Die Neue Zeit
30th November 2015, 01:06
Labour Commons Union and Systematic Work Time Reduction
“The narrative maintains that a policy of work time regulation is a superior way of achieving greater socioeconomic participation than competing full-employment plans – such as job or income guarantees – that rely on greater economic growth and the creation of more employment hours in the aggregate. Since a truly sustainable employment policy will need to alter the existing distribution of social labors as well as the social psychology of economic gain, an hours-based regulation of the labor market is the most appropriate way to promote greater harmony between lives and livelihoods.” (Robert LaJeunesse)
With these words and others, the Institutionalist and labour economist Robert LaJeunesse introduced his Work Time Regulation as Sustainable Full Employment Strategy work. He criticized the Post-Keynesian policy proposal of a public employer of last resort for consumer services, as applied to the most developed states, on the structural basis that this would facilitate the commodification of work previously outside the labour market, like household work and eldercare, such that the aggregate labour time for society is increased, thereby exacerbating the “paradox of abundance”:
Indeed, many of the potential occupational activities that buffer stock proponents envision (companionship, safety and environmental supervision, daycare provision, etc.) are functions that are frequently provided through non-market mechanisms. Payment for such activities could easily corrupt the very meaning of non-market functions, pulling many caring and nurturing tasks into the orb of the market.
By itself, a public employer of last resort for consumer services may have a radical impact, but such impact is only at first. This does not have the protracted but more systemic impact that, for example, the most successful of anti-smoking campaigns and regulations have had: essentially limiting smoking to individual residences.
LaJeunesse then proposed work time regulation as an alternative, which “grants future productivity dividends in the form of leisure time rather than money.” Throughout the history of mere “labour movements” and even worker-class movements, there has never been such a systematic approach to reducing work time or working hours. First came the 10-hour workday, and then the 40-hour workweek, but nothing further. Even a subsequent reduction of the 32-hour workweek discussed in Chapter 5, to a 28-hour workweek, would not be systematic.
While the stagnation or depression of real wages over the decades is better known, not as well-known is the stagnation or depression of real disposable incomes and of real discretionary incomes, over the same period. Regardless, there may by one justifiable anchor for the policy-based maintenance of stagnant, but not depressed, real discretionary income: a slow but long-term decline in working hours.
Each increment of such decline could be made on an annual basis and tied for the most part to inflation, some cost of living measure, or some productivity per capita measure. For example, this decline could decrease employment participation for a static or growing population, while maintaining present levels of both real labour productivity per capita and real living standards. Unlike a sliding scale, however, there would be no upward adjustments to working hours. Some algebra is necessary below to show the slow but long-term decline in working hours per week under such actually radical policy.
Assuming end-of-period compounding calculations, a 1% annual decline in working hours, and a base value of 40 hours per week:
Year 1 working hours = 39.6000
Year 5 working hours = 38.0396
Year 10 working hours = 36.1753
Year 20 working hours = 32.7163
Year 30 working hours = 29.5880
Year 50 working hours = 24.2002
Assuming end-of-period compounding calculations, a 2% annual decline in working hours, and a base value of 40 hours per week:
Year 1 working hours = 39.2000
Year 5 working hours = 36.1568
Year 10 working hours = 32.6829
Year 20 working hours = 26.7043
Year 30 working hours = 21.8194
Year 50 working hours = 14.5668
That is quite some reduction of work time or working hours. Further declines could be contemplated with the immediate realization of a 4-day, 32-hour workweek without any loss of pay or benefits. Citing ecological imperatives, LaJeunesse argued that even a public employer of last resort for consumer services would be compelled to implement a slow but long-term decline in working hours for its employees.
Another subject matter expert on labour studies, Tom Walker, made a similar argument for work time reduction, argued against economists’ “lump-of-labor contempt for work time reduction,” and suggested that a labour commons union would be the most effective vehicle for systematic work time reduction. In Time on the Ledger: Social Accounting for the Good Society, Walker wrote:
The labor commons union is proposed here an experimental institution that would treat employment as a common pool resource. Such an undertaking has various precedents, none of them exact but all nonetheless suggestive. The traditional workers' ethic of the craft guilds viewed the work available as something akin to a common resource. Guild principles included the proposition that a given amount of work could be divided up equitably among the available hands. This is not to say that workers assumed the amount of work to be unalterably fixed for all time. They were, however, dealing with the finite demands of a given locality at a particular time. In addition there are worker co-ops, works councils, syndicalism and the movement unionism such as the eight-hour leagues and nine-hour leagues in the U.S., Canada and the U.K. in the 19th century.
[…]
Collectively, working people would be better off if they joined in refusing to compete in a race to the bottom. By collectively conserving work effort, the workers acting co-operatively might achieve higher levels of productivity than otherwise as well as build greater social solidarity and security.
