The changing landscape of work time reduction. The past and the future.

This chapter explains a historical overview of work organization strategies during the nineteenth and early twentieth century. It analyses the political and economic factors that affected the work time norms in the second half of the twentieth century, from around 1970 to 2000. The chapter discusses work organization in the changing world of low economic growth, decelerating increases in labour productivity and high levels of unemployment. It examines recent work time reduction and work-sharing policies in several European countries and evaluates their results. Work time reduction (WTR) became a critical and highly disputed issue in the early stages of emerging capitalism when the industrial revolution brought about not only technological advances, but also unprecedented levels of increases in work time. Improved labour productivity led to a hitherto unseen economic output, flooding markets with products and increasing material standards of living.