"The Prince Charles Fallacy is more often known as the "lump of labour fallacy," that there are just so many jobs to go round, so one person's job gain is inevitably another's job loss. The same form of primitive zero-sum thinking leads trade unionists to laud restrictions on both the work week and overtime because such restrictions will allegedly lead to more jobs. France's disastrous experience with the 35-hour work week has been the most recent demonstration of the flaws in such arguments." _____________________
Letter to the editor of the National Post RE: Peter Foster's Mandatory Fallacies
"While ostensively discussing mandatory retirement, Peter Foster flies off on an irrelevant tangent to denounce the French 35-hour workweek as a disaster. What is Mr. Foster's evidence for this supposed "disaster"? The fact that most French citizens want to keep it, in defiance of their right-wing government, neoliberal economists, Anglo-American business page editorialists and employers' federations? Econometric studies? Well, no, because some actual studies find that employment increased in France after the 35-hour workweek was introduced (see Logeay and Schreiber, "Testing the effectiveness of the French work-sharing reform: a forecasting approach" July 2004).
"So then what is Mr. Foster's trump card proof of disaster? Why the hoary "lump-of-labour fallacy" canard that gets trotted out every time an ideologue wants to brand his opponents a feckless gang of morons. For Mr. Foster's information, if the lump-of-labour fallacy could walk it would be the Piltdown Man. It is not economic science but scientific legend that reduced working time policies are based on such a fallacy. I would refer Mr. Foster to my published research on the fallacy claim, but I would suspect that evidence is probably beside the point for frothing-at-the-mouth editorial writers. Readers of the Post, though, are welcome to consult my "The 'lump-of-labor' case against work-sharing" in Working Time: International trends, theory and policy perspectives."
Tom Walker _____________________
I discretely refrained from mentioning that yesterday I sent off the manuscript of a second paper debunking the lump-of-labor fallacy claim. Why do I bother? Why do I keep harping on this seemingly trivial facet of mass media (and mainstream economist) deception? Because, in the words of the 1902 final report of an Industrial Commission of the US Congress (probably drafted by institutionalist economics founder John R. Commons), the reduction of working time is “the most substantial and permanent gain which labor can secure.” Because, in the words of the 1866 Congress of the International Working Men's Association at Geneva (drafted by Karl Marx) "the limitation of the working-day is a preliminary condition without which all further attempts at improvement and emancipation must prove abortive." And because, in the words of John Maynard Keynes, "Less work is the ultimate solution [to maintaining long-term full employment]."
In short, false claims about a "lump-of-labor fallacy" are not merely anti-trade unionist, they attack the full spectrum of socialist and non-socialist progressive economic thought of the past century and a half and insist on blind obedience to the peculiar early 19th century economic dogmas of J.B. Say and Nassau Senior. And these false claims circulate with ease at the IMF, the OECD, the ILO(!), finance ministries, first tier economics departments and elite economics journals everywhere.
It is almost as if the most reactionary elements in society were the only ones who took Marx's, Commons' and Keynes' insights to heart and who realized that they could maintain an invincible advantage over all of society simply by declaring the reduction of working time to be out of bounds. I say "almost" because really I'm afraid that they wouldn't be able to do this without an enormous complicity from "the left" and/or "ordinary folks" who are scared stiff of emancipation. And with good reason -- there's no precedent for "a world which could be free."
I have posted a draft of my most recent paper at http://www.worklessparty.org/wlitblog/lumpdump.doc
The Sandwichman