WORK LESS Institute of Technology

IT'S BEEN TEN YEARS

By Arthur Donner

(The following op-ed was published in the Toronto Star on December 16, 2004, with the headline, "We're working harder than ever." Arthur Donner is a Toronto economic consultant. In 1994 he chaired the federal government’s Advisory Group on Working Time and the Distribution of Work; for more on this topic, please see “Jobs, Jobs, Jobs”, Reality Check, issue # 9)

Ten years ago Canadians stood at the threshold of shorter work time and a more balanced home life. A decade later, we’re still standing there. Maybe it’s time we finally crossed over.

Nineteen-ninety-four was a time of political excitement in Canada. People expected that the stunning the defeat of the highly unpopular Brian Mulroney government would trigger progressive new social programs. I was asked by the federal government to chair an Advisory Group on Working Time and the Distribution of Work. We were given a fairly ambitious mandate, including “to assess whether and how shorter working time and a more equitable distribution of work could contribute to job creation.”

We looked at and made recommendations on the many different dimensions of this issue, including adopting a four-day work week, working fewer years over the life cycle, fewer days per year, shorter work days, compressed work week schedules, early/phased in retirement, paid or unpaid leaves, and sabbaticals.

But at the time, the Liberal federal government was still reeling from the hangover of an inherited $42-billion budget deficit. A battle was raging between the Neo-Conservatives in Paul Martin’s Finance Department and the social-minded policy people in Lloyd Axworthy’s Human Resources Department. The Neo-Cons won. With the powerful Mr. Martin making it his mission to wrestle the deficit to the ground, the 1995 federal budget ushered in major cuts to transfer payments to the provinces, ultimately causing a cascade of program cuts in health care, education and welfare spending at the provincial level.

Much has changed in the past 10 years. The deficit has been eliminated and the debt is being paid down. Economic growth is solid and likely to remain so for a number of years. But the problems and solutions that the Advisory Group raised are as timely as ever.

A major driver of today’s growing gap between the “haves” and the “have-nots” is still the uneven distribution of working time – with some Canadians working too many hours and others not enough. The polarization is, in fact, probably more severe today than it was 10 years ago. Canada’s unemployment rate is still above 7% and the number who involuntarily work long hours is even higher today than in the past. Many who work part time would love a full time job.

Reducing working time has historically been an important response to rising standards of living and improving family life. Between 1900 and 1945, the standard of living rose while the average work week in manufacturing fell from 60 hours to about 40. What happened was that as the standard of living of Canadians rose during the first-half of the 20th century, workers took their “economic growth dividends” partly in the form of time off from work (a shortened work week, longer paid vacations), and partly in the form of higher real wages and salaries. But this trend came to an abrupt halt in the 1950s.

Since the mid-1970s, we’ve seen an increased polarization of working time going hand-in-hand with a higher level of unemployment. This is also reflected in a very rapid growth of non-standard jobs (part-time workers, self-employed individuals, and dependent and independent contractors). Some of these trends are "cyclical", that is, they are related to recessions and/or weak economic growth, but deeper "structural" forces are also changing how we work and how long we work.

In our 1994 Report, we used an econometric model to simulate how a major reduction in average working time would affect the economy, the job market, and the cost of social programs in Canada. We concluded that a phased-in reduction of work time over a 10-year period could be a win-win situation for Canada. The measured unemployment rate would fall. Real GDP levels would be basically unaffected, but labour productivity would be higher. And governments overall budgetary picture would become rosier with fewer people needing social assistance or employment insurance. Another big benefit would be a substantial increase in the leisure time for those who were working unusually long hours.

Of course none of this happened. Canada didn’t move towards shorter working hours or increased leisure -- in fact the opposite has been true.

Given where we are today, it may be useful to see why some of the advice we offered 10 years ago can still point the way for meeting the needs of the 21st century – a more flexible labour market, greater access to employment for those in need, a more sane balance between work and family life, and enhanced opportunities to pursue education and skills upgrading.

There are still marked differences in the standard work week across Canada. The solution we advised was a legislated standard work week that is no longer than 40 hours. Employees should have the right to refuse overtime beyond the 40-hour standard, and, when overtime is chosen, should be encouraged to take time off instead of overtime pay. A maximum of paid overtime work should be set—we came up with a figure of 100 hours annually. Beyond that, overtime should only be compensated with time off. Together, these steps would clearly reduce the incidence of involuntary long hours work.

