By Louis O. Kelso
Now that unemployment, conventionally measured, has been brought down from five percent to about four percent, there is a sort of competition among economists, labor leaders and holders of public office to find even bolder, more imaginative ways of improving upon this triumph. For, as the President in his Manpower Report so judiciously reminds us, “Our celebration must be tempered with caution.”
It is necessary to create 134,000 jobs each month just to accommodate next year’s labor force expansion, and this figure does not include the jobs that must be created to offset those claimed by “the requirements of the new technology,” to use the President’s delicate phrase. And then there is the additional challenge of the so-called “unemployables” — units of potential manpower and womanpower still outside the economy’s superheated embrace.
If every American who needs an income is to find employment, it is obvious that the business of job creation must be pursued with relentless dedication. To be sure, much is being done. All of the usual devices for creating jobs are being vigorously applied. Defense (war) spending is being accelerated; it is also being directed particularly to areas in which unemployment is highest. (Senator Thomas Kuchel, R.-Calif., once deplored making the “multibillion-dollar defense budget a WPA enterprise,” but this remark merely exposes the Senator’s lack of economic sophistication.) Space spending is continuing.
Unfortunately, inflation has put a stop to proposals to increase depreciation allowances and investment credits; otherwise, this well-tried method would enable us to increase employment through further encouragement of new capital formation. Inflation has also regrettably forced us to abandon such well-proved expedients as reducing interest on home mortgages, broadening the insuring authority for the Federal Housing Administration, and intensifying the secondary mortgage market activities of the Federal National Mortgage Association. These activities could have brought about more building of houses and apartments, and more employment in the supplier industries.
But, on the positive side, farm subsidies continue to bolster employment in the production — and storing — of farm surpluses, and this splendid technique is made even more useful by unprecedented donations of surpluses through the Food for Peace program.
None of these activities, however, is directed primarily toward achieving higher output in order to satisfy a desire for the products themselves. In fact, in many instances, it is frankly recognized that the increased output of economic goods is an unwanted side effect which must be stoically accepted. We do not need more farm surpluses. Unless we are to make it possible for families to pledge even their more distant future incomes in order to acquire more housing, we can say there does not appear to be much unsatisfied economic demand for additional housing at the moment. Our basic concern, then, is not more goods and services, but more employment.
Then why are we not more openly appreciative of that expedient way of life that in so many thousands of varieties we have come to know as featherbedding? Here is a method of “creating employment,” or synthetically contriving toil, which accounts for millions upon millions of our officially “employed” and which, for the most part, is free from the disadvantage of contributing to our surpluses or wasting our natural resources. For the marvel of genuine featherbedding is that it actually creates nothing except a job.
Featherbedding, furthermore, has the virtue of being adaptable to almost every unemployment problem. It has worked successfully for decades at every functional level from the vice president on down to the floor sweeper and the guard. It can be used effectively in the arts and professions, as that now-legendary hero of featherbedding, James Caesar Petrillo, former president of The American Federation of Musicians, amply demonstrated. The orchestra sitting silently and motionlessly in the wings while high-fidelity recording and playback equipment provides the music is now a familiar sight in the entertainment world.
Featherbedding can double or triple the crews of trucks, increase by one-third the flight crews of jet airliners, provide two stagehands at sermons delivered by Evangelist Billy Graham — one to place and remove a glass from the pulpit and the other to handle the water pitcher. It can put firemen on diesel locomotives in spite of the fact that the designers of this type of equipment had supposed they had dispensed with the firemen’s job. Through ingenious applications of this outstanding job-creating tool, work in the building trades can be so subdivided and limited that dozens of workers are sometimes used to perform what was previously one job.
In a society which thrives on self-congratulation, job creation through the use of featherbedding seems to have many advantages that recommend it. Men and women who are functionally disemployed by the march of technological progress can be promoted to “witnesses” or watchers or supervisors with various kinds of reassuring titles.
Featherbedding has other virtues which make it highly useful as a producer of employment. It does not involve any radical changes at the scene of employment, and it is an expedient that can function almost automatically anywhere, unless the environment is downright hostile. For these discoveries and the consequent hypotheses, we are indebted to one of the foremost scientists in this field, C. Northcote Parkinson. Assuming that the production operation is not invaded by some heartless barbarian bent upon cost minimization, according to Parkinson’s Law, work naturally tends to expand so as to “fill the time available for its completion.” Furthermore, thanks to the natural tendency of those having any responsibility or supervisory function to multiply subordinates rather than rivals, the number of jobs can, through featherbedding, increase indefinitely, regardless of whether the demand for output remains stationary or, indeed, disappears altogether.