The potential for reduced hours to result in higher productivity – in some cases, even higher total output – is explicit in Sydney Chapman’s theory of the hours of labor […]
Are today's labor unions up to the challenge? In the UK, the United States, and Canada, unions have long abandoned their traditional strategies of prioritizing the demand for shorter hours […] How would the labor commons union come into existence? How would it be organized and governed? What principles would it uphold and tactics would it employ? These important details can be left for future elaboration, not least because they differ from case to case and in many instances would involve the reorientation of and transition from established institutions that themselves may vary substantially.
Even within a fully socialized labour market – where public services would be the sole de jure employer, hire all workers directly as a monopsony, and contract out all labour services as a monopoly to the rest of the public sector and to the private sector – systematic work time reduction would be the responsibility of workers’ self-management via the labour commons union.
This extension of workers’ self-management to a labour commons union and a mandate of systematic work time reduction could indeed be a directional or genuinely transitional measure, rather than one on the threshold, as it may result strictly in labour empowerment, and may require the working class to expropriate ruling-class political power beforehand. Going back to LaJeunesse, he argued, firstly, that both the big corporate capitalist and the petty capitalist would prefer a real wage increase for their employees over an equivalent reduction in working week hours, so that those employees would keep working and keep spending, preferring consumption habitually over leisure.
Secondly, with respect to the private sector, the public sector, and the third sector, he argued:
By contrast, work time regulation has the potential to reverse the Galbraithan social imbalance by reducing the scale of the private sector while expanding activities in the third sector. A redistribution of work time would afford the over-employed the time needed to partake more fully in the third sector, while the greater income received by the under-employed could help to increase their social involvement as well. Since work time reduction is a form of productivity dividend that does not necessitate more consumption and production in the private sphere, it would not exacerbate the social imbalance between public and private sector activities.
Lastly, with respect to a shared objection to unconditional basic income by Post-Keynesians and Institutionalists, he argued:
In this sense, advocates of job guarantees and work time reduction proponents share a criticism of income guarantees. Both agree that immediately abandoning a societal role for paid work, with no concurrent reform of educational and cultural support systems, will lead to growing disenfranchisement of the unemployed and underemployed. Where the two part company is how society will achieve the needed labor market reform in transition to a workerless society, or at least one in which work is less urgent.
[…]
[Andre] Gorz envisions work time reduction as the principal policy lever.
[…]
Many Marxists would prefer a reduction in wage-labor time to make-work programs that escalate the commodity fetish and labor market segmentation.
REFERENCES
Work Time Regulation as Sustainable Full Employment Strategy: The social effort bargain by Robert LaJeunesse [https://books.google.ca/books?id=W4B9AgAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover]
Time on the Ledger: Social Accounting for the Good Society by Tom Walker [https://books.google.ca/books?id=BsnB_01NcVAC&printsec=frontcover]
“The narrative maintains that a policy of work time regulation is a superior way of achieving greater socioeconomic participation than competing full-employment plans – such as job or income guarantees – that rely on greater economic growth and the creation of more employment hours in the aggregate. Since a truly sustainable employment policy will need to alter the existing distribution of social labors as well as the social psychology of economic gain, an hours-based regulation of the labor market is the most appropriate way to promote greater harmony between lives and livelihoods.” (Robert LaJeunesse)
With these words and others, the Institutionalist and labour economist Robert LaJeunesse introduced his Work Time Regulation as Sustainable Full Employment Strategy work. He criticized the Post-Keynesian policy proposal of a public employer of last resort for consumer services, as applied to the most developed states, on the structural basis that this would facilitate the commodification of work previously outside the labour market, like household work and eldercare, such that the aggregate labour time for society is increased, thereby exacerbating the “paradox of abundance”:
Indeed, many of the potential occupational activities that buffer stock proponents envision (companionship, safety and environmental supervision, daycare provision, etc.) are functions that are frequently provided through non-market mechanisms. Payment for such activities could easily corrupt the very meaning of non-market functions, pulling many caring and nurturing tasks into the orb of the market.
By itself, a public employer of last resort for consumer services may have a radical impact, but such impact is only at first. This does not have the protracted but more systemic impact that, for example, the most successful of anti-smoking campaigns and regulations have had: essentially limiting smoking to individual residences.
LaJeunesse then proposed work time regulation as an alternative, which “grants future productivity dividends in the form of leisure time rather than money.” Throughout the history of mere “labour movements” and even worker-class movements, there has never been such a systematic approach to reducing work time or working hours. First came the 10-hour workday, and then the 40-hour workweek, but nothing further. Even a subsequent reduction of the 32-hour workweek discussed in Chapter 5, to a 28-hour workweek, would not be systematic.
While the stagnation or depression of real wages over the decades is better known, not as well-known is the stagnation or depression of real disposable incomes and of real discretionary incomes, over the same period. Regardless, there may by one justifiable anchor for the policy-based maintenance of stagnant, but not depressed, real discretionary income: a slow but long-term decline in working hours.
Each increment of such decline could be made on an annual basis and tied for the most part to inflation, some cost of living measure, or some productivity per capita measure. For example, this decline could decrease employment participation for a static or growing population, while maintaining present levels of both real labour productivity per capita and real living standards. Unlike a sliding scale, however, there would be no upward adjustments to working hours. Some algebra is necessary below to show the slow but long-term decline in working hours per week under such actually radical policy.
