Professor Sutton, while I agree with the stated problem of overworking employees in today's culture, the scaling back of work for higher employment is problematic as it assumes a zero-sum game economy. Reducing productivity, like breaking windows does not increase the amount of total available work. By working longer hours, the engineers produce more value for the companies which in turn allows them to invest that value or consume. source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lump_of_labour_fallacy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broken_window_fallacy