Re: Redistribution of overtime hours
I agree with Tom Walker that the Statscan article contained "flagrant distortions" by assuming an equivalence between overtime hours and jobs. Nevertheless, I felt that it was quite effective in addressing some of the myths and misconceptions around the possibility of job sharing. For example: "Many of these new hypothetical jobs call for a well-qualified, often highly educated labour force. Depending on the region, managerial, administrative and professional positions represent nearly a quarter of the overall potential, and those in construction, a tenth. One-third of potential new jobs would also come from processing, machining and product fabricating occupations, which may also require fairly specialized workers." This suggests that about 65% of all paid jobs could not easily be shared, or could be shared, in most cases, only after prolonged and expensive training. The article further addresses the geographic discrepancy between where overtime is most frequently worked and where the need for jobs is greatest. Moving people without jobs to areas where there is substantial overtime could, again, be very costly and disruptive. The potential for job sharing would be at a maximum if we all lived in the same place and were capable of doing the same thing in a single large factory. However, the realities of specialization and location are otherwise, and job sharing would therefore seem to offer very limited scope for solving the unemployment problem. But limited to whom? There is a potential for sharing among jobs which require limited skills, such as grocery check-out clerks or workers in fast-food outlets. However, these workers are already being paid minimum wage or just a little more, and need every dollar they earn. If the total wage-bill available for them were to be stretched even further to include those currently unemployed, their earnings would fall substantially below the minimum wage. The working poor would become the totally impoverished working poor. Nothing would be solved. Ed Weick
Re: Redistribution of overtime hours
As Ed Weick points out, the job creation potential of redistributing overtime hours is limited. Advocates of redistributing work have long acknowledged this fact. Estimates of creation potential routinely take into account skill differentials, regional dispersion, non-divisibility of operations etc., etc., etc. The "myth" that overtime hours can be converted into new jobs at a ratio of one new job for every forty hours of overtime is NOT a stock feature of the shorter work time advocate's bag of tricks. The equivalence myth is a straw man, as is the "lump of labour" argument that there is only a given amount of work to be done. What I find objectionable about the Statistics Canada study is that it purports to "dispell a myth" that doesn't really exist and to "correct" that myth by presenting a preposterous exaggeration. Technically the argument is not about whether the job creation potential (given the 1995 numbers) is 169,000 jobs or 10,000 jobs. It's about whether there's a potential for 30-50,000 jobs or for 10,000 jobs. The 30,000 figure is a conservative estimate. Ten thousand is a game of statistical limbo -- "how low can you go?" While such a calculation may be useful for establishing an absolute minimum potential for job creation, it is presented in the statscan study as an estimate of the absolute maximum. But ethically, the statscan study is worse. It upholds a doctrine that says that full-time employed people should have "first choice" about their hours of work WITHOUT REGARD to that choice's effect on job opportunities for other people. In other words, the "potential for job creation" is limited only to the leftovers that no one who is already at the table wants. And it's not even to be suggested to the diners that there may be others who would be grateful for the scraps. It is not good social science or policy to replace one myth with another. It is even worse to set up and knock down a straw man in order to pave the way for creating a new myth. I hate to digress, but there's another feature of the "non-transferable hours" argument that pisses me off. As in the statscan study, comparisons are inevitably given between the skill levels of the overwork and those of the unemployed. It is said that it would be hard to "match" new jobs to old overtime hours. This is total BULL. A skills match needn't be directly between overworked employees and the unemployed. There is an army of people in between. These include people with professional qualifications working on-call or on short term contracts. Hundreds of thousands of people are employed at jobs that don't require their full skills. There are even people who would just welcome a change of scenery if the job market were a bit more fluid. But the point is, there are no employees with "unmatchable skills". The myth of the skills mismatch between the overworked and the unemployed is a way of saying "we're not in the business of solving problems, we're in the business of telling you there's no solution to the problem and maybe even suggesting to you that there's not even any problem, it's all in your head." There's a problem, alright. Regards, Tom Walker ^^^ knoW Ware Communications Vancouver, B.C., CANADA [EMAIL PROTECTED] (604) 688-8296 ^^^ The TimeWork Web: http://www.vcn.bc.ca/timework/
FW-Where are we being taken?
