The Invisible Handcuffs of Capitalism: How Market Tyranny Stifles the Economy by Stunting Workers (17 page)

Leisure is something to be regarded with misgivings, especially in the lower income brackets. Accordingly, a reduction in the standard work-week must always be considered dubious social policy inducing moral or spiritual weakness.
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Business leaders added that workers actually benefit from long hours because the restriction of leisure makes workers better people.

One nineteenth-century businessman asserted that the best course is to give men “plenty to do, and a long while to do it in, and you will find them physically and morally better.”
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Another told the Massachusetts Bureau of Statistics of Labor, “I worked 11, 12, 14 and 15 hours a day, and have as yet felt no bad effects from it, but rather been strengthened. It is not the hours per day that a person works that breaks him down, but the hours spent in dissipation.”
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A study of business ideology in the 1920s summarized the prevailing view at the time, which was even more damning of shorter hours:

It may be observed at the outset that leisure and idleness are synonymous for the masses. The identification of the idea that the average man might enrich his personality by putting leisure to some constructive use was patently ridiculous. What
unthinking creature
could be ennobled by the fruits of leisure? For such as they, not to work is to loaf. Leisure is idleness.

Leisure will … lead to an abuse of time by developing a taste for improper amusements and luxuries; it tends to increase criminality; … and it will eventually bring complete decay to man’s capacities.
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Debauchery was not really a central concern for economists. If it were, they could just as easily glance up the social ladder rather than concentrating their moral scrutiny on the less fortunate. Economists might be offended by seeing a drunken worker stumbling in the streets. Better that he have a chauffeur to pluck him up before the public catches sight of his drunkenness.

Even at the height of the struggle about the length of the working day, economists did little to seriously inquire about the subject. Had they done so, they might have taken note of the corrosive consequences of long working hours. Exhaustion took a toll on workers’ health. Excessive hours of work meant that workers rarely saw their families during daylight hours. Such enforced absence had a negative effect on their children. Excessive hours of work were also conducive to a psychology of despair, which people often try to control with drink, the very symptom of debauchery that long hours are supposed to hold in check. How would economists’ subjective evaluation of their own welfare possibly change if they found themselves subjected to the imposition of long hours of grueling physical labor? I think any rational person knows the answer.

Consider the attitude of W. Michael Cox, chief economist for the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas and one of the most prominent cheerleaders for markets. Dr. Cox always finds ways to put markets in the best possible light. When faced with the quandary about essential workers, such as firemen, having to work two jobs to be able to afford to live in New York City, Dr. Cox pontificated, using the language of investment advisors, “I think it’s great…. It gives you portfolio diversification in your income.”
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Here Dr. Cox has outdone himself, in justifying the unjustifiable, while implicitly financializing the job market. Going beyond Adam Smith who saw workers as merchants selling their labor, Dr. Cox recasts them as investors. Just as investors profit by diversifying their portfolios, workers would be well advised to hold more than one job. Sophisticated investors divide their funds among many, even hundreds of different stocks. If only the poor, benighted workers could figure out how to extend the day beyond twenty-four hours, they could
do the same. I wonder how Dr. Cox would feel, however, if groggy but well-diversified firefighters arrived to save his house already so exhausted from their other job that they could not perform their duties effectively.

Extending the Years of Work

The Procrustean imperative demands that employers attempt to squeeze every possible bit of effort from everyone on their payroll. Similarly, businesses want people to be available for work for as many years as possible, so long as their efforts are a source of potential profit. The emphasis changes, depending on the prevailing business strategy.

At the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, longer hours were not the issue, because the normal working day was already fourteen hours. At the time, employers needed a steady stream of cheap, unskilled labor. Because children’s wages were a pittance, employers found them ideal for many factory tasks. However, with wages so low and working conditions abhorrent, employers had difficulty obtaining a sufficient supply of children. Orphanages provided some bodies. So did some desperate and destitute parents. Even so, the supply remained insufficient for the growing demands of industry.

Intellectuals encouraged employers to push children to enter the labor force. William Temple, a contemporary of Adam Smith, called for the addition of four-year-old children to the labor force. Anticipating modern Skinnerian psychology, Temple speculated, “For by these means, we hope that the rising generation will be so habituated to constant employment that it would at length prove agreeable and entertaining to them.”
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Compared to John Locke, the philosopher of liberty and often credited as the inspiration of the U.S. Declaration of Independence, Temple was a kind of progressive. Locke called for the commencement of work at the age of three.
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Since people like Locke and Temple considered workers to be practically indistinguishable from animals, it is little wonder that they did not favor educating the workers’ children. What is more, education
might foster subversive sentiments. Yet the truth of child labor gave the lie to any justification of it and any arguments against educating working-class children.

Consider the life of Robert Blincoe, an orphan who was “given” to a factory owner and then escaped. In later life, he told his story to a journalist named John Brown, who published it in a small newspaper in 1828 and then in book form in 1832. Beatings and other sadistic punishments, together with the requirement to repetitively perform unnatural movements in an unhealthy and dangerous workplace, badly deformed Blincoe’s body. Conditions were so abominable that the children at the factory were reduced to stealing food from pig troughs.
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In the wake of the ensuing public concern about working conditions, Parliament held hearings.

Blincoe’s misfortune was able to touch the public’s conscience only because of a conflict between powerful interest groups. The aristocratic landlords and factory owners were at odds. Each group pretended to display its social conscience by self-righteously pointing to the abuses of the other. The manufacturers had accused the landowning classes of selfishly imposing high food prices on poor workers by using protectionism to drive up the price of grain.

