- Email: [email protected]
Night work as a labor market phenomenon: Southern textiles in the interwar period
EXPLORATIONS
IN ECONOMIC
HISTORY
20, 331-350
(1983)
Night Work as a Labor Market Phenomenon: Southern Textiles in the lnterwar Period* MARTHA
SHIELLS
University
of Kansas
AND GAVIN WRIGHT Stanford
University
In the 1920s and 1930s night work in the textiles industry was widely viewed as a major social problem in need of reform. Bulletins of the Women’s Bureau maintained that night workers suffered from loss of sleep, deprivation of sunlight, injury to sight, chronic fatigue, and high rates of illness and accidents, and that the most severe victims were women night workers and the neglected members of their families (USDL, 1928). One company president lamented that night work put a “strain upon the morals of the operatives,” which was “greater than any wise Management could justly permit” (Smith, 1960, p. 220). Southern cotton mills were identified as among the worst offenders, in terms of both working conditions and night work incidence. The concerns of reformers were regarded sympathetically by analysts who viewed “the unrestricted night operation of plants” as “the most menacing factor of excess productive capacity” and hence the source of most of the industry’s problems (Smith, p. 63). The well-known free-trader Frank Taussig described the rise of Southern textiles as “an artifical and almost insensate growth, much promoted by the use of nightwork so widespread as to shame our civilization” (Taussig, 1931, p. 513). The effort to limit or abolish night * For comments on earlier drafts, we extend our thanks to Christopher Clague, Clint Shiells, and Tom Weiss, and to two particularly conscientious referees for this journal. This research was partially supported by the Center for Comparative and Historical Research on the Market Economies (CCHROME) at the University of Michigan. Address correspondence to Professor Gavin Wright, Dept. of Economics, Stanford University, Stanford, Calif. 94305. 331 0014~4983f831
$3.0(4
Copyright 0 1983 by Academic Press. Inc. All rights of reproduction in any form reserved.
332
SHIELLS
AND WRIGHT
work became the core of the Cotton Textile Institute’s response to the Great Textiles Depression after 1924, a campaign in which they were joined by such unlikely bedfellows as the National Consumers’ League, the Southern Council on Women in Industry, and the League of Women Voters.’ As an example of a reform that seemed to have inexorable pressure behind it, but which ultimately failed and would today be unthinkable, the campaign is interesting in itself. Our concern in this article, however, is with the question somewhat obscured by moral fervor, namely the reasons for the spread of night work in Southern textiles between World War I and World War II. Despite the attention paid to this case in numerous microeconomics textbooks, as an illustration of the adjustment process under conditions of excess capacity (Mansfield, 1979, pp. 26% 269; Cohen and Cyert, 1965, pp. 162-165), no persuasive account for the origins of this situation has been offered. We argue that the explanation lies in the stickiness of wages and the emergence of excess labor supplies in Southern textiles in the 1920s and 1930s building on earlier research presented in Wright (1981). To press our historical interpretation, we first lay out a model of night work and wage stickiness which shows (in contrast to previous shift work models) that high wages and depressed demand conditions may well increase the relative and absolute importance of night work, under competitive market conditions. The ironic result emerges that national policies to raise the wages of Southern labor ensured the failure of the crusade to abolish Southern night work. I. A MODEL OF NIGHT WORK In this section we present a simple model that first shows that downwardly rigid wages encourage night work and then demonstrates that a downturn in product demand may lead firms to hire a greater proportion of night workers. The problem addressed in most of the recent shiftwork literature, for example, Betancourt and Clague (1975, 1981), Marris (1964), and Winston (1974), is what determines the number of shifts a plant is designed to run. To model this problem, the authors focus on the firm’s long-run cost minimizing behavior, assuming an output restraint, perfectly elastic labor supplies, and zero ex post elasticity of substitution. One result of these models is that an important determinant of the profitability of shiftwork is the share of capital costs in total single-shift capital and labor costs. Since shift work spreads capital costs over more units of ’ Galambos (1959, p. 153). The National Women’s Party opposed the program on the grounds that it discriminated against women. For samples of contemporary views on night work, see Women’s Bureau (1928), National Industrial Conference Board (1927), and Textile World (February 4, 1928).
NIGHT
WORK IN SOUTHERN
TEXTILES
333
output, a firm with higher capital costs will achieve relatively greater savings by adopting shift work. In the Betancourt and Clague model the effect of higher wages on the profitability of nightwork depends on the elasticity of input substitution. If the elasticity of substitution between labor and capital is less than unity, then an increase in the wage relative to the price of capital will lower capital’s share in costs. Lowering capital’s share will lower the profitability of shiftwork, and thus night shift employment will decline. Our model of night work differs from those discussed above in several respects. First, we want to analyze the response of firms to short-run and disequilibrium phenomena, so we begin with a fixed capital stock and allow for some ex post substitutability.2 Second, rather than assuming perfectly elastic labor supplies we derive day and night labor supplies from the behavior of utility maximizing workers. Finally, we do not require that wages always adjust to clear labor markets. The model is simplified by assuming that firms are profit maximizing competitors in product markets, taking output price as given by p. We also abstract from changes in the length of the standard workday, measuring labor in man-days of equal length on day and night shifts. Thus, a firm working “short-time” will work fewer man-days, rather than fewer hours per day. The inclusion of changes in the length of the workday, however, is a straightforward extension of the model. Demand for Shift Workers
For a firm with capital stock ??, output is given by Q = QD + QN = F(LD, R + F(L*, a
where & is output, L is labor, and the superscripts D and N refer to the day and night shifts, respectively. The production function is assumed to have a nonzero elasticity of substitution even in the short run. This assumption is particularly appropriate for textile industries, where there is considerable flexibility in the labor/capital ratio after machines are in place. The firm’s profits are T = p[F(LD, m + F(LN, n]
- [WLD + (1 + 09 WLN + r??l
(2)
where a! is the shift work premium, and capital costs Y do not depend on how many shifts are worked.3 First-order conditions for profit max’ This is surely appropriate for the textiles industry, where the number of spindles or looms assigned to each worker can be readily varied. Our model does not contribute to the analysis of cases where ex post flexibility is technologically limited, which is the assumption made by Betancourt and Clague. ’ This implies that the rate of depreciation is independent of the rate of utilization, a defensible assumption when most depreciation results from technological obsolescence rather than wear and tear (Betancourt and Clague, 1981, pp. 18-32).
334
SHIELLS
AND WRIGHT
REAL WAGE
w(l + a)
LN
LD
LABOR
FIG. 1. Firm demand curve.
imization
imply
For given W, p, K, and CYcondition (3) determines total output as well as the proportion of day and night workers. The firm allocates labor between day and night shifts by balancing the shift work premium (Yand the diminishing returns to the fixed capital stock F,(L, a. As Fig. 1 indicates, as long as (Y is positive, the night shift will be smaller than the day shift. There will be no night shift if (x is so high that F,(O, KJ < ~(1 + a). Many firms will be in this position, and will not run a second shift, if the night premium is defined to include all the extra costs associated with night work. The need for better lighting, administrative overhead, and less convenient maintenance schedules would then increase the premium. Also, to the extent that fatigue and medical problems reduce the productivity of night workers, the cost per unit of effective night labor will be higher.4 Firm demand curves are aggregated in conventional fashion to form an industry demand curve. 4 We also must assume that the ex post elasticity of substitution is less than unity. Otherwise, the marginal product of labor tends to infinity as labor is reduced to zero, and lirms would always hire some night labor no matter how high the premium is. Also, including night-specific costs in the premium implies that there is a wedge between what firms pay and what workers receive. For simplicity, we ignore this in the rest of the analysis.
