INTRODUCTION

in that it permits for some industries a better balancing of
production and consumption. Commodities tend to be overproduced
 and to lose part of their market value if consumers,
hough able to buy them, do not have time to use them. But
many persons question whether the extension of leisure is
justifiable merely on such grounds, and ask whether additional
 leisure will be used in ways beneficial to the cultural
interests of society. Employers, as such, have perhaps no
direct interest in these latter questions, yet as citizens they
are bound to be affected by them.
Enough has already been said to indicate the diversity of
questions raised by the five-day week proposal, but this very
complexity should stimulate rather than diminish interest in
the subject. In the short space of a few years, the five-day
week has passed from the status of a vague future possibility
to that of an accomplished fact in several hundred establishments,
 and has become a live question in many others. Like
many other phases of administrative policy, its merit can not
be decided once and for all. In each individual establishment
 these and other questions will have to be considered
when determining the advisability of a five-day working
schedule.
After all, the movement toward shorter working hours is
not independent and isolated from other factors involved in
economic development. It is but one of the related tendencies
 which, to be sound, must move in conformity with general
 economic law and progress. To attempt to accelerate a
single constituent of this progress arbitrarily is to invite
conomic maladjustment, which is more likely to retard than
‘0 expedite orderly advance toward the desired goal.
The immediate issues involved in five-day week operation
are comparatively simple. When hours of work per week
remain the same under the shorter as under the longer work
week, no important administrative questions arise. But
when weekly hours are reduced, the important problem of
maintaining production and unit wage costs comes at once to
the front. If, immediately following the change to the fiveday
 schedule, the production and wage cost situation should
prove unsatisfactory, is there a likelihood that conditions
could be corrected through further improvement in methods