>But is it the case that some hours actually worked simply not reported -
>especially in white collar occupations? I understand that BLS's
>"work-horse" - the quarterly census of employment and wages (ES-202)
>does not collect information on hours worked (just monthly employment
>and wages) - and that information is collected via various surveys done
>by state Labor Market Information agencies. I also understand that not
>all employees may be covered by these surveys e.g. last time I checked
>MD did not include managerial workers.
>
>The bottom line is that the number of hours worked is an estimate and,
>given the realities of the US labor market, probably an under-estimate.
White collar hours are estimated from production worker hours, based on survey data from the 1970s. The BLS is updating the formulas, but they're not done with the job yet.
Yes, hours worked is almost certainly underestimated; white-collar workers in computers are assumed to work normal 35-40 hour weeks. We don't know if the underestimates are relatively constant over time, or if the underestimates have gotten wider over the years.
Also, the inputs are hours paid, not actual hours worked. Wal-Mart workers who routinely work off the clock are counted as working only those hours that are on the clock.
I wrote at some length about all this in After the New Economy.
>As I understand, value added by foreign labor can be factored out in
>national accounts only as "intermediate consumption" i.e. if the firm
>purchased it as a semi-finished product or raw material or perhaps a
>foreign contract. But what happens if, say, an overseas subsidiary of
>Sweatshops-R-Us makes parts in, say, China, and then ships them to the
>US-based assembly plant also owned by Sweatshops-R-US where they are
>assembled into the final product and sold in the US market? I think,
>but I am not sure, that the only intermediate consumption reported by
>Sweatshops-R-Us would be price of raw materials purchased overseas and
>that would feature as value added abroad - whereas the value added by
>the foreign subsidiary and transferred to the US-based branch would
>feature as value added in the US. I can ask a colleague of mine who is
>an expert on national accounts.
The imported parts should be reported as imports in the national accounts (and outsourced service work should be reported as service imports). They're probably underestimated, though we don't know by how much.
>As to your comment that productivity increase is just another word for
>exploitation of labor - not necessarily. It depends how the value added
>is distributed.
Yup, for sure, but productivity gains are distributed in the U.S. over the last several years have accrued almost entirely to capital.
Doug