Part-time workers should also be offered pro-rated benefits and a basic entitlement to unpaid education leave should be entrenched into employment standards legislation.

Clearly, the biggest threat to working families continues to be the inability to manage the competition between time at work and attention to family responsibilities. This is why I still believe that Canada needs a new set of working time arrangements.

As in the past, a deal or arrangement among government, business and labour has to happen in order to transform future productivity gains into a blend of shorter work time as well as into higher wages or salaries. This new direction should trigger a win-win solution -- improved budgets, smaller welfare bills, reduced unemployment, and increased leisure time. The unemployed and the under-employed would surely be happier if they are gainfully employed. Those who are currently working unusually long hours would see their money incomes shrink, but then they would have increased leisure time to spend with their families.

Canada also needs to level the playing field between full-time work and part time work. We have to change the policies – such as pro-rated benefits not required for part-time workers -- that act as disincentives to firms to hire full-time workers. A further dis-incentive is that the fixed cost of hiring new workers has increased too rapidly, certainly when compared to the average hourly wage level.

Finally, we need a new class of champions who will promote the value of reduced working time. Our experience to date is that business champions are not plentiful and organized labour champions are too few to count on. Business tends to see only the short term higher costs, but none of the productivity or other benefits. Organized labour also has a problem with its members who want long hours at overtime rates of pay.

However, this issue resonates with so many Canadians. Surely a new set of champions for reduced working time will emerge. The time for action is long overdue.

REALITY CHECK

Realty Check: The Canadian Reveiw of Wellbeing is a joint project of GPI Atlantic and the Atkinson Foundation. The November 2004 issue focuses on work time, wellbeing, and the future of work. It's available for downloading in a pdf file from both of those sites. The current issue is sort of a ten-year retrospective on the "Donner Report" (the report of the federal Advisory Group on Working Time and the Distribution of Work).

Below are the topics in this issue:

"Troubling Trends Overwork, Underwork, Insecure Work"
"Jobs, Jobs, Jobs: Counting Them Wrong and Right"
"Cut overwork to create jobs"
"Canada’s blueprint for more jobs & more leisure"
"Counting the costs of overwork "
"Whatever happened to ‘the leisure society’?"

"Reality Check #9 looks at successful experiments in Europe, and examines Canada's own landmark Donner Commission Report. These experiments and recommendations demonstrate that it is possible to reduce overwork, improve work-family balance, increase free time and vacation time, and reduce unemployment and underemployment."

SURVEYS WITH A SMILE ;-)

Sometimes discussion in the comments section deserves to be brought up to the "front page."

tstreet asked,

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

My reply:

studies...

I'll let "my editor" 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

Feather, Peter, and Douglass Shaw. 2000. "The Demand for Leisure Time in the Presence of Constrained Work Hours." Economic Inquiry, Vol. 38, no. 4, pp. 651-62.

Friedman, Will, and J. Casner-Lotto. 2003. Time is of the Essence: New Scheduling Options for Unionized Employees.(pdf file) Work in America Institute and Labor Project for Working Families.

Heldrich Center for Workforce Development. 1999. "Who Will Let the Good Times Roll?: A National Survey on Jobs, the Economy, and Race for President."(pdf file) Work Trends Survey, Vol. 1, p.16.

Jacobs, J., and K. Gerson. 2001. "Who Are the Overworked Americans?" In Working Time: International Trends, Theory, and Policy Perspectives, ed. Lonnie Golden and D. Figart. New York: Routledge, pp. 89-105.

Lang, Kevin, and Shulamit Kahn. 2001. "Hours Constraints: Theory, Evidence and Policy Implications."(word doc) In Working Time in a Comparative Perspective, Volume 1, ed. G. Wong and G. Picot. Kalamazoo, Mich.: Upjohn Institute for Employment Research.

Reynolds, Jeremy. 2003. "You Can't Always Get the Hours You Want: Mismatches between Actual and Preferred Work Hours in the United States." Social Forces, Vol. 81, no. 4, pp. 1171-99.

Schor, J. 1995. "Trading Income for Leisure Time, Is There Public Support for Escaping Work-and-Spend?" In The North the South and the Environment: Ecological Constraints and the Global Economy, ed. V. Bhaskar and Andrew Glyn. United Nations University Press.

