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

Thu Jul 14 16:09:01 CEST 2011

I did a quick edit already to the wiki. I'll go back and proof read it later
today.

On Thu, Jul 14, 2011 at 5:34 AM, Michel Bauwens <michelsub2004 at gmail.com>wrote:

> Dear Tom,
>
> I update the blog item with your text,
>
> as for the wiki links, feel free to update and improve directly,
>
> because the transfer from the doc to the wiki generated many errors, I had
> to spend a long time editing already,
>
> Michel
>
>
> On Thu, Jul 14, 2011 at 3:33 AM, Sandwichman <lumpoflabor at gmail.com>wrote:
>
>> Michel,
>>
>> There were some formatting errors in the text you sent, mainly having to
>> do with paragraphing and some words being joined together. I've copied below
>> the excerpts you selected with the corrected formatting:
>>
>> Tom
>>
>>
>> *Book: Jobs, Liberty and the Bottom Line, Tom Walker, Draft: 01/04/2011
>>
>>
>> Tom Walker, on Employment as a Common Pool Resource:
>> *
>> [Elinor] 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 not difficult 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 in
>> everyday 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 nineteenth 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 [in the book],
>> 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 cooperatively
>> 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 and governed? What principles would it uphold and tactics would it
>> employ? These important details can be left for future elaboration, not
>> least because they differ from case to case and in many instances would
>> involve the reorientation of and transition from established institutions
>> that themselves may vary substantially.
>>
>>
>> *Tom Walker, on the need for new methods of social accounting:*
>>
>> 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
>> 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."
>>
>> ...
>>
>>
>> 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 [standard] 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 [Simon] 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.
>>
>>
>> On Wed, Jul 13, 2011 at 4:14 AM, Michel Bauwens <michelsub2004 at gmail.com>wrote:
>>
>>> 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>
>>> Tags: [empty]
>>> [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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>>> http://blog.p2pfoundation.net
>>>
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>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
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>>>
>>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> Sandwichman
>>
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