From "The Unsolved Riddle of Social Justice" by Stephen Leacock:
..in all cases of social legislation, no application of the law can be made so sweeping and so immediate as to dislocate the machine and bring industry to a stop… Precisely [this] reasoning holds good of the shortening of the hours of labour both by legislative enactment and by collective organization. Here again the first thing necessary is a clear vision of the goal towards which we are to strive.
The hours of labour are too long. The world has been caught in the wheels of its own machinery which will not stop. With each advance in invention and mechanical power it works harder still. New and feverish desires for luxuries replace each older want as satisfied. The nerves of our industrial civilization are worn thin with the rattle of its own machinery. The industrial world is restless, over-strained and quarrelsome. It seethes with furious discontent, and looks about it eagerly for a fight. It needs a rest. It should be sent, as nerve patients are, to the seaside or the quiet of the hills. Failing this, it should at least slacken the pace of its work and shorten its working day.
And for this the thing needed is an altered public opinion on the subject of work in relation to human character and development. The nineteenth century glorified work. The poet, sitting beneath a shady tree, sang of its glories. The working man was incited to contemplate the beauty of the night’s rest that followed on the exhaustion of the day. It was proved to him that if his day was dull at least his sleep was sound. The ideal of society was the cheery artisan and the honest blacksmith, awake and singing with the lark and busy all day long at the loom and the anvil, till the grateful night soothed them into well-earned slumber. This, they were told, was better than the distracted sleep of princes.
The educated world repeated to itself these grotesque fallacies till it lost sight of plain and simple truths. Seven o’clock in the morning is too early for any rational human being to be herded into a factory at the call of a steam whistle. Ten hours a day of mechanical task is too long: nine hours is too long: eight hours is too long. I am not raising here the question as to how and to what extent the eight hours can be shortened, but only urging the primary need of recognizing that a working day of eight hours is too long for the full and proper development of human capacity and for the rational enjoyment of life. There is no need to quote here to the contrary the long and sustained toil of the pioneer, the eager labour of the student, unmindful of the silent hours, or the fierce acquisitive activity of the money-maker that knows no pause. Activities such as these differ with a whole sky from the wage-work of the modern industrial worker. The task in one case is done for its own sake. It is life itself. The other is done only for the sake of the wage it brings. It is, or should be, a mere preliminary to living.
Let it be granted, of course, that a certain amount of work is an absolute necessity for human character. There is no more pathetic spectacle on our human stage than the figure of poor puppy in his beach suit and his tuxedo jacket seeking in vain to amuse himself for ever. A leisure class no sooner arises than the melancholy monotony of amusement forces it into mimic work and make-believe activities. It dare not face the empty day.
But when all is said about the horror of idleness the broad fact remains that the hours of work are too long. If we could in imagination disregard for a moment all question of how the hours of work are to be shortened and how production is to be maintained and ask only what would be the ideal number of the daily hours of compulsory work, for character’s sake, few of us would put them at more than four or five. Many of us, as applied to ourselves, at least, would take a chance on character at two.
The shortening of the general hours of work, then, should be among the primary aims of social reform. There need be no fear that with shortened hours of labour the sum total of production would fall short of human needs. This, as has been shown from beginning to end of this essay, is out of the question. Human desires would eat up the result of ten times the work we now accomplish. Human needs would be satisfied with a fraction of it. But the real difficulty in the shortening of hours lies elsewhere. Here, as in the parallel case of the minimum wage, the danger is that the attempt to alter things too rapidly may dislocate the industrial machine. We ought to attempt such a shortening as will strain the machine to a breaking point, but never break it. This can be done, as with the minimum wage, partly by positive legislation and partly collective action. Not much can be done at once. But the process can be continuous. The short hours achieved with acclamation to-day will later be denounced as the long hours of to-morrow. The essential point to grasp, however, is that society at large has nothing to lose by the process. The shortened hours become a part of the framework of production. It adapts itself to it. Hitherto we have been caught in the running of our own machine: it is time that we altered the gearing of it.
Due to the forum, "War on Democratic Rights," with Naomi Klein in Vancouver next Wednesday, February 2, the study group will go on a field trip. The forum is at St. Andrew's Wesley Church, Burrard and Nelson and starts at 7:30 p.m. It is organized by Stopwar.ca. Also appearing on the forum wll be Terry Engler of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union and Harsha Walia of No One Is Illegal. Admission is on a sliding scale: $5-$10, "no one will be turned away."
The following Wednesday, February 9, we'll be back at LUGZ at 8:00. We will be discussing "The European Dream" by Jeremy Rifkin: "In this selection from his provocative new book, social thinker Jeremy Rifkin argues that the American Dream has turned into a liability that has us clinging to an outmoded past. Meanwhile, a different vision of life that's now emerging from Europe could be the world's best hope for negotiating its shared global future."
Work Less Techies may be interested to hear about "The University of Openess" which is based in London. Much of the uo wiki is "wordulation" but there's there's also some substantive stuff there like weekly Unix workshops (FUNIX), the Lime House Town Hall and the Faculty of Cartography, which has a page on the Olympic Sacrifice Zone. There is also a "Faculty of Busiless Studies" (no typo) with a reading list that sheds light on some of the obscure corners of our reading last week of Paolo Virno. I recommend, for context, the review by Sergio Bolognia of Steve Wright's "Storming Heaven. Class composition and struggle in Italian Autonomist Marxism", Raniero Panzieri's "The Capitalist Use of Machinery: Marx Versus the Objectivists" and Mario Tronti's "The Strategy of the Refusal."
Speaking of throwing light on Virno, I came across the following piece of historical background, which makes fascinating reading in light of the upcoming occupied Iraq "elections" Bush's inauguration pledge to "spread democracy". (See also above, Naomi Klein forum on the "War on Democratic Rights"!)
"Everything that happened in Italy in the past 50 years had to do with America's necessity to 'tame' the left-wing, the unions and the movements. The US kept in office a ludicrously corrupted Christian Democrat government, which was continually thrown into legitimacy crises because of scandals, strikes and mutual back-stabbing within the coalitions.
"In the summer of 1960 the situation had grown so unstable that the Christian Democrats endeavoured to prop up their government by involving the Italian Social Movement, i.e. the neo-Fascist Party. As a consequence, riots flared up in many cities, especially in Genoa, where young workers fought the police and prevented the Fascists from holding their party congress in a town that was awarded with the gold medal of Resistance. The prime minister Fernando Tambroni ordered the police to fire. Several demonstrators were injured and killed in Reggio Emilia and Licata. Tambroni was forced to resign and was replaced by a less reactionary premier. Since striped T-shirts were in fashion among the youth and all the Genoa rioters happened to wear them, that battle made history as "the revolt of striped T-shirts". As to the political situation, it continued to be very unstable: from 1948 to 1989 Italy changed prime ministers about 50 times."
Here's a link back to WLIT's October posting on the work ethic and the hacker ethic.
Speaking of the work ethic, Paolo Virno makes the following comment in an essay entitled, "The Ambivalence of Disenchantment."
"...in contrast to its position in the recent past, work no longer functions as a powerful surrogate for an objective ethical framework. It no longer takes the place of traditional forms of morality that have long since been emptied or dissolved."
Virno's statement is complex enough to warrant line by line scrutiny:
"...in contrast to its position in the recent past"
Here, not only is Virno making a contrast but he is also asserting that in the recent past work performed the function that it no longer does.
"no longer functions as a powerful surrogate for an objective ethical framework"
The function that work performed in the recent past was not to pose an ojective ethical framework but, in the form of the work ethic, to provide as a substitute for one.
"It no longer takes the place of traditional forms of morality that have long since been emptied or dissolved."
The passive tense of "have been emptied or dissolved" is ambiguous but the implication would seem to be that work, by offering a surrogate for traditional morality was responsible or complicit in that ethical dissolution.
In the third thesis from his A Grammar of the Multitude, Paolo Virno criticizes the position of Andre Gorz regarding the reduction of working time. Virno critiques Gorz's radical proposals for the reduction of working time from an even more radical anaylsis of the changes that have occured in work over the past 30 years or so. In Virno's view, "every qualitative difference between labor time and non-labor time falls short." (thesis number four)
"The crisis of the society of labor certainly does not coincide with a linear shrinking of labor time. Instead, the latter exhibits an unheard of pervasiveness in today's world. The positions of Gorz and Rifkin on the "end of work" (Gorz, Reclaiming Work; Rifkin, The End of Work) are mistaken; they spread misunderstandings of all kinds; and even worse, they prevent us from focusing on the very question they raise."
There are several recent interviews with Paolo Virno available online at Generations Online (scroll down).
Regarding thesis number four, in the late 1950s Harold Rosenberg wrote an essay called "The Orgamerican Phantasy" that discussed the sociological observations of William Whyte on The Organization Man (Chapter 2 of that book is "The Decline of the Protestant Ethic!). Both Whyte's observations about the business executive and Rosenberg's about the intellectual employee dealt with the experience of elites. But the breakdown of the barrier between work and non-work that they identified for those elites ("today's intellectual unbuilds his life in order to live his job") anticipates what Virno claims has now become pervasive and perhaps even most intense in the most precarious occupational niches.
"At the executive level, Whyte described men who worked long hours but didn't feel that it was a burden. They worked fifty or sixty hours a week, as well as after hours in work-related entertaining, conferences, and reading. They promoted those who followed their example. 'We have, in sum, a man who is so completely involved in his work that he cannot distinguish between work and the rest of his life - and is happy that he cannot.'"
The intellectual employee also accepts a more total identification with his role than other workers, in that the editorial director, the designer, the copywriter, etc., sells himself more completely in terms of both psychic energy expended and number of hours worked. With him the division between work and leisure, discipline and freedom, has truly been erased. If the free artist or the founder of a great enterprise builds his life exclusively out of the substance of his work, today's intellectual unbuilds his life in order to live his job.*
* The rule quoted by Whyte for corporation executives generally, "You promote the guy who takes his problem home with him." Becomes for the intellectual, "You hire the guy who takes his problem to bed with him." His job has a creative side in which his preconscious must also collaborate.
