Remembrance of Work Time Standards Lost

Mainstream economists have completely blown the issue of working time

By: Tom Walker

  Twenty-five years ago, two-thirds of the Canadian work force worked a standard 35 to 40 hours a week. And they received a full-time pay cheque with holiday and vacation pay for doing so.
  By 1995, the proportion of the workforce working standard hours had declined to a bare majority. Many of the rest of us have migrated to part-time jobs with substandard pay and benefits or to long hours of work often without compensation for overtime.
  About a third of the people working part-time say they would rather have a full-time job but can't find one and many of the people working long hours would gladly forgo income for more time off. So what happens when unions or social activists suggest that perhaps we could solve both dilemmas and reduce unemployment in the bargain by redistributing the hours of work - perhaps even try something like the 35-hour work week brought in recently by the French government?
 

The lump-of-labour fallacy is a scientific hoax

  What happens is advocates of shorter work hours are scolded by financial commentators and think-tank experts like Michael Walker of the Fraser Institute that to even consider such a thing is proof of "economic ignorance". According to National Post columnist Peter Foster, for example, the French 35-hour policy is based on a "fundamental economic misunderstanding known as the 'lump-of-labour fallacy'."
  What the heck is a "lump of labour" and why did I spend the last two years studying and writing about it? The simple answer is that the lump of labour is a "theory" that isn't a theory; it is an "economic fallacy" that is not an economic fallacy.

Time-worn hoax
  Like the chemically-aged skull of a modern man and jawbone of an orangutan dug up at Piltdown, England in 1911, the lump-of-labour fallacy is a scientific hoax. Unlike the counterfeit missing link, however, the lump-of-labour fallacy may be making our work lives miserable - eroding our job security, piling up our workload, gobbling our pay cheques and spoiling our weekends.
  You don't need to know exactly what the lump-of-labour fallacy is or says. It's a relic of sheer nonsense that has been reverently handed down from generation to generation of mainstream economists. If you insist on learning the details, you can read my chapter debunking the lump-of-labour claim in a recent scholarly volume on working time.
  What you DO need to know is that mainstream economists have completely blown the issue of working time. There once was an economic theory of the hours of labour, a very good theory indeed presented by Sir Sydney Chapman - an esteemed and excruciatingly orthodox Cambridge economist - in Winnipeg in 1909.
  Economics, as it is taught at universities, has managed to "lose" its own theory, though. It's in the library, but few economists bother to look for it there. Instead they look in their textbooks, where the theory isn't.
  During the 1950s and 1960s the most widely-used introductory textbook in first year economics courses across North America was a book affectionately known as "Samuelson". Its official title was Economics: An Introduction by Paul Samuelson.
  Edition after revised edition of that ubiquitous textbook carried a breezy discussion of why union demands or policy proposals for shorter hours of work - though admittedly well-intentioned - are hare-brained panaceas not worth considering seriously. Why? Because they are based on the venerable lump-of-labour fallacy.
  The claim makes about as much sense as saying that caring about nutrition is based on a lump-of-food fallacy or that personal hygiene is based on a lump-of-soap fallacy. That hasn't prevented financial page editorialists and business lobbyists from banging the fallacy gong any time a shorter work time proposal makes it onto the agenda of public debate. I first read the phrase in a column written by Jock Finlayson, vice president for research of the B.C. Business Council, who invoked it several times in the mid-1990s to ward off the grim spectre of Jeremy Rifkin's The End of Work.
  The bottom line is North America is choking from overwork, underemployment and just plain misallocation of working time. Governments are loath to do anything about it, because they're afraid that if they do, corporate lobbyists and financial page editorialists will humiliate them with mocking cries of "fallacy" and "panacea".
  As I mentioned earlier, you don't need to know what the lump-of-labour fallacy is. All you need to know is that something is profoundly wrong with the way that the hours of work are being regulated - subtly and unofficially being de-regulated, really - in North America and that the arguments against doing something about it are utterly groundless.
  Isn't it about time we called the bluff of the textbook-thumping experts who seem to think that a toxic cocktail of overwork and underemployment is "good for the economy"? Isn't it about time we buried the bogus lump-of-labour fallacy alongside the remains of that other scientific hoax, the Piltdown Man?

Tom Walker is a social policy analyst and advocate of shorter working time. His chapter on "The 'lump-of-labour' case against work-sharing" is in Working Time: International trends, theory and policy perspectives edited by Lonnie Golden and Deborah Figart, published by Routledge.

Posted: April 09, 2001

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