Luddism

Wojtek Sokolowski sokol at jhu.edu
Wed Jul 18 08:19:02 PDT 2001


At 08:17 PM 7/17/01 -0700, Michael P. wrote:
>Kelley, these are the same authors that Doug has previously torn to shreds.
>Look at hours on the job. Yes, it fell from 1870 till 1973. What about the
>1990 data? Well, more and more jobs are part-time. Is that progress?
So, if
>you have 2 part time jobs both jobs will contribute toward a lowered average
>time on the job.

In this light it is intersting to note that the most reliable employment data source, the ES-202 (quarterly unemplyment insurance data that are near-census quality) gives information only on total number of persons employed and wages - it does not give the number of hours worked. The latter are collected on a survey-basis, which typically includes only non-surpervisory employees (at least in MD, the state I'm most familiar with) - the labour market segment most affected by part-time jobs. At the same time, there is plenty of anecdotal evidence of "supervisory" (read: white collar workers) working longer hours without overtime.

Another point - the term "leisure time" is misleading - a great chunk of this time can be more appropriately described as "consumer work" i.e. time spent on purchasing consumer goods, and "commuter work" i.e. time spent on commuting to the places of employment ond consumer work. If we factor the consumer and commuter work out, the actual amount of leisure (i.e. truly disposable free time) shrinks quite considerably.

Wojtek



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