The dismal scientists

 

According to nearly every economist of the last 300 odd years, labour is a commodity for which there is a supply and demand. A great fallacy underlies this assumption and it has generated an array of absurdities which has reached even to the heights of the United Nations. Economic theory itself however is not at fault. Poor application of basic economic and scientific principles is responsible.

 

A job is a financial product that most people would rather do without or at the least are more than willing to minimise their exposure to.  Why would anyone go to work if they didn’t have to?  Demand for jobs is very low. If you enjoy what you do you won’t have to work a day in your life anyway, it’s not work, you are just getting paid for having a good time. Work is by definition something you don’t want to do.  No rational person would demand a right to work, or at least you wouldn’t think so…

 

A league of gentlemen

 

A right to work, as is to be found in the  International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (the Conventional wisdom),[1]  is about as useful as a right to go to the toilet; you just have to do it at sometime, somewhere or another.

 

Market Analysis

 

Plumbers charge through the nose doing all the shitty, smelly jobs out there which nobody wants. There is a huge number of people taking a dump but a very low demand for truckloads of shit. Prima facie supply is high while demand is low. The laws of supply and demand predict the clearance price of crappy jobs would be at the bottom but the exact opposite is true! In fact there is an urgent need (demand) to go to the toilet but not many people willing to plumb the depths of despair (supply). The fact is that shit is worth shit-all and plumb-ers worth their weight in gold.[2]

 

Once you start categorising labour as a commodity your economic model starts spitting out nonsense. People are not their jobs. Jobs are a capitalist product which we buy. Commodities are the supply, people do the buying, people do the consum-ing, and people do the investing. People do the demanding; people create the demand and people don’t want the shit to hit the fan. Demand, for other people to lend a helping hand, is high, although to do so is very rude and it is much more ethical to ask politely. What is being ‘supplied,’ and how it is being ‘demanded,’ is the very crux of a labour contract. Technically speaking People don’t supply anything at all, with one exception.

 

Supply

 

A good way of approaching an analysis of labour as a unitary concept is Adam Smith’s economic model which categorised economic wealth as deriving from three sui generis sources, that is, land, labour and capital (tools and machinery).[3]  Labour is merely the manipulation of natural products derived from the land which by way of the application of fixed capital are thereby transformed into a tradable commodity form.

 

The one thing that people do ‘produce’ or ‘supply’ is children. Giving birth really is like going to work; women must go ‘in to labour’ and much like other industries dominated by women[4] the mother is compensated on a piece rate basis (the baby bonus).[5] The product of her labours (that is, a child) is not a tradable product however[6] [7] and yet at the same time widely considered to be adequate compensation for the effort expended.[8]  It just gets sillier.

 

With my feet in the air and my head on the ground

 

Increasing the labour supply, generally speaking, is not considered to be work, despite the existence of such idioms as being ‘on the job’ and ‘on the make.’ Decreasing the labour supply is as easy not going to work on Mondays. Decreasing the labour supply also creates more jobs because you are spreading the load. Both processes, though highly efficient, require no effort at all. It would appear that if labour is a commodity, you can eat your cake and have it too.

 

It would also therefore appear that increasing and decreasing the labour supply can quite reasonably and properly be done simultaneously because you will have time to have sex on the extra day you don’t go to work. Accordingly, studies have indicated that this is in fact the case and that the more work you do the less sex you get and the phenomenon is not related to income level (price).[9] Do less work and get more product at any given price? Sounds like a free lunch.

Also Paradoxical is the fact that with or without the use of birth control having sex on your day off would be counterproductive; if you were not using birth control you may have a child and that would defeat the object of reducing the labour supply. If you failed to conceive you would have failed to increase it.  And yet the exact opposite is true; having sex and producing a child and a day off to have a holiday are both highly conducive to increased production![10] What is the marginal utility of one child? Zero, you can’t use them, only love them and infinite because they are priceless. Whether you are trying to increase or decrease the labour supply actually going to work would defeat the aim of the whole exercise, living a good life.