As someone who grew up in the “three glorious decades” it would seem to me that an awful lot of the domestic improvements happened during or soon after the largest declines in industrial working time.

I can certainly see the argument that household appliances enable a greater paid workforce participation by women. Point taken. But if you look at the distribution of hours, particularly among men, you’ll see that high income earners work more hours than they did say in the 1970s and low income earners’ declines in hours can entirely be explained by greater precariousness of employment. Stop calling unemployment “leisure”!

Please have a look at Jared Bernstein and Karen Kornbluh’s study showing that middle and lower income families barely maintained their income levels by increasing household hours of work. In fact, low income families worked more hours AND had less income over the period studied. Just how are those families “buying” more leisure from household production with lower incomes?

I post the title and time period studied of the Bernstein and Kornbluh piece later. I don’t have time to look it up right at the moment.

Look to the real mistake that the nef have made. It’s in their analysis of working hours itself. And yes, Keynes was wrong here too (hey, even Homer nods and all that).

We must distinguish between paid working hours in the market and unpaid working hours in household production. OK, nef do at least nod in this direction.

But the trend over the past century or so has been entirely the opposite of what nef are suggesting should happen. As wealth increases of course we have been taking some of that extra wealth in the form of more leisure. But which for of production, household or market, is it that we have been gaining that extra leisure from?

All of the time use surveys show that, for women market working hours have been rising (for the bovious reasons of emancipation etc). For men paid working hours have been declining. But for both sexes unpaid hours in household production have been falling strongly.

So it would appear that we prefer to do paid working hours in order to purchase those things (vacuums, wahing machines, ready meals, clothes rather than home seamstressing, whatever) which reduce household production. This seems logical as the productivity of labour is higher the more division and specialisation of labour we have. By working and purchasing such goods and services rather than by doing them ourselves we get more goods and services for a certain number of working hours. (BTW, this isn’t some right wing invention. This is an implication of the Stiglitz/Sen report for Sarkozy on alternatives to GDP as a measure of wellbeing.)

Now this effect is really very strong. From the Luxembourg Income Study we get the result, just as an example, that the average American woman does fewer total working hours than her German equivalent. More market hours, yes, but fewer in home production.

And this is where the nef goes wrong. The entire thrust of their argument is that we would be better off doing fewer market hours and more in household production. To ridicule it, we are better off spending four hours making jam than we are working two hours for pay to purchase the same amount of jam.

Unless you put a very high value on the social aspects or risking pouring boiling sugar over the kiddies this just isn’t true.

And from what people have actually been doing in the past century this isn’t true, most people simply don’t place that high a value on such social activities. We can see this in what they have been doing. They’ve been taking more leisure as a result of increasing wealth, yes. But they’ve been doing that by preferentially reducing household production hours rather than market working hours.

The suggestion that we should reduce market hours in favour of home production hours thus fails. Not because anyone’s violated some principle of economics or because there’s a fallacy built into the logic.

But simply because when we observe what several billion human beings have been doing over a century it turns out that this isn’t they way that those billions would like to organise their lives.

It’s humanity that’s wrong, d’ye see?

Let’s stop the taunts and the name calling for a just a moment here to recall that the issue is NOT whether or not there is a “fixed amount of work,” as the lump-of-labor fallacy has it but whether or not work-time reduction is a feasible response to either 1. current high levels of unemployment due to the recession or, 2. going forward, to a new economic paradigm in which GDP growth no longer figures as an imperative for maintaining social stability.

The fallacy taunt would rule out the effectiveness of a reduction of working time for either purpose. It is an “if-and-only-if” proposition. “If it was true that there is a fixed amount of work to be done, work-sharing could be effective. But since it’s not true, it can’t be.” You’re not allowed to pick and choose between “long term fallacy but short term non-fallacy.”