------. 2001. "The Triple Imperative: Global Ecology, Poverty and Worktime Reduction." Berkeley Journal of Sociology, Vol. 45, pp. 2-17.

Shank, S. 1986. "Preferred Hours of Work and Corresponding Earnings." Monthly Labor Review, Vol. 109, pp. 40-44.

LES 35 HEURES

Last Thursday the French Prime Minister, Pierre Raffarin, announced measures to fatally weaken the 35-hour law in France. Coverage of this issue in the English-language press is, as usual, entirely from the perspective of the employers' organizations, ultraliberal economists and the right-wing politicians. For example, a report originating from Agence France Presse says that the 35 hour law "has come under attack for helping create the country's stubbornly high unemployment."

Both the OECD and the French government have credited the 35 hour law with creating 350,000 - 400,000 jobs. That is less than the Socialist government had expected but it is not nothing and it certainly didn't "create unemployment."

The 35 hour week will remain in force nominally but enforcement will be "eased" in several ways, such as allowing employers to "negotiate" longer working times, increasing the amount of overtime that can be accumulated from 180 to 220 hours and making the overtime payable in money instead of time off.

Here is Raffarin's "Contract with France, 2005" report. The changes to the 35 hour law are on pages 9 and 10.

And here's the responses so far of a few of my internet contacts in France.

Bernard Girard says "reforming" the 35-hour law will increase inequality and is bad for employment: "La réforme des 35 heures va augmenter les inégalités et c’est mauvais pour l’emploi."

Emmanuel at Ceteris Paribus writes in part 1 of a series on working less to live better that just looking at the employment effects or the GDP effects of the 35 hour law ignores the benefit that comes from having more free time: "Travailler moins pour vivre mieux."

See also the previous post by Emmanuel Révisionnisme in which he marvels at the ability of the right to frame the debate on the 35 hour week by making up facts. Sound familiar?

GORZ ON CARS

Speaking of André Gorz, there's this great piece he wrote in 1973 about cars that starts off, "The worst thing about cars is that they are like castles or villas by the sea..." It was titled "The Social Ideology of the Motorcar."

YOUR POWER IS TURNING OUR DARKNESS TO DAWN

"This country is changing. We had a 58-hour week, a 48-hour week, a 40-hour week. As machines take more and more of the jobs of men, we are going to find the workweek reduced, and we are going to find people wondering what they should do." -- US President John F. Kennedy, September 29, 1963.

A little less than two months before his death on November 22, 1963, John F. Kennedy spoke at the dedication of the Whiskeytown reservoir in Northern California. His remarks about reducing the workweek were notable because since before his election he had adamantly opposed such a move, which at that time was being vigorously advocated by the AFL-CIO and its president, George Meany.

Listening to the audio of JFK speaking from that dam two months before he was assasinated, the first thought I had was, "now, there's some stirring rhetoric." Second thought I had was, "hey, maybe we can play off those motifs, building the shorter work time connection." So I looked more closely at the text and some of the presuppositions and potential contradictions started to peek back at me. One of the contradictions was the line about "water going to the sea unused." That's a strange concept. The water in a wild river doesn't go to the sea unused. Fish use it, if nothing else. And people use the fish.

So I had a hunch it might be worth a closer look at how the environmental impacts of the Trinity diversion played out. My hunch was correct. It turns out that more water was diverted from the Trinity river than the Bureau of Reclamation had ever authorized. The excess diversion hurt the fish, which hurt the Hoopa Valley and Yurok tribes who traditionally caught and ate those fish. Meanwhile, the diverted water went to agribusiness corporations in the southern Central Valley at massively subsidized, "dirt" cheap prices. Ain't the free enterprise system grand?

A couple of other lines struck me from the Whiskeytown speech. One of them was just the reference to the Grand Coulee Dam, which set me off humming "Roll On, Columbia" to myself. It's a great song and Woody Guthrie was a great songwriter, but that doesn't mean every line of it is necessarily true.

"Your power is turning our darkness to dawn," might be metaphorically true in the luminescent sense of the electrification lighting up homes and factories at night. But there's another metaphor there about the power of public works turning the darkness of the Depression to the dawn of... what? An enduring New Deal social democracy? 'Fraid not. Didn't pan out that way. How about the "dawn" of cold war, the interstate highway system, suburban sprawl, automation, the baby boom, the war in Vietnam, the OPEC oil embargo, Watergate, Samuel Huntington's "excess of democracy", Carter's malaise and utlimately Reagan's Morning in America, Newt Gingrich's Contract with America and Bush's Compassionate Conservatism.

