Congress, ever ready to impose quotas in the name of whatever cause achieves sacred-cow status, has picked up telecommuting. It has decreed that federal agencies must allow telecommuting and that the Office of Personnel Management must ensure that at least 25 percent of the federal workforce is participating, starting immediately.
The increase in telecommuting and in flextime has fueled many stories about the growing openness of labor arrangements. But these two developments are not the tip of a new labor iceberg; they are the whole iceberg. In other areas, working arrangements are steadily becoming less rather than more flexible.
For example, one might expect that many young mothers who have moved into the labor force would prefer part-time to full-time work. In fact, while the absolute number of part-time workers has expanded, part-timers as a percentage of the work force have declined from 20 percent in 1982 to 16 percent today.
Nor is the Internet generating the host of independent contractors or temporary employees that was anticipated. Only 8.2 million workers are independent, and they are mostly what they have always been: management consultants, sales reps, real estate agents, carpenters, and truck drivers. No more than 156,000 independents work as computer geeks, and no tide of independents is discernible in other parts of the economy.
Agency-employed temps are also rare, supplying only 1.2 million workers. They are not particularly noticeable in high tech; only 1 percent (18,000) of all systems analysts and 2 percent (15,000) of programmers live in the temp world.
The increase in scheduling flexibility has also proved a limited benefit. It applies mostly to professional, managerial, and sales workers, 40 percent of whom can control their schedules. As one moves down any given hierarchy, flexibility grows more rare.
Logically, introducing flexibility into organizational structures and work schedules could not only accommodate the desires of soccer moms and dads, it could produce significant economic savings that would benefit firms and workers. Yet so far the response to the possibilities created by the information age has been notably tepid. Why?
Keeping the workers down
Conventional labor arrangements are largely dictated by the economic imperatives involved in making the most efficient use of a firm’s infrastructure, such as the support staff, supervisory time and energy, information resources, and communications. These require centralized work sites and consistent hours of operation. They also require massive investments in buildings and equipment that are used a measly 40 hours a week, plus an expensive transportation infrastructure built to meet rush hour needs that also eats up billions of hours of human commuting time.
The rise of the Internet, among other communication technologies, offers huge opportunities to organize work in new ways. Space and equipment costs can be cut, travel time reduced, even public infrastructure investments re-configured. The potential gains in efficiency are dazzling.
But the centralized structures and fixed schedules of the modern workplace are dictated by something other than economic efficiency. They are compelled by federal and state government rules, and it is far from clear that these will permit the changes necessary to produce possible gains. In fact, to judge by the telecommuting and stock-options cases, it is clear that these rules will be modified only after bitter, inch-by-inch struggles.
The U.S. Department of Labor enforces over 180 different laws. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and the National Labor Relations Board administer regulatory empires of their own, and the 50 states add yet more regulatory layers. These laws encompass a huge array of subjects and purposes.
The first of the big federal acts was the Davis-Bacon Act of 1931, which required that federal construction projects pay "prevailing wages" so as to avoid cutthroat competition for scarce work during the Depression. Other federal laws initiated during the Depression era, or added since, cover wages and hours, protection of corporate whistleblowers, pensions, family and medical leave, occupational safety and health, disabilities, and many points in between.
It is a jerrybuilt structure, and much of it was enacted for dubious motives. Davis-Bacon was designed by its congressional sponsors to ensure that African Americans, who were not allowed into unions, got no share of Depression-era public spending.
Laws against home-based work are based partly on the truth that the practice can be used to avoid minimum wage laws. But they also provide employment to people who do not want to keep a regular schedule. The labor bureaucracy’s hostility to such arrangements derives largely from the labor-union calculation that home workers are hard to organize. The Department of Labor has conducted a decades-long crusade against folks who want to supplement meager incomes by part-time knitting at home.
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