I found the first, biographical half of your story interesting because it
explains the origin of your interest in the shorter working week -- and I
thank you for writing about this at length.
In my previous message I was not at all implying that your endeavours were
frivolous -- only that discussion of shorter working weeks is far less
important than rather more fundamental problems concerning education and
skill-training. However, I am a not enamoured of your use of phrases such
as "Hayekian inspired nostalgia" and "neo-liberal resurgence" at the end of
your message because it means that you are putting up a division between
you and me. Such labels don't help useful discussion.
What concerns me -- and has concerned me ever since the beginning of FW
list -- is that a significant minority of the population are educated so
badly that it is incapable of responding to new employment possibilities
and will remain trapped in criminality or public squalor or total
dependency for the rest of their lives. It is getting worse by the day in
all developed countries.
It is not so much the closed minds of the educational boards and government
funding bodies that you ran up against that is the problem. It is their
very existence. There is no way that they can be reformed or their views
changed because they consider it axiomatic (and also by you, presumably)
that they are necessary. In truth, they have no real idea of what their
customers feel because they are too removed from them and never receive
direct feedback.
Fortunately, and at long last, the situation has now become so serious in
America and England (at least) that various educational experiments are now
taking place (vouchers, charter schools, etc) by which funds are sent down
to a level much closer to the customers -- parents and children. There is
now some hope that we will start to see the beginnings of democratic
education for the first time in 150 years ever since since nation-state
governments (or, rather, their middle-class civil services) muscled
themselves into the business.
Keith Hudson
At 08:47 24/06/01 -0700, Tom Walker wrote:
>Twenty years ago I was working at the school board in Vancouver as a
>facilities planning technician. I was one of the people who estimated future
>enrolments and tried to match up district-wide programs with classrooms. The
>management brought in a goals and objectives process in which all of the
>administrative staff were supposed to catalog what they did and establish
>what they would do individually and collectively to achieve goals set by the
>elected board. It was one of those superficial renaming exercises where
>everyone knows that they'll keep performing the same old routine but they'll
>call it something relevant sounding.
>
>As a 'reward' for writing a brief critique of the process, I was assigned
>'responsibility' for one of the goals: keeping the board informed about
>social and economic issues affecting school children in Vancouver. I was
>flabbergasted. The nominal task had such broad possibilities of
>interpretation! I ofcourse knew what everyone else took for granted -- that
>I wasn't really supposed to take it seriously. Everything would be just
>ducky if I stuck to my enrolment lathe and maybe arranged to have Statistics
>Canada send over monthly unemployment stats and annual child poverty figures.
>
>Being cantankerous, though, I embarked on a survey of radical literature
>criticizing the contemporary social relevance of schooling in its early
>industrial age institutional form. Would anyone be surprised that my first
>memo to board officials relating to the goal earned me a warning note and a
>trip to the deputy superintendent's office?
>
>Yes, it was like being sent to the vice principal's office in high school.
>The deputy supe patted me on the head (figuratively), winked and wagged his
>finger at me (also figuratively) and told me that in the future it would be
>better if I cleared things with him first. So he could file them in the
>round file.
>
>Oh, and it looked like perhaps I didn't have enough to do to keep me out of
>trouble. My job was helpfully redefined so that I would be kept occupied
>eight hours a day poking the keys of a calculator. In technical terms it
>could be called "constructive dismissal". After about six months chained to
>a calculator in a cellar dungeon (hyperbole), I left.
>
>It so happens that my fun and games at the school board came to the
>attention of a doctoral candidate at the university. He encouraged me to go
>into a graduate program there to further explore the hardy institutional
>resistance to critique. And so was conceived my eventual masters thesis on
>what can and can't be said and how people know and enforce the difference.
>
>To make a long story short, Hans Christian Anderson lied. The part about the
>child saying the emperor is naked and everyone suddenly acknowledging the
>truth is wishful thinking.
>
>Keith's impression that I am hung up about shorter working weeks is
>understandable. Six years ago I responded to a request for research
>proposals from the provincial government to look at the feasibility of
>creating jobs by redistributing working time. I developed what some people
>have told me was a "too innovative" proposal to look at the narratives that
>frame and constrain the issue.