6.2. Thesis 1
Post-Fordism (and with it the multitude) appeared, in Italy, with the social unrest which is generally remembered as the "movement of 1977"
Post-Fordism, in Italy arose from the tumults of labor-power which was educated. uncertain, mobile; one which hated the work ethic and opposed, at tunes head on. the tradition and the culture of the historical left. marking a clear discontinuity with respect to assembly-line workers, with their practices and customs, with their ways of life. Post-Fordism arose from conflicts centered upon social figures which, despite their apparent marginal status, were about to become the authentic fulcrum of the new cycle of capitalistic development. Besides, it had already happened before that a radical revolution in the manner of production was accompanied by premature political strife among those strata of labor-power. which, a little later, would make up the supporting axis of the production of surplus value. It is enough to recall the dangerousness attributed in the eighteenth century to the British vagabonds, already thrown out of the fields and on the verge of being let in to the first factories. Or think of the struggles of the unskilled American workers from 1910 to 1920, struggles which preceded the Henry Ford and Frederick Taylor turning point, a turning point based precisely on the systematic removal of skill from labor. Every drastic metamorphosis of productive organization is destined from the start, to conjure up the pangs of the "original accumulation," forcing, all over again, the transformation of a relationship among things (new technologies, a different allocation of investments, etc.) into a social relationship. It is exactly in this delicate interval that, at times, the subjective aspect, which will later become an irrefutable course of fact, reveals itself.
The masterpiece of Italian capitalism consists of having transformed into a productive resource precisely those modes of behavior which, at first, made their appearance under the semblance of radical conflict. The conversion of the collective propensities of the 1977 movement (exit from the factories, indifference to steady employment, familiarity with learning and communication networks) into a renewed concept of professionalism (opportunism, idle talk, virtuosity, etc.): this is the most precious result of the Italian counter-revolution ("counter-revolution" meaning not the simple restoration of a previous state of affairs, but, literally, a revolution to the contrary, that is, a drastic innovation of the economy and institutions in order to re-launch productivity and political domination).
The 1977 movement had the misfortune of being treated as if it were a movement of marginal people and parasites. However, marginal and parasitical was the point of view adopted by those making these accusations. In fact, they identified themselves entirely with the Fordist paradigm, believing that only a secure job in factories making lasting consumer goods was "central" and "productive. Thus they identified with a production cycle already in decline. Looking at it closely, the 1977 movement anticipated certain traits of the post-Fordist multitude. As angry and coarse as it was, however. the virtuosity of this movement was not servile.
6.3. Thesis 2
Post-Fordism is the empirical realization of the "Fragment on Machines" by Marx.
Marx writes: "The theft of alien labour time, on which the present wealth is based, appears a miserable foundation in face of this new one [(the automated system of machines) Virno addition, trans.] created by large-scale industry itself. As soon as labour in the direct form has ceased to be the great well-spring of wealth, labour time ceases and must cease to be its measure, and hence exchange value [must cease to be the measure] of use value. (Italics and brackets from Nicolaus's English translation, trans.)" (Grundrisse: 705). In the "Fragment on Machines" from the Grundrisse, from which I drew that citation, Marx upholds a thesis that is hardly Marxist: abstract knowledge-scientific knowledge, first and foremost, but not only that-moves towards becoming nothing less than the principal productive force, relegating parceled and repetitive labor to a residual position. We know that Marx turns to a fairly suggestive image to indicate the complex of knowledge which makes up the epicenter of social production and at the same time prearranges its vital confines: general intellect. The tendential pre-eminence of knowledge makes of labor time a "miserable foundation." The so-called "law of value" (according to which the value of a product is determined by the amount of labor time that went into it), which Marx considers the keystone of modern social relations, is, however, shattered and refuted by capitalist development itself.
It is at this point that Marx proposes a hypothesis on surpassing the rate of dominant production which is very different from the more famous hypotheses presen'ted in his other works. In the "Fragment," the crisis of capitalism is no longer attributed to the disproportions inherent in a means of production truly based on labor time supplied by individuals (it is no longer attributed, therefore, to the imbalances connected to the full force of the law, for example, to the fall of the rate of profit). Instead, there comes to the foreground the splitting contradiction between a productive process which directly and exclusively calls upon science, and a unit of measurement of wealth which still coincides with the quantity of labor incorporated in the products. The progressive widening of this differential means, according to Marx, that "production based on exchange value breaks down" (Grundrisse: 705) and leads thus to communism.
What is most obvious in the post-Ford era is the full factual realization of the tendency described by Marx without, however, any emancipating consequences. The disproportion between the role accomplished by knowledge and the decreasing importance of labor time has given rise to new and stable forms of power, rather than to a hotbed of crisis. The radical metamorphosis of the very concept of production belongs, as always, in the sphere of working under a boss. More than alluding to the overcoming of what already exists, the "Fragment" is a toolbox for the sociologist. It describes an empirical reality which lies in front of all our eyes: the empirical reality of the post-Fordist structure.
6.4. Thesis 3
The crisis of the society of labor is reflected in the multitude itself.
The crisis of the society of labor certainly does not coincide with a linear shrinking of labor time. Instead, the latter exhibits an unheard of pervasiveness in today's world. The positions of Gorz and Rifkin on the "end of work" (Gorz, Reclaiming Work; Rifkin, The End of Work) are mistaken; they spread misunderstandings of all kinds; and even worse, they prevent us from focusing on the very question they raise.
The crisis of the society of labor consists to the fact (brought up thesis 2) that social wealth is produced from science, from the general intellect, rather than from the work delivered by individuals. The work demanded seems reducible to a virtually negligible portion of a life. Science, information, knowledge in general, cooperation, these present themselves as the key support system of production — these, rather than labor time. Nevertheless, this labor time continues to be valid as a parameter of social development and of social wealth. Thus, the overflow of labor from society establishes a contradictory process, a theater of violent oppositions and disturbing paradoxes. Labor time is the unit of measurement in use, but no longer the true one unit of measurement. To ignore one or the other of the two sides — that is, to emphasize either the validity alone, or the lack of veracity alone — does not take us far: in the first case, one does not become aware of the crisis of the society of labor, in the second case one ends up guaranteeing conciliatory representations in the manner of Gorz or Rifkin.
The surpassing of the society of labor occurs in the forms prescribed by the social system based on wage labor. Overtime, which is a potential source of wealth, manifests itself as poverty: wages compensation, structural unemployment (brought on by investments. not by the lack thereof), unlimited flexibility in the use of labor-power, proliferation of hierarchies. re-establishment of archaic disciplinary, measures to control individuals no longer subject to the rules of the factory system. This is the magnetic storm which allows. on the phenomenological plane, for the "surpassing" which is paradoxical to the point of taking place upon the very foundation of that which was to be surpassed.
Let me repeat the key-phrase: the surpassing of the society of labor comes about in compliance with the rules of wage labor. This phrase can be applied to the post-Fordist situation in the same manner as Marx's observation regarding the first stock companies. Marx writes: "the joint-stock system is an abolition of capitalist private industry on the basis of the capitalist system itself" (Capital, Volume 3: 570). That is to say: the stock companies assert the possibility of escaping the regime of private property, but this assertion always takes place within the realm of private property and, indeed, increases disproportionately the power of the latter. The difficulty, with reference to post-Fordism as well as to the stock companies, lies in considering simultaneously the two contradictory points of view, that is to say, subsistence and ending, validity and surmountability.
The crisis of the society of labor (if correctly understood) implies that all of post-Fordist labor-power can be described using the categories with which Marx analyzed the "industrial reserve army," that is, unemployment. Marx believed that the "industrial reserve army" was divisible into three types or figures: fluid (today we would speak of turn-over, early retirement, etc.), latent (where at any moment a technological innovation could intervene, reducing employment), stagnant (in current terms: working under the table, temporary work, atypical work). According to Marx, it is the mass of the unemployed which is fluid, latent or stagnant, certainly not the employed labor class; they are a marginal sector of labor-power, not its main sector. Yet, the crisis of the society of labor (with the complex characteristics which I tried to outline earlier) causes these three determining categories to apply, in effect, to all labor-power. Fluid, or latent, or stagnant, applies to the employed labor class as such. Each allocation of wage labor allows the nonnecessity of that labor and the excessive social cost inherent in that labor to leak out. But this non-necessity, as always, manifests itself as a perpetuation of wage labor in temporary or "flexible" forms,
6.5. Thesis 4
For the post-Fordist multitude every qualitative difference between labor time and non-labor time falls short.
Social time, in today's world, seems to have come unhinged because there is no longer anything which distinguishes labor from the rest of human activities. Therefore. since work ceases to constitute a special and seperate praxis, with distinctive criteria and procedures in effect at its center, completely different from those criteria and procedures which regulate non-labor time, there is not a clean, well-defined threshold separating labor time from non-labor time. In Fordism, according to Gramsci, the intellect remains outside of production; only when the work has been finished does the Fordist worker read the newspaper, go to the local party headquarters, think, have conversations. In post-Fordism, however, since the "life of the mind" is included fully within the time-space of production, en essential homogeneity prevails.
Labor and non-labor develop an identical form of productivity, based on the exercise of generic human faculties: language, memory, sociability, ethical and aesthetic inclinations, the capacity for abstraction and learning. From the point of view of "what" is done and "how" it is done, there is no substantial difference between employment and unemployment. It could be said that: unemployment is non-remunerated labor and labor, in turn, is remunerated unemployment. Working endlessly can be justified with good reasons, and working less and less frequently can be equally justified. These paradoxical formulas, contradicting each other, when put together demonstrate how social time has come unhinged.
The old distinction between "labor" and "non-labor" ends up in the distinction between remunerated life and non-remunerated life. The bor-der between these two lives is arbitrary, changeable, subject to political decision making.
The productive cooperation in which labor-power participates is always larger and richer than the one put into play by the labor process. It includes also the world of non-labor, the experiences and knowledge matured out side of the factory and the office. Labor-power increases the value of capital only because it never loses its qualities of non-labor (that is, its inherent connection to a productive cooperation richer than the one implicit in the labor process in the strictest sense of the term).
Since social cooperation precedes end exceeds the work process, post-Fordist labor is always, also, hidden labor. This expression should not be taken here to mean labor which is un-contracted, "under the table." Hidden labor is, in the first place, non-remunerated life, that is to say the pert of human activity which, alike in every respect to the activity of labor, is not, however, calculated as productive force.
