> Marvin, perhaps unintentionally, raises a flaw in the traditional
> post-WWII union position on shorter working time: no loss in pay, no
> effect on output and yet it saves jobs. How does that work? It doesn't. It
> simply doesn't add up. Management was after cost cuts. Where are they if
> you assume no loss in pay and no reduction in work force? What unions have
> forgotten (they once understood it) is that it is better to have higher
> wages, shorter working times and rising incomes than to have higher total
> incomes at the expense of lower wages, longer hours and stagnating
> incomes. To achieve the former may require trading off _some_ current
> income for increased bargaining power in the future, which is what smart
> unions did in the later 19th century. The US Industrial Commission final
> report of 1902 gave the example of the stone cutters. Of course if
> productivity rises faster than the hours of work fall you can have your
> higher income cake and eat your shorter hours too, providing you have the
> bargaining power. But it is a mistake to base strategy entirely on that
> assumption.
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Tom has done a lot of useful work in this area, and I respect that. I hope
what follows will be helpful.
When we sought shorter hours at the same pay, we argued that the same number of employees working a half hour less a day would produce the same number of annual surveys and reports. Our own members in the field told us this was a fair assumption based on their experience. You can perhaps measure the output of widgets among hourly workers, but as anyone who has worked in an office environment can attest, measuring individual and collective output and the hourly cost of production is much more elusive in an office environment, where the "product" is usually much more amorphous, and compensation is based on an annual salary rather than hourly wage.
When we put the onus on the employer to show us how his cost would go up or output decline if the same number of workers worked fewer hours, he could not do so. Ultimately, of course, the departments ignored us and simply decided to cut costs by laying off workers as they intended to all along. Even entreaties from some of our members that they would work reduced hours at lower pay to save the jobs of their fellows had little effect - the same result, I'm afraid, that would have obtained if Tom had put the case on their behalf, as he does above. This was, at bottom, a political decision with little economic jusification, decreed from management's political masters who were under pressure from the corporate sector and taxpayers to cut the public sector. I suspect this is how many layoffs also occur in the private sector - under pressure from shareholders eager to increase profits, with little economic justification apart from that.
We therefore couldn't support layoffs, or pay cuts in the guise of reduced hours, in the interest of saving tax dollars for corporations, the wealthy, or misguided lower-income taxpayers who think that they benefit from this trade-off to government spending on social programs. In the context of threatened layoffs, we advanced this alternative as a defensive measure. In retrospect, the demand for a modest reduction in worktime wasn't that unreasonable; the effect on operations would have been minimal and the employers' wage bill would have remained steady. But, of course, this was precisely the problem: the employer needed to demonstrate a serious reduction in the wage bill and layoffs were the only means of doing so. He was interested in cutting jobs not saving them, so our interests were diametrically opposed.
We were also opposed as a practical matter to reduced hours for reduced pay. We feared it as an incentive to employers to repeatedly come back to the unions, demanding further cuts in hours and pay as an alternative to "layoffs", whose economic logic is difficult to determine even when the employer opens the books. This wasn't/isn't so much a public sector problem, where these decisions are almost wholly political, but it is a much more complex and difficult decision for private sector unionists, especially those in the developed countries facing low-wage competition from abroad, and it is a very slippery slope.
As a more general historic proposition, shorter hours at "no loss in pay" have been a long-standing and respectable demand of the international labour movement since the demand for the 10 hour day in the 19th century and the 8 hour day in the 20th. As late as the 70s, calling for a 35 hour week was seen as something imminently realizable. And something more than equitable, given the more accelerated progression in productivity as a result of advances in technology and workers' education and skill levels.
Productivity has continued to grow since the 70s - some say quite spectacularly in the recent period - yet relative wages and hours have stagnated or gone backwards. The level of wages and hours doesn't depend primarily on the subjective factor, ie. the existence of "smart unions" who know how to "trade off current income" for "increased bargaining power" - either now or "in the future". It has everything to do with the rapidly evolving global division of labour and corresponding relationship of bargaining power between labour and capital which has become worse, not better, as a result of these changing objective conditions.
There is an old saying in the labour movement which I always took to heart when I was at the table: "Workers don't need unions to go backwards...they can do that all by themselves." That's the sad reality unfolding today.
MG