Coyle:>>> Or is it time to introduce a drastic cut in the work week?<<<
me; >> good idea, but is there a political movement of sufficient strength to push >> this program (hopefully without weekly pay-cuts)? did anyone advocate this >> program as part of the Occupy movement?<< Coyle: > ... I infer from your question that you think that such an advocacy would be > good. < Yes (as I've said before), but with that clause that almost always seems to be forgotten by hours-cutting advocates, i.e., with no cut in yearly salaries or wages. [That is, I favor cuts in working hours with no cuts in yearly salaries or wages after taxes.] More generally, any effort to cut working hours per year should be part of a larger and more comprehensive vision to ensure that the hours-cut program doesn't have anti-worker unintended consequences (or such results for other dominated folks). I also don't think hours cuts are the be-all and end-all of political sloganeering, since there are other important issues. And sloganeering itself leaves much to be desired. As I've said before, over and over (I guess), mere slogans and programs don't mean much at all if there's no social movement linked to them, however tenuously. Slogans with no basis in social movements produce results like those of the Sparts and their transitional program. The most effective slogans have some basis in (and build on) what people already favor. In sum, it's not the slogan or even the broader program that prevents unintended consequences as much as the movement. That's what keeps the politicians honest, at least for awhile. > But should not economists be talking about this "good idea" so as to bring it > to the attention of a wide audience? How many economists brought it up at > Occupy? < Who knows? I can only speak of my personal experience. (Has anyone done a poll??) When I spoke to Occupy Long Beach/Pasadena/LA, I mostly answered questions (is the dollar to be replaced with the "Amero"?, should we get these politicians to sign a vow promising to be honest?, etc.) The main concern was financial, perhaps because of my short opening presentation about the financial crisis (which of course is what spawned Occupy in the first place). > I should clarify to agree that cutting working time is not an immediate > solution to the problem of unemployment. But the unemployment the US faces > is chronic (as well as cyclical) and needs a solution beyond fiscal and > monetary steps. So even if we have an immediate problem, is it not a good > idea to move immediately on the chronic problem?< Is hours-cutting the panacea, solving all or many of the economic ills that face us, or is it something that's good in a more specific way, i.e., counteracting the intensifying work-loads that US workers have been facing over the decades? (The latter is the emphasis of Julie Schor's THE OVERWORKED AMERICAN, for example.) As I read Dean Baker's hours-cutting ideas, they are a form of unemployment insurance (sharing jobs rather than -- or in addition to -- taxing the employed to help the unemployed). The officially-measured unemployment that the US currently faces (that's above about 3% or 4% of the official labor force) isn't chronic but is instead due to deficient aggregate demand and so can be solved, at least in theory, by pumping up demand. Fiscal policy might be able to deal with that excess unemployment (as with the beginning of WW2), though it seems unlikely to do be used (due to political stalemate). Currently monetary policy is stymied partly since it's almost run out of ammunition and partly due to political opposition from Wall Street and the banks. (The financial interests are clearly dominant at the ECB.) The political problem that faces hours-cuts is even larger, since the opposition isn't simply a matter of capitalists opposing capitalist programs, as with expansionary fiscal or monetary policy. As for it being "a good idea to move immediately on the chronic problem," the current balance of political power suggests that other kinds of "solutions" besides hours-cuts will be implemented. The "liberal" one is to have better training for the unemployed, so that there's less mismatch between the unemployed and the vacancies available (and perhaps using computers to provide better information to employers and the unemployed, though Monster.com does a lot of that already). The "conservative" one is to abolish minimum wage laws and labor unions, to force the economic world -- if not the whole world -- to fit into the mold of the free market utopia. There's another problem: it's possible that high unemployment persists partly or even largely because private demand for products and thus labor-power is weighed down by structural problems, e.g., excessive debt and/or industrial capacity that's unused because it doesn't match the structure and composition of aggregate demand. Given these kinds of imbalances, increasing aggregate demand spurs inflation even though many basic resources (not just labor) are unemployed. How is it that cutting yearly work-hours deals with this problem? Anyway, to me cutting work-hours (without falling after-tax yearly pay) seems more of a matter of changing the priorities of the entire economy (away from commodity production, excessive and non-satisfying consumption, and ecological destruction) than as a solution to problems in labor-power markets (except as an alternative form of unemployment insurance). If we're forced to sum that up as a slogan, how about the old socialist one, i.e., "production for use, not for profit"? Of course, this cuts against the grain of capitalist society and the current balance of political power, so the slogan should be "don't mourn, organize!" that's enough for today. Too much work. -- Jim Devine / If you're going to support the lesser of two evils, you should at least know the nature of that evil. _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