Assuming end-of-period compounding calculations, a 1% annual decline in working hours, and a base value of 40 hours per week:
Year 1 working hours = 39.6000
Year 5 working hours = 38.0396
Year 10 working hours = 36.1753
Year 20 working hours = 32.7163
Year 30 working hours = 29.5880
Year 50 working hours = 24.2002
Assuming end-of-period compounding calculations, a 2% annual decline in working hours, and a base value of 40 hours per week:
Year 1 working hours = 39.2000
Year 5 working hours = 36.1568
Year 10 working hours = 32.6829
Year 20 working hours = 26.7043
Year 30 working hours = 21.8194
Year 50 working hours = 14.5668
That is quite some reduction of work time or working hours. Further declines could be contemplated with the immediate realization of a 4-day, 32-hour workweek without any loss of pay or benefits. Citing ecological imperatives, LaJeunesse argued that even a public employer of last resort for consumer services would be compelled to implement a slow but long-term decline in working hours for its employees.
Another subject matter expert on labour studies, Tom Walker, made a similar argument for work time reduction, argued against economists’ “lump-of-labor contempt for work time reduction,” and suggested that a labour commons union would be the most effective vehicle for systematic work time reduction. In Time on the Ledger: Social Accounting for the Good Society, Walker wrote:
The labor commons union is proposed here an experimental institution that would treat employment as a common pool resource. Such an undertaking has various precedents, none of them exact but all nonetheless suggestive. The traditional workers' ethic of the craft guilds viewed the work available as something akin to a common resource. Guild principles included the proposition that a given amount of work could be divided up equitably among the available hands. This is not to say that workers assumed the amount of work to be unalterably fixed for all time. They were, however, dealing with the finite demands of a given locality at a particular time. In addition there are worker co-ops, works councils, syndicalism and the movement unionism such as the eight-hour leagues and nine-hour leagues in the U.S., Canada and the U.K. in the 19th century.
[…]
Collectively, working people would be better off if they joined in refusing to compete in a race to the bottom. By collectively conserving work effort, the workers acting co-operatively might achieve higher levels of productivity than otherwise as well as build greater social solidarity and security.
The potential for reduced hours to result in higher productivity – in some cases, even higher total output – is explicit in Sydney Chapman’s theory of the hours of labor […]
Are today's labor unions up to the challenge? In the UK, the United States, and Canada, unions have long abandoned their traditional strategies of prioritizing the demand for shorter hours […] How would the labor commons union come into existence? How would it be organized and governed? What principles would it uphold and tactics would it employ? These important details can be left for future elaboration, not least because they differ from case to case and in many instances would involve the reorientation of and transition from established institutions that themselves may vary substantially.
Even within a fully socialized labour market – where public services would be the sole de jure employer, hire all workers directly as a monopsony, and contract out all labour services as a monopoly to the rest of the public sector and to the private sector – systematic work time reduction would be the responsibility of workers’ self-management via the labour commons union.
This extension of workers’ self-management to a labour commons union and a mandate of systematic work time reduction could indeed be a directional or genuinely transitional measure, rather than one on the threshold, as it may result strictly in labour empowerment, and may require the working class to expropriate ruling-class political power beforehand. Going back to LaJeunesse, he argued, firstly, that both the big corporate capitalist and the petty capitalist would prefer a real wage increase for their employees over an equivalent reduction in working week hours, so that those employees would keep working and keep spending, preferring consumption habitually over leisure.
Secondly, with respect to the private sector, the public sector, and the third sector, he argued:
By contrast, work time regulation has the potential to reverse the Galbraithan social imbalance by reducing the scale of the private sector while expanding activities in the third sector. A redistribution of work time would afford the over-employed the time needed to partake more fully in the third sector, while the greater income received by the under-employed could help to increase their social involvement as well. Since work time reduction is a form of productivity dividend that does not necessitate more consumption and production in the private sphere, it would not exacerbate the social imbalance between public and private sector activities.
Lastly, with respect to a shared objection to unconditional basic income by Post-Keynesians and Institutionalists, he argued:
In this sense, advocates of job guarantees and work time reduction proponents share a criticism of income guarantees. Both agree that immediately abandoning a societal role for paid work, with no concurrent reform of educational and cultural support systems, will lead to growing disenfranchisement of the unemployed and underemployed. Where the two part company is how society will achieve the needed labor market reform in transition to a workerless society, or at least one in which work is less urgent.
[…]
[Andre] Gorz envisions work time reduction as the principal policy lever.
[…]
Many Marxists would prefer a reduction in wage-labor time to make-work programs that escalate the commodity fetish and labor market segmentation.
REFERENCES
Work Time Regulation as Sustainable Full Employment Strategy: The social effort bargain by Robert LaJeunesse [https://books.google.ca/books?id=W4B9AgAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover]
Time on the Ledger: Social Accounting for the Good Society by Tom Walker [https://books.google.ca/books?id=BsnB_01NcVAC&printsec=frontcover]