[P2P-F] TOm Walker's social accounting for a labor commons

[Michel Bauwens]

Tom, I created 3 entries for  your work, feel free to improve them,

see:

http://p2pfoundation.net/Employment_as_a_Common_Pool_Resource

http://p2pfoundation.net/Social_Accounting

http://p2pfoundation.net/Labor_Commons

This goes into an article for the blog on july 20, entitled,

Towards a Labor Commons: Considering Employment as a Common Pool Resource
through Social Accounting <http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/?p=17893>

The text is below:

Towards a Labor Commons: Considering Employment as a Common Pool Resource
through Social Accounting <http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/?p=17893>
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[image: photo of Michel Bauwens]
Michel Bauwens
20th July 2011

“Not only can employment be regarded as one more common pool resource among
others, it can also be argued that it is the common pool resource par
excellence – the instance that stands as the single most far-reaching and
democratically vital model of a common pool resource. Donald Stabile alluded
to something in this vein when he noted that, “Human labor is also the
primary constituent of the society whose values must be part of any
criterion of social evaluation.The appropriate starting point in any policy
directed at social costs is with those imposed on labor.”

Until now, labor is explicitly considered as a commodity, and we intuitively
know that human labor cannot be subjugated in such a way. But is there a
concrete alternative? Tom Walker thinks so, and believes a new social
accounting is the method to get there. The following is excerpted from chapter
4<http://www.scribd.com/fullscreen/59880049?access_key=key-1ajmcetzddqc7zpz2zvm>of
his book:

*Book: Jobs, Liberty and the Bottom Line, Tom Walker, Draft: 12/07/2011*

*Tom Walker, on Employment as a Common Pool Resource:*

*“Ostrom’s framework for distinguishing different types of goods and
services classifies them as either highly subtractable – meaning that one
person’s use of a resource leaves less available for others – or have low
subtractability and as either more or less excludable, depending on how
difficult or costly it is to exclude people from access to the good. Taken
together, those two pairs constitute a matrix that specifies four ideal
types of goods. Private goods are subtractable and excludable (that is it is
not difficult to exclude beneficiaries). Public goods are neither highly
subtractable nor excludable. The remaining sectors are common pool
resources, which are subtractable but difficult to exclude and toll goods,
which have low subtractability but are notdifficult to exclude people from.*

*Labor is commonly treated as a commodity, which the employer purchases with
a wage or salary. However, it is also possible and useful to view a job
position, with its income, status and promotional opportunities, as a good
that the worker purchases with his or her time and relevant skill and
credentials. From the perspective of the workers, job positions would
arguably rank within Ostrom’s analytical grid as both highly subtractable
and difficult to exclude potential competitors from. Employment thus would
count as a common pool resource in that framework. A disclaimer is necessary
here. A good needn’t be available only in a fixed quantity to be considered
subtractable. The supply can be ever expanding, but if demand expands faster
than supply, there still may not be enough to go around. Contrary to the
theoretical abstractions based on assumptions of perfect competition, full
employment, etc., price competition doesn’t clear the market for jobs, nor
can most workers voluntarily withdraw from competition on the job market and
subsist on a private income or the family farm.Another way of thinking about
common pool resources is as gifts. Peter Barnes uses the generic term, the
commons,to refer to “all the gifts that we inherit or create together.” If
it seems strange at first to refer to employment as a gift, it should be
remembered that we already do so inevery day speech – “I applied for the job
but they gave it to someone else.” “She’s a hard worker,if only someone
would give her a job.” We don’t talk about a store giving us something we’ve
just bought. But we do talk about teachers giving students their grades.*

