In my previous post, I gave what one might call my more conventional, das
kapitalian, view of what's happening with hours. There is, however, another
interpretation -- call it the grundrisse scenario -- that I think is at
least as plausible but might seem a bit far out.
That scenario would be that productivity has become so detached from labour
input that the expenditure of hours of work as a source of value is
increasingly a token exercise, but one that remains culturally necessary for
the valorization of capital. Thus the increase of 4 hours a week could very
well reflect the social non-necessity not only of those 4 extra hours but of
a considerable number of the base hours from 20 years ago.
Or -- to take another stab at it -- men are working 4 more hours to
*cover-up* the perplexing circumstance that there may be no measureable
difference in the output from a workweek having a length of 44 or 40 or 36
or 32 or 28 or 24 or 16 hours of work. Because of institutional arrangements
built up around the 40 hour week, to reduce hours so drastically would IMPLY
either a huge loss in income and benefits or an inconceivable class struggle
and working class victory. And capital is taking those superfluous hours,
socially unnecessary as they may be, because 1. this is the way it has
always valorized itself, 2. society has not yet caught on to the
fictitiousness of all this superfluous value and 3. as long as everyone else
keeps doing it, the hours still count as if they were "socially necessary
labour time".
>Chris Burford asked
>
>>CNN on stress quotes the National Institute of Occupational Health and
>>Safety as saying that men are working on average 4 hours a week longer than
>>20 years ago.
>>
>>Figures presumably for the USA
>
>Yes, figures would definitely be for USA, according to the ILO annual hours
in most other jurisdictions (with a few developing country exceptions) have
declined so weekly hours would presumably also have declined.
>
>>Are they true?
>
>They are in the right ball park. Average weekly hours are tricky because
there are different ways of collecting the data and different ways of
reporting it. The 4 hour a week increase would probably be for full-time
employed workers, rather than an across the board average.
>
>>Why is it happening?
>
>My call is mismanagement -- a combination of inept labour cost accounting
practices and management credulity toward their own stupid propaganda has
led U.S. employers to pursue lower hourly labour _rates_ even at the expense
of productivity. Stanford Business School Prof. Jeffery Pfeffer argued in a
Harvard Review of Business article a few years ago that most managers don't
know the difference between labour rates and labour costs (which is the rate
divided by hourly of output). Apparently a lot of workers are foolish enough
to work a lot more hours for just a tiny bit more take home pay -- less pay
even than the added expense of working the extra time.
>
>For more on the mythology surrounding working time see the summary of my
forthcoming chapter at http://www.vcn.bc.ca/timework/execsum.htm or better
yet see the chapter, "The 'lump of labor' case against work-sharing:
populist fallacy or marginalist throwback" in _Working Time: International
Trends, Theory and Policy Perspectives_, edited by Lonnie Golden and Deborah
Figart forthcoming from Routledge in February 2001.
>
>>and who benefits?
>
>Is there a Satan? Seriously though, there is undoubtedly a short term
accounting advantage to employers roughly equivalent to the real loss
experienced by workers as a result of what is in effect a "cost shift"
strategy. In the longer term, that ficticious profit will certainly be wiped
out as employers (in general) face bottlenecks, labour shortages and pent-up
unrest. Of course, those who have benefited from the swindle and those who
will have to pay for the damage are not likely to be the same corporations
-- tough shit. The closest analogy I can think of is the situation in the
former Soviet Bloc where managers of state-owned enterprises faced
incentives to over-value their obsolete and depreciated capital equipment
and warehouses full of unsaleable inventory.
>
>In my opinion, this has been THE big unreported story of the last 20 years
and a story that the left in North America seems eerily blase about (unlike
a certain K. Marx who in Das Kapital cited, with admiration, the redundantly
unequivocal resolution drafted by that very same K. Marx in 1866 for the
Congress of International Working Men's Association: "We declare that the
limitation of the working day is a preliminary condition without which all
further attempts at improvement and emancipation must prove abortive.").
>
>
>
Tom Walker
Sandwichman and Deconsultant
Bowen Island, BC
