A long time ago, I visited Venice in the company of a lady who was somewhat obsessed with fashion and who therefore travelled with an onerous superfluity of luggage. We had ten pieces, two of mine and eight of hers. At the end of our stay we made our way from hotel to station by gondola, the boat crammed to the gunwales  with our suitcases. Mooring at the landing-stage beside Santa Lucia station, our gondolier handed these up to the quayside porter, who loaded them on to a big barrow.

The main entrance to the station was only a few steps away, so I said to the porter, il treno per Milano, per favore. O no! I wasn't familiar with Venetian working practices. The porter's reply sticks in my memory: Non posso fino al treno! I can't take you all the way to the train. I will take you to the station entrance; there you will have to find another porter to take you to the train. These two fellows, needless to say, collected obligatory charges of around ten thousand lire each.

That is a fine example of a restrictive practice if the kind traditionally dear to trade unions, but abhorred by employers and free-market economists. Such practices were once very common; they still exist, though much enfeebled. The demarcation disputes  of the 1960s and 70s, where a strike could easily break out if a task reserved for the riveters' union was assigned to a member of the hole-borers', are now considered obsolete and absurd. However, in those days unemployment rates were far below those of recent years.

Division of labour in British India

For a striking example of restrictive practices, we may cast our minds back to India in the days of the British Raj and the full rigours of the system of castes, each of which had its clearly reserved occupations. Domestic servants were very strict about their own little trade unions. The man who waited at table might not be prepared to bring your tea in the morning; the cook would perhaps cook but he wouldn't wash up; there would be a special man to dust the floor; another special man to sweep out the verandah and so on. If you had a man to look after the horses he would need an assistant who went and cut the grass...² An affluent British household before the 1914-18 war could well have more than twenty servants; not because there was really enough work for so many hands, but because of the restrictions on the activities of each caste.

In the Britain of the 1960s, matters were not so very different. The managing director of a shipbuilding yard describes the process of fitting a porthole: Trade 1 lines the thing up; trade 2 drills the pilot hole; trade 3 burns it larger; trede 4 dresses it; trade 5 puts the fitment in...and so it goes on, with eight trades doing one job.³

Today, thanks to the influence of the libertarian economists and their political followers, we find those old-fashioned restrictions ridiculous. In effect, though probably unconsciously, we have accepted the theory of Ludwig von Mises, according to which all work is a disutility, something we would rather not do. It is therefore absurd for a job to be done by ten workers when it could conceivably be done by nine. We must eliminate all work that is not strictly necessary for the production of whatever the market demands. If we don't do this because we believe in it, the free market will force us to do it anyway.

Too little work?

But what if that production does not strictly require the work of all the people who want to work and need to work? You have already read (at the head of this article) the answer given by Henry Hazlitt, for many years a dominant American spokesman for the Austrian economists. You have doubtless found it inadequate. Well, the Austrians have another answer, this time that of Mises himself: it is the supply of labour available that determines to what an extent...nature in each of its varieties can be exploited for the satisfaction of [human] needs.⁴ In other words, we can always increase our production, and thus our exploitation of natural resources, up to the point where all available labour is fully employed.

This argument follows from an assumption made by Mises: labour is the most scarce of all the primary means of production.⁵ In 1949, when he published this curious notion, unemployment was very low in most developed countries and overexploitation of natural resources was not a major worry. Today, his assumption seems completely unrealistic. Natural resources are becoming increasingly scarce; labour seems more and more overabundant. But this apparent abundance is the result of our habit of eliminating human work wherever technology can replace it.

No more walking to Brighton

Years ago, in the City of London, stockbrokers employed many messengers who spent their time walking around the City (all London brokers were then within the compact 'square mile'), delivering documents from office to office. These messengers got plenty of exercise; many became very fit walkers. It was largely the messengers who competed in the famous Stock Exchange Walk from London to Brighton (52 miles in a day in May). Today there are few messengers, since most documents are transmitted electronically, and the Walk no longer takes place.

In fact, walking long distances and other physically demanding work has become so rare that we exercise artificially in grim gyms, even using a device resembling the old-time treadmill - once considered a particularly nasty form of punishment in prisons. 

We can no longer get rid of unemployment simply through growth in global production. Already many natural resources are becoming rare because of excessive human consumption, while the pollution caused by production is growing intolerable. Yet we need more employment. Are the old-fashioned restrictive practices really as silly as we have come to think? Hazlitt jeered at 'make-work' because, according to his Austrian philosophy, work is always something that is undesirable. So what is the point of making it?

But we would do better to recognise that each of us has a need, psychological as well as financial, to do some kind of work. Is it not true that in the present-day world there are hundreds of millions of people who would gladly work, if they had the opportunity? So let's abandon those Austrian fantasies. In the real world, human work is, in principle, something that is both necessary and desirable, for the workers as well as for those who buy their output. So why not, if need be, make some of it?

The folly of multi-tasking

Instead, we have done the opposite. In our zeal to get our work done by as few workers as possible, we have invented the paractice of multi-tasking in which one person is expected to do several things simultaneously or, at least, intermittently in quick succession. The word multitasking derives from computer engineering, and refers to the ability of a microprocessor to process several tasks at once. Here is a recent comment from leading Australian business journalist Leon Gettler, writing here for the management website WAtoday:

Wherever you look, more focus is being placed on multi-tasking. Part of it is just the sheer availability of different options which makes it easier to listen to your iPod while answering emails and responding to text messages, occasionally going back to the letter you are drafting. Another force driving it is that workplaces are now a lot smaller. Fewer people have been left to do the same job and that means more emphasis on multi-tasking.⁶

Who isn't in awe of the person who can speed-read a report, listen in on a meeting, and keep an eye on their emails at the same time? Multi-tasking works, right? Wrong, very wrong. The great multi-taskers of our time turn out to be the ones who remember nothing and get the least done. This is the shocking conclusion of Stanford University researchers Eyal Ophie, Clifford Nass and Anthony Wagner.⁸ 

Human data-processors

Nass explained that heavy multi-taskers can't keep things separate in their minds...they seem to like to be flooded with information. It's almost as if they prefer to scan the environment and look for new information rather than ponder what they have.

Other researchers, says Kirwan-Taylor, believe that the constant alternating bursts of attention and interruption foisted upon us by technology are leading to a mild version of ADD (attention deficit disorder). She quotes an expert on this subject, Harvard psychiatrist Prof. Edward Hallowell, who observes that the way people use multi-tasking today implies we are focusing on several things at once. That is cognitively impossible...what you give up when you work like that is depth. You give up the capacity to reflect and any deep emotion. You just turn yourself into a human data-processor...

Hallowell was called in to an investment firm to get traders to spend less time perusing their screens and more time thinking about the investments they wanted to make...but they couldn't stop. Eventually we had to move their screens.

It looks as though multi-tasking may have contributed largely to the ghastly financial mess in which such hyperactive traders have landed us.

The division of labour under the old Indian caste system, and for that matter in British shipyards and car factories only a few decades ago, was clearly exaggerated. But it does not follow that we should go to the other extreme. We should seek a happier mean. Work is not something to be done by as few people as possible, overstretched, and in some cases overpaid, to the ultimate limit. Or, more commonly, overstretched and underpaid.

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