*There is some ambiguity in the notion of employment as a gift. After all,
as Barnes points out, “A gift is something we receive, as opposed to
something we earn.” On the one hand, people do earn their job opportunities
by acquiring credentials, experience and networks of contacts. But, on the
other hand, those qualifications don’t always land them the jobs they are
qualified for and people often take advantage of connections to get jobs
they’re not really qualified for. Despite an inexhaustible supply of
rhetoric and ritual about meritocracy, there remains a residual element of
vassalage in the employment relation, as there is in academia. Successful
institutions of the type identified by Ostrom rarely come into being through
explicit contracts. More often they evolve through long periods of informal,
collective learning about what works and what doesn’t. Another approach to
creating these institutions would involve more deliberate experimentation.
For such institutional innovation to take place,however, it is essential,
Dryzek cautioned, that participation “move beyond the narrow community of
political economists and political theorists and into society at large.”
Treating employment as a common pool resource could be one such deliberate
experiment.The labor commons union is proposed here an experimental
institution that would treat employment as a common pool resource. Such an
undertaking has various precedents, none of them exact but all nonetheless
suggestive. The traditional workers’ ethic of the craft guilds viewed the
work available as something akin to a common resource. Guild principles
included the proposition that a given amount of work could be divided up
equitably among the available hands. This is not to say that workers assumed
the amount of work to be unalterably fixed for all time. They were, however,
dealing with the finite demands of a given locality at a particular time. In
addition there are worker co-ops, works councils, syndicalism and the
movement unionism such as the eight-hour leagues and nine-hour leagues in
the U.S., Canada and the U.K.in the 19th century. Regardless of whether the
idea of sharing work makes sense strictly in terms of industrial efficiency,
as an ethical proposition it is simply the reciprocal gesture of
co-operative working arrangements. John Maurice Clark’s analysis of social
overhead costs, discussed below, suggests that the notion also makes
economic sense, given an appropriate social accounting framework.Just to be
clear, social accounting does not refer to some warm fuzzy notion as opposed
to the hard math of business. It is not socialist accounting, sociable
accounting, sociological accounting or uniquely subjective. It is, properly
speaking, the kind of accounting required when dealing with two or more
discrete accounting units. It pays more rigorous attention to boundary
conditions when the elements from those accounting units are aggregated. It
is harder math than using the single firm’s bottom line as a
one-size-fits-all metaphor. It requires explicit accounting for the
cost-shifting that results from imposed economic transactions rather than an
apologetic shrug about the difficulty of quantifying
externalities.Collectively, working people would be better off if they
joined in refusing to compete in a race to the bottom. Some individuals
might have to forgo receiving more than their share of the economic dividend
from the expanded trade that might result from competition between
workers.But where does it say it is an ethical imperative that the most
ambitious should benefit at the expense of their less single-minded
companions? Incidentally, by collectively conserving work effort, the
workers acting co-operatively might achieve higher levels of productivity
than otherwise as well as build greater social solidarity and security.
Economists merely assume that competition between workers will result in
greater expanded trade than would cooperation. They don’t consider all the
factors.*

*How would the labor commons union come into existence? How would it be
organized andgoverned? What principles would it uphold and tactics would it
employ? These important detailscan be left for future elaboration, not least
because they differ from case to case and in manyinstances would involve the
reorientation of and transition from established institutions that
themselves may vary substantially.*

*…*

*Not only can employment be regarded as one more common pool resource among
others, itcan also be argued that it is the common pool resource par
excellance – the instance that stands as the single most far-reaching and
democratically vital model of a common pool resource. Donald Stabile alluded
to something in this vein when he noted that, “Human labor is also the
primary constituent of the society whose values must be part of any
criterion of social evaluation.The appropriate starting point in any policy
directed at social costs is with those imposed on labor.”*

*Tom Walker, on the need for new methods of social accounting:*

*“Werner Sombart (1952) described the concept of capital as something that
“did not exist before double-entry book-keeping.” “Capital,” he wrote, “can
be defined as that amount of wealth which is used in making profits and
which enters into the accounts.” In “Accounting and the Labour Process,” Rob
Bryer (2006) wrote of a capitalist “mentality” that consists of using
accounting information to control the labor process “by holding the
collective worker accountable for the rate of return on capital.” Such
control from the bottom line is central, not incidental, to both the
domination of the labor process by capital and the evolution of the ways
that domination has been implemented through successive varieties of
technology. Any alternative to that domination requires the development of a
counter-mentality that “turns the capitalist development of calculation and
accountability to other ends.” Bryer imagined such counter-mentality as a
“socialist mentality” but I would amend that to a”social-accounting
mentality” to both enlist and implicate an existing social-accounting
tradition as well as to differentiate the alternative mentality from
advocacy of state socialism. Ownership of the means of production may be
beside the point or the amenable forms of ownership may be more eclectic
than traditional socialism assumes. It is not private ownership per se that
is onerous but the domination over the labor process that capital decrees
and a one-dimensional accounting mentality enforces. Social accounting is
simply the kind of accounting that needs to be done when two or more
accounting entities are aggregated. It differs from the accounting of a
single enterprise in the way that transactions between the constituent parts
are treated. Great care needs to be taken in defining the boundaries between
parties to avoid the double-counting errors that are pervasive in attempts
at social accounting.*

*…*

*When these book-keeping calculations are naïvely transferred to social
accounting practices – including collective bargaining – they also produce
“really wondrous errors and confusions.” Today, national income accounting –
the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) – is the most prominent example of social
accounting. Most economists assume that a perpetually increasing GDP is an
imperative for achieving well-being, full employment or some other normative
goal. Critics of this supposed growth imperative suggest otherwise. But
perhaps the debate is confounded by a misperception of what it is that is
growing.”*

* The problem of externalities*

*“Roefie Hueting (2008) has adapted Kuznets’s analysis of duplication to the
issues of social and environmental externalities, using the term
“asymmetrical entering” as a more inclusive description of the accounting
error than double counting. Asymmetrical entering refers to the costs of
restoring or substituting for an environmental or social free good after it
has been damaged or destroyed. There is no subtraction from the GDP for the
damage to the environment or social wellbeing, which is technically
appropriate because there is no monetary exchange involved, but this is what
makes counting the costs of restoration as an addition to GDP asymmetrical.
Stefano Bartolini (2006) has made a related point about what he terms
negative externality or negative endogenous growth (NEGs). This describes a
vicious cycle in which the products required to substitute for the free
goods of nature and society destroyed by the negative externalities of
industrial activity count as growth even as they are generating additional
negative externalities, which then lead to more substitution, more growth
and so on.”*


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