NIGHT
WORK
IN SOUTHERN
335
TEXTILES
Supply of Shift Workers Each individual i has a utility function with two arguments Ui = Ui (Xi, Zj)
(4
where Xi is a composite good with price p and Zi is a dichotomous variable reflecting whether the individual works the day or the night shift. Night work is a bad, or Ui(Xi, N> < Ui(Xi, D) for ail individuals and all values of X. If Ui is the level of utility individual i obtains when he withdraws from the wage-labor market, then we can define i’s reservation TV real day wage tiii = --J as the value that satisfies the identity
P
Ui(;ciji)D) ~ 77i.
(5)
Thus, individual i is willing to supply day labor whenever w > gi. Further, we can define individual i’s reservation night work premium pi as the value that satisfies the identity Ui(W(1 + Cui), ~ ~
Ui(W,
D).
(61
For any cz > iZii, the individual will prefer to work nights. Equations (5) and (6) imply that individual i will be indifferent between working nights and not working when Ui(~i(l + Cyi), N) = pi. Market labor supplies are derived by assuming distributions of pi and Ei across potential workers. Then if LS is the total labor supply, LF is the market supply of day workers, and Lt the night workers,
LS = all persons i for whom either w > Wi or w(1 + o) > Wi(1 + C!i)
(7)
Lg = all persons i belonging to Ls for whom (Y 6 Ei
(f3
L; = Ls - L&
(9)
Equilibrium
will be obtained
in this market
by adjusting
w and CYuntil
LS = LD and LF = LE where LD and Lg are the total market labor demand and the day shift labor demand as defined in the section above, Figure 2 depicts this equilibrium. In this figure G;ijminand =(I + E)min are the reservation wages of the individuals least averse to wage labor and night work, respectively. Li and LF then rise from these ordinates, as higher wage levels surpass more reservation wages. These must be understood as equilibrium curves, because in our model the positions of the curves will be interdependent, since each individual is on both labor supply curves simultaneously. Nonetheless, the equilibrium relationships will be as pictured. The vertical distance between Lt and L: will increase as L increases because individuals with higher zi”i’s must be induced to work nights, as the night labor force expands.
336 Disequilibrium
SHIELLS
AND
WRIGHT
Wages
Suppose now that the wage is stuck above the equilibrium level. This disequilibrium wage could result from a decline in output demand and prices accompanied by downwardly rigid nominal wages. This case is described in more detail below. The disequilibrium wages could also be associated with legal minimum wages, or wages in the modern sectors of LDCs. With a disequilibrium wage w1 > w, it follows at once from Eq. (3) that the day shift will contract. If a! is flexible and w1 < w(1 + CX), however, the night shift will not contract because (Y will decline to 6 such that wl(l + CE) = w(1 -t a). The total night wage is the same, so firms are willing to hire the same number of night workers. Also, by condition (7), anyone who was working nights will still want to supply labor. Since a has decreased, some night workers may prefer to switch to day jobs, but the scarcity of day jobs would prevent this. Therefore, the supply of night labor remains constant, and the night shift will not contract as the day shift does. We can say more than this, though, because in this situation some of the unemployed former day shift workers may switch to working nights. In particular, any former day shift worker for whom W,(l
+ ~) > !Vi(l + pi)
(9)
will prefer to work nights rather than remain unemployed. If for some workers a was just barely below their night work reservation price, then we expect that some additional workers will now be compensated for the disutility of night work by the higher real wage. In terms of the labor supply conditions given above we are saying that as the total labor supply expands, and the number of day workers hired decreases, the night labor supply increases. As a result, the day labor surplus will diminish, the shift premium will be further depressed to aI, and there will be an absolute expansion of night work. There are several limits to the expansion of the night shift. First, even if the shift premium is flexible, the total night wage should not be assumed to have a lower floor than the day wage. Thus, the constraint that CYbe nonnegative implies that the night labor supply cannot increase beyond the point where the night wage is equal to the day wage. Second, individuals who were not working at all before will not begin to work nights now. If a person was not working before the disequilibrium wage was imposed, then he must have preferred unemployment to working nights at the total night wage w(1 + cu), Thus, such individuals will not offer night labor at a total wage even lower than w,(l + &) = w(1 + CX).Any increase in the night labor supply must therefore come from people who had been working days, but who lost their jobs when the real wage rose. Given a choice, these people prefer day work to night work at the going wages. They may, however, prefer night work to unemployment. Consequently,
NIGHT
WORK IN SOUTHERN
337
TEXTILES
REAL
WAGE
LR
LD
LABOR
FIG. 2. Industry equifbrium.
the expansion of the night shift can be no greater than the contraction of the day shift. In general, we expect the increase in night labor supply to be less than this limit since workers who were not already on the night shift are those who are relatively averse to night work. Some of these workers will prefer to withdraw from wage labor altogether, rather than work nights. The effects of a disequilibrium wage on day and night shift employment are illustrated in Fig. 3. Here the disequilibrium wage w1 causes the day shift to contract from LD to Lp. Initially, the night premium declines from a! to &, offsetting the increase in the real wage, and night shift employment remains constant at LN. If, however, some of the LD Lf unemployed former day shift workers decide to accept night jobs, the night labor supply curve will shift from Lg to (LF),. This will result in a further decrease of the night premium to a1 and expansion of the night shift to Ly. It may be thought unrealistic to treat the night work premium as completely flexible while the basic daily wage is rigidly fixed. In Southern textiles, many firms paid no explicit premium, while others paid a nominal premium in cents per hour.’ More often the premium was implicit, in ’ See Woman and Child Wage-Earners (1910, p. 186). Since World War II, about onequarter of night shift workers have received no premium, while the other three-quarters have received a premium of 5$ per hour (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Wage Structure: Series 2, Nos. 37, 41, 89; Reports 82, 184; Bulletins 1410, 1.506, 1637, 1801).
