“One Little Hour”

I just received the American Historical Association’s Perspectives on History for February. One of the articles complained about the shrinking availability of tenure track positions at universities. Also, over the past two decades part-time faculty have taken on an increasing share of the teaching load in the academe. The history profession has become more and more stratified.

You see, tenure track professors head the history departments, hand out teaching assignments, and ladle the gravy. Unsurprisingly, tenure track professors ensure their own fiscal well-being. By hiring adjunct, part-time faculty to work for barely more than minimum wage, tenure track faculty can maximize their own earnings. Welcome to the modern day guild system!

Labor unions, which are endowed with even more legal rights than informal, academic guilds, also maximize union-members pay at the expense of non-unionized workers. Sure, in some cases labor unions corner the market and control a labor monopoly, in which case the increased labor costs are born by consumers. But even there the market flows downhill. Consumers and companies move as the cost of living and producing increases, one signficant cause for the defection of industry from the Rustbelt to the Sunbelt and the population shift from the North to the South and Southwest. Visit inner-city Detroit or Philadelphia for a visual primer into the ultimate consequences of unionization.

When restrictions are placed on the labor market, the market responds in predictable fashion. Government stipulates that full-time workers be given benefits, then the market encourages employers to hire more part-time workers to whom those regulations do not apply. If you’ve ever worked as a part-time employee you probably remember getting in trouble when you tried to work too many hours…doing so would bump you into the full-time category and require the company to give you additional benefits.

This two-tiered system is inefficient. All things considered, one person working 40 hours is significantly more productive than two persons working 20 hours each. Yet our system encourages companies to take the less efficient route instead of maximizing efficiency and productivity.