Results from the BC Provincial Election, ridings with Work Less Party candidates:
Vancouver Hastings
Denise Brennan Work Less Party 213 1.07%
Ian Gregson Green Party of BC 1,722 8.65%
Laura McDiarmid BC Liberal Party 6,536 32.84%
Catherine Millard Saadi The Platinum Party 61 0.31%
Will Offley Independent 117 0.59%
Stephen Payne British Columbia Marijuana Party 163 0.82%
Shane Simpson New Democratic Party of B.C. 10,834 54.44%
Carrol Woolsey Social Credit 254 1.28%
total votes cast... 19,900 100.00%
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Vancouver-Burrard
John Clarke Libertarian 361 1.36%
Antonio Francisco Ferreira The Platinum Party 26 0.10%
John Gordon Ince The Sex Party 92 0.35%
Janek Patrick John Kuchmistrz Green Party of BC 3,405 12.82%
Lorne Mayencourt BC Liberal Party 11,230 42.28%
Ian McLeod DR BC 77 0.29%
Tim Stevenson New Democratic Party of B.C. 11,217 42.23%
Lisa Voldeng Work Less Party 153 0.58%
26,561 100.00%
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Vancouver-Fairview
Patrick Gallagher Clark The Sex Party 107 0.41%
Hamdy El-Rayes Green Party of BC 2,244 8.62%
Virginia Greene BC Liberal Party 11,368 43.69%
Gregor Robertson New Democratic Party of B.C. 12,114 46.55%
Malcolm Janet Mary van Delst Work Less Party 87 0.33%
Scott Yee Independent 101 0.39%
26,021 100.00%
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Surrey-Newton
Harry Bains New Democratic Party of B.C. 10,300 57.76%
Dan Deresh Green Party of BC 841 4.72%
Jeff Robert Evans The Platinum Party 69 0.39%
Harry Grewal DR BC 261 1.46%
Daniel Igali BC Liberal Party 6,247 35.03%
Gordon Scott Work Less Party 114 0.64%
17,832 100.00%
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Vancouver-Point Grey
Gordon Campbell BC Liberal Party 11,759 46.34%
Damian Kettlewell Green Party of BC 3,758 14.81%
Gudrun Kost The Platinum Party 17 0.07%
Mel Lehan New Democratic Party of B.C. 9,557 37.67%
Jeff Monds Libertarian 42 0.17%
Yolanda Elizabeth Perez British Columbia Marijuana Party 122 0.48%
Tom Walker Work Less Party 118 0.47%
25,373 100.00%
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Vancouver-Langara
Charles Brunet-Latimer Work Less Party 149 0.80%
Christopher De Wilde Libertarian 172 0.92%
Mark Allen Conrad Gueffroy British Columbia Marijuana Party 205 1.10%
Anita Romaniuk New Democratic Party of B.C. 6,049 32.41%
Carole Taylor BC Liberal Party 10,635 56.98%
Doug Warkentin Green Party of BC 1,453 7.79%
18,663 100.00%
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Vancouver-Mount Pleasant
Juliet Andalis BC Liberal Party 4,000 21.65%
Christopher Patrick Bennett British Columbia Marijuana Party 268 1.45%
Raven Bowen Green Party of BC 1,825 9.88%
Mike Hansen Independent 190 1.03%
Jenny Kwan New Democratic Party of B.C. 11,889 64.35%
Peter Marcus Communist Party of BC 88 0.48%
Kirk Anton Moses The Platinum Party 15 0.08%
Imtiaz Popat DR BC 32 0.17%
Niki Westman Work Less Party 168 0.91%
18,475 100.00%
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Comox Valley
Chris Aikman Green Party of BC 2,588 9.02%
Barbara Biley People's Front 49 0.17%
Andrew Black New Democratic Party of B.C. 12,400 43.24%
Don Davis DR BC 176 0.61%
Miracle Emery British Columbia Marijuana Party 198 0.69%
Mel Garden Refed BC 61 0.21%
Stan Hagen BC Liberal Party 13,130 45.78%
Bruce O'Hara Work Less Party 77 0.27%
28,679 100.00%
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Victoria-Hillside
Steve Filipovic Green Party of BC 2,656 11.82%
Rob Fleming New Democratic Party of B.C. 12,832 57.10%
Katrina Jean Herriot Work Less Party 147 0.65%
Jim McDermott DR BC 331 1.47%
Sheila Orr BC Liberal Party 6,507 28.95%
22,473 100.00%
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North Vancouver-Seymour
Christine E. Ellis Work Less Party 154 0.64%
Daniel Morrison Jarvis BC Liberal Party 13,866 57.40%
Darin Keith Neal British Columbia Marijuana Party 192 0.79%
Cathy Pinsent New Democratic Party of B.C. 7,141 29.56%
John Sharpe Green Party of BC 2,803 11.60%
24,156 100.00%
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West Vancouver-Capilano
Jodie Joanna Giesz-Ramsay BC Marijuana Party 136 0.67%
Terry Platt New Democratic Party of B.C. 3,622 17.97%
Ralph Sultan BC Liberal Party 13,798 68.46%
Ben West Work Less Party 118 0.59%
Lee White Green Party of BC 2,481 12.31%
STV results riding by riding;
http://elections.bc.ca/elections/ge2005/refresults.htm
Total Work Less Party votes: 1498.