The crucial point here is to recognize that in the realm of labor, experiences which mature outside of labor bold predominant weight; et the same time, we must be aware that this more general sphere of experience, once included in the productive process, is subordinate to the rules of the mode of capitalistic production. Here also there is a double risk: either to deny the breadth of what is included in the mode of production, or, in the name of this breadth, to deny the existence of a specific mode of production.
6.6. Thesis 5
In post-Fordism there exists a permanent disproportion between "labor time" and the more ample "production time."
Marx distinguishes between "labor time" and "production time" in chapters XII and XIII of the second book of the Capital. Think of the cycle of sowing and harvesting. The farm laborer works for a month (labor time); then a long interval follows for the growing of the grain (production time, but no longer labor time); and at last, the period of harvesting arrives (once again, labor time). In agriculture and other sectors, production is more extensive than labor activity, in the proper sense of the term; the latter makes up hardly a fraction of the overall cycle. The pairing of the terms "labor time"/"production time" is an extraordinarily pertinent conceptual tool for understanding post-Fordist reality, that is to say, the modern expression of the social working day. Beyond the examples from agriculture adopted by Marx, the disproportion between "production" and "labor" fits fairly well the situation described in "Fragment on Machines"; in other words, it fits a situation in which labor time presents itself as "miserable residue."
The disproportion takes on two different forms. In the first place, it is revealed within every single working day of every single worker. The worker oversees and coordinates (labor time) the automatic system of machines (whose function defines production time); the worker's activity often ends up being a sort of maintenance. It could be said that in the post-Fordist environment production time is interrupted only at intervals by labor time. While sowing is a necessary condition for the subsequent phase of the grain's growth, the modern activity of overseeing and coordinating is placed, from beginning to end, alongside the automated process.
There is a second, and more radical, way of conceiving this disproportion. In post-Fordism "production time" includes non-labor time, duringhich social cooperation takes its root (see thesis 4). Hence I define "production time" as that indissoluble unity of remunerated life and non-remunerated life, labor and non-labor, emerged social cooperation and Submerged social cooperation. "Labor time" is only one component, and not necessarily the most prominent one, of "production time" understood in this way. This evidence drives us to reformulate, in part or entirely, the theory of surplus-value. According to Marx, surplus-value springs from surplus-labor, that is, from the difference between necessary labor (which compensates the capitalist for the expense sustained in acquiring the laborpower) and the entirety of the working day. So then, one would have to say that in the post-Fordist era, surplus-value is determined above all by the gap between production time which is not calculated as labor time and labor time in the true sense of the term. What matters is not only the disproportion, inherent in labor time, between necessary labor and surplus-labor, but also, and perhaps even more, the disproportion between production time (which includes non-labor, its own distinctive productivity) and labor time.
6.7. Thesis 6
In one way, post-Fordism is characterized by the co-existence of the most diverse productive models and, in another way, by essentially homogeneous socialization which takes place outside of the workplace.
Differently from the Fordist organization of labor, today's organization of labor is always spotty. Technological innovation is not universal: more than determining an unequivocal and leading productive model, it keeps a myriad of different models alive, including the resuscitation of some outdated and anachronistic models. Post-Fordism re-edits the entire history of labor, from islands of mass labor to enclaves of professional workers, from re-inflated independent labor to reinstated forms of personal power. The production models which have followed one another during this long period re-present themselves synchronically, as if according to the standards of a World's Fair. The background and the hypothesis behind this proliferation of differences, this shattering of organizing forms, is established, however, by the general intellect, by computerized data communication technology, by productive cooperation which includes within itself the time of non-labor. Paradoxically, just when knowledge and language become the principal productive force, there is an unrestrained multiplication of the models of labor organization, not to mention their eclectic co-existence.
We may well ask what the software engineer has in common with the Fiat worker, or with the temporary worker. We must have the courage to answer: precious little. with regard to job description, to professional skills, to the nature of the labor process. But we can also answer: everything, with regard to the make-up and contents of the socialization of single individuals outside of the work place. That is to say, these workers have in common emotional tonalities, interests, mentality, expectations. Except that, while in the advanced sectors this homogeneous ethos (opportunism, idle talk, etc.) is included in production and delineates professional profiles, this ethos strengthens, instead, the "world of life" for those who fall into the traditional sectors, as well as for the border-workers who swing between work and unemployment. To put it succinctly: the seam is to be found between the opportunism at work and the universal opportunism demanded by the urban experience. The essentially unitary character of socialization detached from the labor process stands in counterpoint to the fragmentation of productive models, to their World's Fair style co-existence.
6.8. Thesis 7
In Post-Fordism, the general intellect does not coincide with fixed capital, but manifests itself principally as a linguistic reiteration of living labor.
As was already said on the second day of our seminar, Marx, without reserve, equated the general intellect (that is, knowledge as principal productive force) with fixed capital, with the "objective scientific capacity" inherent in the system of machines. In this way he omitted the dimension, absolutely preeminent today, in which the general intellect presents itself as living labor. It is necessary to analyze post-Fordist production in order to support this criticism. In so-called "second-generation independent labor," but also in the operational procedures of a radically reformed factory such as the Fiat factory in Melfi, it is not difficult to recognize that the connection between knowledge and production is not at all exhausted within the system of machines; on the contrary, it articulates itself in the linguistic cooperation of men and women, in their actually acting in concert.
In the Post-Fordist environment, a decisive role is played by the infinite variety of concepts and logical schemes which cannot ever be set within fixed capital, being inseparable from the reiteration of a plurality of living subjects. The general intellect includes, thus, formal and informal knowledge, imagination. ethical propensities, mindsets, and "linguistic games." In contemporary labor processes, there are thoughts and discourses which function as productive "machines," without having to adopt the form of a mechanical body or of an electronic valve.
The general intellect becomes an attribute of living labor when the activity of the latter consists increasingly of linguistic services. Here we touch upon the lack of foundation in Jürgen Habermas's position. Inspired by Hegel's teachings in Jena (Habermas, Arbeit and Interaktion), he contrasts labor with interaction, "instrumental or `strategic' action" with "communicative action." In his judgment, the two spheres answer to standards that are mutually incommensurable: labor comes straight from the logic of means/ends, linguistic interaction rests upon exchange, upon reciprocal recognition, upon the sharing of an identical ethos. Today, however, wage labor (employed, surplus-value producing labor) is interaction. The labor process is no longer taciturn, but loquacious.
"Communicative action" no longer holds its privileged, even exclusive, place within ethicalcultural relations or within politics, no longer lies outside the sphere of the material reproduction of life. To the contrary, the dialogical word is seated at the very heart of capitalistic production. In short: to understand fully the rules of post-Fordist labor, it is necessary to turn more and more to Saussure and Wittgenstein. It is true that these authors lost interest in the social relations of production; nevertheless, since they reflected so deeply on linguistic experience, they have more to teach us about the "loquacious factory" than do the professional economists.
It has already been stated that one part of the labor time of an individual is destined to enrich and strengthen productive cooperation itself, the mosaic in which the individual serves as one tessera. To put it more clearly: the task of a worker is that of rendering better and more varied the connection between individual labor and the services of others. It is this reflective character of labor activity which insists that in labor the linguistic-relational aspects assume an increasing importance; it also insists that opportunism and idle talk become tools of great importance. Hegel spoke of an "astuteness of labor," meaning by this expression the capacity to further natural causality, with the aim of utilizing its power in view of a determined goal. Accordingly, in the realm of post-Fordism, Hegel's "astuteness" has been supplanted by Heidegger's "idle talk."
6.9. Thesis 8
The whole of post-Fordist labor-power, even the most unskilled, is an intellectual labor-power, the "intellectuality of the masses."
I use the term "intellectuality of the masses" for the whole of post-Ford era living labor (not including certain specially qualified industries of the tertiary sector) in that it is a depository of cognitive and communicative skills which cannot be objectified within the system of machines. The intellectuality of the masses is the preeminent form in which, today, the general intellect reveals itself (see thesis 7). I hardly need to say that I do not refer in any way to any imaginary erudition of subordinate labor; I certainly do not think that today's workers are experts in the fields of molecular biology or classical philology. As was already mentioned in the preceding days, what stands out is rather the intellect in general, the most generic aptitudes of the mind: the faculty of language, the inclination to learn, memory, the ability to abstract and to correlate, the inclination toward self-reflection. The intellectuality of the masses has nothing to do with acts of thought (books, algebraic formulas, etc.) but with the simple faculty of thought and verbal communication. Language (like intellect or memory) is much more diffuse and less specialized than what has been thought. It is not the scientists, but the simple speakers who are a good example of the intellectuality of the masses. They have nothing to do with the new "worker aristocracy"; rather, they stand at the opposite pole. Upon close reflection, the intellectuality of the masses does nothing less than prove completely true, for the first time, the Marxist definition of laborpower already cited: "the aggregate of those mental and physical capabilities existing in the physical form, the living personality, of a human being" (Capital, Volume 1: 270).
With regard to the intellectuality of the masses, it is necessary to avoid those deadly simplifications that befall those who are always searching for comfortable repetitions of past experiences. A way of being that has its fulcrum in knowledge and language cannot be defined according to economic-productive categories. In sum, we are not dealing here with the last link of that chain whose preceding links are, as far as I know, the worker by trade and the assembly-line worker. The characteristic aspects of the intellectuality of the masses, its identity, so to speak, cannot be found in relation to labor, but, above all, on the level of life forms, of cultural consumption, of linguistic practices. Nevertheless, and this is the other side of the coin, just when production is no longer in any way the specific locus of the formation of identity, exactly at that point does it project itself into every aspect of experience, subsuming linguistic competencies, ethical propensities, and the nuances of subjectivity.
The intellectuality of the masses lies at the heart of this dialectic. Because it is difficult to describe in economic-productive terms, for this reason exactly (and not in spite of this reason). it is a fundamental component of today's capitalistic accumulation, The intellectuality of the masses (another name for the multitude) is at the center of the post-Ford economy precisely because its mode of being completely avoids the concepts of the political economy,
6.10. Thesis 9
The multitude throws the "theory of proletarianization" out of the mix.
