Current forecasts paint a dismal future for unions; observers in the 1920s and 1930s also projected bleak prospects for organized labor. Analysts in the interwar years were off the mark. This paper seeks to investigate whether the revival of the labor movement before WWII was the result of...

Workers paid by the piece should in principle cooperate with new techniques that increase their output. In practice, however, firms seem unable to keep piece rates fixed, and when they cut rates workers often respond by restricting output. This paper investigates a case where in fact firms...

This paper brings a long-term perspective to the debate on the causes of worktime differences among OECD countries. Exploiting new data sets on hours of work per week, days at work per year, and annual work hours between 1870 and 2000, we challenge the conventional view that Europeans began to...