Re: PK on the lump of labor fallacy

[Jurriaan Bendien <bendien@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

The same employers who hailed the downfall of the Socialist Unity Party
government in East Germany, where piece wages were a regular practice, also
opposed the shorter working week in Western Europe and the USA.

In the post-Fordist world within the developed capitalist countries, the
majority of jobs aren't manufacturing jobs on mechanised production-chains
producing physical goods, but services jobs in the tertiary sector, and it
is quite easy to show, that you can get the same output there in four days
as in five days (in some cases, even three days). What this means is that a
lot of employment hours actually have to do just with obtaining money
income, rather than with real output, and that increased output may be much
more difficult to achieve by management anyhow, simply because of the nature
of the service being supplied.

This reality, which is important to understand the modern modalities of the
rate of exploitation of labour-power, however is hidden in the comparative
valuation of gross and net products according to the Keynesian
income/product identities. If you think this through, you will see that it
provides an excellent demonstration of Marx's theory of value, because
actually it is the differential valuation of labour-time which shapes cost
prices (which normally represent the greater part of the sale value, while
profit mark-ups are the lesser part) here, and not the utility preference
attached to the product in the eyes of the consumer, and monopoly pricing in
fact exascerbates this trend. The conceptual problem really resides in the
concept of the intensity of work, which is difficult to measure objectively
in a direct way, and hence becomes subject to moral controversy and esoteric
mysteries.

What is the consequence of some workers working at an extremely high
intensity of labour, and some workers not working at all, apart from great
disparities in take-home pay ? Health problems, quite literally, a society
in which more and more people are ill. That is why, apart from better sex,
the shorter working week is one of the best contributions that could be made
to a healthier society, together with a guaranteed minimum income, and this
argument holds true regardless of whether one struggles for a reduction of
working hours without loss of pay, or not. Speaking of which, have a look at
the ILO data on income and labour hours for different countries and the
industrial sectors in which this labour is expended. You will be able to
discover quite easily that an unequal exchange occurs between the primary,
secondary and tertiary sector, to the advantage of the tertiary sector.
Paradoxically, on average, workers who are physically strongest get paid
less, which is an interesting facet of social Darwinism.

The standard conventional productivity measures used in econometrics don't
just fail to capture what is going on here, they hide what is actually going
on.

J.