>
> On May 14, 2007, at 4:44 AM, James Heartfield wrote:
>
> > I think the comment of Doug's Miles remembers is this:
> >
> > "Total hours worked in the U.S. private sector have risen 70% since
> > 1973;
> > the pop is up only 43%. So the rise in
> > aggregate consumption has come with a huge increase in the work
> > effort"
> >
> > Which is an estimate of the total hours worked, in relation to the
> > total
> > population, whereas you would need to relate it to the working
> > population to
> > get the hours worked by an average American.
>
> In the 1950s and 1960s, 56-57% of the adult U.S. population worked
> for pay. That rose to 60% in the 1980s, and peaked at almost 65% in
> 2000. It fell in the recession and has risen slowly since, and is now
> around 63%. So a larger portion of the U.S. pop is working for pay
> than in the "Golden Age" - mainly women. Male participation rates
> have fallen, esp for older people. A major reason the average
> individual workweek (now 33.8 hours, just above its all-time low) has
> fallen is the declining weight of manufacturing, where the average
> workweek is 41 hours. Manufacturing was 30% of the workforce in 1950;
> 21% in 1980; now, it's 10%.
>
> Doug
>
And like I showed yesterday if you stack declining hours against changing
participation rates you get a remarkably stable intensity of paid labour for
the working class as a whole.
Setting 1964 as one by dividing the subsequent years gives us an index
1964.......1.00 1970.......1.003 1985.......0.982 1990.......1.013 2000.......1.037 2006.......0.998
Travis