Keith Hudson wrote,
>It's no use throwing confrontational language at me -- in rows of upper
>case words or not.
The "confrontational language" was a slightly modified quote from David F.
Schloss (in the original he referred specifically to the "length of the
working day" rather than generally to the "hours of work" because the issue
was the 8-hour day and not the 35-hour week). I'm not throwing any language
at YOU, Keith. I'm all too familiar with your style of argument. I'm only
replying to you on the off chance that someone else will eavesdrop on the
(non)conversation.
>I did indeed go to the summary of your chapter, but didn't understand much
>of it due to the sociological/academic type language. But it seems to me
>that your argument (as in your message below) makes use of the trick of
>referring to some authority somewhere else -- but never adequately >explained.
>
>If you can't explain your case in simple language that ordinary folk can
>understand, weigh and consider, then I'm afraid I will continue to be
>unconvinced and will rest upon a sensible interpretation of the facts.
I can explain the case in simple language that ordinary folk can understand
(and I will below) but it is hard for anyone, ordinary or not to grasp the
rather remarkable finding that a "scientific discipline" (economics) turned
its back on its own established theoretical tradition and instead embraced a
flimsy piece of anti-trade union propaganda from a discredited source.
That's the plain case.
It took 54 years for the Piltdown man to be edited out of the "evolutionary
chain" and even longer for Cyril Burt's twin studies to be recognized as
forgeries. In simple language, the "lump of labour fallacy" is a scientific
hoax.
It's all very well to dismiss the plain case as a unsupported allegation and
to dismiss the deliberate presentation of a preponderance of evidence as
"sociological/academic type language". In addition to the "executive
summary", I've also got a popularization of the scholarly argument, which I
will copy at the end of this message.
Now, you don't have to agree with what I say in the plain case, the
scholarly paper, the executive summary or the popularization. But please
don't attack the scholarly for not being popular and the popular for not
being scholarly; dismiss the nuanced as not being clear and the clear as not
being nuanced. It leaves me with no way of communicating.
What is this "trick of referring to some authority somewhere else?" In my
chapter all my authorities and sources are carefully noted, which I suppose
you would object to as part of the "sociological/academic type language".
The funny part of this citation game is that in the course of my research I
have followed up on every citation (hundreds) of the lump-of-labour,
lump-of-work or lump-of-output fallacy that I could find through full text
searches of several journal databases and through index searches and visual
scans of textbooks and scholarly and popular books in the subject area. I
have also sent written enquiries to several "authorities" who themselves
cited the lump of labour fallacy as authoritative. I hunted down and ordered
photocopies from distant libraries so I could scrutinize obscure pamplets.
Paul Samuelson, in a gracious letter, could offer no source for the lump of
labour fallacy he discussed in his textbook for fifty years. Evidently it
was just something he was taught in school and he duly passed it on without
questioning it. One of my respondents guessed that J.S. Mill was the source
of the expression and argument. Well, he wasn't but there is nevertheless an
interesting connection between Mill, the wages-fund doctrine and its
refutation and the lump-of-labour fallacy that I won't go into because it is
a digression.
>I will repeat my message in simple terms in one paragraph and if you can't
>reply to this in equally brief, simple terms without resorting to all sorts
>of other inaccessible authorities, then I'll remain unconvinced.
No, by conviction you will remain unconvinced regardless.
>Reducing the working week can only extend employment in the case of a
>particular business if: (a) the firm has enough "slack" to be able improve
>its efficiency to compensate for the reduction in working hours by its
>employees, and, (b) the market for its goods or services can be extended --
>and thus be able to take on more employees.
There is nothing in the above paragraph that I dispute. I would only
emphasize that there is abundant "slack" in _most_ firms in the form of
inefficiently excess or deficient hours of work. (Yes, Keith too short hours
can also be inefficient). Part of Chapman's demonstration is that under
competitive conditions firms will tend to employ workers at hours of work
that are longer than would be optimal. In the context of extensive fringe
benefits and capped payroll taxes, Chapman's theory would have to be
modified to include another tendency for firms to employ workers at hours
that are shorter than optimal. No, the two tendencies don't "cancel each
other out." They are non-continuous and apply to different classifications
of employees.
>This will only apply to some businesses. Once these have become more
>efficient and taken on more employees, then no more progress can be made
>until entirely new technological processes are adopted by the firms
>concerned. New processes don;t grow on trees. They only come along
>episodically. The French government are now up against a brick wall (in the
>case of firms of over 20 employees) and won't be able to produce more
>empoyment.
Think of it as a reciprocating process -- technical improvements create the
conditions (fatigue, increased output, unemployment) for shorter hours of
work and the reduced hours of work in turn create an incentive (labour
scarcity, upward wage pressure) for introducing further technical
improvements, which in turn create a demand for further reductions in the
hours of labour and so on... It is a dynamic process that lays the golden
egg, not one side of it. The claim of a "lump of labour fallacy" implies
that the reduction of the hours of work has no place in the dynamic process.
There would be a lump of labour fallacy if advocates of shorter work time
took the view that is falsely ascribed to them, but they don't.
>I note that you haven't challenged my reductio ad impossibile argument.
>I'll repeat it: If reducing the working week from 39 to 35 hours is so
>successful in extending employment, why doesn't the French government
>reduce the working week to 30 hours, or 25 hours, or 20 hours . . . ?
Gee, that's a real toughie. ;-) Let's say you're driving along the
expressway at 40 kilometres an hour and the speed limit is 80. I tell you
you would be safer and get where you're going quicker to drive at 80. Well,
if what I say is true why wouldn't you be even safer at 90 or 100 or 120?