But, while we’re on the subject of argument from authority, I would like to delve a bit further into Mr. Keynes’s views of the long and short of working less. First, in a 1945 letter to T.S. Eliot, Keynes wrote,

The full employment policy by means of investment is only one particular application of an intellectual theorem. You can produce the result just as well by consuming more or working less. Personally I regard the investment policy as first aid. In U.S. it almost certainly will not do the trick. Less work is the ultimate solution.”

A more formal exposition of Keynes’s view can be found in his 1943 Treasury Dept. memorandum on “The Long Term Problem of Full Employment”, in which he wrote, in part (please follow the link for context):

10. As the third phase comes into sight; the problem stressed by Sir H. Henderson begins to be pressing. It becomes necessary to encourage wise consumption and discourage saving,-and to absorb some part of the unwanted surplus by increased leisure, more holidays (which are a wonderfully good way of getting rid of money) and shorter hours.

Lest anyone suspect I’m cherry-picking Keynes quotes just to score debate points, I refer you to Keynes’s biographer, Robert Skidelsky and especially to a 1998 article he wrote titled “Keynes and Employment Policy in the Second World War.”

Although I agree with Keynes, I wouldn’t want to leave the impression of holding him up as the ultimate authority on the matter. That honour I would readily concede to a student of Alfred Marshall’s who was highly regarded in his day but whose contribution is largely neglected these days, Sydney J. Chapman. Chapman’s analysis was cited extensively and approvingly by A.C. Pigou, J.R. Hicks and Lionel Robbins and ultimately became the basis for John Maurice Clark’s analysis of social overhead costs.

For those more concerned with promoting economic literacy than with hurling glib taunts of “economic illiteracy,” here is the abstract of a paper I presented at a conference in Amsterdam few years ago, “Missing: The Strange Disappearance of S. J. Chapman’s Theory of the Hours of Labour”

Sidney Chapman’s theory of the hours of labour, published in 1909 in The Economic Journal, was acknowledged as authoritative by the leading economists of the day. It provided important insights into the prospects for market rationality with respect to work time arrangements and hinted at a profound immanent critique of economists’ excessive concern with external wealth. Chapman’s theory was consigned to obscurity by mathematical analyses that reverted heedlessly to outdated and naïve assumptions about the connection between hours and output. The centenary of the theory’s publication offers an occasion to reconsider what has been lost by economists’ neglect of Chapman’s theory.

Now, the case for how reducing working time cuts unemployment is not a simple one. It is not a matter of “dividing up a fixed amount of work.” It has to do with first, recognizing the market failure (described by Chapman and Pigou) with regard to the maldistribution of employment, resulting in both overwork and unemployment, and second with accounting for that maldistribution as a social overhead cost (Clark) that firms simply shed and shift to individual or society as a whole as an “externality.” “If all industry were integrated and owned by workers, what would be the relation of constant to variable expense?” Clark asked, “it would be clear to worker-owners that the real cost of labor could not be materially reduced by unemployment.”

What Keynes is usually attributed as saying is: “When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, Sir?” Krugman has changed his mind when the facts do (for example on the impact of globalisation on unemployment as evidence built up in the 1990s), but I don’t read the quote Tom Walker gives in the same way.

It is clear from the context of this Krugman piece that he is talking about work-sharing for employees of companies in trouble as a temporary policy to get through a recession with fewer people completely laid off. This is different from a policy that attempts to bring about a permanent reduction in unemployment across the whole economy through shortening the working week, and I don’t see anything in the quote which would make me think that Krugman is in favour of that.

Indeed, he scarcely seems in favour of work-sharing to tide over a recession, saying recently that he is turning to it as what he understands “perfectly well to be a third-best solution” because inflation and a conventional stimulus are not politically possible (http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/11/13/its-the-stupidity-economy/).

As I said in my previous comment, I think there are lots of interesting reasons to promote shorter working weeks (think how much more time we could spending the blogosphere –mmm… appealing idea (?)), but cutting unemployment is not one of them.

