Re: sub-sub-sub-sub-sub-contracting

[Michael Perelman <michael@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

This seems to be the source of the information, although the numbers are slightly
different:

Hundley, Kris. 2005. "A Big Player For Big Debris." St. Petersburg
Times (11 December).


On Fri, Dec 16, 2005 at 09:08:17PM -0500, Sandwichman wrote:
> michael perelman <michael@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:at the bottom of the chain of
> subcontracting, the fee is only four cubic dollars per yard
>   At least they're getting paid in cubic dollars. Or did you  mean to say "cube-root dollars"? This is what they call in corporate  jargon "adding value". A total value of $20 per cubic yard is "added"  by Halliburton and the other middle men. By the way, Henry Mayhew  included an early and scathing report on the middle man system in his  London Labour and the London Poor.
>
>   The colloquial name for this system of sub-sub-sub-contracting was  "lump work" and the Oxford dictionary credits Mayhew with the first  literary usage of the term. That's lump work as in lump-of-work,  otherwise known as a lump-of-labor.
>
>   It's clear that a substantial excess of unemployment is essential for  the sub-sub-sub-contracting racket to thrive and it seems not  unreasonable to me to suspect that the public policies that enable the  racket are in place precisely because they enable the elaboration of an  ever longer "value-adding chain" that is, of course, hailed as GDP  growth.
>
>   The Sandwichman
>
>
>
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Michael Perelman
Economics Department
California State University
Chico, CA 95929

Tel. 530-898-5321
E-Mail michael at ecst.csuchico.edu