338
SHIELLS
AND
WRIGHT
--trt--------__------------_II‘1 __------
NIGHT
WORK
IN SOUTHERN
TEXTILES
339
that a worker with limited experience could expect to be placed on a better paying job on the night shift than if he insisted on daytime work. The many references to problems recruiting a “good class of help” for the night shift (Smith, 1960, pp. 34,48) suggest that this form of effective premium was large and significant in the firms’ calculations. The notion that the firm has more flexibility in manipulating implicit premia operating through placement rules and job attributes is, indeed, part of the basic rationale for our approach. For the sake of argument, however, suppose that the firm finds it administratively impossible to pay any night shift premium at all. In that case we reach the same conclusion by a different route. With (x = only people who prefer night work (for whom Ei < 0) would be willing to work nights. Since we assume that night work is bad for all individuals, there will be no night shift initially. In this situation the marginal-productivity “gap” between day and night will be much greater than in the former case, hence the incentive to establish a night shift when workers become available will be strong. Suppose now that the real wage rises to the disequilibrium level w,. More people will be attracted into the labor market by the higher real wage. Of these people, those who have only a slight aversion to night work will supply night labor when they find that day jobs are scarce. Thus, the night shift will expand even if no displaced day shift workers switch to night work. If some former day shift workers are now willing to work nights, the expansion of night work will be even greater. In our view, the typical Southern textile firm was somewhere between the full-premium and the no-premium. situations. The events described above could result from a deflation of the general price level when the nominal wage is sticky. Suppose that demand for the composite commodity X declines, and its price falls from p to pl. If w = W/p and w1 = W/p,, where W is the rigid nominal wage, then our model predicts the impact on the extent of shift work of a general deflation with a sticky wage. Our model can be compared to models of the macroeconomy in which unemployment is caused by the failure of the nominal wage to fall proportionally with the price level, restoring the market clearing real wage. In our model, however, the unemployment problem is mitigated when employers adjust attributes of the job package, partially offsetting the increased real wage. In the case of night work, adjusting the job package means switching workers to jobs where their marginal product is greater. We therefore have the result that the output decline caused by a downwardly rigid wage will be less than the employment decline. The basic point is that if workers faced with unemployment throw themselves on the mercy of employers, rational firms facing sticky wages will put them to work where their marginal ,product is highest,’ namely on the night shift. Furthermore, the expansion of the night shift will be
340
SHIELLS
AND WRIGHT
more dramatic when employers have not been able to pay full premia for night work. In this case, the shift premium implicit in the higher real wage can attract workers who are relatively less averse to night work. One rather surprising result of our model is that it is possible for the higher wage to lead to an increase in output. Some of the workers who would ordinarily be unable to find work at the higher wage are now able to join the night shift. If a large proportion of the displaced day workers are not extremely averse to night work, then total employment will not decrease by very much. In addition, by moving workers from the day shift, where their marginal product is low, to the night shift, where their marginal product is high, firms can increase output per worker. For reasonable values of the elasticity of substitution, models of the long-run determinants of labor associate high wages with less shift work activity. Our model, on the other hand, associates high wages with more shift work activity. Betancourt and Clague (1981, p. 232) claim that the planned level of shift work in LDCs is low because the factor prices “aren’t right.” Subsidies to productive investments will keep capital prices artificially low at the same time that social pressures cause labor in the modern sector to be priced above its opportunity cost. Unless the elasticity of substitution between capital and labor is greater than unity, the long-run models predict that the higher wage to rental rate ratio in LDCs will lead to lower levels of shift work activity in LDCs than in developed countries.‘j Betancourt and Clague do not consider, however, that a socially determined wage will not be a market-clearing wage.7 In this case, our disequilibrium model would be more appropriate. The disequilibrium model predicts that the level of shiftwork in LDCs will be higher, at least where manufacturing wages are above labor’s opportunity cost. Of the two contradictory predictions, ours seems to be more consistent with the data they present. The two developing countries for which they give data, India and Israel, have higher levels of shift work than the two developed countries, France and Japan (p. 157). Industry-Specific
Decline in Demand
A slightly more complex example of a rigid wage influencing the extent of shift work occurs when demand for a particular product declines relative to others. To illustrate this case, we must introduce a relative price for the industry’s product pl = P,/p where P, is the &solute product price and p is the general price level. If the industry’s relative price declines from p1 to p2, then the relative value of the marginal 6 Estimates of the elasticity of substitution for the textiles industry are usually below unity, though often not significantly below. See Arrow et al. (1961, p. 140), Zarembka (1970, p. 50) Humphrey and Moroney (1975, p. 70). ’ Betancourt and Clague do briefly note the possible implications of unemployment for their conclusions (1981, p. 232), but the point is not developed.
NIGHT
WORK
IN SOUTHERN
TEXTILES
341
product in the industry will shift from pIFL(L, a to p2FL(L, @ as in Fig. 4. The immediate effect will be a decline in night as well as day employment. Even if none of the displaced day shift workers switch to working nights, however, it is likely that the relative importance of night work will increase. Night shift employment will fall relatively less because the downward flexibility of the shift premium allows the quantity of night labor demanded to increase. Furthermore, if some unemployed day shift workers do switch to nights, then there could be an absolute expansion of night work in the midst of an industry-specific depression. This case is illustrated in Fig. 4 where night employment grows from i$ to Ly in response to the fall in product price. The analysis of the no-premium regime is similar, and serves if anything, to increase the likelihood and extent of night work expansion in the midst of depressed demand conditions. II. HISTORICAL
EWDENCE
Among textile industry historians, the prevailing view has been that the rise of night work in the 1920s was a legacy of war-time experience REAL WAGE
w
p FIG.
RN LlL2 4.
Industry-specific
D L2 decline
LD 1 in demand.
LABOR
342
SHIELLS
AND WRIGHT
with double shifts (e.g., Blicksilver, 1959, p. 62; Backman and Gainsbrugh, 1946, p. 26). The implicit suggestion seems to be that night work was an organizational innovation, which required a demonstration period for its success. Lloyd Reynolds’ well-known 1940 article on “Cutthroat Competition” attributed excess capacity in the industry in part to the rise of ni ht work, a proposition that later textbook writers embellished into F somewhat mysterious “institutional changes” (Cohen and Cyert, 1965, p. 164). Thomas Navin argued explicitly that the wartime boom made night work “socially acceptable for the first time” (1950, pp. 338-339). Since almost all the Northern textile states already had legislation prohibiting night work for women, however, it is apparent that this alleged social revolution must have been limited to the South. It is indeed the devastating impact of Southern competition during this period that made the night work issue so explosive. Louis Galambos recounts the persistent and nearly successful efforts of the Cotton Textile Institute to push through night work prohibitions between 1927 and 1932 (1966, pp. 116118, 141-169). It was an unabashed attempt to mobilize reform groups in support of a plan to restrict output, while avoiding antitrust prosecution. The crusade did, however, accurately reflect the views of many manufacturers that night work was a form of “cutthroat competition” which was at the root of the industry’s problem. This reading of the historical record cannot be sustained. It is true that the practice of night work in Southern textiles expanded during the 192Os, but it was not an innovation at the time of World War I. There are numerous reports of mills running “day and night” during the 1890s in such journals as Manufacturers Record, and notices of mills using electric lighting are common.’ As early as the 188Os, virtually all Japanese cotton spinning mills were run on a 24-hr basis, using electric lighting. Closer to home, a 1909 study of the Mexican cotton industry reported that mills in that country “run night and day, and usually figure on 135 hours a week,” more than twice the average for the South as of the early 1920s (Clark, 1909, p. 29). Table 1 presents some limited time series evidence on night work in North Carolina; the data do not support the idea that a revolutionary break occurred during the war years, though they do show a gradual expansion during the 1920s. Evidence from BLS surveys suggests that the pattern was fairly general in the South, night work expanding as demand conditions worsened. In 1926,41% of Southern mills reported night shifts, 42% in 1928, and 64% in 1930 (BLS, Bulletins 446, 492, 539).
Furthermore, the explanations offered by employers as to why they did not run night shifts at all times almost always stressed labor supply ’ For example, “The Cherry Cotton Mill of Florence, Alabama: an electric light plant has been installed in the mill, and the management is preparing to put on a night force of operators” (November 9, 1894, p. 225).
