>Has anyone seen any study indicating that temp and part-time employment,
>speed-ups and stretch-outs, longer hours, forced overtime and other modes
>of extracting absolute surplus value themselves increase or multiply during
>or after industrial restructuring of various kinds that aims to lower unit
>labor costs.
>Straight economists wouldn't even raise the question; bent economists would
>raise the question without necessarily being able to answer it, given the
>way the statistics are collected. Any firm can extract more surplus value
>absolutely, up to a point; it's only the system as a whole (competition,
>etc.) that produces surplus value relatively. Yet if one could correlate
>data on temp. etc., work with rising labor productivity in one or more firm
>or in one industry (which generates more rent, temporarily, until the rent
>is competed away by other capitals doing restructuring, such that more
>surplus value relatively is produced), one would have at least an
>indication. Thanks for any help.
This doesn't answer the question, but there's an article in the March 1999 issue of the Monthly Labor Review on part-time employment by industry; it says that rapidly growing sectors have been more likely to use part-timers than other sectors. The article is available in Acrobat format at <http://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/art3full.pdf>.
Doug