Thanks, Tim. Some background on the challenge. I first made it back in October 2004 on the MaxSpeak blog, which had a fairly large readership. There were no takers. In April 2008, I upped the anted to $10,000 on the condition that the defender of the lump taunt get their defense published in a high-ranking, peer-reviewed economics journal. I offered a lesser prize of $1000 for publication in a lower ranking journal. Again not a single taker. Not even an inquiry.

Now, admittedly, some potential defenders of the lump taunt may have reservations about how the question of “conclusive evidence” is to be adjudicated and whether I can be trusted with regard to payment. No problem. If someone actually thinks they can meet the challenge, I’m sure we could work out a mutually agreed upon arbitrator and stakeholder. I can be contacted at lumpoflabor gmail com (with all the usual symbols in between the words).

Once they’ve read my published refutation of the fallacy taunt, though, I doubt anyone will see it as an “easy C$5000.”

One word of caution. The challenge is not (and never has been), “have ANY advocates of work time reduction EVER committed the fallacy.” Of course they have (but less often than you might think). Opponents of work time reduction also commit the fallacy repeatedly and with apparent impunity. On occasion, they unwittingly commit the fallacy in the very process of trying to justify their taunt! The challenge is about whether the fallacy is inherent or “inevitable” in the case for work time reduction.

The French economists, Pierre Cahuc and Andre Zylberberg took this mischievous line of unreasoning to it most extreme absurdity, insinuating an intellectual affinity between work-sharing and the Nazi genocide:

The idea that any country’s economy, and a fortiori the world economy, contains a fixed number of jobs or hours of work that can be parceled out in different ways is false. When used to justify policies that reduce the length of the individual work week, it may lead to unintended consequences. It is, moreover, harmful when used to justify the withdrawal of mothers with children from the working population (thanks, for example, to parental education allowances). It can even be dangerous, as when it leads to the notion that getting rid of ‘superfluous’ manpower (the Jews of Nazi Germany in the past, immigrants from many countries in the present)…

Slippery slopes, thin edges of wedges and all reductio ad absurdum aside, the fact remains that the only “belief in a fixed amount of work” at stake is a FALSELY ATTRIBUTED one. Mr. Stanley, along with Mr. Lockwood and MM. Cahuc and Zylberberg merely repeat a taunt for which there is no evidence.

The nef’s case for moving to a more equitable and leisurely sharing of work is not based on an assumption that the amount of work is fixed. There is, I repeat, NO EVIDENCE for the taunt that it is. If Mr. Stanley, Mr. Lockwood (or any one else) can produce conclusive evidence that the assumption of a fixed amount of work is inherent in the case for work time reduction as a policy tool for job-creation or preservation, I will forthwith personally send them a cheque for $5,000 Canadian. My money is safe because they can’t do it.

This is not to deny that it is possible to make bad, silly or incoherent arguments even for a worthwhile goal. But to reduce and equate all arguments to a stereotyped fallacy is itself the height of folly.

How unsurprising to see the argument from authority from Matthew Lockwood. Reminds me of another authority, John Maynard Keynes who said, “when circumstances change I change my opinion.” Good Keynesian that he is, Professor Krugman has indeed changed his opinion in response to changed circumstances and now advocates work-sharing in the U.S. In his November 12, 2009 column Free to Lose Krugman wrote:

Should America be trying anything along these lines? In a recent interview in The Washington Post, Lawrence Summers, the Obama administration’s highest-ranking economist, was dismissive: “It may be desirable to have a given amount of work shared among more people. But that’s not as desirable as expanding the total amount of work.” True. But we are not, in fact, expanding the total amount of work — and Congress doesn’t seem willing to spend enough on stimulus to change that unfortunate fact. So shouldn’t we be considering other measures, if only as a stopgap?

Now, the usual objection to European-style employment policies is that they’re bad for long-run growth — that protecting jobs and encouraging work-sharing makes companies in expanding sectors less likely to hire and reduces the incentives for workers to move to more productive occupations. And in normal times there’s something to be said for American-style “free to lose” labor markets, in which employers can fire workers at will but also face few barriers to new hiring.