NIGHT
WORK IN SOUTHERN
TEXTILES
343
TABLE 1 Percentage of Firms and Percentage of Labor Force at Firms Reporting Night Shifts: North Carolina 1905-1926
1907 1908 1909 1910 1911 1912 1913 1914 1916 1918 1920 1922 1924 1926
Firms (%)
Workers (%)
23.0 21.4 18.5 15.3 14.1 16.9 17.3 19.0 23.3 24.0 26.1 40.5 11.9 36.0 43.5 52.7
34.0 31.6 27.7 23.0 14.3 15.2 14.9 15.6 24.1 21.5 24.5 36.7 10.5 38.1 42.6 57.2
Source. North Carolina Bureau of Labor and Printing, Annual Reports 17-35.
conditions. In an interview manufacturer” stated,
conducted
in 1907, a “prominent
cotton
When labor was plentiful, in the early days of the cotton industry in the South, people came from the farms begging for work. They were so anxious to secure employment that the fact of its being night work did not matter. Then the mills were sure of securing as good a class of operatives for night shifts as for day shifts and night work was as profitable as day work. But from 1900 on, when labor began to be scarce, this condition vanished. The better class of operatives could always get day work. This left the least intelligent to do night work; hence the product of such work was of inferior quality and less profitable than the product of day work. (USDL, 1910, pp. 284-285)
The volume of night work complaints during the depressed 1890s as opposed to the prosperous years 1904-1907 seems to bear out this interpretion (North Carolina Bureau of Labor & Printing 1895-1907). Further testimony may be found in the responses of firms to a question on a 1919 US. Housing Corporation form asking how many shifts they ran and why. In Charlotte, North Carolina, only 2 of 20 textile firms reported two shifts, and virtually every one of the one-shift firms gave “scarcity of help, ” “lack of labor,” or “labor shortage” as the reason9 9 Files of U.S. Housing Corporation, 34, 48, 219-220).
National Archives. See also Smith (1960, pp. 20,
344
SHIELLS
AND WRIGHT
In an earlier article, Wright (1981, pp. 621-628) presented evidence that the Southern textile industry in the 1920s was characterized by excess labor supply. The background for this situation was the striking increase in nominal and real wages between 1914 and 1920, coinciding with depressed conditions in Southern agriculture thereafter. The crux of the evidence is summarized in Fig. 5, which traces the course of farm and industry wages between 1880 and 1933. Throughout the 192Os, Southern cotton textile labor appeared to be priced above its opportunity cost, as represented by farm wages. Patterns of night work fit quite closely the predictions of our model. Where premia were formerly paid, they declined or disappeared (Blicksilver, pp. 69-70). Families were required to supply night workers as a condition for entry into the mill village. We even find, as our model predicts, that the night shift expanded while the day shift contracted. Table 2 shows that the 1920s were characterized by a decline in the full-time work week as well as a decline in the percentage of full-time hours actually worked. As one observer noted (Women’s Bureau, 1928, p. 7), A strange comment on shift work is offered by the combination of night work with short time. In many places, even with the mills running three or four days a week, the night shifts still continued.
We ran a simple regression provide a preliminary test of wages encourage night work. OLS for the period 1905-1926 NWL
on the North Carolina nightwork data to our hypothesis that high, disequilibrium The following results are obtained using (t ratios are in parentheses)“:
= 27.23 + 2964(WTEX-WFARM)/WPI (2.69) N = 16 R2 = 0.392 D-W = 1.28
+ 40.07@ - Q)/Q (1.05)
i0 The data on WTEX comes from Bureau of Labor Statistics industry wage surveys, conducted annually 1905-1914, then biannually 1916-1926. WFARM is from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (1942). Since our model incorporates both firm and household decisions, either the WPI or the CPI, or both, could be used as deflators. We use the WPI because it is a better historical series, and because the relevance of existing cost of living indices to Southern textile mill workers is questionable. The measure WTEX- WFARMI WPI was scaled up by 1000. Q is North Carolina output of cotton cloth in bales, adjusted to a constant weight, where both figures are taken from the annual surveys of the Commercial and Financial Chronic/e. Q = 538.63 + 38.24T, where T is incremented by one from 1905 to 1914 and by two thereafter. There was some problem in synchronizing the dates of the various yearly series. The North Carolina State Labor Bureau surveys of night work appear to reflect levels of nightwork at the beginning of the year, while the BLS wage surveys were taken irregularly throughout the ensuing year until 1922. We chose to match night work observations for 1905-1922 with the previous year’s wage, except for 1924 and 1926, where the wage survey was taken in January.
NIGHT
WORK
IN SOUTHERN
TEXTILES
345
346
SHIELLS
Data
AND TABLE on Hours
WRIGHT 2 of Work
1907 New England
1924
South
New England
South actually 73 80 77 75 79
Ring spinners (F) Speeder tenders (M&F) Spoolers (F) Doffers (M) Weavers (M&F)
83 87 86 82 88
Percent 82 78 78 81 80
of full-time 78 83 83 81 84
Ring spinners Speeder tenders Spoolers Doffers Weavers
48.7 50.7 50.0 48.0 51.2
Hours 51.2 49.1 48.6 51.0 50.1
actually 39.8 42.1 41.3 40.9 42.3
Full-time
1928
hours
worked, 40.4 44.4 42.4 41.8 43.7
New England worked 81 83 85 82 86 per week 41.5 41.7 42.2 42.3 43.0
1900 1902 1904 1906 1908 1910 1912 1914 1916 1918 1920 1922 1924 1926 1928
66 66 66 65.7 60.1 60 60 60 60 56.5 54.0 54.2 55 55 55
Source. USDL Bulletins
-
(1910): 371, 492; Bulletin
In this equation NWL workers employed at 1. (WTEX-WFARM)/WPI WTEX, the wage rate gives a base wage in
Weavers (S.C.) 66 66 66 65.5 60.4 60 60 60 60 59.9 54.3 54.9 55 55 55
65 71 71 71 71 37.1 40.0 39.5 39.3 39.6
per week Slasher
Spinners (S.C.)
South
tenders
(S.C.)
(N.C.)
tGa.1
60 60 60 60 60 60 55 55 55 55 55
65.3 62.5 60 60 60 60.2 55.2 55.2 55.3 55.5 55.4
63.2 62.2 60 60 60 60 56.4 56.8 55.9 56.3 56.3
1, pp. 262-269,
BLS
Women and Child Wage-Earners,
Vol.,
604.
