I remember hearing about this when I was a kid too … you’d often hear people looking forward to the “30 hour week” which surely, at the time, couldn’t be far off. But instead, as productivity increased, its fruits were hoarded by the capital-owning classes, and the wage-earner was squeezed harder and harder and harder … salaries stagnant, hours and workloads rising, benefits cut (no more company-funded retirement fund for you proles, and soon no employer-provided health insurance either). Now we have double-digit poverty, a “reserve army of the unemployed” (many of whom, through sheer desperation, are forced to enlist in the real Army and face senseless death overseas), and virtually everyone in the 99% is economically-insecure to one degree or another. The “leisure society” is entirely within our grasp, but not without wresting the ill-gotten political and economic power from those who currently hold it.
(Source: thomhartmann.com)