But these aren’t normal times. Right now, workers who lose their jobs aren’t moving to the jobs of the future; they’re entering the ranks of the unemployed and staying there. Long-term unemployment is already at its highest levels since the 1930s, and it’s still on the rise.

Does Krugman’s change of heart make Krugman an “economic illiterate’ or were his earlier words perhaps a bit intemperate?

As for the difference-in-difference macroeconomic studies of employment effects, what laypeople often fail to understand is the results of macroeconomic analysis essentially reflect the assumptions made by the economists. I haven’t read this particular study (Chemin and Wasmer) but I have read other difference-in-difference studies and, trust me, they DO rely on the assumption that it is basically a matter of “dividing up a given number of hours of work.” The only thing this scholastic procedure ‘proves’ is that the amount of work is not fixed. But, hey, we knew that already. Other studies have found positive employment effects, but then they make other assumptions. Then there’s the question of publication bias and results cherry picking (do a whole bunch of studies until you find one that produces the results that you know are more publishable). That said, the study you cite MAY be a very well-designed one with valuable findings. It’s just that I’ve read too many of these things to ASSUME that at the outset.

Tom Walker is consistently cogent and Nigel Stanley, even where I disagree with him is erudite and nuanced–we could use more of such Labor leadership in the US. His argument regarding immigrants is an important concern, but the advocates of shorter hours are not immigrant bashers and make their case not on a fixed amount of work, but on the health, family, community, environmental and, during the recession, employment, benefits of reduced working time.

Certainly Mr. Stanley is right that such reductions need to be combined with important increases in the minimum wage, and in the US, with all the things we advocate here (family leave, vacation time, etc.) which you already have in the UK. We should not get fixated on issues like LofL or whether 21 hours is too arbitrary, but rather focus on the fact that “the reduction of the working day” is still “the prerequesite” for freedom and for improvement in so many other areas of life.

Thank you, Nigel Stanley for your recognition of its importance even if you do not fully share the views of NEF or Tom Walker or myself. Can we get you over the US?

cheers, John de Graaf And PS Thanks to Tom Walker for the full Gompers quote–the labor leaders of that era were visionaries.

But whatever the history of the lump of labour fallacy, the argument (which is made in the NEF report) that cutting the hours of workers will reduce unemployment seems weak to me.

France provides a natural experiment. The 35 hour week policy was introduced in 2000. Unemployment in France in the mid-1990s was just touching 12%. It started falling in 1997 and was around 9% in 2000. For the next 6 years it stayed around that level with no major move down. The conclusion that the law had little effect on employment is supported by quite careful studies such as: http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/605426

If I am misinformed about the lump of labour fallacy, at least I am in the good company of Paul Krugman (http://www.pkarchive.org/column/100703.html). If he thinks the fallacy is economically illiterate (he actually calls it “dangerous”) then that’s good enough for me.

“He famously defined trade unionism in one word, ‘more’”.

This illustrates the pitfall of relying on attributed or abridged statements rather than what people actually said. What Gompers said was:

“What does labor want? We want more schoolhouses and less jails; more books and less arsenals; more learning and less vice; more leisure and less greed; more justice and less revenge; in fact, more of the opportunities to cultivate our better natures, to make manhood more noble, womanhood more beautiful, and childhood more happy and bright.”

So there were lesses as well as mores in Gompers’s desire. But, as Robert F. Kennedy pointed out, the jails, arsenals, vice and revenge all add to the GDP — to economic growth. Not to mention cleaning up pollution.

As for the lump-of-labour fallacy. The “fallacy of the fallacy” has nothing to do with whether there is or isn’t a fixed amount of work to be done. It has everything to do with nonsensical BELIEFS falsely attributed to people. It’s like if I say “Nigel Stanley believes he is descended from Piltdown Man, but he’s wrong because there was no such creature.” It’s true that there no such creature as Piltdown Man.