is the percentage of North Carolina cotton textile firms working night shifts, as presented in Table is a measure of labor market disequilibrium. for female spinners in North Carolina farm labor, the textile industry. WFARM, the wage rate for
NIGHT
WORK IN SOUTHERN
TEXTILES
347
North Carolina farm labor, reflects labor’s opportunity cost. The gap between these wages is then expressed in real terms by deflating by the wholesale price index. The coefficient on the wage gap term is positive, as expected, and statistically significant. The second independent variable, (Q - $)/Q is a proportional measure of the deviation of North Carolina’s output of cotton cloth from a simple time trend. The coefficient on this variable is not significantly different from zero, but then our model predicts that the direction of cyclical movements in nightwork in a single industry will be ambiguous. The shortcomings of this crude regression on aggregated data are undoubtedly severe, but the results lend at least some credence to our proposition that during this period the relationship between textile wages and night work was positive. The launching of the National Industrial Recovery Administration in 1933 requires a distinct break in the historical narrative, The NIRA provided exactly the kind of enforcement authority that the industry association had long been looking for, and the cotton textile code (the first one adopted in the nation) enacted a strong version of night work prohibition, in conjunction with the 40-hr work week and minimum wages for labor (Galambos, 1959, Chap. 9; Weinstein, 1980, Chap. 1). As Fig. 5 indicates, the minimum wage provisions represented a substantial increase in hourly payment in the South, raising them still further above levels that already exceeded opportunity costs by a wide margin. These circumstances would have increased night work according to our model, but the code prohibited firms from running their machinery more than 80 hr per week (the so-called 40-40 plan). The industry experience after the demise of NRA in 1935, however, is striking: the higher wage scales and shorter work week were generally retained,” while the hours of machinery again increased. Firm-level information on night work practices in the 1930s is difficult to find, but a 1937 survey reported that the second shift had become “all but universal,” with 35% of Southern firms .making some use of a third shift (BLS Bulletin 663, pp. 27). Figures on spindlehours per spindle as compiled by the Commerce Department tell a similar story (Table 3). They show that “capacity utilization” rose ,in the depression years of 1936-1937, 1938-1939, and 1939-1940 to levels exceeding any previous experience. Presumably, the reason we do not have published shift work surveys from the late 1930s is that the political campaign to abolish night work had become hopeless. From 1933 onward, Southern industrial employers were under continuing federal pressure to raise their wages toward national norms. The labor provisions of the NRA were restored by the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, and Subsequent increases in the level and coverage of the federal ‘I Detailed documentation of stickiness of wages and wage structures may be found in BLS Bulletin 663 (1938), particularly the bar graphs on p. 118.
348
SHIELLS
Spindle-Hours 1921-1922 1922-1923 1923-1924 1924-1925 192.5-1926 1926-1927 1927-1928 1928-1929 1929-1930 1930-1931 1931-1932 1932-1933 1933-1934 1934-193s 1935-1936 1936-1937 1937-1938 1938-1939 1939-1940 Source.
per Spindle,
AND
Southern
WRIGHT
TABLE 3 States, 1921-1957
2976 3389 2937 3171 3274 3625 3527 3627 3236 2851 2801 3483 3067 2825 3431 4111 3180 3779 4232 Computed
from
Statistical
(Years
ending
July
1940-1941 1941-1942 1942-1943 1943-1944 1944-1945 1945-1946 1946-1947 1947-194s 1948-1949 1949-1950 1950-1951 1951-1952 1952-1953 1953-1954 1954- 1955 1955-1956 1956-1957
Abstracts
of the United
States,
31) 4920 5855 6042 5590 5352 4882 5275 5425 4574 5084 5795 5040 5509 5141 5423 5609 5536
1923-1958.
minimum wage have all had their major “bite” in the South. In light of this history, it is notable that by far the largest increases in average weekly plant hours over the period 1929-1976 occurred in two low-wage Southern industries (see Table 4), textiles and tobacco. Equally noteworthy for the textiles industry is that this transition occurred during a time when shift work premia were small and steadily declining in real terms. According to BLS wage surveys, the prevailing third-shift premium remained at 5e per hour between 1946 and 1975. In what is itself a remarkable example of wage stickiness, the premium had been placed at 5e by a decision of the War Labor Board in 1945 (War Labor Reports, 1945, pp. 793-818). We do not, of course, mean to deny the obvious facts that lighting technologies, lifestyles, and many other relevant variables have changed over this period, but we suggest that the surplus labor conditions which prevailed during these years encouraged the industry to build night work into its plans in a permanent way. III. CONCLUDING COMMENTS We can only conjecture at this point about the scope of potential applicability of the sort of model we have developed. In a modem industrial economy, the combination of circumstances required may be somewhat rare: competitive conditions in the product market along with wage rigidity in the labor market. There may be other historical applications, however, from earlier periods. Brody (1960), for example, states that the expansion
NIGHT
WORK IN SOUTHERN
TEXTILES
349
TABLE 4 Average Weekly Plant Hours, 1929-1976, Major Industry
Food Tobacco Textiles Apparel Lumber Furniture Paper Printing/publishing Chemicals Petroleum Rubber Leather Stone, clay, and glass Primary metals Machinery Electrical machinery Transportation equipment Instruments All manufacturing
1929
1976
88.0 49.2 66.8 46.0 58.2 50.3 128.7 62.7 108.1 157.8 103.7 49.4 104.6 125.5 55.7 49.6 60.5 59.5
90.3 104.4 t1.5.6 46.3 62.6 52.6 139.6 82.8 138.2 162.9 120.0 45.6 119.3 142.4 83.5 77.0 88.8 76.6
Percent change 2.6 112.2 73.0 0.6 7.6 4.6 8.5 31.6 27.8 3.2 15.7 -7.7 14.1 13.5 49.9 55.2 46.8 28.7 24.7
Source. Foss (1981, p. 59).
of shifts to 12 hr in the steel industry occurred during periods of depression in the 1890s (p. 38). And these combinations may be common in LDCs, in industries where product prices are set in world markets, but wages are held up by social pressure or “premature” minimum wage legislation. More broadly, the notion that job attributes have greater flexibility than wage rates is one that has wide potential relevance, which has barely begun to be explored in historical research. This is, of course, a disequilibrium and therefore a short-run conception in conventional terms. But the idea that periods of disequilibrium generate institutional changes which subsequently alter the character of future equilibria is to us the essence of the historical approach to economics. REFERENCES Arrow, Kenneth, Chenery, Ho&s B., Minhas, Bagicha, and Solow, Robert M. (1961), “Capital Labor Substitution and Economic Efficiency.” Review of Economics and Statistics 43. Backman, Jules, and Gainsbrugh, M. R. (1946), Economics of the Cotton Textile Industry. New York: National Industrial Conference Board. Betancourt, Roger R., and Clague, Christopher K. (1975), “An Economic Analysis of Capital Utilization.” Southern Economic Journal 42, 69-78. Betancourt, Roger R., and Clague, Christopher K. (1981), Capital Utilization. New York: Cambridge Univ. Press.
