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This chapter introduces the measures of working conditions and labor rights that are the focus of the book and shows how labor conditions changed in the late 20th century. The key working conditions are pay, hours of work, and workplace health and safety. The four key labor rights (emphasized in policy discussions by international organizations) are freedom of association, nondiscrimination, abolition of forced labor, and reduction of child labor. Evidence presented in this chapter shows that measures of these working conditions and labor rights improved during the late 20th century, a period of increased international economic integration. The data also show that countries that are open to international trade have superior labor conditions.

One response to deindustrialization in New England was a campaign by corporate interests to roll back social legislation and cut business taxes and government spending. The effort is known here as “retrenchment.” Retrenchment advocates argued that cutbacks were necessary to enhance the competitiveness of textiles and other troubled New England industries. The chapter focuses on events in Massachusetts in the 1920s and 30s. It closely examines business associations’ drive to ease the state’s hours of work laws for women in manufacturing. The chapter also considers the campaign by Massachusetts business interests to reduce government spending and corporate taxes. The business push for retrenchment in post–World War I Massachusetts had mixed results. Due to concerted resistance from unions and reformers, the state’s labor laws and other social protections were unchanged or even strengthened. However, business groups eventually secured substantial reductions in corporate taxes.

The focus of this chapter is on women. Women in the early twentieth century enjoyed leisure time up to marriage but not thereafter. Married women’s entry into the labour market in large numbers in the second half of the twentieth century did nothing to increase their leisure, and by the end of the century there was a growing literature addressed to women on how to achieve ‘work-life balance’, the key being personal organisation. But ‘life’ in this literature consisted mainly of unpaid child care and domestic work. It coincided with a half to the long decline of hours and in sectors of the economy, particularly in managerial jobs, an increase. Stress at work was increasingly a factor.

The effect of labor unions on a variety of non-wage aspects of work is a small, yet important, aspect of the recent history of unionism in the United States. Although unions have demonstrated a historical commitment to non-wage aspects of jobs, union goals and impacts may have changed as union density and influence have declined. Using data from a variety of databases, this chapter investigates the following questions: How do the non-wage aspects of union jobs differ from those of non-union jobs? Have these differences changed during the past several decades? The chapter first documents and describes differences in hours worked in union and non-union jobs. It then provides an updated assessment of union impacts on the provision of various fringe benefits (health insurance, pensions, etc.) addressed for an earlier period in various studies. It also discusses the economics of reductions in hours of work and uses data from the Current Population Survey and the Panel Study of Income Dynamics to determine the impact of unions on hours worked.

This chapter evaluates Keynes’s economic vision by acknowledging some great intuitions on his part, including the growing and persistent role of technological progress in the future, the defeat of the Malthusian gloom prophecies, and the reopening of the debate on the goal of human life and socioeconomic action due to the growing perceived importance of immaterial needs. To get a glimpse of the bigger picture, however, it is also important to consider the less successful prophecies, including the prediction of the progressive reduction of hours worked and of the end of economics—intended as the end or the much reduced relevance of economic problems. This chapter also highlights the missing elements that generated the wrong predictions and, inevitably, the chapter plays the same game Keynes did by extending a look into the future.