In Marxist theoretical discussion, the comparison between "complex" (intellectual, that is) labor and "simple" (unskilled) labor has provoked more than a few problems. What is the unit of measurement which permits this comparison? The prevalent answer is: the unit of measurement coincides with "simple" labor, along with the pure waste of psychophysical energy; "complex" labor is merely a multiple of "simple" labor. The ratio between one and the other can be determined by considering the different cost of education (school, varied specializations, etc.) for the intellectual labor-power as opposed to the unskilled labor-power. Little of this old and controversial question interests me; here I would like, however, to capitalize on the terminology used in its regard. I hold that the intellectuality of the masses (see thesis 8) in its totality is "complex" labor — but, note carefully — "complex" labor which is not reducible to "simple" labor. The complexity, as well as the irreducibility, comes from the fact that this labor-power mobilizes, in the fulfilling of its work duties, linguistic-cognitive competencies which are generically human. These competencies, or faculties, cause the duties of the individual to be characterized always by a high rate of sociability and intelligence, even though they are not all specialized duties (we are not speaking of engineers or philologists here, but of ordinary workers). That which is not reducible to "simple" labor is, if you will, the cooperative quality of the concrete operations carried out by the intellectuality of the masses.
To say that all post-Ford era labor is complex labor, irreducible to simple labor, means also to confirm that today the "theory of proletarianization" is completely out of the mix. This theory had its peak of honor in signaling the potential comparability of intellectual labor to manual labor. Precisely for this reason, the theory ends up unsuited for accounting for the intellectuality of the masses or, and this is the same thing, for accounting for living labor as general intellect. The theory of proletarianization fails when intellectual (or complex) labor cannot be equated with a network of specialized knowledge, but becomes one with the use of the generic linguistic-cognitive faculties of the human animal. This is the conceptual (and practical) movement which modifies all the terms of the question.
The lack of proletarianization certainly does not mean that qualified workers retain privileged niches. Instead it means that the sort of homogeneity by subtraction which the concept of "proletariat" usually implies does not characterize all post-Fordist labor-power, as complex or intellectual as it may be. In other words, the lack of proletarianization means that post-Ford labor is multitude, not people.
6.11. Thesis 10
Post-Fordism is the "communism of capital."
The metamorphosis of social systems in the West, during the 1930's, has at times been designated with an expression as clear as it is apparently paradoxical: socialism of capital. With this term one alludes to the determining role taken on by the State within the economic cycle, to the end of the laissez-faire liberalist, to the processes of centralization and planning guided by public industry, to the politics of full employment, to the beginning of Welfare. The capitalistic response to the October Revolution and the crisis of 1929 was the gigantic socialization (or better, nationalization) of the means of production. To put it in the words of Marx which I cited a little while ago, there was "an abolition of the capitalist private industry on the basis of the capitalist system itself" (Capital, Volume 3: 570).
The metamorphosis of social systems in the West, during the 1980's and 1990's, can be synthesized in a more pertinent manner with the expression: communism of capital. This means that the capitalistic initiative orchestrates for its own benefit precisely those material and cultural conditions which would guarantee a calm version of realism for the potential communist. Think of the objectives which constitute the fulcrum of such a prospect: the abolition of that intolerable scandal, the persistence of wage labor; the extinction of the State as an industry of coercion and as a "monopoly of political decision-making"; the valorization of all that which renders the life of an individual unique. Yet, in the course of the last twenty years, an insidious and terrible interpretation of these same objectives has been put forth. First of all, the irreversible shrinking of socially necessary labor time has taken place, with an increase in labor time for those on the "inside" and the alienation of those on the "outside." Even when squeezed by temporary workers, the entity of employed workers presents itself as "overpopulation" or as the "industrial reserve army." Secondly, the radical crisis, or actually the desegregation, of the national States expresses itself as the miniature reproduction, like a Chinese box, of the form-of-State. Thirdly. after the fall of a "universal equivalent" capable of operating effectively, we witness a fetishistic cult of differences — except that these differences, claiming a substantial surreptitious foundation. give rise to all sorts of domineering and discriminating hierarchies.
If we can say that Fordism incorporated, and rewrote in its own way, some aspects of the socialist experience, then post-Fordism has fundamentally dismissed both Keynesianism and socialism. Post-Fordism, hinging as it does upon the general intellect and the multitude, puts forth, in its own way, typical demands of communism (abolition of work, dissolution of the State, etc.). Post-Fordism is the communism of capital.
Following on the heels of the Ford era, there was the socialist revolution in Russia (and, even if defeated, an attempt at revolution in western Europe). It is appropriate to ask which experience of social unrest served as the prelude to post-Fordism. Well, I believe that during the 1960's and 1970's there was, in the West, a defeated revolution — the first revolution aimed not against poverty and backwardness, but specifically against the means of capitalistic production, thus, against wage labor. If I speak of a defeated revolution, it is not because a lot of people were blathering on about revolution. I am not referring to the circus of subjectivity, but to a sober fact: for a long period of time, both in the factories and in the lower income urban areas, in the schools as in certain fragile state institutions, two opposing powers confronted one another, resulting in the paralysis of political decision-making. From this point of view — objective, serious — it can be maintained that in Italy and in other Western countries there was a defeated revolution. Post-Fordism, or the "communism of capital," is the answer to this defeated revolution, so different from those of the 1920's. The quality of the "answer" is equal to and opposed to the quality of the "question." I believe that the social struggles of the 1960's and 1970's expressed non-socialist demands, indeed anti-socialist demands: radical criticism of labor; an accentuated taste for differences, or, if you prefer, a refining of the "principle of individuation"; no longer the desire to take possession of the State, but the aptitude (at times violent, certainly) for defending oneself from the State, for dissolving the bondage to the State as such. It is not difficult to recognize communist inspiration and orientation in the failed revolution of the 1960's and 1970's. For this reason, post-Fordism, which constitutes a response to that revolution, has given life to a sort of paradoxical "communism of capital."
Here's an entry where WLITechies can suggest (in the comments) questions for the open-air questionnaire.
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.
Not everyone is aware of this crisis. Some are aware of it but find it in their interest to deny its existence. This is true, in particular, of a large number of `neo-conservatives', bent on upholding the ideology of work in a context in which paid work is becoming increasingly scarce. They thus encourage people looking for paid work to enter into increasingly fierce competition with each other, relying on this competition to bring down the cost of labour (that is, wages) and allow the `strong' to eliminate the `weak'. They look to this neoDarwinian process of the `survival of the fittest' to bring about the rebirth of a dynamic form of capitalism, with all its blemishes removed together with all or part of its social legislation.
1.4. Working Less so that Everyone can Work
It is in the common interest of waged workers not to compete with one other, to organize a united response to their employers and collectively negotiate their conditions of employment with the latter. This common interest finds its expression in trade unionism.
In a context in which there is not enough paid full-time work to go round, abandoning the work ethic becomes a condition of survival for the trade-union movement. To do so is no betrayal on the movement's part. The liberation from work and the idea of `working less so everyone can work' were, after all, at the origin of the struggle of the labour movement.
By work we have come to understand a paid activity, performed on behalf of a third party (the employer), to achieve goals we have not chosen for ourselves and according to procedures and schedules laid down by the person paying our wages. There is widespread confusion between `work' and `job' or `employment', as there is between the `right to work', the `right to a wage' and the `right to an income'.
Now, in practice, not all activities constitute work, and neither is all work paid or done with payment in mind. We have to distinguish between three types of work.
1.5.1. Work for economic ends
This is work done with payment in mind. Here money, that is, commodity exchange, is the principal goal. One works first of all to `earn a living', and the satisfaction or pleasure one may possibly derive from such work is a subordinate consideration. This may be termed -work for economic ends.
1.5.2. Domestic labour and work-for-oneself
This is work done not with a view to exchange but in order to achieve a result of which one is, directly, the principal beneficiary. `Reproductive' work, that is, domestic labour, which guarantees the basic and immediate necessities of life day after day - preparing food, keeping oneself and one's home clean, giving birth to children and bringing them up, and so on - is an example of this kind of work. It was and still is often the case that women are made to do such work on top of the work they do for economic ends.
Since the domestic community (the nuclear or extended family) is one in which life is based on sharing everything rather than on an accounting calculation and commodity exchange, it is only recently that the idea of wages for housework has arisen. Previously, by contrast, domestic labour was seen as work done by and for the domestic community as a whole. This attitude, it should be stressed, is only justifiable if all the members of the domestic community share the tasks equitably. A number of activists have called for women to be given wages for housework in the form of a public allowance, in recognition of the social utility of such work. But this will not lead to the equitable sharing of household chores and moreover it poses the following problems:
- it transforms domestic labour into work for economic ends, that is, into a domestic (servant's) job;
- it places domestic labour in the same category as socially useful work, whereas its aim is - and should be - not social utility but the well-being and personal fulfilment of the members of the community, which is not at all the same thing. The confusion between the fulfilment of individuals and their social utility stems from a totalitarian conception of society in which there is no place for the uniqueness and singularity of the individual or for the specificity of the private sphere. By nature this sphere is - and should be - exempt from social control and the criteria of public utility.
1.5.3. Autonomous activity
Autonomous activities are activities one performs freely and not from necessity, as ends in themselves. This includes all activities which are experienced as fulfilling, enriching, sources of meaning and happiness: artistic, philosophical, scientific, relational, educational, charitable and mutual-aid activities, activities of auto-production, and so on. All these activities require `work' in the sense that they require effort and methodical application but their meaning lies as much in their performance as in their product: activities such as these are the substance of life itself. But this always requires there to be no shortage of time. Indeed, the same activity - bringing up children, preparing a meal or taking care of our surtoundings, for example - can take the form of a chore in which one is subject to what seem like oppressive constraints or of a gratifying activity, depending on whether one is harrassed by lack of time or whether the activity can be performed at leisure, in co-operation with others and through the voluntary sharing of the tasks involved.
The progressive domination of work for economic ends was only made possible by the advent of capitalism and the generalization of commodity exchange. We owe to it in particular the destruction of a great deal of non-commodity services and exchanges and domestic production in which work for economic ends and the pleasure of creating something of beauty were inextricably linked. This explains why the labour movement originally challenged the overriding importance industrial capitalism attached to waged work and economic ends. However, in calling for the abolition of wage labour and for the government or selfgovernment of society by freely associated workers in control of the means of production, the demands of the workers ran directly counter to the developments that were actually taking place. The movement was utopian in so far as the possibility of giving substance to its demands had not emerged.
