An essential text for the Work Less Institute of Technology is André Gorz's 1988 Critique of Economic Reason. At the end of that book is an appendix (which I was delighted to find already online) titled "Summary for Trade Unionists and Other Left Activists."
From The Critique of Economic Reason
by André Gorz:
THE CRISIS OF WORK
1.1. The Ideology of Work
Work for economic ends has not always been the dominant activity of mankind. It has only been dominant across the whole of society since the advent of industrial capitalism, about two hundred years ago. Before capitalism, people in pre-modern societies, in the Middle Ages and the Ancient World, worked far less than they do nowadays, as they do in the precapitalist societies that still exist today. In fact, the difference was such that the first industrialists, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, had great difficulty getting their workforce to do a full day's work, week in week out. The first factory bosses went bankrupt precisely for this reason.
That is to say that what the British and the Germans call `the work ethic' and the `work-based society' are recent phenomena.
It is a feature of `work-based societies' that they consider work as at one and the same time a moral duty, a social obligation and the route to personal success. The ideology of work assumes that,
- the more each individual works, the better off everyone will be;
- those who work little or not at all are acting against the interests of the community as a whole and do not deserve to be members of it;
- those who work hard achieve social success and those who do not succeed have only themselves to blame.
This ideology is still deeply ingrained and hardly a day passes without some politician, be he Right - or left-wing, urging us to work and insisting that work is the only way to solve the present crisis. If we are to `beat unemployment', they add, we must work more, not less.
1.2. The Crisis of the Work Ethic
In actual fact the work ethic has become obsolete. It is no longer true that producing more means working more, or that producing more will lead to a better way of life.
The connection between more and better has been broken; our needs for many products and services are already more than adequately met, and many of our as-yet- unsatisfied needs will be met not by producing more, but by producing differently, producing other things, or even producing less. This is especially true as regards our needs for air, water, space, silence, beauty, time and human contact.
Neither is it true any longer that the more each individual works, the better off everyone will be. The present crisis has stimulated technological change of an unprecedented scale and speed: `the micro-chip revolution'. The object and indeed the effect of this revolution has been to make rapidly increasing savings in labour, in the industrial, administrative and service sectors. Increasing production is secured in these sectors by decreasing amounts of labour. As a result, the social process of production no longer needs everyone to work in it on a full-time basis. The work ethic ceases to be viable in such a situation and work-based society is thrown into crisis.
Posted by sandwichman at January 16, 2005 01:56 PMGreat blog. Is Gorz's book still in print?
Posted by: a-train at December 14, 2004 11:50 AMI don't know if it's in print but you should be able to find a used copy online.
Posted by: Sandwichman at December 14, 2004 01:30 PMI think Gorz looks at the workforce in isolation from the internationalization of the work force, something not as prevalent in 1988 as it is now. Greater productivity has become somewhat irrelevant as jobs are being outsourced to China, India, et. al. Unless on is forced to retain one's workforce in the U.S., France, Germany, etc., the solution will continue to be layoffs as opposed to work sharing.
At one time, I shared Gorz's dream. It would seem his dream is no longer operative. One thing has been accomplished, though -- a radical reduction in work hours. In fact, it has been so successful that thousands of our fellow citizens are now not working at all. And as pointed out by Gorz, most of these have had to transition to person to person services sector. We are all rapidly becoming domestic help serving those few left who have decent salaries.
Until Gorz and others solve the outsourcing conundrum, I see nothing but increasing misery. Even China is and will be subject to downsizing as productivity increases.
Posted by: tom at December 16, 2004 11:27 AMTom,
I think that both the promise and the threat of outsourcing are over rated. What people usually compare are, technically speaking, labour rates rather than labour costs. The labour cost is the rate adjusted for labour productivity.
Neither rates nor productivity are unchanging, thus cost differentials can vary quite substantially over time. It is also not free to manage outsourced operations nor to transport goods. As the costs of management and transporation increase, they can overwhelm whatever costs savings remain in direct production.
I believe with outsourcing at some point one begins to run into a situation where it cannot be increased too rapidly because either the labour rates go up or the productivity goes down in the location where the work is moved to. Late arrivals on the outsourcing bandwagon find that they're losing money on the deal and the air starts to leak out of that bubble.
There's also the thorny question of markets for the outsourced products. Many people think that the trick of providing those markets through US balance of payments deficits cannot be sustained indefinitely. I would include myself.
This is not to deny that in the meantime there can be some real displacement from outsourcing, only to challenge the view that the process is inexorable and irreversible.
Posted by: Sandwichman at December 16, 2004 11:49 AMSandwichman,
The problem is that the government, by subsidizing transportation and other costs associated with outsourcing, artificially shifts the point of diminishing returns upward. So outsourcing is profitable at much higher levels than it would be in a free market. And the "government" I'm talking about, BTW, is not just the U.S. government. Recent news about Wal-Mart's friendly attitude toward official Chinese "labor unions" speaks volumes about W-M's viability in a free market world.
Posted by: Kevin Carson at December 16, 2004 01:14 PMIt's true what you say about government subsidizing transportation etc. But then it's not so much the outsourcing that is the problem as the kind of intervention we get from the state under the regime of big capital. Again, I think this takes us back to Dilke's argument about the source of the national difficulites. One of these days, I'd like to do a "slow read" on this blog of the Source and Remedy. But I'll save that for until after Gorz.
Posted by: Sandwichman at December 16, 2004 01:42 PMWhile it seems perfectly true that labor costs, not rates are the key factor, it is not clear that we can assume that the U.S., for example will maintain significant productivity advantages over the Chinese. In any event, Gorz doesn't address these issues, at least in the summary.
As an aside, have you seen studies that show how Americans actually feel about their long hours and short vacation times? It seems like most Americans are perfectly happy to sacrifice their leisure, sanity, and health to stay on the consumption treadmill. Ever rising consumption and lower to negative savings rates rule.
Posted by: tstreet at December 17, 2004 08:53 AM
studies...
I'll let Lonnie Golden answer that(2004):
"Estimates of the aggregate level of overemployment vary by the type of sample and instrument, since these estimates are highly sensitive to survey question wording and the options that are presented. The preference for fewer hours depends on the implicit assumptions provoked about the foregone income, the dimensions of hours reduced, and the type of time-off gains realized. When questions include an option of obtaining higher income via more hours of work, such as in the May 1985 Current Population and General Social Survey, estimates of overemployment are as low as 6 to 10 percent (Lang and Kahn 2001; Reynolds 2003), but also up to 30 percent (Heldrich Center for Workforce Development 1999). If respondents are presented exclusively with options for reducing hours and pay, the proportion of workers that would give up at least one half day's pay for at least one half day of work less per week (or more free time or family time), ranges from 28 to over 50 percent (Jacobs and Gerson 2001; Feather and Shaw 2000; Schor 1995, 2001; Friedman and Casner-Lotto 2003)."
Golden, L., 2004, "Overemployed Workers in the U.S. Labor Market," The Industrial Relations Research Association, Proceedings 2004 http://tinyurl.com/6wlpa
Posted by: Sandwichman at December 17, 2004 09:48 AM