Question

#8 Summarize and Explain the Economic Situation:

I have referred to various union make work and feather bed practices. These practices, and the public toleration of them, spring from the same fundamental fallacy as the fear of machines. This is the belief that a more efficient way of doing a thing destroys jobs, and it's necessary corollary that a less efficient way of doing it creates them. Allied to this fallacy is the belief that there is just a

fixed amount of work to be done in the world, and that, if we cannot add to this work by thinking up more cumbersome ways of doing it, at least we can think of devices for spreading it around among as large a number of people as possible.

This error lies behind the minute subdivision of labor upon which unions insist. In the building trades in large cities the subdivision is notorious. Bricklayers are not allowed to use stones for a chimney: that is the special work of stonemasons. An electrician cannot rip out a board to fix a connection and put it back again: that is the special job, no matter how simple it may be, of the carpenters. A plumber will not remove or put back a tile incident to fixing a leak in the shower: that is the job of a tile-setter.

Furious "jurisdictional" strikes are fought among unions for the exclusive right to do certain types of borderline jobs. In a statement recently prepared by the American railroads for the Attorney-General's Committee on administrative Procedure, t h e roads gave innumerable examples in which the National Railroad Adjustment Board had decided that "each separate operation on the railroad, no matter how minute, such as talking over a telephone or spiking or unspiking a switch, is so far an exclusive property of a particular class of employe that if an employe of another class, in the course of his regular duties, performs such operations he must not only be paid an extra day's wages for doing so, but a t the same time the furloughed or unemployed members of the class held to be entitled to perform the operation must be paid a day's wages for not having been called upon to perform it."

Answer 1

Labourers who are a part of union are not educated and do not understand that having machines to do the work efficiently will not lead to a loss of jobs. The insecurity that unions have is leading them to pressurize for rules which are creating inefficiencies. For instance, they have rules set up that only a group should do one kind of task and this prevents another group from doing it even if they can do it better and quicker. Similarly, protesting against setting up machines in firms will only delay production and inefficiencies. This is because they believe there is only fixed amount of work and this creates insecurities about anyone doing the work that they should. However, training is needed for them to understand that if machines do the more routine work, it will not lead to a loss of jobs, instead there will be newer jobs and processes for them to do.