Yet what was utopian in the early nineteenth century has ceased in part to be so today: the economy and the social process of production require decreasing quantities of wage labour. The subordination of all other human activities and goals to waged work, for economic ends is ceasing to be either necessary or meaningful. Emancipation from economic and commercial rationality is becoming a possibility, but it can only become reality through actions which also demonstrate its feasibility. Cultural action and the development of `alternative activities' take on particular significance in this context. l shall return to this point below.
The report of the Advisory Group on Working Time and the Distribution of Work was presented to the Canadian Minister of Human Resources Development in December, 1994.
General
1. The Advisory Group endorses a new public policy priority that emphasizes redistribution and reduction of working time.
2. The Advisory Group urges employers, trade unions, and employees to place more emphasis on working time issues and their implications in collective bargaining and workplace decision making.
3.The Advisory Group recommends that the Minister of Human Resources Development initiate energetic and broadly-based public discussions on the Report. We urge the provincial ministers of labour to participate in these post-report consultations, as part of a national dialogue, and/or that they undertake their own consultations.
Worktime Innovations
4. The Advisory Group calls on governments, as the largest employers in Canada, and on their collective bargaining agents to review the recommendations of this Report and to support innovative (workplace) practices to facilitate the reduction, reorganization, and redistribution of work in the public service.
5. The Advisory Group urges the federal and provincial ministers of labour to give priority to the issues of worktime in their deliberations and to examine the policies in their jurisdictions which would support new arrangements in the public and private sectors with the potential for additional job creation.
The Standard Workweek
6. The Advisory Group notes that marked disparities exist in the legislated standard workweek across Canada. We recommend that the legislated standard workweek be no longer than 40 hours per week in any jurisdiction.
7. The Advisory Group recommends that federal and provincial governments periodically review the legislated standard workweek to ensure that the standard moves with the normal full-time workweek in their jurisdiction.
Overtime
8. The Advisory Group recommends that employees be given the right to refuse overtime work after the legislated standard workweek of 40 hours and that this right be incorporated into employment standards legislation.
9. The Advisory Group recommends that employers and employees utilize time off in lieu of overtime pay after the standard workweek.
Annual Hours and Time-off in Lieu
10. The Advisory Group recommends that the maximum amount of overtime in excess of regular working hours for which compensation can be paid be set at 100 hours annually. Overtime in excess of the 100 hours should only be compensated on the basis of time off in lieu of overtime, at the overtime rate.
11. The Advisory Group recommends that the hours of work coverage under employment standards legislation be broadened to include salaried employees and other full-time workers who may now be excluded. Similar annual limits on overtime and the requirement for time off in lieu of overtime pay beyond 100 hours would apply to this group.
Contingent Work Force
12. The Advisory Group recommends that employment standards be vigorously enforced, especially for part-time workers and for those outside the normal workplace environment. Special attention should be paid to non-standard workers to ensure that they are fully covered and protected under employment standards, have access ss to collective bargaining, and receive at least the minimum hourly wage and other workplace-related social benefits.
13. The Advisory Group recommends that a registry be created in all jurisdictions to cover employees who work at home. Employers would be obliged to provide information on hours of work and pay for their home-based employees. It should include a mechanism to enable employees to register and to verify the accuracy of the information about their hours of work and their pay.
Part-time Workers
14. The Advisory Group recommends that employers be required to provide pro-rated benefits to regularly employed, part-time employees.
Retirement
15. The Advisory Group supports wider adoption of the practice of phased-in retirement, under which older employees are encouraged to work reduced regular hours or take leaves of absence as a transition to retirement.
16. The Advisory Group recognizes that a major obstacle to phased-in retirement could be the reduction of future public and private pension benefits. We recommend that governments, employers, unions, and employees consider changes and their implications to public and private pension plans, arrangements, and regulations, to ensure that phased-in retirement does not substantially reduce future pension benefits.
Family Leave
17. The Advisory Group recommends that employment standards in all jurisdictions provide a right to take an unpaid leave of absence from work after the birth or the adoption of a child at least equal to the period of entitlement to Unemployment Insurance under maternity and parental benefits (15 weeks maternity benefits and the 10 weeks of parental benefits payable to the mother of father). Serious consideration should be given to the general adoption of the Quebec standard of 34 weeks of leave.
18. The Advisory Group recommends that Canadians be entitled to five days of unpaid family leave per year, the current standard in Quebec. These leaves would be linked to the care and health of immediate family members.
Education and Training Leaves
19. The Advisory Group recommends the increased adoption of paid education and training leave plans through the joint agreement of employers and employees and unions.
20. The Advisory Group recommends that a basic entitlement to unpaid education and training leaves be entrenched in provincial and federal standards in order to expand opportunities for learning. The ability to gain access to this entitlement should be linked to the length of service with a company or organization.
21. The Advisory Group urges the federal government to support greater use of education leaves by considering changes to the tax system such as income averaging.
UI Worksharing
22. The Advisory Group recommends the continuation of the UI worksharing program for reducing short-term layoffs. However, the applications process should be reviewed to ensure that it is more accessible, particularly to small business.
Post-Report Processes
23.The Advisory Group recommends that the responsibilities of existing organizations be expanded to promote and report on worktime redistribution and flexible work arrangements over the longer term. It recommends that the Canadian Labour Market and Productivity Centre (CLMPC) focus on ongoing consultations between business and labour, while the Bureau of Labour Information (BLI) focus on disseminating information on changing worktime practices.
Information Needs
24. So that all Canadians may better understand the changing workplace, the Advisory Group recommends that Statistics Canada monitor these trends, and specifically: a) conduct periodic surveys of worktime preferences and practices of both employers and employees; b) provide more data on the non-standard workforce.
Back by popular demand, the study circle will begin meeting next Wednesday evening, January 12, 2005 at LUGZ Coffee Lounge, 2525 Main St.
Please arrive 10 - 15 minutes before 8:00 p.m. so we can start discussion at 8:00.
I'm going to try something a bit different this term, which is to have a schedule, topics and recommending readings. For those who've been checking the WLIT blog from time to time, you'll notice that I already started posting the readings on the blog beginning in December. I will continue to post this material (beginning with the Reality Check newsletter latter today) so that discussion of the readings can begin at any time before the meetings and they can continue on afterwards.
January 12: Reality Check: ten years after the Donner commission on working time and the distribution of work
Readings;"We're working harder than ever," Arthur Donner, Toronto Star, Dec. 16, and the November newsletter "Reality Check" with short features on "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," and "Whatever happened to ‘the leisure society’?"
January 19: The crisis of work/ working less so that all can work. Introduction to Gorz
Reading: Section 1 (1.1-1.6) of Gorz's "Critique of Economic Reason: Summary for Trade Unionists and Other Left Activists"
January 26: What's the difference between work and not-work? Introduction to Virno
Reading: "Ten theses on the multitude and post-Fordism": part 1 (1-6) Paolo Virno
February 2: To be decided at the January 26 circle. Should we continue on with Gorz? with Virno? with both? or what else?
To enable commenting on the artcles that originally appeared in the November, 2004 Reality Check newsletter, I've re-posted them here. If you want to print out, I recommend you use the pdf file. Reality Check: The Canadian Review of Wellbeing is a joint project of The Atkinson Charitable Foundation and GPI Atlantic.
Table of Contents:
· Jobs, jobs, jobs counting them wrong and right
· Troubling trends: overwork, underwork, insecure work
· Cut overwork to create jobs
· Canada’s blueprint for more jobs, more leisure – the donner report
· Counting the costs of overwork and underwork
· The work-and-spend treadmill
· Whatever happened to the leisure society?
· The Netherlands: from Dutch disease to Dutch miracle
· Recommended reading
In his 1936 film “Modern Times,” Charlie Chaplin appears as a klutzy factory worker who just can’t keep up with the ever-increasing speed of his assembly line job. The conveyor belt keeps moving faster. Charlie finally cracks. In one famous scene, he is ‘eaten’ by the factory’s massive system of cogs. He travels through the machinery, wrenches in hand, adjusting bolts as he proceeds, until the apparatus finally spits him out – unscathed, of course.
The film is a wry social commentary about the nature of modern work. It deftly shows that while increased production may be great for turning out more widgets, it can just as easily turn people into machines, or servants of machines.
There is no doubt that the nature of work has changed dramatically over the past century. While our conventional measures of progress chronicle the widely accepted benefits of these changes – such as higher levels of income and greater consumption – they have been less successful at documenting the costs of modern work.
Growth doesn’t always mean prosperity or wellbeing
The more hours we work for pay, and the less free time we have, the more the economy grows and the ‘better off’ we are supposed to be, according to conventional measures of progress. By that standard, stress is good for the economy.
Better indicators and measures of progress would not treat work-related stress and the cost of treating stress-induced illness as contributions to prosperity. Instead, they would be counted as costs to the economy.
Better measures of progress would similarly recognize that higher levels of income, growth, and output in the industrialized world have not necessarily increased levels of satisfaction, wellbeing, and economic security.
GDP per capita was much lower 35 years ago than it is today. But are we better off today than we were in 1970? In the ’60s and ’70s, fewer people were out of work, fewer people needed food banks, and personal debt was much lower. The GDP can grow even as poverty, insecurity, and inequality increase, as the gap between rich and poor widens, as the earth’s resources are depleted, and as quality of life declines.
No progress in work hours, job quality, job security
The economy can grow while work – which supposedly ‘drives’ the economy – deteriorates. The following key indicators can present a more accurate picture of whether work is improving in Canada:
• A decline in unemployment;
• A decline in underemployment, signified by a decline in numbers of people who work part time because they can’t find full-time work;
• An increase in job security, characterized by jobs with benefits, security, and decent pay;
• A decline in over-work, or the proportion of people who work long hours;
• An increase in types of work that are not socially or environmentally harmful, and a decrease in work that is damaging to communities or the environment;
• A reduction in work stress and an increase in work that improves work/family balance, and contributes to quality of life.
The trends outlined in this issue of Reality Check show a decline in progress among these indicators over a 25-year period. The good news is that Canada can reverse these trends by learning from successful experiments in Europe, and from the Canadian government’s own landmark Donner Commission report, profiled in this issue.