350
SHIELLS
AND WRIGHT
Blicksilver, Jack (1959) Cotton Manufacturing in the Southeast: An Historical Analysis. Atlanta: Georgia State College of Business Administration. Brody, David (1969), Steelworkers in America. New York: Harper Torchbooks (originally published 1960). Clark, W. A. Graham (1909), ‘Cotton Goods in Latin America, Part I.” U.S. Bureau of Manufactures, Special Agents Series, Report 31. Cohen, Kalman J., and Cyert, Richard M. (1965), Theory ofthe Firm, 2nd ed. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall. Foss, Murray F. (1981), “Long-Run Changes in the Workweek of Fixed Capital.” American Economic Review 71, 58-63. Galambos, Louis (1%6), Competition and Cooperation. Baltimore, Md.: The Johns Hopkins Press. Humphrey, David B., and Moroney, J. R. (1975), “Substitution Among Capital, Labor, and Natural Resource Products in American Manufacturing.” Journal of Political Economy 83. Mansfield, Edwin (1979), Microeconomics, 3rd ed. New York: Norton. Marris, R. (1964), The Economics of Capita/ Utihzation. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press. National Industrial Conference Board (1927), Night Work in Industry. New York. National Industrial Conference Board (1938-1940) Quarter/y Review of the Textiles Industry, l-11. Navin, Thomas R. (1950), The Whitin Machine Works Since 1831. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press. North Carolina Bureau of Labor and Printing. (1895-1926), Annual Reports. Reynolds, Lloyd G. (1940), “Cut-throat Competition.” American Economic Review 30, 736-747. Smith, Robert Sidney (1960), Mill on the Dan: A History of Dan River Mills 1882-1950. Durham, N.C.: Duke Univ. Press. Taussig, Frank W. (1931), The Tariff History of the United States, 8th ed. New York: Putnam, 193 1. Textile World, February 4, 1928. United States Bureau of Labor Statistics, Wages and Hours of Labor Series. Bulletins 371, 446, 492, 539, 604, 663. United States Bureau of Labor Statistics, Wage Structure. Series 2, Nos. 37, 41, 89; Reports 82, 184; Bulletins 1410, 1506, 1637, 1801. U.S. Department of Agriculture (1942), Crops and Markets, Vol. 19, no. 5. United States Department of Labor (1910), Report on Women and Child Wage-Earners in the United States, Vol. 1, Washington, D.C. United States Department of Labor, Women’s Bureau (1928), “The Employment of Women at Night,” Bulletin 64. War Labor Reports: Wage and Salary Stabilization (1945), Vol. 21. Bureau of National Affairs. Weinstein, Michael (1980), fiecovery and Redistribution under NZRA. Amsterdam: NorthHolland. Winston, Gordon C. (1974), “The Theory of Capital Utilization and Idleness.” Journal of Economic Literature 12, 1301-1320. Wright, Gavin (1981), “Cheap Labor and Southern Textiles, 1880-1930.” Quarterly Journal of Economics 96, 60.5-629. Zarembka, Paul (1970), “On the Empirical Relevance of the CES Production Function.” Review of Economics and Statistics 52.
IN ECONOMIC
HISTORY
20, 331-350
(1983)
Night Work as a Labor Market Phenomenon: Southern Textiles in the lnterwar Period* MARTHA
SHIELLS
University
of Kansas
AND GAVIN WRIGHT Stanford
University
In the 1920s and 1930s night work in the textiles industry was widely viewed as a major social problem in need of reform. Bulletins of the Women’s Bureau maintained that night workers suffered from loss of sleep, deprivation of sunlight, injury to sight, chronic fatigue, and high rates of illness and accidents, and that the most severe victims were women night workers and the neglected members of their families (USDL, 1928). One company president lamented that night work put a “strain upon the morals of the operatives,” which was “greater than any wise Management could justly permit” (Smith, 1960, p. 220). Southern cotton mills were identified as among the worst offenders, in terms of both working conditions and night work incidence. The concerns of reformers were regarded sympathetically by analysts who viewed “the unrestricted night operation of plants” as “the most menacing factor of excess productive capacity” and hence the source of most of the industry’s problems (Smith, p. 63). The well-known free-trader Frank Taussig described the rise of Southern textiles as “an artifical and almost insensate growth, much promoted by the use of nightwork so widespread as to shame our civilization” (Taussig, 1931, p. 513). The effort to limit or abolish night * For comments on earlier drafts, we extend our thanks to Christopher Clague, Clint Shiells, and Tom Weiss, and to two particularly conscientious referees for this journal. This research was partially supported by the Center for Comparative and Historical Research on the Market Economies (CCHROME) at the University of Michigan. Address correspondence to Professor Gavin Wright, Dept. of Economics, Stanford University, Stanford, Calif. 94305. 331 0014~4983f831
$3.0(4
Copyright 0 1983 by Academic Press. Inc. All rights of reproduction in any form reserved.
332
SHIELLS
AND WRIGHT
work became the core of the Cotton Textile Institute’s response to the Great Textiles Depression after 1924, a campaign in which they were joined by such unlikely bedfellows as the National Consumers’ League, the Southern Council on Women in Industry, and the League of Women Voters.’ As an example of a reform that seemed to have inexorable pressure behind it, but which ultimately failed and would today be unthinkable, the campaign is interesting in itself. Our concern in this article, however, is with the question somewhat obscured by moral fervor, namely the reasons for the spread of night work in Southern textiles between World War I and World War II. Despite the attention paid to this case in numerous microeconomics textbooks, as an illustration of the adjustment process under conditions of excess capacity (Mansfield, 1979, pp. 26% 269; Cohen and Cyert, 1965, pp. 162-165), no persuasive account for the origins of this situation has been offered. We argue that the explanation lies in the stickiness of wages and the emergence of excess labor supplies in Southern textiles in the 1920s and 1930s building on earlier research presented in Wright (1981). To press our historical interpretation, we first lay out a model of night work and wage stickiness which shows (in contrast to previous shift work models) that high wages and depressed demand conditions may well increase the relative and absolute importance of night work, under competitive market conditions. The ironic result emerges that national policies to raise the wages of Southern labor ensured the failure of the crusade to abolish Southern night work. I. A MODEL OF NIGHT WORK In this section we present a simple model that first shows that downwardly rigid wages encourage night work and then demonstrates that a downturn in product demand may lead firms to hire a greater proportion of night workers. The problem addressed in most of the recent shiftwork literature, for example, Betancourt and Clague (1975, 1981), Marris (1964), and Winston (1974), is what determines the number of shifts a plant is designed to run. To model this problem, the authors focus on the firm’s long-run cost minimizing behavior, assuming an output restraint, perfectly elastic labor supplies, and zero ex post elasticity of substitution. One result of these models is that an important determinant of the profitability of shiftwork is the share of capital costs in total single-shift capital and labor costs. Since shift work spreads capital costs over more units of ’ Galambos (1959, p. 153). The National Women’s Party opposed the program on the grounds that it discriminated against women. For samples of contemporary views on night work, see Women’s Bureau (1928), National Industrial Conference Board (1927), and Textile World (February 4, 1928).
NIGHT
WORK IN SOUTHERN
TEXTILES
333
output, a firm with higher capital costs will achieve relatively greater savings by adopting shift work. In the Betancourt and Clague model the effect of higher wages on the profitability of nightwork depends on the elasticity of input substitution. If the elasticity of substitution between labor and capital is less than unity, then an increase in the wage relative to the price of capital will lower capital’s share in costs. Lowering capital’s share will lower the profitability of shiftwork, and thus night shift employment will decline. Our model of night work differs from those discussed above in several respects. First, we want to analyze the response of firms to short-run and disequilibrium phenomena, so we begin with a fixed capital stock and allow for some ex post substitutability.2 Second, rather than assuming perfectly elastic labor supplies we derive day and night labor supplies from the behavior of utility maximizing workers. Finally, we do not require that wages always adjust to clear labor markets. The model is simplified by assuming that firms are profit maximizing competitors in product markets, taking output price as given by p. We also abstract from changes in the length of the standard workday, measuring labor in man-days of equal length on day and night shifts. Thus, a firm working “short-time” will work fewer man-days, rather than fewer hours per day. The inclusion of changes in the length of the workday, however, is a straightforward extension of the model. Demand for Shift Workers
For a firm with capital stock ??, output is given by Q = QD + QN = F(LD, R + F(L*, a
where & is output, L is labor, and the superscripts D and N refer to the day and night shifts, respectively. The production function is assumed to have a nonzero elasticity of substitution even in the short run. This assumption is particularly appropriate for textile industries, where there is considerable flexibility in the labor/capital ratio after machines are in place. The firm’s profits are T = p[F(LD, m + F(LN, n]
- [WLD + (1 + 09 WLN + r??l
(2)
where a! is the shift work premium, and capital costs Y do not depend on how many shifts are worked.3 First-order conditions for profit max’ This is surely appropriate for the textiles industry, where the number of spindles or looms assigned to each worker can be readily varied. Our model does not contribute to the analysis of cases where ex post flexibility is technologically limited, which is the assumption made by Betancourt and Clague. ’ This implies that the rate of depreciation is independent of the rate of utilization, a defensible assumption when most depreciation results from technological obsolescence rather than wear and tear (Betancourt and Clague, 1981, pp. 18-32).