But suppose that the presence of too many featherbedders is actually detrimental to a job that really has to be performed? The answer is vicarious featherbedding. About the time that the average worker reaches the peak of his efficiency, thus becoming a serious menace to all who are engaged in the noble art of increasing employment, he may be “retired” from the scene of employment. In these cases, he may continue to be paid on the theory that he is still receiving compensation for previous work.
Variations of this technique are unemployment compensation, social security (to the extent it is financed by the employer rather than by savings of the worker himself), consultant contracts under which the “consulting” is imaginary, etc. The limits of this essay do not permit more than a passing reference to this off-the-job featherbedding. That it is a fertile field for the future, however, lying wholly within the fundamental concept of paying wages out of the process of production to persons who are not producing anything, is evident. It is equally evident that this area requires further exploration in order to determine the full range of its potential.
For example, there are occasions where personal, on-the-job featherbedding causes positive harm. Take the case of a mother who must be separated from her small children in order to engage in factory or office featherbedding. In cases such as this, off-the-job or vicarious featherbedding might well prove to be a more socially enlightened expedient.
As a means of assuring full employment, featherbedding has the stamp of approval of tradition and long usage, whereas the production of surpluses and other non-economic goods (such as space race hardware and superfluous “defense” goods) — expedients increasingly relied upon in our economy — are of comparatively recent origin.
In most of Europe (including the Soviet Union), featherbedding is the preferred method of artificially creating employment. Government efficiency experts in Italy, for example, have estimated that not more than 20 percent of the hordes of civil servants in that land perform any useful service whatsoever. But even this commendable achievement is at least equaled by the British and probably surpassed by the French, whose leadership in the art of featherbedding is truly inspirational. Surely no country other than France could manage to have as many food stores as the United States with a population one-fourth as large. By vending food with the highest retail markups known anywhere, French stores are able to create an incredible amount of “employment.” This feat becomes all the more remarkable when one considers the size of the enterprises involved.
Can we afford featherbedding? This is a question frequently asked by economists, accountants, and public office holders charged in one way or another with the regulation or health of the economy. I submit that there is a great deal of fuzzy thinking about this subject. To the extent that the question is an economic one — and generally it is purely so — the answer is not difficult. If we can produce all the useful goods and services that we can afford to consume while employing, say, two-thirds of the entire labor force, then it should be obvious that we can “afford” to have the other third “employed” at featherbedding.
At the moral level, it would seem that featherbedding compares favorably with the production of surpluses as a means of achieving full employment. Both are artificially contrived, and in the economic senses surpluses are no more necessary than the presence of non-productive persons at the scene of production. Featherbedding is certainly more in line with declared national objectives of conserving our natural resources against unnecessary waste.
In terms of psychological effect upon workers and non-workers, the two methods would seem also to be about on a parity. The underlying problem, of course, centers about the dignity of man. No one can question the existence of a deep, basic compulsion by all men to be engaged in creative work. Unfortunately, most men interpret this compulsion as one requiring them to engage in the production of wealth. The transfer of some 90 percent or more of the actual burden of production from men to capital instruments has, therefore, created serious psychological and moral problems.
Can a man who believes his dignity as a human being depends upon his engaging in the production of wealth avoid psychological and moral catastrophe in the face of the fact that capital instruments produce the great bulk of our wealth? Indeed, the magnitude of the problem is growing apace, for the proportion of the total product produced by capital instruments rather than by labor increases as science and technological change progress.
I submit that neither of the two methods — the production of surpluses or featherbedding — offers any decisive moral advantage over the other. Some workers will be more easily fooled into believing they are actually engaged in some necessary creative activity if they are producing surpluses, for the surpluses will arise, or at any rate be stored, destroyed or given away, at some point remote from the scene of production, and the absurdity of the workers’ activity will thus be concealed.
In comparison, most of the non-workers engaged in featherbedding seem well able to submerge their powers of discrimination so that they are no longer able to distinguish between production and non-production. Probably this euphoric sublimation of the gnawing urge to be creative can be more easily achieved in an environment where featherbedding is virtually universal. Thus comparison of genuinely creative activity with featherbedding which pretends to be creative is virtually impossible (for example, in an enterprise where substantially all productive activity is carried on by capital instruments, but where a great many non-workers are employed at all levels). The automating of clerical and supervisory functions promises to increase substantially the number of such enterprises.
As long as our goal is to constantly re-create what we have technologically destroyed — namely, full employment — we have no choice but to make “let’s pretend” our national economic sport. Unless, of course, we should prefer to turn back the clock and restore to men the burden of production we have transferred to capital.
The goal then is the one Lincoln once asserted to be impossible: to fool all of the people all of the time. But we have done the impossible before, and it looks as if we may succeed again.
— Originally published in CHALLENGE, The Magazine of Economic Affairs, publication of Challenge Communications, Inc., Sept./Oct. 1966