These examples demonstrate it is possible to reduce overwork, improve work/family balance, increase free time and vacation time, and reduce unemployment and underemployment.
Instead of counting things ‘wrong,’ by falsely equating long hours with progress, we can use indicators of genuine progress to count things right.
This article was originally published in Reality Check: The Canadian Review of Wellbeing, a joint project of The Atkinson Charitable Foundation and GPI Atlantic.
Compared to the 1970s, a growing proportion of Canadians is working longer hours and moonlighting. On the opposite end of the spectrum, a growing proportion can’t find enough work, and insecure, temporary work has increased, according to Statistics Canada data.
Roughly 30 years ago, one-quarter of all Canadians with full-time jobs worked over 41 hours a week. By 2001, the proportion had risen to one-third. These people come from all walks of life, from managers, professionals, and the self-employed to blue-collar labourers and many workers in low-skilled, low-paying jobs.
When unpaid household work and work on the job are combined, the total work burden for some people is staggering. Mothers with full-time jobs work on average 73 hours a week, while full-time employed fathers work 71 hours. A growing body of evidence points to substantial costs associated with work stress, long work hours, insecure or insufficient work, and unemployment.
In short, today’s widespread work trends adversely affect people’s health, quality of life, and the economy. Involuntary part-time more than doubles In his best-selling novel Generation X, Douglas Coupland defined the McJob: “A low-pay, low-prestige, low-dignity, low-benefit, no-future job in the service sector. Frequently considered a satisfying career choice by people who have never held one.”
While Statistics Canada data do not distinguish between ‘good’ and ‘bad jobs,’ they document changes in numbers of people who involuntarily take part-time work. They also count numbers of temporary – and therefore insecure – jobs.
Part-time employment is on the rise. In 1953, roughly four per cent of Canadian workers held part-time jobs. By 2001, nearly one-fifth of the workforce was working part-time. Many would rather have full-time jobs.
Between 1976 and 1995, the proportion of involuntary part-timers, as a percentage of all part-timers, nearly tripled. In 2001, 26 per cent of part-timers worked part-time because they couldn’t find full-time work. In addition, since part-time jobs are more likely to pay poorly, carry no benefits, and provide limited job security, many part-timers can’t make ends meet.
Similarly, jobs in Canada are becoming less secure. Since 1997 alone, when Statistics Canada began collecting information on whether jobs were permanent or temporary, the proportion of workers employed in temporary jobs increased by 12 per cent.
Many are unable to get by on one job. Between 1976 and 2001 the incidence of moonlighting more than doubled. According to Statistics Canada, “…more people are arming themselves with several jobs in the event that one disappears.”
There aren’t enough permanent, secure, and fulltime jobs to go around. At the same time, the percentage of people working long hours has risen. The incidence of overtime increased 11 per cent between 1997 and 2001 alone.
Growing gap between rich and poor related to work-hours imbalance
This growing polarization of work hours is partly responsible for the widening gap between rich and poor in Canada. While some people are working increasingly long work hours, others can’t get enough hours.
Statistics Canada found that the increase in earnings inequality that took place in the 1980s and 1990s occurred in conjunction with changes in the distribution of annual hours worked. In 1990, the richest 20 per cent of Canadians had about seven times as much disposable income, after transfers and taxes, as the poorest 20 per cent. By 2001, they had nearly nine times as much.
The paradox of our times is that many Canadians today work long hours while many others have no work at all,” reads the landmark 1994 report by Canada’s Federal Advisory Group on Working Time and the Distribution of Work, popularly called the Donner Report. “Research shows that, under the right circumstances, a major reduction in working time could result in a meaningful decrease in unemployment and a significant redistribution of jobs.”
Indeed, cutting the working time of all Canadian workers by 10 per cent would result in a “substantial redistribution of jobs,” according to results of a simulation by the economic forecasting firm Informetrica Limited. The simulation, featured in the Donner Report, examined what would happen if Canadians gradually reduced their work hours through methods such as shorter workweeks, more vacation time, or phased-in retirement.
Reducing work-time can cut government expenses, make workers more productive
The results were positive. Between 1995 and 2004 – the time span of the simulation – the unemployment rate was predicted to drop by four percentage points, as many unemployed found new jobs due to the overall reduction in work hours. GDP would be little affected because the same amount of goods and services would be produced. Disposable income would decline slightly because of the shorter work hours. However, this drop in income would be offset by substantial increases in leisure time.
Several studies also show that a drop in work hours actually makes workers more productive. The Donner Report concluded that a 10 per cent reduction in working time would produce a five per cent increase in hourly productivity. In addition, government spending on social assistance and unemployment insurance would decrease, the tax base would widen, and corporate profits would rise slightly.
“We think of that as a real win-win, including a win for the government budget, never mind job creation,” says Arthur Donner, who chaired the Advisory Group.
A study done this year by GPI Atlantic uses the same model to show that a 10 per cent reduction in Nova Scotia’s work hours should free up enough hours to create about 20,000 new jobs, even after offsets in labour productivity are accounted for. If these jobs were filled from the ranks of the unemployed, the province’s unemployment rate would be cut nearly in half.
This article was originally published in Reality Check: The Canadian Review of Wellbeing, a joint project of The Atkinson Charitable Foundation and GPI Atlantic.
The paradox of our times is that many Canadians today work long hours while many others have no work at all,” reads the landmark 1994 report by Canada’s Federal Advisory Group on Working Time and the Distribution of Work, popularly called the Donner Report. “Research shows that, under the right circumstances, a major reduction in working time could result in a meaningful decrease in unemployment and a significant redistribution of jobs.”
Indeed, cutting the working time of all Canadian workers by 10 per cent would result in a “substantial redistribution of jobs,” according to results of a simulation by the economic forecasting firm Informetrica Limited.
The simulation, featured in the Donner Report, examined what would happen if Canadians gradually reduced their work hours through methods such as shorter workweeks, more vacation time, or phased-in retirement.
Reducing work-time can cut government expenses, make workers more productive
The results were positive. Between 1995 and 2004 – the time span of the simulation – the unemployment rate was predicted to drop by four percentage points, as many unemployed found new jobs due to the overall reduction in work hours. GDP would be little affected because the same amount of goods and services would be produced. Disposable income would decline slightly because of the shorter work hours. However, this drop in income would be offset by substantial increases in leisure time.
Several studies also show that a drop in work hours actually makes workers more productive. The Donner Report concluded that a 10 per cent reduction in working time would produce a five per cent increase in hourly productivity. In addition, government spending on social assistance and unemployment insurance would decrease, the tax base would widen, and corporate profits would rise slightly.
“We think of that as a real win-win, including a win for the government budget, never mind job creation,” says Arthur Donner, who chaired the Advisory Group.
A study done this year by GPI Atlantic uses the same model to show that a 10 per cent reduction in Nova Scotia’s work hours should free up enough hours to create about 20,000 new jobs, even after offsets in labour productivity are accounted for. If these jobs were filled from the ranks of the unemployed, the province’s unemployment rate would be cut nearly in half.
Cut overtime to create jobs
Cutting overtime is another way to redistribute work in Canada, while also avoiding health costs and problems associated with overwork and unemployment. In 2001, 1.2 million Canadians were out of work. At the same time, workers clocked nine million hours of paid overtime – the equivalent of 225,000 full-time jobs. Cutting overtime can make a dramatic difference to workers in some beleaguered industries. For example, the union at a Powell River, B.C., pulp and paper plant restored 89 lost jobs in 1997 by reducing its workers’ overtime hours.
Canada can choose among policies, learn from other nations
Canada is in the enviable position of being able to learn from the lessons of many work reduction experiments in Europe and North America – and to learn from our own mistakes. One notable Canadian failure is Ontario’s “Rae Days,” introduced by the NDP premier in 1993. The plan, which attempted to save money and jobs by cutting work hours, was unpopular, poorly implemented, and short-lived.
By comparison, countries such as Belgium, Denmark, and the Netherlands have implemented a wide variety of successful work-time reduction policies. In 1995, eight per cent of Belgium’s civil servants – 7,000 workers – took a 20 per cent reduction in work hours in exchange for a 10 per cent reduction in pay.
The Netherlands redistributed work hours so that workers now put in 469 fewer hours per year than U.S. workers – equivalent to nearly three months less work yearly. One third of Dutch employees works under 35 hours weekly, with many people job-sharing. Only six per cent of people working these shorter hours would rather have more work.
Sweden, Luxembourg, France, and Austria have up to five weeks of holidays per year, while Danes have 5.5 weeks, and 70 per cent of German workers now have six or more weeks paid vacation a year.
There are many options for cutting both overwork and underwork, and for promoting policies that foster equality and increased quality of life, secure jobs with benefits, and work that is socially and environmentally benign:
• Job-sharing: Two people choose to share one fulltime job, including benefits and pension package.
• Shorter workdays: Parents match their work hours with their children’s school hours, to be home when children return from school.
• 4-day workweek: Reducing work to 35 or 32 hours a week. Biggest advantages are a large block of leisure time and less commuting.
• Longer vacations, sabbaticals, or educational leaves.
• Phased-in retirement: Older workers gradually work fewer hours, and serve as mentors training incoming younger workers.
• Flexitime: Workers vary the beginning and end of their workday. Allows better balance of work and family life. Many benefits, including less absenteeism and workplace stress.
• Telecommuting: Working from home or some site other than the workplace. Benefits include flexibility, more control over time, and less commuting. Drawbacks may include social isolation and a lack of regulation.
One innovative and successful experiment in Albany, New York, gave civil servants the option of unpaid summer leave to coincide with their children’s summer vacations, with guaranteed re-entry to the workforce in September. This created summer jobs for university students and saved the state government money, while improving morale and work/family balance for the workers.
This article was originally published in Reality Check: The Canadian Review of Wellbeing, a joint project of The Atkinson Charitable Foundation and GPI Atlantic.
Critics often say that when faced with a problem, governments invariably commission a study. But that’s not quite fair. The reports often contain a wealth of knowledge and policy recommendations. Too often, though, they languish in obscurity.
Ten years ago, faced with high unemployment and a changing job market, the federal government created the Advisory Group on Working Time and the Distribution of Work.