334
SHIELLS
AND WRIGHT
REAL WAGE
w(l + a)
LN
LD
LABOR
FIG. 1. Firm demand curve.
imization
imply
For given W, p, K, and CYcondition (3) determines total output as well as the proportion of day and night workers. The firm allocates labor between day and night shifts by balancing the shift work premium (Yand the diminishing returns to the fixed capital stock F,(L, a. As Fig. 1 indicates, as long as (Y is positive, the night shift will be smaller than the day shift. There will be no night shift if (x is so high that F,(O, KJ < ~(1 + a). Many firms will be in this position, and will not run a second shift, if the night premium is defined to include all the extra costs associated with night work. The need for better lighting, administrative overhead, and less convenient maintenance schedules would then increase the premium. Also, to the extent that fatigue and medical problems reduce the productivity of night workers, the cost per unit of effective night labor will be higher.4 Firm demand curves are aggregated in conventional fashion to form an industry demand curve. 4 We also must assume that the ex post elasticity of substitution is less than unity. Otherwise, the marginal product of labor tends to infinity as labor is reduced to zero, and lirms would always hire some night labor no matter how high the premium is. Also, including night-specific costs in the premium implies that there is a wedge between what firms pay and what workers receive. For simplicity, we ignore this in the rest of the analysis.
NIGHT
WORK
IN SOUTHERN
335
TEXTILES
Supply of Shift Workers Each individual i has a utility function with two arguments Ui = Ui (Xi, Zj)
(4
where Xi is a composite good with price p and Zi is a dichotomous variable reflecting whether the individual works the day or the night shift. Night work is a bad, or Ui(Xi, N> < Ui(Xi, D) for ail individuals and all values of X. If Ui is the level of utility individual i obtains when he withdraws from the wage-labor market, then we can define i’s reservation TV real day wage tiii = --J as the value that satisfies the identity
P
Ui(;ciji)D) ~ 77i.
(5)
Thus, individual i is willing to supply day labor whenever w > gi. Further, we can define individual i’s reservation night work premium pi as the value that satisfies the identity Ui(W(1 + Cui), ~ ~
Ui(W,
D).
(61
For any cz > iZii, the individual will prefer to work nights. Equations (5) and (6) imply that individual i will be indifferent between working nights and not working when Ui(~i(l + Cyi), N) = pi. Market labor supplies are derived by assuming distributions of pi and Ei across potential workers. Then if LS is the total labor supply, LF is the market supply of day workers, and Lt the night workers,
LS = all persons i for whom either w > Wi or w(1 + o) > Wi(1 + C!i)
(7)
Lg = all persons i belonging to Ls for whom (Y 6 Ei
(f3
L; = Ls - L&
(9)
Equilibrium
will be obtained
in this market
by adjusting
w and CYuntil
LS = LD and LF = LE where LD and Lg are the total market labor demand and the day shift labor demand as defined in the section above, Figure 2 depicts this equilibrium. In this figure G;ijminand =(I + E)min are the reservation wages of the individuals least averse to wage labor and night work, respectively. Li and LF then rise from these ordinates, as higher wage levels surpass more reservation wages. These must be understood as equilibrium curves, because in our model the positions of the curves will be interdependent, since each individual is on both labor supply curves simultaneously. Nonetheless, the equilibrium relationships will be as pictured. The vertical distance between Lt and L: will increase as L increases because individuals with higher zi”i’s must be induced to work nights, as the night labor force expands.
336 Disequilibrium
SHIELLS
AND
WRIGHT
Wages
Suppose now that the wage is stuck above the equilibrium level. This disequilibrium wage could result from a decline in output demand and prices accompanied by downwardly rigid nominal wages. This case is described in more detail below. The disequilibrium wages could also be associated with legal minimum wages, or wages in the modern sectors of LDCs. With a disequilibrium wage w1 > w, it follows at once from Eq. (3) that the day shift will contract. If a! is flexible and w1 < w(1 + CX), however, the night shift will not contract because (Y will decline to 6 such that wl(l + CE) = w(1 -t a). The total night wage is the same, so firms are willing to hire the same number of night workers. Also, by condition (7), anyone who was working nights will still want to supply labor. Since a has decreased, some night workers may prefer to switch to day jobs, but the scarcity of day jobs would prevent this. Therefore, the supply of night labor remains constant, and the night shift will not contract as the day shift does. We can say more than this, though, because in this situation some of the unemployed former day shift workers may switch to working nights. In particular, any former day shift worker for whom W,(l
+ ~) > !Vi(l + pi)
(9)
will prefer to work nights rather than remain unemployed. If for some workers a was just barely below their night work reservation price, then we expect that some additional workers will now be compensated for the disutility of night work by the higher real wage. In terms of the labor supply conditions given above we are saying that as the total labor supply expands, and the number of day workers hired decreases, the night labor supply increases. As a result, the day labor surplus will diminish, the shift premium will be further depressed to aI, and there will be an absolute expansion of night work. There are several limits to the expansion of the night shift. First, even if the shift premium is flexible, the total night wage should not be assumed to have a lower floor than the day wage. Thus, the constraint that CYbe nonnegative implies that the night labor supply cannot increase beyond the point where the night wage is equal to the day wage. Second, individuals who were not working at all before will not begin to work nights now. If a person was not working before the disequilibrium wage was imposed, then he must have preferred unemployment to working nights at the total night wage w(1 + cu), Thus, such individuals will not offer night labor at a total wage even lower than w,(l + &) = w(1 + CX).Any increase in the night labor supply must therefore come from people who had been working days, but who lost their jobs when the real wage rose. Given a choice, these people prefer day work to night work at the going wages. They may, however, prefer night work to unemployment. Consequently,
NIGHT
WORK IN SOUTHERN
337
TEXTILES
REAL
WAGE
LR
LD
LABOR
FIG. 2. Industry equifbrium.
the expansion of the night shift can be no greater than the contraction of the day shift. In general, we expect the increase in night labor supply to be less than this limit since workers who were not already on the night shift are those who are relatively averse to night work. Some of these workers will prefer to withdraw from wage labor altogether, rather than work nights. The effects of a disequilibrium wage on day and night shift employment are illustrated in Fig. 3. Here the disequilibrium wage w1 causes the day shift to contract from LD to Lp. Initially, the night premium declines from a! to &, offsetting the increase in the real wage, and night shift employment remains constant at LN. If, however, some of the LD Lf unemployed former day shift workers decide to accept night jobs, the night labor supply curve will shift from Lg to (LF),. This will result in a further decrease of the night premium to a1 and expansion of the night shift to Ly. It may be thought unrealistic to treat the night work premium as completely flexible while the basic daily wage is rigidly fixed. In Southern textiles, many firms paid no explicit premium, while others paid a nominal premium in cents per hour.’ More often the premium was implicit, in ’ See Woman and Child Wage-Earners (1910, p. 186). Since World War II, about onequarter of night shift workers have received no premium, while the other three-quarters have received a premium of 5$ per hour (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Wage Structure: Series 2, Nos. 37, 41, 89; Reports 82, 184; Bulletins 1410, 1.506, 1637, 1801).
