Chris’ note: In honor of Labor Day, we’re passing along an essay from Legacy Research cofounder Bill Bonner. Longtime Bill readers may recognize it. Bill first penned it in 2014, back when he was publishing Diary of a Rogue Economist. But as you’ll see, the message is just as relevant today…
I wish we could get into that painfulness stuff.
– One luggage handler to another,
overheard in the airport in Paris
Today, exceptionally, we write about something we know something about: painfulness.
This is our translation of a new concept in French labor law. It involves something called la pénibilité, which refers to the difficulty, suffering or pain, involved in a job.
Sitting at a desk in an air-conditioned office involves little or no pénibilité. Carrying heavy roof tiles up a steep ladder in the rain, by contrast, involves quite a bit.
In typical French fashion, the labor bureaucracy has set out to make adjustments.
Pénibilité is measured. Then it is compensated. Each worker has his own account, in which he gets credits, depending on how painful his work is.
Get 10 points in your account, and you get to retire three months early.
Factors contributing to painfulness include: noise, night work, bending, kneeling, crouching, carrying heavy burdens, smoke and so forth. If you get two of these factors working for you, your points are doubled.
[Note: The system Bill describes became law on January 1, 2015 and January 1, 2016. French president Emmanuel Macron abolished four of the criteria in 2017.]
Alas, it is impossible to measure the real pain involved in any aspect of life.
Doesn’t the pleasure of being out in the fresh air compensate for the discomfort of bad weather?
How to compare the pain of shoveling horse manure to the pain of listening to it?
The luggage handler who measures his own suffering in heavy valises should try reading Janet Yellen’s speeches; then he’d know what real pain is!
It is because the real pain in life is not quantifiable that we have markets.
We don’t know how difficult, painful or costly it is to produce a beet or a TV set. The price tells us. The more painful it is, the less people there are who want to do it. As the supply of willing workers goes down, the price goes up.
But you can’t expect the bureaucrats to understand that. Their zombie jobs depend on not understanding it. They must pretend that everything is measurable and controllable.
Besides, from our experience, the labor market can be quirky and unreliable…
“Problem of child labour on US farms highlighted,” runs a headline in the Financial Times.
The problem was brought to light by a Human Rights Watch report, which studied how tobacco farms in the US operate.
“Children who cannot legally buy cigarettes harvest tobacco, use heavy machinery and climb into barn rafters to dry leaves. During shifts as long as 12 hours, these workers – some as young as seven – are exposed to nicotine, pesticides and extreme heat.”
“Hey,” we said to nobody in particular, “they’re talking about us!”
As soon as we were able, we went to work in the tobacco fields. In the 1950s and 1960s, tobacco was a cash crop in southern Maryland, where we grew up. But it was pénible: It was labor intensive, and the working conditions were tough.
Labor was becoming more and more difficult to come by. Tenant farmers were packing up and moving to Washington DC, where they could get jobs in the government.
That left family. Boys – sons, cousins, nephews, friends – were rounded up in late August and put to work cutting, spearing, hauling and hanging tobacco.
The air was heavy in the morning, but still bearable. As the day advanced, the pénibilité rose. By the afternoon, the temperature was usually in the 90s… with nearly 100% humidity. The sun beat down. The tobacco grew heavier and heavier.
We boys – earning about $5 a day, with no pénibilité points – were unaware of the painfulness of it. Instead, we made it a sport.
Two cousins – slightly older – along with your editor and his brother each took his place at the start of a long row of tobacco.
The plants had been cut down. Our job was to pick up the plants, which must have weighed 10 or 20 pounds each, and spear them onto a hickory stick – five or six plants per stick – so that they could be hung in the barn to dry.
Our sport was to race each other to see who could get to the end of the line first.
Our brother was always the champion. Hoisting the plants onto the spearhead, one after the other, without complaint or hesitation, his technique was flawless, his energy unflagging…
Talk about pain! Imagine your poor editor. He not only suffered the pain of the hard work, but the pain of losing the race, too.
Regards,
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Bill Bonner
Cofounder, Legacy Research