Alex is a busy man. The 36-year-old husband and father of three commutes each day to his full-time job at a large telecom company in Denver, the city he moved to from his native Peru in 2003. At night, he has classes or homework for the bachelor?s in social science he is pursuing at a nearby university. With or without an alarm, he wakes up at 5 AM every day, and it?s only then, after eating breakfast and glancing at the newspaper, that he has a chance to serve in his capacity as the sole US organizer and webmaster of the Global Campaign for the 4 Hour Work-Day.
?I?ve been trying to contact other organizations,? he says, ?though, ironically, I don?t have time.?
But Alex has big plans. By the end of the decade he envisions ?a really crazy movement? with chapters around the world orchestrating the requisite work stoppage.
A century ago, such an undertaking would have seemed less obviously doomed. For decades the US labor movement had already been filling the streets with hundreds of thousands of workers demanding an eight-hour workday. This was just one more step in the gradual reduction of working hours that was expected to continue forever. Before the Civil War, workers like the factory women of Lowell, Massachusetts, had fought for a reduction to ten hours from 12 or more. Later, when the Great Depression hit, unions called for shorter hours to spread out the reduced workload and prevent layoffs; big companies like Kellogg?s followed suit voluntarily. But in the wake of World War II, the eight-hour grind stuck, and today most workers end up doing more than that.
Continued http://www.vice.com/read/who-stole-t...-0000406-v21n8
http://www.4hourworkday.org/
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