The Black Hole of Public Administration

Chapter 10 The Myth of the Public Service as a Lump of Labour

CHAPTER 10 TheMythofthePublicServiceasaLumpofLabour … for appropriate regulation, the variety in the regulator must be equal or greater than the variety in the system being regulated. —Ross Ashby’s statement of the Ashby Law Introduction The ‘lump of labour’ fallacy is an old economic chestnut. It refers to the presumption that there is a fixed amount of work to be done in the world, so that any increase in the amount any worker does reduces the amount of work left to do, and thus the number of available jobs. As a result, the argument goes, automation leads to unemployment since it reduces the amount of work left. This is an idea economists have ridiculed for a long time, yet it resurfaces periodically under new garb. More recently, it has been embraced by the economically naive, arguing that more jobs can be created by reducing the length of the workweek. This ‘lump of labour’ fallacy I (as we would call it) focuses on there being a fixed quantity of labour. There is, however, another equally toxic ‘lump of labour’ fallacy—the lump of labour fallacy II: that presumes that labour is qualitatively homogeneous, like a lump of butter, within different sectors. 353 354 The Black Hole of Public Administration According to this argument, all work is done by ‘guardians’ in the public sector and by ‘traders’ in the private sector, and there is a difference of kind between these types of work. This second fallacy is not in good currency in the private sector, where it is generally agreed that there is little merit in assuming that labour is homogeneous: nobody but the most ethereal theorist believes that there is such a thing as ‘a labour market’ where everyone is substitutable for any one else. This is not a useful way to describe what is, in reality, a complex and differentiated matrix of labour exchanges, where the entities exchanged have little commonality one with the other. But the situation is different in the public sector where it is readilyassumedbymanyobserversthatpublicsectoremployment has a different quality because it is public employment, and this lump of somewhat undifferentiated work has come to be associated with a higher calling, a heavier burden of office, and to be perceived as requiring greater protection and higher status than other types of work. This fallacy has created very serious problems of adjustment in the real world of the segmented labour markets in the public sector. It has led naive observers to suggest that any reduction in the size of the lump of public sector employment (whatever type of public sector job might be eliminated) automatically entails an impoverishment of societal governance since ‘public sector employment’ cannot be eroded without undermining the ‘sacred’ work of the state. What makes this particular level of public employment optimal is never examined, and what makes all public servants fundamentally and essentially different from other workers is never clearly explained either. It is simply readily assumed by many—inspired by the work of Jane Jacobs (1992)—that this is the case. This presumed idiosyncrasy of public sector employment has now become one of the most important constraints on the evolution of governance in Canada: it has dramatically stalled the exploration of a whole array of collaborative arrangements 355 The Myth of the Public Service as a Lump of Labour between the private, public and social sectors (because these would be likely to erode the almost sacred basis of state employment) and has prevented serious efforts to modernize the public sector whenever it might entail fragmentation of the body of public servants that might be required to operate under different regimes. As a result, any need felt for effective re-engineering of government into a more inclusive, more participative, more collaborative and more effective apparatus in today’s world (through all sorts of means including public-private partnerships (PPPs or P3s) or other arrangements reducing the size of the formal state workforce) has been opposed because every public sector job has been consecrated as one of ‘guardian’ of the public good and/or of the fabric of society and therefore declared untouchable. While this might be regarded as a plausible negotiating position for public sector unions, it is hardly defendable intellectually. Nevertheless, it is an argument in good currency in certain ideological circles (Rouillard et al. 2006). All this has not prevented de...