Tom and Lawry, Some time ago, Lawry wondered just how the immense productivity gains of the last 100 years have been squandered. By now, a 15-hour (or even 10- or 5-hour) week should surely be adequate for all of us to have much the same standard of living as now. Nobody took up Lawry's question at the time.
The problem with such a theoretical situation is that some individuals, for reasons of creativity or, in other (most?) cases, sheer greed, want to work for far more hours than necessary and, inter alia, create innovations for sale. Such businesses are then able to attract the employment of less-able others who have less-satisfying creative activities but are attracted by the prospect of more money and thus being able to buy novel forms of entertainment to wile away their free time. Thus, unfortunately, the working week will always tend to expand well above the necessary minimum -- the hours demanded being pulled and pushed from both employers and employees. And, to add to all this in the course of the last century, bureaucrats within large businesses and senior government civil servants have learned that that they can so easily create immense pyramids of power and privilege for themselves just as the church and royalty did before them -- particularly in times of inflation when prices and taxation rise making the process almost effortless (and imperceptible to the rest of us). And the more that they can make their processes (and the welfare state) increasingly complex (and apparently necessary) the more that they they justify their existence. This is really just another way of describing what Tom has written so brilliantly below. Keith At 18:51 04/09/02 -0700, Tom Walker wrote: <<<< In North America, the regressive structure of payroll taxes and the reliance on employer-paid medical insurance and other benefits contributes to a high overhead per employee, which is mitigated for part-time employees by denying them employment benefits. These days policy proposals for shorter work time always address ways to mitigate these non-wage administrative costs. The other side of the coin, that employers typically overlook is burn-out from stress and overwork, absenteeism and long-term disability. With more people, you might even let them pee whenever nature calls. Generally speaking, shorter working hours make it possible to introduce more intensive work practices and create incentives for doing so. This is, of course, a circular process because increased productivity is "labour saving" thus leading to a further need to reduce the hours of work, more productivity gains and further savings of labour. By the way, this intensity typically has to do with mental attention rather than physical speed. At some point in such a virtuous cycle, however, employment would cease to play its central role as social regulator and this is what had sociologists, psychologists and educators worried in the 1950s and 1960s when it was feared that the big problem of the future was how to prepare people to handle all that leisure. Herbert Marcuse summed up this anxiety in 1955: "But the closer the real possibility of liberating the individual from the constraints once justified by scarcity and immaturity, the greater the need for maintaining and streamlining these constraints lest the established order of domination dissolve. Civilization has to defend itself against the specter of a world which could be free." Admittedly there are all kinds of new tasks that can be added as "necessities", including even the development of means for conducting wars for securing the energy needed to supply an economy vast enough to finance the development of means for conducting wars for securing the energy needed to supply... It is too easy to assume a conspiracy of dominators behind the need identified by Marcuse for maintaining the established order of domination. I don't think it's that way. Rather, I suspect that domination occupies an occult and privileged place in our collective belief and value system. Specifically, it seems to me that the so-called "work ethic" implies and requires a liege/vassal relationship without which it is simply incoherent -- no, profoundly incoherent. Of course in our economy where workers freely exchange their labour there are no liege/vassal relationships. That is, there are no _concrete_ feudal relationships. They have been safely removed to an abstract realm where they are immune to criticism. Instead of a flesh and blood lord, we get to be ruled by invisible hands, time equal to money, iron cages, green cheese factories and procedures designed to maximize the output of someone whose mental make-up resembles that of an ox (Smith, Franklin, Weber, Keynes, Taylor). Almost makes one long for the elegant simplicity of "service sweat for duty" because the damned "duty" is still there sans the oblige on the part of any noblesse, if you'll pardon my fractured French. Part of that duty has been transformed into debt, pure and simple; another part resides in one's pre-eminent duty to avoid becoming a burden to the taxpayer (unless, of course, one is a politician or a tobacco farmer or a public servant or a weapons manufacturer or an employee of a declining industry or a pharmaceutical researcher or a major league sports team that needs a stadium or any of the myriad of deservingly _hard-working_ burdens on the taxpayer). And why aren't the costs of all the make-work, keep-work and lure-work government spending and tax expenditure charged against the productivity of the economy whose hours of work are longer than they need to be? I'm not saying that these charges need to be included in the calculation that finds shorter work time more favourable -- they don't. It's just that when people attribute to shorter work time administrative costs that have been arbitrarily structured in a way that is biased against shorter work time it seems like they're dealing from a stacked deck. Walter Oi "discovered" quasi-fixed labour costs as if they were some kind of a chemical element or new animal species and not the residue of a very finite, recent and historically specific policy regime. >>>> ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- -------------- Keith Hudson,6 Upper Camden Place, Bath BA1 5HX, England Tel:01225 312622/444881; Fax:01225 447727; E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] ________________________________________________________________________
