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PREFACE

While the health of the worker under the greater speed and
mental strain of modern industrial operation is one factor
considered, the five-day week is also being advocated on
grounds of the increased productivity of modern machine
industry and industrial organization, and because of the need
for wider markets and greater public purchasing power for
the growing mass production of industry. High purchasing
power of the people can not, it is argued, be developed except
through higher wages. Therefore, it is contended that while
progressive mass production must make commodities available
 at progressively cheaper prices, the population’s ability
to purchase them in increasing measure must be sustained
through higher wage earnings; and, furthermore, unless the
people have more leisure they can not use more commodities,
and unless they can use them they will not want them.
Such reasoning is on the surface plausible and appealing,
but its simplicity and plausibility conceal a tangle of complex
and difficult problems. The industry of a great nation, like
the United States, is not one large factory but a vast collection
 of separate industries and establishments, in many ways
interdependent but also in constant competition, each with
its own problems of costs, prices and markets. No single
method of operation or philosophy of management, even
though it may be theoretically sound, is generally applicable.
In the course of time, individual adjustments and policies
may tend in the direction of one general practice, such as the
five-day week. Experience in this field, however, has not
been general or long enough, as yet, to enable anyone to say
with assurance that such practice, or the philosophy upon
which it is based, will be generally or universally valid from
the point of view of the national economic interest.
For the present, the task of industry is to follow the growth
of the five-day week movement and to analyze the fund of
concrete experience that has been, and is being, accumulated.
In this way, industry will be currently prepared for the exercise
 of sound judgment upon the question whenever it may
arise as an issue.
To assist in this task is the purpose of the present study,
which intends only to describe the present status of five-day
operation and the experience with it in American manufac-