The factory owners did not actually believe that the elimination of the tariff would allow workers to benefit from cheaper food. Manufacturers wanted to eliminate agricultural protection because cheap food would allow them to boost profits by reducing wages. Manufacturers also hoped to expand foreign markets. They assumed that if other nations had the chance to export grain to Great Britain, these countries would use some of their increased agricultural income to purchase British manufactured goods. In addition, potential competitors would be less inclined to try to compete with Great Britain by developing their own manufacturing if they enjoyed a prosperous agriculture.
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Landlords retaliated by denouncing inhuman factory conditions.
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Blincoe’s story served their campaign well. In the wake of such publicity, the British Factory Act of 1833 reduced the hours of work for British children between the ages of nine and thirteen to nine hours a
day and forty-eight hours a week. Children between thirteen and sixteen were limited to a maximum of a mere sixty-nine hours.

Such episodes of concern are usually fleeting. By 1844, the mill owners won the right to hire eight-year-old children again. The concern about working hours for children also left economics unaffected. Economists were touched by the plight of the poor, unfortunate factory owners, deprived of the right to determine how long children in their employ should work.

Blincoe’s experience illustrates the far-reaching destructive nature of Procrusteanism. Within the Procrustean mindset, child labor offered an opportunity to increase production. Gratuitous brutality was simply a legitimate technique for getting a recalcitrant child to work harder. Recall Nardinelli’s speculation that young children actually maximized their utility agreeing to be whipped.

Neither Blincoe nor any other child received their hypothetical beating premiums. Only an ignoramus would not understand that using violence to extract excessive labor from young children limits the quality of labor over the long term. The social benefits from educating young people must surely outweigh the work that can be forced out of a five- or six-year-old child.

Although business does not push for more child labor today, a move is afoot to extend the years of work by deferring retirement. The threshold for receiving Social Security benefits in the United States is creeping upward. Propaganda in favor of old people working is mounting. The
Wall Street Journal
published a glowing front-page story about the case of Bonnie Lovellette Rooks, a janitor on the floor of a steel factory, who was a month shy of her seventy-ninth birthday. She could not afford to retire because of her medical costs and the responsibility of caring for a disabled daughter.
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The tone of the story was not an expression of sympathy for Ms. Rooks; instead, it exuded appreciation for the potential of a stretching of working years worthy of Procrustes. Business has good reason to applaud the prolonged career of Ms. Rooks, although she has less cause to appreciate the economic conditions that left her with so much responsibility for an unaffordable medical system.

Cases like that of Ms. Rooks are certain to become more common. In a 2007 estimate, Mitra Toossie of the Bureau of Labor Statistics projected that the share of workers in the labor force fifty-five and older, would leap from 16.8 percent in 2006 to 22.7 percent by 2016, making elderly workers one of the fastest growing groups in the labor force.
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The BLS projections may turn out to be conservative. Corporations are rapidly cutting benefits, making private pensions increasingly rare. The recent financial crises have decimated many 401(k) accounts. As pensions shrink and medical care gets ever more expensive, the option to retire becomes less likely for millions of people.

Business understands the advantage of this new arrangement. Not only can employers shed the responsibility of providing pensions, but they can also enjoy the downward pressure on wages, further traumatizing workers in the process. Yet one is supposed to accept all of this as a result of transactions among equal parties.

Distorted Procrustean Logic

As Margaret Thatcher claimed, the economy runs according to an inexorable logic, one that cannot be defied without severe consequences. Lawrence Summers, nephew of two Nobel Prize–winning economists and a former U.S. Secretary of the Treasury, reframed Thatcher’s warning that “There Is No Alternative” in the context of economic theory. Before an international audience, Summers proclaimed the necessity of following the rule of markets: “The laws of economics, it’s often forgotten, are like the laws of engineering. There’s only one set of laws and they work everywhere.”
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Looking at work, workers, and working conditions objectively shatters the facade of scientific immutability as well as that of voluntarism. Imagine Summers making the same claim when the typical working day was twelve or fourteen hours. Employers would have no need to offer their workers any justification, given the severe imbalance of power. The long working day would just appear to be a natural part of the rhythm of life.

The lengths to which economists are willing to go to give “scientific” cover for increasing (and not reducing) the length of the working day and the working life is illustrated by the case of Nassau Senior. Senior attempted to invoke the science of political economy to defend factory owners from those who would be foolish enough to argue for the reduction of the hours of work. Senior was anything but an obscure economist. He was enormously influential, later becoming the first holder of the Drummond Chair at Oxford, as well as president of Section F (the social science section) of the British Association for the Advancement of Science.

Senior’s “analysis” included a predictable protest against what he considered an unwarranted interference with a legitimate contract between workers and their employers. Senior went further. Using data that manufacturers had supplied him, he gave dire warnings about interfering with the labor market: “If the hours of working were reduced by one hour per day [prices remaining the same], the net profit would be destroyed—if they were reduced by one hour and a half, even the gross profit would be destroyed.”
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One problem interfered with Senior’s calculation: it was wrong. Marx had great fun in tearing apart Senior’s logic.
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Senior’s blunder depended upon the assumption that all non-labor costs would remain the same, while the shortened hours of work would reduce output. Senior forgot that if the factory were spinning cotton for one hour less, it would require less cotton. The argument behind Senior’s “Last Hour,” as Marx dubbed it, was so absurd that no later economist defended it.

The world did not end when Parliament legislated mild restrictions on the working day. Nor did profits disappear. British industry prospered. Whereas Procrustean logic demanded that no industrialist tamper with the working day, when all faced the same requirement the outcome was benign.