Describes, in particular, the experience resulting from the successful 1989-1991 campaign for a shorter working week by the Confederation of Shipbuilding and Engineering Unions.

This book is written in support of proposals to reduce work time in order to improve employment opportunities. The authors, both of whom have been deeply involved in shorter workweek policy debates, argue that the failure of the U.S. to enact shorter workweek legislation when it was first proposed in the late 1950s was a significant policy mistake. They argue further that reduced work hours are an effective means to full employment, improved income distribution, and a stronger consumer market--in addition to promising a better life to the contemporary American family. Policymakers concerned with employment issues as well as trade union officials and students of industrial relations will find here a new framework of ideas to support the renewed consideration of shorter workweek legislation. The authors approach their subject by analyzing the consequences of the U.S. rejection of shorter workweek proposals over the past 30 years. Among them, they contend, are an increasing polarization of incomes, the devotion of more and more resources to the support of economic waste, and a continuing problem with unemployment. The current preoccupation with dollar-denominated growth (a legacy from the Great Depression) has produced a debt-ridden system which increasingly fails to accomodate people's real needs: hence, the authors call for a nonfinancial analysis of economic questions. Taken as a whole, this volume offers both an eloquent defense of leisure and a cogent analysis of the beneficial economic effects of the institution of a shorter workweek or longer annual vacation.

Machine generated contents note: -- I. Introduction: Why Working Hours? -- II. A Brief History of Working Hours -- III. Conceptual Framework -- IV. Estimates of Production Functions -- V. Further Implications of the Augmented Production Functions -- VI. Hours of Work, Health, and Well-Being -- VII. The Association between Working Hours and Hourly Earnings -- VIII. Concluding Notes

Structured in three parts, Economics of Fatigue and Unrest is as relevant today for the study of industrial relations and human resource management as when it was first published. It contains chapters on the following: * The growth of technical efficiency * The theory of fatigue and unrest * The costs of industrial inefficiency * The loss by staff turnover * The loss by absence * The loss by industrial accidents and ill-health

This reference provides an overview of relevant literature to engineers, managers, accountants, occupational health and safety specialists, and industrial hygienists, so that they, and other professionals, can understand what has caused our workplaces to become primary sources of physical and mental illness.