Despite a few flaws -- including a brief descent into credulous lump-of-labour rehash -- there is an interesting new paper on reduced work time by two Harvard economists Alberto Alesina and Edward Glaeser, and a Dartmouth economist, Bruce Sacerdote. It is titled Work and Leisure in the U.S. and Europe: Why so Different? and its major innovation is to introduce the notion of a "social multiplier" to the analysis of the utility of leisure. There was a brief discussion of it at catallaxy.
If I understand the paper's argument correctly, it makes an important contribution to the understanding of the working time issue by raising the possibility of a more desirable equilibrium that might be achieved through the regulation of working time. There is an important precedent for a such a conclusion that the authors have overlooked, S.J. Chapman's 1909 article, "Hours of Labour," published in The Economic Journal. Chapman concluded that under competition both workers and firms would tend to accept hours that were longer than optimal, both from the perspective of the workers' wellbeing and the firms' goal of maximizing total output per worker.
Chapman's theory reflected empirical evidence from the late 19th and early 20th centuries, later cited by Philip Sargent Florence, that the change from a 12-hour day to a 10-hour day actually increased total output per worker and that further reduction to an 8-hour day at least maintained output at the level of the 10-hour day. A.C. Pigou also discussed this phenomenon in the chapter on the hours of labour in his 1924 textbook, Economics of Welfare.
Obviously, it would be impossible to certify how much of the increases in output per worker resulted directly from the decrease in the length of the working day. However, Chapman did provide a theoretical explanation from why such a paradoxical increase in output could occur.
Alesina et al. caution that an increase in the cost of labor input per hour would lead to input substitution and thus reduce employment. However, Chapman's theory makes it not so obvious that reduced hours of work at given total wages would increase the cost of labor input per unit of output, which is the salient issue. Of course, it is possible that firms will make the mistake of viewing an increase in labour rates (per hour) as implying an increase in labour costs (per unit) and will behave "irrationally" as Jeffery Pfeffer has suggested (1998, "Six Dangerous Myths about Pay," Harvard Business Review, 76[3], 109-121) but consideration of such behavior would take us away from the province of economic analysis. So it would be appropriate to reconsider the authors' assumptions about labor costs and input substitutions stated on pages 17 and 22 of the paper.
Also on page 22, they make reference to unions' stated policies allegedly being "based on the assumption that the total amount of work to be performed was somehow fixed." I take it that they picked up this characterization of the unions' stated policies from Jennifer Hunt's articles on work-sharing in Germany, which the cite in the sentence immediately preceding. Several years ago I read Hunt's articles carefully and was unable to find any specific evidence in support of several general statements she made about "wide-spread popular beliefs" in a fixed amount of work. The alleged belief in a fixed amount of work is commonly referred to as the "lump-of-labor fallacy". I read Hunt's articles in connection with an investigation of the intellectual history, credentials and legacy of that oddly-named entity (2000, "The 'lump-of-labor' case againt work-sharing: populist fallacy or marginalist throwback" in _Working Time: International trends, theory and policy perspectives_, Routledge). It turns out that there is no substance to the claim that advocates of reduced working time routinely commit such a fallacy and very questionable grounds for the assumption often advanced by neoclassical economists that there is little or no prospect for employment gains from reduced work time. As Gerhard Bosch argues in an earlier chapter in the same book, the prospect for job creation depends as much on how as on whether working time is reduced.
On page 25 of the article, the authors come close to addressing the how rather than the whether of working time reduction and job creation when they remark that "Had the unions accepted a constant hourly wage that [job creation] might have worked..." I would suggest a minor modification. Again, it is not the hourly wage that needs to be held constant but the cost per unit of output, so it could be argued that wage increases that did not exceed productivity gains from reduced hours would offer positive job creation prospects. Of course, it needs at some point to be recognized that those job creation prospects would not be from the "redistribution" of an existing _quantity_ of work but from the dynamic creation of a qualitatively new regime of work and working time -- a regime in which hours are shorter, productivity is higher, costs are lower and employment is greater. That said, talk about redistributing work may be closer to the mark regarding the relation between hours of work and the ideals of life than are pedantically punctilious objections to "views, fallacious or otherwise, concerning the mechanics of distribution. Bad arguments have been used to justify good ends (Chapman, p. 365)."
I do think that the paper's suggestion of a "happier equilibrium" is a welcome step away from what tends to be a sterile debate between two solitudes. I would add, though, that in light of Chapman's theory such a happier equilibrium may also be closer to being economically optimal than the dismal competitive one that is today usually assumed to be optimal.
Wikipedia has an entry on the lump-of-labour fallacy. Back in October, I added two paragraphs to it to call attention to my critique of the alleged fallacy but my addition was recently deleted by an editor with some sort of an ax to grind. Follow the indicated links to view and/or contribute to the entry and the edit discussion.