Jim Devine wrote, >please describe one example of a case of so-called suctional unemployment >that does not fit this "special case." 1. See below. The guy in the story was fired for refusing to work overtime. He's NOT the example, he's the exception to the rule. The example is all the folks who didn't get fired because they did the overtime even though they didn't really want to. Probably a lot of folks who wouldn't even have gotten fired but didn't want to take any chances. And other folks who put in the overtime to "help out" their work mates who were also putting in overtime to keep up with work in an understaffed work place. I hope you don't try to construct this story as "symetrical" because the choice was between putting in overtime and being unemployed. As Joseph Bryant's story shows, the choice can also be between submissively putting in overtime and fighting back . . . and even (God forbid) winning. Wednesday November 11 2:01 AM ET Workers Protesting Forced Overtime By KEVIN GALVIN Associated Press Writer WASHINGTON (AP) - After 24 years of fixing phone lines, Joseph Bryant was dismissed by Bell Atlantic Inc. last year for refusing overtime work. The divorced father had sole custody of his two children and needed to pick them up after school. ``I was just trying to balance the overtime,'' he said. ``When you've got kids, you can't just leave them.'' The company argued before an arbitrator that Bryant's child care ``excuse'' wasn't reasonable because he could have made alternative plans for the children on days he was assigned to work late. But Bryant won his arbitration 18 months after he was discharged from his job in Baltimore. His plight illustrates the increasing pressures felt by workers whose bosses require them to put in extra hours. There are no hard statistics on forced overtime, according to academics, but overtime hours are on the rise and mandatory overtime is increasingly seen as an issue in labor negotiations. The issue has come up in contract disputes in a variety of industries and companies, including General Motors Corp. (NYSE:GM - news), United Parcel Service, CP&I Steel and several communications companies. Some employers say they must demand longer hours from their workers because tight labor markets make it impossible to hire enough employees. But unions argue that companies want to avoid hiring additional workers, who would be entitled to costly vacation and health benefits. ``Employers are attempting to force more labor out of their current employees rather than create new jobs. That's the bottom line,'' said Jim Grossfeld, a labor consultant. Union leaders cast mandatory overtime as a family values issue, arguing that it robs parents of time with their children and strains marriages. With workers already complaining during relatively rosy economic times, there is concern that the problem could grow worse during an economic downturn. The issue was a main sticking point behind two recent strikes by telephone workers. When some 35,000 members of the Communications Workers of America struck US West in August, their complaints included forced overtime that frequently meant 60-hour workweeks. A week earlier, CWA members struck Bell Atlantic over similar issues. At settlement, the US West workers won a cap on mandatory overtime at 16 hours per week next year and eight hours per week beginning in 2001. The Bell Atlantic workers' contract said they can't be forced to work back-to-back six-day weeks and, for most of the year, they can refuse to work more than 10 hours of overtime per week. Most employers recognize that there's a fine line between extra hours and excessive overtime. Bell Atlantic spokesman Steve Marcus said, ``We recognize that employees do need time to spend with their families and friends and we try to strike a balance.'' But, Marcus said, ``We provide service to our customers 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and that requires some overtime for our employees.'' Randel K. Johnson, a U.S. Chamber of Commerce vice president, said forced overtime is not a widespread problem and should be worked out case by case through labor negotiations rather than through federal legislation. Labor law doesn't limit hours as long as overtime is paid. ``Even when the Democrats controlled the House and the Senate and the White House, the issue was never even on their radar screen,'' Johnson said. Lonnie Golden, an economist at Pennsylvania State University, said recent research shows that weekly work hours are on the rise and the increase is unevenly distributed among workers. Overtime in U.S. manufacturing industries averages about 4.7 hours per week, and in durable goods industries it's more than five hours. Those figures, the same for 1996 and 1997, were all-time highs since such records began in 1956, Golden said. Overtime in other sectors, such as the service industry, can't reliably be tracked because part-time workers skew the numbers. >There's no need to send it to me or pen-l. Simple give us a quick summary >of what you mean. It's a brief history of the lump-of-labour fallacy. The fallacy turns out to be a riddle. The original fallacy was the wages-fund doctrine of the bourgeois political economists -- the doctrine that there was only a fixed amount of wages and that any efforts by unions to raise wages were futile because they could only either take wages away from other workers or price themselves out of the market. The rise of the trade union movement, socialism and the success of the Ten Hours Bill spelled the end of the wages-fund doctrine. But it was covertly resurected toward the end of the 19th century by Marshall who turned the critique of the doctrine on its head and demonstrated the "fallacy" of a fixed *work-fund*. Marshall's demo only dealt with a special case but that hasn't prevented subsequent legions of chamber of commerce speakers and right-wing think tank hacks from invoking The Well-Known Fallacy as irreproachable proof that reducing the hours of work inexorably leads to more unemployment not less. Somewhere, deep beneath the surface of the vulgarly touted fallacy lurks a real fallacy. That real fallacy is akin to the Pile of Money Ellen points out is not needed to pay social security benefits. In Old Testament terms, the accumulation of a real, physical surplus is seen as contradictory. At first it has a positive, providential role in "laying up a store against bad times" (Joseph's agricultural ministry to the Pharoah). But it eventually leads to an oppressive concentration of power -- enslavement. In it's ultimate, absurd form the compulsive hoard becomes the source of famine rather than a defense against it. Leviticus -- with its prescriptions for leaving a portion of the harvest in the corners of the field for the poor, giving the land its rest every seven years and the Jubilee cancellation of debts -- appears to be a dialectical answer to the dilemma of compulsive accumulation and the fetishization that the hoard invites, the fetish that the inanimate hoard itself, not human activity, is the source of value. Tom Walker http://www.vcn.bc.ca/timework/