>
>The funding for the original request was eliminated in a budget freeze but I
>went on to recycle some of the concepts and pre-proposal research in
>subsequent proposals. What I discovered, to my fascination and chagrin, was
>that my well-researched and cautiously-worded proposals on this topic
>sometimes evoked inexplicable hostility. I knew I had got hold of a hot one.
>
>Sometimes it is hard for even me to remember that my hang up is not shorter
>working time but policy narratives that prohibit balanced and reasoned
>discussion about important issues. As for the "more serious" problems Keith
>mentions, I can only comment in self-justification that my curriculum vitae
>of work addressing those more serious problems has led me to the sticking
>point of narrative and the more specific "hinge" of narratives about work,
>time, value and social domination.
>
>There may, in my opinion, be very silly and apparently frivolous (but
>nevertheless entrenched) 'reasons' for what are admittedly serious problems.
>Talking about the nakedness of the emperor may be seem like a frivolous
>activity when the treasury has just been looted. But there may be a
connection.
>
>At a microscopic level of analysis, the 'thing' about the lump of labour
>fallacy is its delicious ungrammaticality. The term literally doesn't refer
>to what it seems to refer to and thus to refute it one has to distinguish
>between what is said, who said it, the context(s) in which it was said and
>what is meant. All this may seem like a bunch of historico-linguistic
>nitpicking, which is precisely how the imperial-nakedness of the *claim of a
>fallacy* evades exposure.
>
>The first premise in refuting a fallacy, "A", is that someone asserts or
>implies "A" as a premise in their argument. The mere fact that "A" is false
>doesn't make it a fallacy if it is not a premise in the argument. In the
>entire history of refuting of the lump-of-labour fallacy no one has ever
>managed to establish the first premise that proposals for shorter work time
>assume, either explictly or implicitly, "a fixed amount of work to be done."
>
>The closest anyone ever came to establishing that premise was Francis Amasa
>Walker in 1890 and John Rae in 1894. Walker made it clear that he was
>refuting a specific claim made by a specific proponant of the eight hour
>day. John Rae logically confused the specific and the general.
>
>But why am I so hung up about the 1890s? Because the Thatcherite and
>Hayekian inspired nostalgia for 19th century liberalism is predicated on
>unlearning things that were learned by the end of that century and in the
>first half of the 20th century. That nostalgia is also predicated on
>pretending that rigid structures of class privilege, class prejudice and
>class hatred characteristic of, say, 19th century Britain were somehow
>incidental, rather than integral to 19th century liberalism. Somehow we are
>supposed to comfort ourselves with the excuse that the neo-liberal
>resurgence of polarized privilege, prejudice and hatred is simply a
>distasteful byproduct of a fundamentally benign return to the wisdom of the
>market.
>
>If one refuses the unlearning and the pretending, one is left with the naked
>view that privilege, prejudice and hatred are the driving principles of the
>neo-liberal prescription. The free market is its "new" clothes.
>
>Keith Hudson wrote,
>
>>I don't know why Tom Walker is quite so hung up about shorter working
>>weeks. There are several more serious social/work problems in the modern
>>developed world (and I confine myself to the developed world because the
>>undeveloped world can only catch up with us by recapitulating our own
>>traumatic historical "progress" -- though hopefully much quicker than we
did).
>>
>>For example, the most serious problem to my mind is the way that the
>>educational system (state plus private) is now more polarised in western
>>countries than it ever has been. The result is that a sizeable minority of
>>children and young people who live in "sink" housing estates in England
>>(and in Europe) are so mentally and psychological stunted that they have no
>>chance whatsoever of breaking into worthwhile jobs. Discussion of the
>>length of the working week -- whether 35/40/45 hours or whatever -- is an
>>almost frivolous activity when compared with trying to understand the more
>>fundamental problems and bleak prospects of so many people.
>Tom Walker
>Bowen Island, BC
>604 947 2213
>
>
>
___________________________________________________________________
Keith Hudson, General Editor, Calus <http://www.calus.org>
6 Upper Camden Place, Bath BA1 5HX, England
Tel: +44 1225 312622; Fax: +44 1225 447727;
mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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