Liberals keep invoking (as do I) the moves in the depression era New Deal to put people to work: the WPA, PWA, CCCs, and more.
But the law that has had the biggest and longest lasting impact on the number of jobs is the Fair Labor Standards Act, which cut the work week to 40 hours. The most important (and crucial) Macro policy to be adopted now is a sharp cut in "standard" hours of work. (Standard in quotes to acknowledge that part-time has been becoming more prevelant.) Cutting to four days would be only a beginning. Keynes, after all, talked about 15 hours being about right for a work week. The most important (and crucial) Climate Change policy to be adopted now is a sharp cut in "standard" hours of work. An Op Ed in today's NYTs, titled "The Future of Fair Labor" has this paragraph: "The act is the bedrock of modern employment law. It outlawed child labor, guaranteed a minimum wage, established the official length of the workweek at 40 hours, and required overtime pay for anything more. Capping the working week encouraged employers to hire more people rather than work the ones they had to exhaustion. All this came not from the magic of market equilibrium but from federal policy." Somebody at the NYTimes gets it that jobs are not coming back, for these occasional pieces continue to surface. Gene The Op Ed can be found at: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/25/opinion/the-future-of-fair-labor.html?hp _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
