I would be most interested to see the multivariate cost/benefit analyses
that are conducted prior to hiring freezes, downsizing, contingent
employment and other fashionable responses to employers' perceptions of
excessive labour costs. According to Jeffrey Pfeffer of the Stanford
Graduate School of Business, most labour shedding results not from rational
analysis by firms but from managers slavishly following fads. Pfeffer
identifies "Six Dangerous Myths About Pay" in the May-June Harvard Business
Review and claims that most managers follow those myths and not rational
analyses of labour costs.
Precisely what, then, justifies the use of the term "rationalization" to
describe labour shedding? There's far, far too much connotation at stake in
"rationalization" to dismiss my objection as semantic quibbling.
"Rationalization" is not merely a laudatory term, it is an assertion that
the shedding of labour is a non-contradictory economic first principle.
May I be so bold as to call it the "lump of reason fallacy"?
Regards,
Tom Walker
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