The nine-member group, chaired by economic consultant Arthur Donner, was charged with assessing whether cutting working time and redistributing work hours could contribute to job creation. The resulting study – widely known as the Donner Report – clearly outlined a series of trends adversely affecting Canadian workers and the economy. It made several recommendations which, if implemented, could reduce unemployment, relieve work stress, and allow people to balance their work and family lives more effectively. And then it died a quiet death.
“This issue just basically fell off the radar screen for the government,” says Arthur Donner, who adds that the far-reaching report could have helped the labour market, economy, and society.
The report noted that while some people were working increasingly long hours, others were unable to find enough work. It also noted a weakening link between economic growth and job growth, because of factors such as workplace restructuring, new technologies, and global competition. And it further noted increased pressures on families, as well as a rise in insecure work and self-employment.
“All of that has gone on in spades since we wrote about it,” says Donner. Indeed, a re-visiting of the data reveals that for the most part, job insecurity, hours polarization, the incidence of non-standard work and inequality have persisted, and they remain more pronounced than they were 10 or 15 years ago. Donner Report recommendations more timely than ever
Governments, businesses, and to some degree labour unions are not doing enough to discourage long work hours, maintains Donner, who says many of the report’s recommendations could be beneficial if implemented today. Among the key recommendations are the right to refuse overtime; a maximum 40-hour workweek; paying pro-rated benefits to part-time workers; the right to unpaid leaves of absence and education leaves; and annual limits on overtime hours.
Mandating a maximum 40-hour workweek after which employers must pay overtime would be the easiest recommendation to fulfill, says Donner. Nearly half of all Canadians live in jurisdictions that have still not legislated a 40-hour maximum workweek. Ontario and Alberta, for instance, have a 44-hour standard, while Nova Scotia and P.E.I. have a 48-hour workweek. “The one I personally favour is a reduction in overtime work. And if you can’t negotiate it, then I favour imposing a maximum limit,” he says.
Donner has one additional recommendation not included in the report: re-vamping the payroll tax system so that it will no longer be in an employer’s interest to work employees for long hours instead of hiring new workers. Options for change include calculating current wage ceilings on EI, CPP and workers' compensation contributions on an hourly, not annual, basis.
Cutting work-time and re-distributing work is not “the magic bullet” to reducing unemployment, says Donner. “But in terms of restoring a better balance between work and family, in terms of taking on the issue of whether work practices are dysfunctional, this report, this direction, has a lot to offer.”
This article was originally published in Reality Check: The Canadian Review of Wellbeing, a joint project of The Atkinson Charitable Foundation and GPI Atlantic.
The verdict is in. Working long hours can kill.
This message in a 1996 editorial of the British Medical Journal came after the death of a junior doctor in Britain who, after reportedly working an 86-hour week, collapsed and died. The editorial notes the growing trend toward increased workload, pressure, and hours of work. And it warns that if overwork “is not to reap its predicted toll,” we need preventive measures including legislation to shorten the workweek, prevent overwork and thereby to increase employment.
Yet since the late ’70s in Canada, there has been a steady increase in the proportion of workers clocking 50 or more hours a week. Overtime is on the rise. By contrast, another growing proportion of workers is scrambling to find enough work to make ends meet.
In our conventional economic accounts, the costs associated with work trends such as overwork, underwork, and unemployment are invisible. The more hours we work for pay, and the less free time we have, the more the economy grows. Likewise, the more we spend on health care, crime, and family breakdown – all associated with unemployment – the more the economy grows. This growth is then mistaken for prosperity and progress. Overwork causes stress, workplace absenteeism, health problems
Statistics Canada cites many studies that show a relationship between work stress and illness. Work stress is associated with higher rates of smoking, drinking, sleep problems, violence, and depression, along with an array of health disorders from heart disease to ulcers. For example, a 25-year Finnish study published last year in the British Medical Journal reported that people with stressful jobs were twice as likely to die from heart problems as those with less stressful jobs.
The Japanese even have a name for sudden death caused by overwork – karoshi. Since it was first legally recognized in the 1980s, 30,000 Japanese have been diagnosed as victims of karoshi – their deaths attributed directly to overwork. Today, Japan has a national pension system for members of karoshi victims’ families. One Japanese study found that the overworked and the underemployed had similar stress rates and risks of heart disease.
In Canada, stress is now twice as prevalent as it was a decade ago, according to a 2002 Health Canada study. The study also found lower job satisfaction and lower commitment to employers compared to 10 years ago. And it reported increased absenteeism. Similarly, Canada’s 1994 General Social Survey found about one third of workers reported workplace stress from too many demands or too many hours. A new report by GPI Atlantic, titled Working Time and the Future of Work in Canada: A Nova Scotia GPI Case Study, estimates absenteeism caused by stress from long work hours in Nova Scotia cost the province nearly $70 million in 2001.
Unemployment brings health costs
But unemployment brings just as many health problems and hidden costs as overwork. The unemployed suffer higher rates of physical and mental illness than those with jobs.
In the early 1980s, University of Toronto economist Frank Reid estimated that each percentage point increase in Canada’s unemployment rate had an overall social cost of $270 million. A 1993 Ontario Medical Association report estimated that unemployment cost the Canadian health care system $1.1 billion in 1993. Likewise, GPI Atlantic’s report conservatively estimates illness associated with unemployment cost the Nova Scotia economy $182 million in 2001.
Lack of work associated with crime, family breakdown
But the costs of joblessness extend beyond health problems. Economist Belton Fleisher’s landmark work on the economics of crime found that cutting unemployment in half will reduce crime rates by 10 per cent. Using Fleisher’s methods, GPI Atlantic estimates that Nova Scotia would save between $60 million and $130 million a year in avoided crime costs by cutting the jobless rate to less than five per cent. All told, unemployment may cost Nova Scotia about $400 million a year in excess disease, divorce, and crime costs.
Evidence indicates that joblessness is closely linked with family breakdown. For example, one U.S. study found that four years after the loss of a job, the separation or divorce rate increased from less than eight per cent to 24 per cent among poor white families, and from 12 to 30 per cent among poor black families.
Work-time reductions cut unemployment and environmental costs
Work-time reductions bring an opportunity to cut unemployment. They also bring what author Anders Hayden calls an “ecological promise.” Commuting to work produces environmental costs in the form of air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions. Thus a shift to a four-day workweek could reduce such costs by 20 per cent. In Vancouver, a four-day workweek experiment at City Hall saved 700 extra vehicle trips and 17,500 kilometres of auto travel per day, reducing air pollutants by 1,240 tonnes annually.
This article was originally published in Reality Check: The Canadian Review of Wellbeing, a joint project of The Atkinson Charitable Foundation and GPI Atlantic.
Middle class Canadians may have more disposable income than they did 20 years ago. But they’re working longer hours to get it.
Between 1980 and 2001, the average disposable income of couples with children and full-time jobs increased by just over eight per cent. But In 2000, Canadian parents were actually working 206 more hours per year for pay – equal to 26 more eight-hour work days – than they did in 1981.
A comparison of work hours vs. income shows that a substantial portion of people’s increased income comes because they are working more. They have essentially “bought” their increased disposable income with increased work effort. Yet at the same time, many of these same Canadians feel overworked and none the richer.
Economist Juliet Schor finds the roots of today’s long work hours in “the work and spend cycle.” High levels of consumption keep us moving on a “treadmill,” says Schor, requiring long hours of work to provide us with more money so we can buy more goods and services.
Average Americans, for example, now consume more than twice what they consumed 40 years ago. According to Schor, between 1983 and 1987 alone, Americans purchased 51 million microwaves, 44 million washers and dryers, 85 million colour televisions, 48 million VCRs, and 23 million cordless phones – all for an adult population of 180 million.
The same trends can be seen in Canada. In 1982, for example, only six per cent of Nova Scotia households had microwave ovens. By 1997, 87 per cent had them. During that period, the fastest growing industries in Canada were computers, audio and visual electronics, trucks and vans, and child-care.
Are all our new ‘labour-saving’ devices and appliances saving us time? Studies of U.S. women have found that those with more consumer durables in their homes work no fewer hours than those with less.
Bigger houses, fewer people, more stuff
The growth in consumption is compounded by the fact that our houses are larger than they were 60 years ago, even as families have become smaller. In 1943, the average Canadian house was 800 square feet. Today, the average house has more than doubled in size, to 1,800 square feet. Yet the decline in family size means that these large houses are occupied by fewer people than ever before. In 1961, for example, there were 4.2 persons per household and 1.6 rooms per person in the average Nova Scotia home. By 1997 there were only 2.5 persons per household, but 2.4 rooms per person.
It’s also costing Canadians more to work those extra hours. The inflation rate for child-care and eating out has been much higher than the overall inflation rate, and very much higher than the increase in real wages. So Canadians have to work longer hours to pay for those services, which in turn makes them even more dependent on paid child-care and restaurant food.
This article was originally published in Reality Check: The Canadian Review of Wellbeing, a joint project of The Atkinson Charitable Foundation and GPI Atlantic.
In the 1950s, the promise of new technologies and skyrocketing productivity led many academics to predict that by the year 2000 we would have a 20-hour workweek. More vacations! More books to read! More time to spend with family and friends! Writers in the 1950s and ’60s regularly imagined such a world, speculating about the massive social adjustments that would be required to accommodate the anticipated explosion in free time.
Instead, in a cruel irony, leisure time is shrinking for many people, and work hours are expanding. Even weekends, once a refuge for many, have been invaded by work. Statistics Canada data confirm that Canadians who work full-time use the weekend to do even more work, both paid and unpaid. Between 1991 and 1999 alone, the proportion of Canadian workers regularly working on weekends jumped from 11 per cent to 18.5 per cent.
In medium and large-sized Canadian firms and organizations, 58 per cent of workers now report work/life conflict and ‘role overload’ – defined simply as “having too much to do in a given amount of time.” This is up sharply from 47 per cent in 1991. Half of Canadian mothers with full-time jobs and one in three fathers with full-time jobs say they are too busy to have any fun. Time use surveys also show that people are sleeping less.