And through all that the turbines continued to turn, pumping out government-subsidized power "to run the great factories and water the land." Somehow the line, To run the great automated, downsized, just-in-time factories and water the agribusiness corporate land, doesn't scan quite so nicely.

Guthrie's reference to the Grand Coulee being "the mightiest thing ever built by a man" reminded me of the photograph on the front cover of a Technocracy pamphlet from the 1930s by M. King Hubbert, Man-Hours and Distribution. The photo was of the giant scroll case of the turbine at the Norris Dam in the Tennessee Valley.

A man is shown, dwarfed by the giant tunnel, carrying a tool, possibly a large pipe wrench, slung over his shoulder. The man is standing toward the background of the photo, facing to the right toward a powerful light that is projecting the man's elongated shadow on the opposite wall of the tunnel.

Maybe that light is the dawn that Woody Guthrie was singing about. Maybe that shadow -- much larger than the man himself -- represents the man-hours of work displaced by the generated power.

M. King Hubbert, by the way, is the guy who predicted "peak oil", first in the US in the 1970s and then for the world, sometime around now. But I won't go into that here. Instead, my train of thought is still following the Depression tracks of Woody's "darkness to dawn" metaphor.

The introductory paragraphs to Hubbert's pamphlet add bit of chiaroscuro to the two-dimensional, on-off switch of the darkness/dawn dichotomy. Hubbert saw the disturbing economic events nevertheless provoking more competent social thinking and the shattering of American folk-lore about the promised reward for hard work and ambition.

Take Woody Guthrie, for instance. He was unemployed and broke in 1941 when the Bonneville Power Authority offered him the princely sum of $266.66 to write a song a day for the soundtrack of a documentary film about the dams on the Columbia River. He wrote 26 songs, so I suppose he got Sundays off. Works out to about ten bucks a song.

For ten bucks a song, it may be petty of me to complain but there's a slightly ambiguous passage in Roll On, Columbia. It concerns who the "we" was that "fought many a fight" on the banks of the river. I had to read those line over several times before satisfying myself that Guthrie's "we" refers to the first nations people defending their territory from Sheridan's imperialist army. I came to that conclusion because "they" logically refers to "Sheridan's boys in the blockhouse... ...who saw us in death but never in flight."

If you don't mind my confessing, I started to cry when I realized that the conquest of the native people by the white settlers and the conquest of the "river's wild flight" by "these mighty men" marks an analogy, not a contrast. And to be consistent, we must identify with the wild mountains and canyons, not with the shiploads of plenty.

But let's get back to JFK, standing on that dam 22 years after Woody Guthrie wrote those songs. He begins by reminiscing about a poem by Stephen Vincent Binet, a poem about American names, "the sharp names that never get fat" and that include the "plumed war-bonnet of Medicine Hat." So what is a medicine hat? According to the source I found, it's the contrasting coloured markings on the top of the head of a horse, including one or both ears, making them look like they're wearing a hat. "Many Native Americans believed horses and ponies having this color marking to be sacred or having special powers. Due to this belief by Native Americans during the Indian Wars many of the horses and ponies bearing this marking were killed by soldiers." Seems to be some kind of a common theme developing here.

"[The Trinity diversion] will show that man can improve on nature..."

JFK's false dichotomy between man and nature is a tempting but elusive target. But even conceding him the poetic license, one must add the caveat that such improvements on nature can have unforeseen consequences that turn out to be the opposite of improvements. I don't know what the balance sheet is on the Whiskeytown reservoir and the Trinity diversion. Are the crops blooming in the former desert around Fresno fertilized and protected with pesticides made from petrocarbons, as well as being irrigated with water diverted from salmon habitat? Because the water's so cheap, do the crops get over-irrigated so that the pesticides leach down into the water table?

And, admitting that the building of dams did indeed bring shiploads of plenty, have those shiploads been used wisely, as JFK suggested in closing they would: to conserve natural resources and develop and improve them; to fulfill responsibilities to ourselves and those who depend upon us; and to make the land better both now and in the long future?