By Tim Redmond - San Francisco Bay Guardian, June 22-28, 2005

French voters are trying to preserve a 35-hour work week in a world where Indian engineers are willing to work a 35-hour day. Good luck.

Thomas L. Friedman, New York Times, June 3, 2005

This really pisses me off.

Ever since the French (bless their anti-American little heads) voted against the European Constitution, the national media have been flooded with comments from deep thinkers who insist that the days of a real social and economic safety net are over.

The whole idea of decent wages and benefits, of jobs that allow enough vacation time, of unemployment insurance that pays the bills, of universal health care, of an economic system that lets even working-class people live an almost comfortable life – that's all over. It's a mad race to the bottom now, and the only way to compete in a globalized economy is for all of us to work like mad hamsters on an electrified wheel.

I'm convinced that this isn't only infuriating – it's wrong. But I'm not the expert, so I thought I'd call Juliet Schor.

Schor is an eminent economist and the author of the classic book The Overworked American. She's a professor at Boston College these days, and she has, to put it mildly, a different take on the world than most American pundits. Some excerpts from our brief interview follow:

Bay Guardian: Is it time to give up on the 35-hour workweek?

Juliet Schor: That's such a simplistic formulation. What the voters [in France] were against is the neoliberal politics that's eroding people's standard of living and producing poor economic outcomes all around the world.

If you look at the so-called Keynesian era [after World War II], we had higher growth and much better outcomes for the vast majority of the people. An economy in which the middle class was growing, not shrinking, and poverty was declining. It was a very profitable time for corporations as well.

This 19th-century model in which all the gains are accruing to the top is one that voters are rightly rejecting.... The race to the bottom is a disaster.

BG: How do you argue for people to maintain a stable job at a decent standard of living when you can outsource so much work anywhere in the world and there are probably people in India willing to work the equivalent of a 35-hour day?

JS: You have to understand that the consumer and the worker are ultimately the same person, and so if you say that we must have the cheapest possible computers and apparel, and airline tickets must be rock-bottom cheap, then it will come around to bite you in the worker side. If you want an economy that pays higher wages, you will also have to pay higher prices. That's a lesson that Americans haven't learned yet.

You have to remember that it's our corporations that are driving down wages. Either they are getting more in profits for management – and people like Michael Jordan, who represents Nike, a small group of people reaping those benefits – or the prices are coming down with the wages, and that's further eroding the position of workers here. Neither, in the end, is a good solution

BG: The other thing that the Thomas Friedmans of the world argue is that nobody will hold the same job for very long anymore, that you have to be prepared to shift jobs all the time. I could argue that that's a hellish way to run an economy.

JS: Let me say one thing. The people who make that argument tend to be tenured economists – arguably the most protected, nonmarket labor that exists. When they start giving up their tenure and living the ideology they say everyone else should live, I'll take them more seriously.

There's another aspect of this that's important. The direction I think we ought to go is more toward local economies that operate in the long-term interest of the communities that they're located in. You see a whole movement emerging for local economies that meet people's needs in a long-term way, both in the industrialized economies and places like India.

Let me make one more point. This country has never been wealthier than it is now, but people's standard of living, their benefits, all the gains of the 20th century, are said to be unaffordable now. That's a lie. It's a lie based on a fundamental ideology that somehow this is a period of intense scarcity. We're richer than ever. But we have a serious distribution problem; an unprecedented percentage of our wealth goes to a very small number of people.