Industrial Workers of the World

"A shorter workday for all employed workers would put thousands of unemployed to work.  If everybody worked, there would be no poverty."

---IWW's 'Little Red Songbook' of 1923

"The answer to all opponents to the reduction of hours of labor could well be given in these words: that so long as there is one man who seeks employment and cannot obtain it, the hours of labor are too long."

-- Gompers

"The full employment policy by means of investment is only one particular application of an intellectual theorem. You can produce the result just as well by consuming more or working less. Personally I regard the investment policy as first aid. In US it almost certainly will not do the trick. Less work is the ultimate solution (a 35 hour week in US would do the trick now). How you mix up the three ingredients of a cure is a matter of taste and experience, i.e. of morals and knowledge."

-- Keynes

"In place of the pompous catalog of the 'inalienable rights of man' comes the modest Magna Carta of a legally limited working-day, which shall make clear 'when the time which the worker sells is ended, and when his own begins.' Quantum mutatus ab illo!"

--Marx