Work interfering with family life
In the U.S. and Japan the situation is similar. American and Japanese workers now work longer hours than workers in any other industrialized country. And a recent U.K. survey revealed that more than half of British full-time workers are so tired they would prefer sleep to more sex, and would happily swap a pay raise for a shorter workweek. In that country, 42 per cent of full-time workers have a workweek longer than 48 hours – a higher proportion than any other country in the European Union. About one third of those surveyed reported that work was interfering with family responsibilities. A century ago, a typical Canadian couple with children worked an average of 111 hours per week of paid and unpaid work. By 2000, that number had risen to 137 hours. Couples with full-time jobs and children work even more: nearly 145 hours a week, when both paid and unpaid work are counted.
Leisure time declines with marriage and with raising children. On average, married people have less free time in a day than single people, and married people with young children have the least amount of free time. In addition, parents are spending more hours at work. Between 1992 and 1998 – the most recent time-use data available – married men and women each clocked an extra two hours per week of paid work.
For this segment of workers, the decline in leisure time has been the direct result of more hours spent on the job. The situation is even graver for single mothers with full-time jobs. According to Statistics Canada, they work an average 75-hour workweek, when paid and unpaid work are combined – more than any other group.
Canada lags behind Europe in vacation time, leisure time
Comparative time-use studies show that Canadians have less free time than most Western Europeans.
The average Danish citizen, for example, has 11 more hours free time each week than the average Canadian. In addition, European workers enjoy up to three times more vacation time. Based on the amount of vacation time provided in relation to years of service, Canadian workers would have to work, on average, 15 years before receiving the vacation time mandated by some European countries after just one year of work.
Long-term Unemployment on the Rise
Canada’s official unemployment rate is just over seven per cent. But this number excludes a growing number of ‘hidden’ unemployed such as involuntary part-timers and ‘discouraged’ workers – those who want work but have given up looking for it. In 2001, for instance, the official unemployment rate in Canada was 7.2 per cent.
Add discouraged workers and the underemployed portion of involuntary part-time work, and the number rises to just above 10 per cent.
In addition, the official figures disguise the fact that long-term unemployment is on the rise. In Canada the proportion of people unemployed for a year or longer has more than doubled over the past 25 years.
Between 1980 and 2001, the average disposable income of couples with children and full-time jobs increased by just over eight per cent. But In 2000, Canadian parents were actually working 206 more hours per year for pay – equal to 26 more eight-hour work days – than they did in 1981.
In the 1980s, a rash of hell-in-a-handbasket headlines announced the new scourge of Europe: The Dutch Disease. The Dutch economy was stagnating with growing deficits and swelling numbers of unemployed workers.
With an unemployment rate hovering around 12 per cent and an estimated 10,000 people a month joining the unemployment rolls in 1984, the state of the Dutch economy was dire.
But by the early 1990s, things began to turn around. Through a set of policies including wage moderation coupled with reduced work hours, the ‘Dutch Disease’ became the ‘Dutch Miracle.’
Unemployment fell to just over six per cent in 1997. By 2001, roughly three quarters of the population between 15 and 64 years of age were employed, compared to 61 per cent in Canada. In 2003, the Dutch unemployment rate was 3.8 per cent.
In 2002, the most recent work-hours data available, the Netherlands had the shortest work hours of any OECD country – 438 fewer annual work hours than in Canada. It also had one of the highest rates of hourly labour productivity.
Workers now have the legislated right to reduce their hours. Dutch laws also guarantee against discrimination in terms of wages, benefits, and opportunities for career advancement. In other words, part-timers get pro-rated benefits according to hours worked, opportunities for promotion, and wages similar to their full-time counterparts. The result is that most people who work part-time want to do so.
A 1996 study showed than only six per cent of Dutch part-timers would rather have full-time work, compared with 26 per cent of Canada’s part-time workforce.
“The Dutch are not aiming to maximize gross national product per capita. Rather we are seeking to attain a high quality of life, a just, participatory and sustainable society that is cohesive,” former Dutch Prime Minister Ruud Lubbers commented in 1999. “Thus, while the Dutch economy is very efficient per working hour, the number of working hours per citizen is rather limited…We like it that way.”
The Netherlands experience demonstrates that making part-time work ‘good’ work with equal hourly pay, pro-rated benefits, and equal opportunity for career advancement can increase the overall rate of part-time work while reducing the rate of involuntary part-time work. It can create jobs by redistributing work hours, and improve quality of life and work-life balance by expanding leisure time.
This article was originally published in Reality Check: The Canadian Review of Wellbeing, a joint project of The Atkinson Charitable Foundation and GPI Atlantic.
Sharing the Work, Sparing the Planet: Work Time, Consumption & Ecology
by Anders Hayden (Toronto: Between the Lines, 1999)
In this seminal book, Anders Hayden – one of the leading proponents of new work schedules in Canada – chronicles the global movement to shorten work time.
Historically, people advocated work-time reductions to create more jobs and “live dignified and healthy lives.” Today, argues Hayden, these two reasons have been “joined by a powerful new motivation: the increasing recognition of ecological limits.” Infinite growth and expanded resource consumption are no longer options.
Work-time reductions offer a way to sustain the environment by shifting the focus from consumption to leisure, while increasing employment, social justice, and quality of life.
Efforts to reduce work hours have been most concentrated and successful in Europe. Drawing on several international and Canadian examples, Hayden shows how work-time reduction can be good for people, and good for the planet.
As mentioned in the previous post, The Work Less Institute of Technology will present, out of order, "Ten Theses on the Multitude and Post-Fordist Capitalism" by Paolo Virno. Instead of 1, 2, 3..., we will present 3, 2, 1, 4, 5... We start with number 3 because it is there that Virno challenges the interpretation of Andre Gorz about the shrinking of working time.
Thesis 3 The crisis of the society of labor is reflected in the multitude itself.
"The crisis of the society of labor certainly does not coincide with a linear shrinking of labor time. Instead, the latter exhibits an unheard of pervasiveness in today's world. The positions of Gorz and Rifkin on the "end of work" (Gorz, Reclaiming Work; Rifkin, The End of Work) are mistaken; they spread misunderstandings of all kinds; and even worse, they prevent us from focusing on the very question they raise.
"The crisis of the society of labor consists of the fact (brought up thesis 2) that social wealth is produced from science, from the general intellect, rather than from the work delivered by individuals. The work demanded seems reducible to a virtually negligible portion of a life. Science, information, knowledge in general, cooperation, these present themselves as the key support system of production -- these, rather than labor time. Nevertheless, this labor time continues to be valid as a parameter of social development and of social wealth. Thus, the overflow of labor from society establishes a contradictory process, a theater of violent oppositions and disturbing paradoxes. Labor time is the unit of measurement in use, but no longer the true one unit of measurement. To ignore one or the other of the two sides -- that is, to emphasize either the validity alone, or the lack of veracity alone -- does not take us far: in the first case, one does not become aware of the crisis of the society of labor, in the second case one ends up guaranteeing conciliatory representations in the manner of Gorz or Rifkin.
"The surpassing of the society of labor occurs in the forms prescribed by the social system based on wage labor. Overtime, which is a potential source of wealth, manifests itself as poverty: wages compensation, structural unemployment (brought on by investments. not by the lack thereof), unlimited flexibility in the use of labor-power, proliferation of hierarchies. re-establishment of archaic disciplinary, measures to control individuals no longer subject to the rules of the factory system. This is the magnetic storm which allows, on the phenomenological plane, for the "surpassing" which is paradoxical to the point of taking place upon the very foundation of that which was to be surpassed.
"Let me repeat the key-phrase: the surpassing of the society of labor comes about in compliance with the rules of wage labor. This phrase can be applied to the post-Fordist situation in the same manner as Marx's observation regarding the first stock companies. Marx writes: "the joint-stock system is an abolition of capitalist private industry on the basis of the capitalist system itself" (Capital, Volume 3: 570). That is to say: the stock companies assert the possibility of escaping the regime of private property, but this assertion always takes place within the realm of private property and, indeed, increases disproportionately the power of the latter. The difficulty, with reference to post-Fordism as well as to the stock companies, lies in considering simultaneously the two contradictory points of view, that is to say, subsistence and ending, validity and surmountability.
"The crisis of the society of labor (if correctly understood) implies that all of post-Fordist labor-power can be described using the categories with which Marx analyzed the "industrial reserve army," that is, unemployment. Marx believed that the "industrial reserve army" was divisible into three types or figures: fluid (today we would speak of turn-over, early retirement, etc.), latent (where at any moment a technological innovation could intervene, reducing employment), stagnant (in current terms: working under the table, temporary work, atypical work). According to Marx, it is the mass of the unemployed which is fluid, latent or stagnant, certainly not the employed labor class; they are a marginal sector of labor-power, not its main sector. Yet, the crisis of the society of labor (with the complex characteristics which I tried to outline earlier) causes these three determining categories to apply, in effect, to all labor-power. Fluid, or latent, or stagnant, applies to the employed labor class as such. Each allocation of wage labor allows the nonnecessity of that labor and the excessive social cost inherent in that labor to leak out. But this non-necessity, as always, manifests itself as a perpetuation of wage labor in temporary or "flexible" forms."
I went out for a post-new year's walk today and stopped in at Magpie magazine store to see if they had the January BC Business with Sarah Efron's piece in it (for which Sarah interviewed me). Not in yet, but... while I was browsing the shelves, I noticed a magazine called new formations whose latest issue is on intellectual work. One of the articles in it was titled "Idleness for All" and I thought that would be a good assigned reading for the Work Less Institute of Technology.
In the article "Idleness for All", the author, Scott McCracken, mentioned a book by Guardian columnist Madeleine Bunting, Willing Slaves: How the Overwork Culture is Ruling Our Lives, which is glowing reviewed here (in the Guardian) by Tom Hodgkinson. Not wanting to settle for puff reviews published in non-arms length sources, I was looking at some other reviews and stumbled across an intriguing reference to A Grammar of the Multitude by the Italian theorist Paolo Virno.
It so happens that someone has posted to the web what appears to me to be the conclusion to Virno's book, "Ten Theses on the Multitude and Post-Fordist Capitalism." Virno's theses -- most specifically, thesis #3 -- in some respects pose a counterpoint to Andre Gorz's "Summary for Trade Unionists and Other Left Activists" of his Critique of Economic Reason, which I have been posting to the Work Less Institute of Technology bit by bit. So what I am going to do is post Virno's theses in alternation with Gorz's. I will start with #3, respecting Virno's claim that the sequence of his presentation of the theses is arbitrary and would lose nothing from being re-arranged.