tom abeles wrote:
>Tom Walker wrote, in part:
>
> What has been
>> occuring instead is an INCREASED reliance on increasingly meaningless (to
>> productivity) criteria of hours of work, job tenure and individual
>> performance. What this means in practice is not "reward commensurate with
>> contribution" but a winner take all lottery.
>-------------------
>
>i am not sure that I understand what is happening in your model. Can you
>give me a scenario and take that the next step forward
That's a good question. With the application of science and technology to
industrial processes, productivity becomes increasingly SOCIAL and not
individually attributable. Karl Marx noticed phenomenon this nearly 150
years ago in the Grundrisse:
"to the degree that large industry develops, the creation of real wealth
comes to depend less on labour time and on the amount of labour employed
than on the power of the agencies set in motion during labour time, whose
'powerful effectiveness' is itself in turn out of all proportion to the
direct labour time spent on their production, but depends rather on the
general state of science and on the progress of technology, or the
application of this science to production."
Some sense of the scale of change can be had by looking at labour
productivity statistics over the longer period. Labour productivity per hour
in the U.S. in 1992 was approximately 13 times what it was in 1870. During
the same period, the average annual hours worked per person employed was
nearly cut in half, from 2,964 in 1870 to 1,589 in 1992. On average, then,
a worker in 1992 produced seven times as much per year in slightly more than
half as many hours. Much of that productivity gain, by the way, occurred
between 1929 and 1973.
I suppose one could say that the average individual U.S. worker in 1992
worked 13 times harder than the average worker in 1870 or was 13 times more
skilled or some intermediate combination of increased skill and effort. I
suppose. Another way of looking at the change, though, is that "inorganic
nature", rather than the worker, has been made to do more of the work:
"No longer does the worker insert a modified natural thing [Naturgegenstand]
as middle link between the object [Objekt] and himself; rather, he inserts
the process of nature, transformed into an industrial process, as a means
between himself and inorganic nature, mastering it. He steps to the side of
the production process instead of being its chief actor. In this
transformation, it is neither the direct human labour he himself performs,
nor the time during which he works, but rather the appropriation of his own
general productive power, his understanding of nature and his mastery over
it by virtue of his presence as a social body -- it is, in a word, the
development of the social individual which appears as the great
foundation-stone of production and of wealth."
All this may sound very grand indeed if one forgets that the "inorganic
nature" in question largely has consisted of the consumption of
non-renewable fossil fuels. Over the past 20 years or so there has been a
marked polarization of income which has been intensified by a polarization
of annual hours worked -- that is to say that (on average) those earning at
a higher hourly rate have also been working progressively more hours per year.
Often this dispersion has been described as a "skills gap" or an "education
premium", thereby attributing the change to differences in individual
ability, knowledge or effort. Considering the major source of productivity
gains over the past century or so, however, it would be better to look at
the dispersion in income as a bounty paid to the most prodigious consumers
of energy. That is to say, relatively small differentials in skill or
educational credentials become the warrants for relatively large
differentials in entitlements to consume energy at work. Individuals are
then compensated roughly in accordance with those later entitlements and not
the original more modest differences in ability, knowledge or effort.
Leaving aside the element of randomness relating individual success in
obtaining employment to credentials, we might find, for example that A, with
20 years of schooling obtains a warrant to consume 40 units of energy per
hour at work while B, with only 16 years of schooling obtains a warrant to
consume a mere 20 units per hour. As a result, A may well "produce" twice as
much per hour as B, thus "justifying" much higher compensation.
regards,
Tom Walker
http://www.vcn.bc.ca/timework/worksite.htm