Tom I found your post to be a gem amongst the coal-dust I have lurked for a couple of years in FW and continue to do so despite the high "noise/gems" ratio My own take is that most of what is posted is intellectual ramblings that I can do little with When I post "practical stuff that has the potential to change the world" which I am focussed on through Candians for Direct Democracy, few people respond, thus my meat may be poison to some of you, and of little interest to others Nevertheless, despite my analysis that there is little of value for me in FW, a gem like Tom's makes it worthwhile for another month Colin Stark Vice-President Canadians for Direct Democracy http://www.npsnet.com/cdd/ [EMAIL PROTECTED] (listserv) At 11:13 PM 12/9/97 -0800, Tom Walker wrote: >Ed Weick wondered (in part): > >> Am I alone in wondering where we are going? > >And Michael Spencer replied (in part), > >>I, for one, don't think the answer is "off into blue sky" or "around in >>circles". . . > >And . . . to judge the listserv by the conversation on the list is missing a >large part of the show. I've collaborated with people from the Futurework >list and from other lists on several research/writing projects. For example, >a paper that Michael Spencer helped me to revise has recently been >circulated to the Canadian Labour Congress's Ad Hoc Working Group on Work >Time, accompanied by a commendation from the CLC's senior economist (Thanks >again, Michael!). snip >A thought occurred to me in response to Ed's question: a listserv isn't >"Twelve Angry Men". What I meant by that is, unlike a courtroom drama, the >discussion isn't guided by a coherent, underlying narrative. As is my habit >whenever a cultural reference pops into my head, I did a web search on >"Twelve Angry Men" and found a course outline from the University of >Michigan that included a blurb on "twelve lessons from twelve angry men". >The course in question was Organizational Behaviour 501 and it also included >a unit on . . . yup, "the future of work". etc
Re: Undoing Monopoly by E-Mail
Jim Dator wrote: > > Well, and depending on what is meant by "socialism", the Scandinavian > countries, Holland and France (certainly) do pretty well, too. I would not argue with you. "Socialism" surely is a Wittgensteinean concept (i.e., it covers a lot of different possibilities which need not all have any one specific attribute in common, but which do all have some kind of family resemblance). > I think > most (North) Americans would consider the social policies of those > countries to be pretty socialistic and would be so termed if proposed > here. I once had a manager to whom I excitedly described a book I had just read about the structure of work in Scandanavia (Pelle Ehn, _Work-Oriented Design of Computer Artifacts_). Said manager dismissed my naivete with a comment that: "that's just the Scandanavian model". A few months later, he lost most of his employees to corporate downsizing, and, a couple years after that, he told me that the company had changed into a place where one might not want to work any more. > If only the Soviet Union and its satellites and cronies are > considered socialists, then that is a pretty restrictive definition of > socialism. I never have thought of them as socialist, but rather as what would happen if the labor unions took over the corporations, and the stereotype of Jimmy Hoffa replaced the stereotype of John Akers. > > Like considering Saudi Arabia to be a prime example of capitalism. > > Or is it? Seriously, I would argue that capitalism is what Habermas calls a "performative self-contradiction": Since its essence is to transform itself into monopolism, it can only exist through pervasive state intervention to preserve competition. Also, it can only exist through pervasive state police intervention to prevent worker revolution, etc. If one wishes to call a system in which coordinated social policy creates and preserves something which can reasonably be called a "free market economy" capitalism, that's OK, so long as one does not oppose such a system of state regulation to socialism, not as one form of state regulation to another, but as absence of state regulation to state regulation. The invisible hand is IMO rather sleight of hand. -- Mankind is not the master of all the stuff that exists, but Everyman (woman, child) is a judge of the world. Brad McCormick, Ed.D. / [EMAIL PROTECTED] (914)238-0788 / 27 Poillon Rd, Chappaqua, NY 10514-3403 USA --- Visit my website ==> http://www.cloud9.net/~bradmcc/
Cheerleading and Democracy 101 (2)
If the man from Time Inc. says it, it must be so. And no doubt we'll be reading shortly in Time magazine a rousing call for national action against the Bill Gates monopoly--a journalistic tour de force that's a worthy successor to the one offered in an earlier serious American periodical by Ida Tarbell against the leading monopoly of her age? Right? Or is that too much to expect of a 1997 magazine that's itself part of a leading media conglomerate, one with a heavy interest in keeping U.S. antimonopoly policy (and enforcement) toothless? But media monopoly--as practiced in, say, 1-newspaper cities with their various TV/radio outlets similarly controlled by local monopolists or by outside conglomerates--is of course a topic for another day, another forum, right? But remember the golden rule: Speak no evil of a fellow monopolist. Now, have we lost the chap who was going to present us with the finished mailing list of our 100 senators? And the 2 frequent contributors who were going to organize a committee of members to draft a letter we might want to (collectively) send them on the Microsoft monopoly? The 3 seem to have withdrawn immediately after I circulated to the list, by way of recognition and encouragement, a note on their efforts. A call from Bill--or one of his enforcers--to their employers? Naah. Too dramatic, right? So what now? We have here a list of 270 technical experts who have--in roughly 1,000 posts--spelled out an impressive bill of particulars (pun intended) itemizing the anti-competitive practices used by Bill Gates to acquire his monopoly of the computer software industry and his modest $40 billion private fortune. We've marched up the hill. Lots of talk. Then I offered the small suggestion that the group might want to DO something about it, to contribute something to the nation's effort here. Write to Janet Reno (individually and collectively), the country's attorney general and #1 antitrust enforcer? One member wrote to her. Write to the 100 members of the U.S. Senate, the folks who give Reno her marching orders? We got the E-mail addresses--and a (now missing) volunteer promised that he would provide the software that would let us (individually, collectively, or however) tell those 100 senators what we know about the Microsoft monopoly, plus what we think the U.S. government ought to do about it. The response of our 270 members? Zip, zilch, nada. Instead, we now argue over whether democracy works--whether our 535 members of Congress read their mail. A cynic might say that this list has followed the classic pattern of Internet discussion groups. Lots of brave talk, never any action. Keep talking until faced with a challenge to take a stand, then run--and join a new 'discussion' group. To borrow from a distinguished former Nader associate, Jim Hightower: "The only thing in the middle of the road is a yellow stripe and dead armadillos." Charles Mueller, Editor ANTITRUST LAW & ECONOMICS REVIEW http://webpages.metrolink.net/~cmueller **
