "Furloughs are cheaper for businesses that are optimistic about the future," says Heidi Shierholz, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute. "It's expensive to fire an employee if you will need to rehire and train a replacement in a year." - Time: the new money
Dean Baker, cofounder of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, has a bold idea: He wants the feds to issue tax credits to companies that would then shorten workers' hours without cutting their pay. In essence, the government would be creating room for future hires, thus lowering unemployment and increasing the spending power of the newly employed. Take Back Your Time's de Graaf says we should adopt policies like those established in Europe that allow employees to voluntarily cut back their hours (for less pay) while retaining most of their benefits.
The Time Line
| The Stone Age | A short life of great leisure, once you found your food. |
| 1100-1300 | Serfdom peaks in Europe, with millions of agricultural workers spending most of their waking hours serving the lord who owned their land. |
| Industrial Revolution | British workers plead for ten-hour days and protection for children. |
| 1911 | A fire kills 146 workers at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory in New York City, where immigrant teen girls toiled 14 hours a day. |
| 1919 | Writer Upton Sinclair coins the term white-collar, to describe workers whom he called "the petty underlings of the business world." This segment of the workforce triples between 1900 and 1950. |
| 1926 | Henry Ford adopts the five-day, eight-hour-a-day workweek. |
| 1930 | Kellogg cuts workweek to 30 hours without any loss in productivity. |
| 1938 | President Franklin D. Roosevelt establishes the first minimum wage and the 44-hour workweek. |
| 1965 | A Senate subcommittee predicts automation will lead to a 21st-century workweek of just 14 hours. |
| 1982 | Unemployment jumps to 10.8 percent, a level not seen since the Great Depression. |
| 2000 | France adopts 35-hour workweek. |
| 2009 | President Barack Obama praises "the selflessness of workers who would rather cut their hours than see a friend lose their job." |
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