But the real issue is does Nigel have the erroneous belief attributed to him. If he doesn’t, the whole claim is a detour and a distraction. That’s what the lump of labour fallacy claim has always been about. Setting up a straw man argument and a red herring to distract from the case at hand.

Furthermore, whether people do or don’t believe in a “fixed amount of work” is beside the point if governments and employers are USING immigration and trade policy strategically to undermine wage rates and the standard of living. Because they are both more vulnerable and may be accustomed to a lower standard of living, immigrants are often willing to work for lower wages that those that currently prevail. To attribute all anxiety about the effects of immigration and trade on employment and wages to racism and right-wing populism is to cede an awful lot of political territory to the opponents of social justice.

But let’s not delude ourselves into imagining we can persuade each other with arguments. Nigel Stanley has stated what he believes is an economic principle. I have disputed the pedigree of his claim and he has understandably become defensive. At this point we’re clearly talking past each other rather than to each other. Perhaps we should proceed into mediation?

I’m challenged as to why a trade unionist should believe that the lump of labour fallacy (lolf) is a fallacy.

That’s simple. The concept that there is a fixed amount of labour to go round is used by the opponents of trade unionism to divide and rule.

I suspect that there are some differences between the UK and US experience here, but the biggest users of the fallacy in the UK are those who tell us that every job for a migrant worker results in one less job for an indigenous UK worker. It is the stock in trade of the racist and far-right parties, and their apologists in our populist right-wing tabloid press.

I certainly don’t read the lofl as an iron rule that says that work-sharing is never an appropriate response to economic downturn. UK unions have called for the same kind of state subsidies that are used in Germany to preserve skilled workforces during the recession, and have negotiated short –term working deals – even without government help – to preserve jobs.

But that is to deal with a reduction in demand, not to share out a fixed amount of labour.

Nor do UK unions back the idea that a shorter working week overall is a sensible response to unemployment. It may make sense in a particular sector or company, but not across the economy as a whole.

Reading about John’s Timeday campaign I was struck that all of its demands have mostly been met – or even exceeded in the UK. It’s worth reproducing them here – so UK readers can see. Most of them flow from European Union rules – and most of them won by union action.

1) Guaranteeing paid leave for all parents for the birth or adoption of a child. Today, only 40% of Americans are able to take advantage of the 12 weeks of unpaid leave provided by the Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993.
2) Guaranteeing at least one week of paid sick leave for all workers. Many Americans work while sick, lowering productivity and endangering other workers.
3) Guaranteeing at least three weeks of paid annual vacation leave for all workers. Studies show that 28% of all female employees and 37% of women earning less than $40,000 a year receive no paid vacation at all.
4) Placing a limit on the amount of compulsory overtime work that an employer can impose, with our goal being to give employees the right to accept or refuse overtime work.
5) Making Election Day a holiday, with the understanding that Americans need time for civic and political participation.
6) Making it easier for Americans to choose part-time work. Hourly wage parity and protection of promotions and pro-rated benefits for part-time workers

But according to LOFL introducing these rights would result in a growing demand for labour. That didn’t happen.

And our argument for less unpaid overtime that we make each year on work your proper hours day (www.workyourproperhoursday.com) is not just that people are stressed out and overworked, but that many workplaces are badly organised and inefficient, and substitute long hours for good management.

The argument about whether you should argue for a 21 hour working week has become a bit fractured.

Of course any specific demand can be denounced as arbitrary, but in practice successful campaigns set achievable demands that can win the support and commitment of those that will benefit from them. That is where the 8 hour day campaign came from, and why it was partially successful. That is pragmatic trade unionism.

21 hours fails that test.

But it has always been my view that unions should do more to campaign more on working time – and I of course agree that shorter working time by men must be part of a fairer share of unpaid work between men and women.

