Origin of the fallacy claim
Authors who employ the charge of a lump-of-labor fallacy as a trump card against reduced work time policies consistently fail to cite a source for the supposedly unimpeachable tidbit of economic reasoning. However, when one investigates the murky pedigree of the claim, the reason for such a scholarly lapse becomes plain. There is no authoritative source for the claim. In place of an acknowledged authority there is only a pastiche of superficially linked but fundamentally contradictory fragments. Thanks to the availability of full-text searching on journal articles ranging back to the nineteenth century, an early and apparently founding mention of the “Theory of the Lump of Labour” can be found in an article on piece-work by David F. Schloss. In that article, Schloss employed the phrase to condemn the restriction of work effort and output, not the reduction of working time.
Debates about the intensification of labor through piece-work, its postulated effects on employment and workers’ retaliatory tactics of restricting output go back at least to the mid-1840s when the Trade Union Magazine published a condemnation of piece-work. However, workers’ objections to piece-work encompassed far more than fears, justified or not, about the loss of jobs. In “Why Working-Men Dislike Piece-Work,” Schloss discussed those substantive objections at length before mentioning that “noteworthy fallacy to which I desire to direct attention.” The context of Schloss’s complaint about the lump of labor is instructive. Not only did he spend the bulk of his article sympathizing with workers’ substantive complaints against piece-work but he also concluded by endorsing the eight-hour day as highly desirable on both social and economic grounds and stressing the urgency that workers should receive a larger share of the national income. His objection to the lump-of-labor fallacy was solely with regard to the withholding of work effort during the time worked and not to reducing hours of work.
Ironically, it was another supporter of the eight-hour day, John Rae, who denounced the supposed belief in a fixed amount of work by fellow eight-hour day proponents who, unlike Rae, expected shorter hours to help solve unemployment. Rae was reacting to extravagant claims such as those by George Gunton in the United States, about the direct and immediate job-creating potential of shorter hours. Rae’s statement that redistributing the hours of work was “not a simple sum in arithmetic” would have been above reproach had he not gone on to insist that the case against job creation was cut and dried.
Charles Beardsley soon refuted Rae’s overextended argument, pointing out that Rae relied on a variation of the same fallacy that he attributed to others. The case for employment gains from shorter hours is neither as direct nor immediate as George Gunton claimed nor as untenable as John Rae insisted. Although few modern proponents of shorter work time would make the extravagant claims that Gunton did, many economists mistakenly believe that the utter futility of work sharing has been conclusively established. It hasn’t.
Neither Schloss nor Rae saw the eight-hour day as a measure aimed exclusively at restriction of output. On the contrary, Rae expected the eight-hour day to result in a higher hourly output and possibly increased total output, which was why he dismissed the possibility that it would reduce unemployment. He assumed that since an equal or greater output per worker would occur in the shorter day, there would be no need for new hiring to take up the slack.
This view of higher productivity during the shorter day was in harmony with the growing body of evidence accumulated from industry over the course of the nineteenth century. Philip Sargant Florence later summed up that evidence as indicating that the reduction of working time from 12 hours to 10 hours increased daily output per worker. Furthermore, daily output remained at its peak during an eight-hour day. Moreover, for days of less than eight hours, average hourly output would continue to increase although total daily output may decline.
Chapman also relied on the same body of evidence when he developed his theory of the hours of labor. Chapman argued persuasively that the hours of labor determined under competitive conditions would tend to be longer than would be optimal from the perspective both of total output and the long-term welfare of the worker. Although economists like Rae, Florence or Chapman didn’t directly draw such conclusions, their premise regarding the increased productivity of shorter hours could form the basis for an “efficiency week” hypothesis for reduced work time such as suggested by Robert LaJeunesse.
Posted by sandwichman at July 1, 2005 05:59 PM