The relationship between hours, output and hourly productivity is expressed
by a curve, not a straight line. That means, given a particular set of
technical conditions, productivity first increases with an increase in the
hours worked and then, after a certain point decreases (BTW Chapman's curve
and his explanation of it are available on my website at
http://www.vcn.bc.ca/worksite.htm).
During the time that productivity increases and part of the time that it is
decreasing, total output also increases. However there also comes a point on
the curve where any further increase in total output during the current
period is at the cost of a decrease in the subsequent period. Just think of
how much output you will produce the day after working a 24-hour shift.
Admittedly it is simpler to think of the relationship between hours,
productivity and output as a straight line and I apologize for the
difficulty introduced by the requirement of thinking in curves.
There are also complexities introduced by the intricacies of adjusting to a
new regime of hours from an old one. It could be that "ideally" a 25-hour
week would be more efficient and create more jobs than a 35-hour week, once
it was in place. But the cost of getting there might be more than a
particular society could afford at one time. In the early 19th century,
typical hours of work ranged up to 70 hours a week. In the 1950s people
produced much greater total output in 40 hours. That doesn't mean, though,
that a 40 hour week in 1830 would have been more productive than a 70 hour
week.
Below is the popularization I mentioned:
Remembrance of Work Time Standards Lost
Twenty-five years ago, two-thirds of the Canadian work force worked a
standard 35 to 40 hour a week. And they received a full-time pay cheque with
holiday and vacation pay for doing so.
By 1995, the proportion of the work-force working standard hours had
declined to a bare majority. Many of the rest of us have migrated to
part-time jobs with substandard pay and benefits or to long hours of work
often without compensation for overtime.
About a third of the people working part-time say they would rather have a
full-time job but can't find one and many of the people working long hours
would gladly forgo income for more time off. So what happens when unions or
social activists suggest that perhaps we could solve both dilemmas and
reduce unemployment in the bargain by redistributing the hours of work --
perhaps even try something like the 35-hour work week brought in recently by
the French government?
What happens is we're scolded by financial commentators and think-tank
experts like Michael Walker of the Fraser Institute that to even consider
such a thing is proof of "economic ignorance". According to National Post
columnist Peter Foster, for example, the French 35-hour policy is based on a
"fundamental economic misunderstanding known as the 'lump-of-labor fallacy'."
What the heck is a "lump of labor" and why did I spend the last two years
studying and writing about it? The simple answer is that the lump of labor
is a "theory" that isn't a theory; it is an "economic fallacy" that is not
an economic fallacy.
Like the chemically-aged skull of a modern man and jawbone of an orangutan
dug up at Piltdown, England in 1911, the lump-of-labor fallacy is a
scientific hoax. Unlike the counterfeit missing link, however, the
lump-of-labor fallacy may be making our work lives miserable -- eroding our
job security, piling up our workload, gobbling our pay cheques and spoiling
our weekends.
You don't need to know exactly what the lump-of-labor fallacy is or says.
It's a relic of sheer nonsense that has been reverently handed down from
generation to generation of mainstream economists. If you insist on learning
the details, you can read my chapter debunking the lump-of-labor claim in a
recent scholarly volume on working time.
What you DO need to know is that mainstream economists have completely blown
the issue of working time. There once was an economic theory of the hours of
labor, a very good theory indeed presented by Sir Sydney Chapman -- an
esteemed and excruciatingly orthodox Cambridge economist -- in Winnipeg in 1909.
Economics, as it is taught at universities, has managed to "lose" its own
theory, though. It's in the library, but few economists bother to look for
it there. Instead they look in their textbooks, where the theory isn't.
During the 1950s and 1960s the most widely-used introductory textbook in
first year economics courses across North America was a book affectionately
known as "Samuelson". Its official title was Economics: An Introduction by
Paul Samuelson.
Edition after revised edition of that ubiquitous textbook carried a breezy
discussion of why union demands or policy proposals for shorter hours of
work -- though admittedly well-intentioned -- are hare-brained panaceas not
worth considering seriously. Why? Because they are based on the venerable
lump-of-labor fallacy.
The claim makes about as much sense as saying that caring about nutrition is
based on a lump-of-food fallacy or that personal hygiene is based on a
lump-of-soap fallacy. That hasn't prevented financial page editorialists and
business lobbyists from banging the fallacy gong any time a shorter work
time proposal makes it onto the agenda of public debate. I first read the
phrase in a column written by Jock Finlayson, vice president for research of
the B.C. Business Council, who invoked it several times in the mid-1990s to
ward off the grim spectre of Jeremy Rifkin's The End of Work.
The bottom line is North America is choking from overwork, underemployment
and just plain misallocation of working time. Governments are loath to do
anything about it, because they're afraid that if they do, corporate
lobbyists and financial page editorialists will humiliate them with mocking
cries of "fallacy" and "panacea".
As I mentioned earlier, you don't need to know what the lump-of-labor
fallacy is. All you need to know is that something is profoundly wrong with
the way that the hours of work are being regulated -- subtly and
unofficially being de-regulated, really -- in North America and that the
arguments against doing something about it are utterly groundless.
Isn't it about time we called the bluff of the textbook-thumping experts who
seem to think that a toxic cocktail of overwork and underemployment is "good
for the economy"? Isn't it about time we buried the bogus lump-of-labor
fallacy alongside the remains of that other scientific hoax, the Piltdown Man?
------------------
Tom Walker is a social policy analyst and advocate of shorter working
time. His chapter on "The 'lump-of-labor' case against work-sharing" is in
_Working Time: International trends, theory and policy perspectives_
edited by Lonnie Golden and Deborah Figart, published by Routledge.
Tom Walker
Bowen Island, BC
604 947 2213
