Tom, I created 3 entries for your work, feel free to improve them,<br><br>see:<br><br><a href="http://p2pfoundation.net/Employment_as_a_Common_Pool_Resource">http://p2pfoundation.net/Employment_as_a_Common_Pool_Resource</a><br>
<br><a href="http://p2pfoundation.net/Social_Accounting">http://p2pfoundation.net/Social_Accounting</a><br><br><a href="http://p2pfoundation.net/Labor_Commons">http://p2pfoundation.net/Labor_Commons</a><br><br>This goes into an article for the blog on july 20, entitled,<br>
<br><a href="http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/?p=17893" rel="bookmark" title="Permanent Link to Towards a Labor Commons: Considering Employment
as a Common Pool Resource through Social Accounting">Towards a Labor
Commons: Considering Employment as a Common Pool Resource through Social
Accounting</a><br><br>The text is below:<br><br><p class="postTitle"><a href="http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/?p=17893" rel="bookmark" title="Permanent Link to Towards a Labor Commons:
Considering Employment as a Common Pool Resource through Social
Accounting">Towards a Labor Commons: Considering Employment as a Common
Pool Resource through Social Accounting</a></p>
<div id="tags-box">Tags: <span class="fee-field" title="Tags">[empty]</span></div>
<img src="http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/wp-content/uploads/avatars/Michel%20Bauwens.jpg" alt="photo of Michel Bauwens" align="left"><div id="postauthorname">Michel
Bauwens</div>
<div id="postdate">20th July 2011</div>
<br>
<blockquote><p>“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.” </p></blockquote>
<p>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 <a href="http://www.scribd.com/fullscreen/59880049?access_key=key-1ajmcetzddqc7zpz2zvm">chapter
4</a> of his book:</p>
<p><strong>Book: Jobs, Liberty and the Bottom Line, Tom Walker, Draft:
12/07/2011</strong> </p>
<p><strong>Tom Walker, on Employment as a Common Pool Resource:</strong></p>
<p><em>“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.</em></p>
<p><em>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.</em></p>
<p><em>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
<a href="http://U.K.in">U.K.in</a> 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.</em></p>
<p><em>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.</em></p>
<p><em>…</em></p>
<p><em>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.”</em></p>
<p><strong>Tom Walker, on the need for new methods of social accounting:</strong></p>
<p><em>“Werner Sombart (1952) described<strong> 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</strong> and the evolution of the ways that domination has been
implemented through successive varieties of technology.<strong> 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.</strong> 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.<strong>
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</strong>. 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.</em></p>
<p><em>…</em></p>
<p><em>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.”</em></p>
<p><em><strong> The problem of externalities</strong></em></p>
<p><em>“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.”</em> </p><br clear="all"><br>-- <br>P2P Foundation: <a href="http://p2pfoundation.net" target="_blank">http://p2pfoundation.net</a> - <a href="http://blog.p2pfoundation.net" target="_blank">http://blog.p2pfoundation.net</a> <br>
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