Happy Labor Day! Or, is it Merry Labor Day? - did anyone get the memo on this?
Labor Day celebrates the "contributions workers have made to the strength, prosperity, and well-being of our country" according to this description of the holiday from the Department of Labor. Coincidentally, a U.N. report released today (story) shows that American workers are the most productive in the world.
Sometimes it seems like workers get shorted in economics, especially when it comes to residual claimant status. Why should the firm maximize returns to shareholders (capital) rather than to labor or some other group? Many of us who work in the US and/or who have received training in US schools seem to take shareholder primacy at face value without really thinking about why it should be so. This goes on despite the fact that not everyone in the world agrees with this approach. I don't find arguments opposing shareholder primacy that are based on ethical or moral grounds to be particularly persuasive; however, these aren't the only arguments. Here's a working paper from Joe Mahoney at the University of Illinois based on a property rights view of the firm.
A nice compliment to the UN file, the Tennessean ran yesterday a story titled, "Collars blue or white, workers find 9-to-5 to be just a dream." (No WSJ on holidays, so I stooped to read the Tennessean.) Here's a meaty section:
ReplyDelete"About a fourth of men and 12 percent of women report working 50 hours or more a week, up sharply from 1980, and about 12 percent of dual-income households say they collectively work more than 100 hours a week, said Jerry Jacobs, a sociologist at the University of Pennsylvania, who studies work-life balance."
Maybe we're efficient, but we lack the kind of balance that I think is healthy for ourselves and our families. The trade-off would be lower productivity, but something valuable would be gained from gaining more vacation time. (Or, rather, finding a system that encourages them to take time off.) How I envy the Germans and Dutch, for example, I have met all around the world. When you have four or five weeks to kill, it's amazing how far from home you will go. Americans can gain from that kind of worldly perspective.
Or, if they want to be workaholics and top the worker efficiency rankings, they can go to Vegas for a weekend and take in a fake Paris skyline.
http://www.tennessean.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070903/BUSINESS01/709030371/1044