But such campaigns must start from where people are and why they work long hours – and they are rather different reasons for those who do paid overtime and those work extra hours without extra pay. The poor are not over-consuming, they work long hours because their children would go hungry or would not have any shoes to consume if they didn’t.

Nor do I accept that working shorter hours has a simple correlation with decarbonisation of the economy. It depends on what job people have, and what they do when they are not at work.

I think this is the same basic error as those who call for steady state economic growth make.

The need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions puts huge constraints on how we can achieve economic growth, but also creates new economic opportunities too.

We can have an economy that is growing that is reducing its carbon emissions, and one that is shrinking that is increasing them (though this is less likely).

I also know that in a democracy it is going to be very hard to get support for the kind of radical policies needed to reduce carbon emissions (though we are somewhat ahead of the US in Europe on this.)

Adding a permanent recession as a condition will not help.

And lastly I had a wry chuckle at Samuel Gompers being used for an environmental argument.

He famously defined trade unionism in one word, “more”.

It may even be that the arbitrariness of the eight-hour demand has come back to haunt us because today many people seem to believe that the eight hours a day and 40 hours a week standards are carved in stone.

On the other hand, objectives such as “flexibility” and “work-family balance” are excruciatingly vague and bland. One might say that they are arbitrary in their non-specificity.

What is to be done? Well, ideally what we need to move toward is the collective, co-operative and informed self-management of working time by those who do the work and give of their time. The models for such self-management are to be found in Elinor Ostrom’s Nobel prize-winning studies of what she refers to as “common pool resources.”

But to move toward that informed collective self-management, we need to first engage in a conversation. nef’s “arbitrary” 21 Hours report was intended to spark that conversation, not to dictate its outcome. In the past, the lump-of-labor fallacy claim was used to shut down that conversation before it got started. We mustn’t let that happen ever again.

This keeps appearing everywhere. Yet we’ve got a huge great report, thousands of pages of it, about the economy over the next century. It’s called the IPCC report.

In it we see that the only ecological limit to future economic growth is carbon emissions. Get a low or zero carbon form of energy generation and there are again no limits.

No, don’t take it up with me that there are obviously other limits. Go and take it up with the IPCC. They are the scientific consensus, after all.

If the TUC and US unions would support first, 35, and then 28 hours, as Stanley suggests at least the TUC might, then that is a huge step in the right direction.

Stanley is totally off though on “lump of labor.” Tom Walker has eloquently shown this “fallacy” to be a fallacy itself. Those who favor shorter hours have not claimed there is only so much work to be done, but that there are limits to the work to be done in each era, whether they be the limits of recession and reduced demand (when all can be employed only by work-sharing or, in part, social spending) or more significantly, the ecological limits to growth which we are already hitting hard.

In either case, work-sharing, including such effective policies as Kurzarbeit, provides valuable ways forward. It can also help workers adjust to the idea of more time and less stuff, which is good for the long term, again as we confront ecological limits, and good, as NEF points out, for health, families, communities and personal growth for the workers themselves.

What I envy is that you in the UK are having this debate and that organized Labor is engaged. That hasn’t happened in the States yet but it needs to.

John de Graaf, Executive Director, TAKE BACK YOUR TIME (www.timeday.org)

It should have read: http://tinyurl.com/lumpoflabor

BTW. the locus classicus of the anti-unionist “fixed amount of work” smear was in a London Times series published in November 1901, titled, “The Crisis in British Industry.” Gompers described the employers associations’ lump-of-labor fallacy propaganda as “a libel and malicious invention of irresponsible and plutocratic foes of organized labor.”

Perhaps Gompers was wrong? Nevertheless, it would behoove the Campaigns and Communications Head for the TUC to learn something about the claim before jumping on a bandwagon previously occupied by a chap (David M. Parry, president of the National Association of Manufacturers in the early 1900s) who vowed to “set about the task of pulling up, root and branch, the un-American institution of trades unionism.”