338
SHIELLS
AND
WRIGHT
--trt--------__------------_II‘1 __------
NIGHT
WORK
IN SOUTHERN
TEXTILES
339
that a worker with limited experience could expect to be placed on a better paying job on the night shift than if he insisted on daytime work. The many references to problems recruiting a “good class of help” for the night shift (Smith, 1960, pp. 34,48) suggest that this form of effective premium was large and significant in the firms’ calculations. The notion that the firm has more flexibility in manipulating implicit premia operating through placement rules and job attributes is, indeed, part of the basic rationale for our approach. For the sake of argument, however, suppose that the firm finds it administratively impossible to pay any night shift premium at all. In that case we reach the same conclusion by a different route. With (x = only people who prefer night work (for whom Ei < 0) would be willing to work nights. Since we assume that night work is bad for all individuals, there will be no night shift initially. In this situation the marginal-productivity “gap” between day and night will be much greater than in the former case, hence the incentive to establish a night shift when workers become available will be strong. Suppose now that the real wage rises to the disequilibrium level w,. More people will be attracted into the labor market by the higher real wage. Of these people, those who have only a slight aversion to night work will supply night labor when they find that day jobs are scarce. Thus, the night shift will expand even if no displaced day shift workers switch to night work. If some former day shift workers are now willing to work nights, the expansion of night work will be even greater. In our view, the typical Southern textile firm was somewhere between the full-premium and the no-premium. situations. The events described above could result from a deflation of the general price level when the nominal wage is sticky. Suppose that demand for the composite commodity X declines, and its price falls from p to pl. If w = W/p and w1 = W/p,, where W is the rigid nominal wage, then our model predicts the impact on the extent of shift work of a general deflation with a sticky wage. Our model can be compared to models of the macroeconomy in which unemployment is caused by the failure of the nominal wage to fall proportionally with the price level, restoring the market clearing real wage. In our model, however, the unemployment problem is mitigated when employers adjust attributes of the job package, partially offsetting the increased real wage. In the case of night work, adjusting the job package means switching workers to jobs where their marginal product is greater. We therefore have the result that the output decline caused by a downwardly rigid wage will be less than the employment decline. The basic point is that if workers faced with unemployment throw themselves on the mercy of employers, rational firms facing sticky wages will put them to work where their marginal ,product is highest,’ namely on the night shift. Furthermore, the expansion of the night shift will be
340
SHIELLS
AND WRIGHT
more dramatic when employers have not been able to pay full premia for night work. In this case, the shift premium implicit in the higher real wage can attract workers who are relatively less averse to night work. One rather surprising result of our model is that it is possible for the higher wage to lead to an increase in output. Some of the workers who would ordinarily be unable to find work at the higher wage are now able to join the night shift. If a large proportion of the displaced day workers are not extremely averse to night work, then total employment will not decrease by very much. In addition, by moving workers from the day shift, where their marginal product is low, to the night shift, where their marginal product is high, firms can increase output per worker. For reasonable values of the elasticity of substitution, models of the long-run determinants of labor associate high wages with less shift work activity. Our model, on the other hand, associates high wages with more shift work activity. Betancourt and Clague (1981, p. 232) claim that the planned level of shift work in LDCs is low because the factor prices “aren’t right.” Subsidies to productive investments will keep capital prices artificially low at the same time that social pressures cause labor in the modern sector to be priced above its opportunity cost. Unless the elasticity of substitution between capital and labor is greater than unity, the long-run models predict that the higher wage to rental rate ratio in LDCs will lead to lower levels of shift work activity in LDCs than in developed countries.‘j Betancourt and Clague do not consider, however, that a socially determined wage will not be a market-clearing wage.7 In this case, our disequilibrium model would be more appropriate. The disequilibrium model predicts that the level of shiftwork in LDCs will be higher, at least where manufacturing wages are above labor’s opportunity cost. Of the two contradictory predictions, ours seems to be more consistent with the data they present. The two developing countries for which they give data, India and Israel, have higher levels of shift work than the two developed countries, France and Japan (p. 157). Industry-Specific
Decline in Demand
A slightly more complex example of a rigid wage influencing the extent of shift work occurs when demand for a particular product declines relative to others. To illustrate this case, we must introduce a relative price for the industry’s product pl = P,/p where P, is the &solute product price and p is the general price level. If the industry’s relative price declines from p1 to p2, then the relative value of the marginal 6 Estimates of the elasticity of substitution for the textiles industry are usually below unity, though often not significantly below. See Arrow et al. (1961, p. 140), Zarembka (1970, p. 50) Humphrey and Moroney (1975, p. 70). ’ Betancourt and Clague do briefly note the possible implications of unemployment for their conclusions (1981, p. 232), but the point is not developed.
NIGHT
WORK
IN SOUTHERN
TEXTILES
341
product in the industry will shift from pIFL(L, a to p2FL(L, @ as in Fig. 4. The immediate effect will be a decline in night as well as day employment. Even if none of the displaced day shift workers switch to working nights, however, it is likely that the relative importance of night work will increase. Night shift employment will fall relatively less because the downward flexibility of the shift premium allows the quantity of night labor demanded to increase. Furthermore, if some unemployed day shift workers do switch to nights, then there could be an absolute expansion of night work in the midst of an industry-specific depression. This case is illustrated in Fig. 4 where night employment grows from i$ to Ly in response to the fall in product price. The analysis of the no-premium regime is similar, and serves if anything, to increase the likelihood and extent of night work expansion in the midst of depressed demand conditions. II. HISTORICAL
EWDENCE
Among textile industry historians, the prevailing view has been that the rise of night work in the 1920s was a legacy of war-time experience REAL WAGE
w
p FIG.
RN LlL2 4.
Industry-specific
D L2 decline
LD 1 in demand.
LABOR
342
SHIELLS
AND WRIGHT
with double shifts (e.g., Blicksilver, 1959, p. 62; Backman and Gainsbrugh, 1946, p. 26). The implicit suggestion seems to be that night work was an organizational innovation, which required a demonstration period for its success. Lloyd Reynolds’ well-known 1940 article on “Cutthroat Competition” attributed excess capacity in the industry in part to the rise of ni ht work, a proposition that later textbook writers embellished into F somewhat mysterious “institutional changes” (Cohen and Cyert, 1965, p. 164). Thomas Navin argued explicitly that the wartime boom made night work “socially acceptable for the first time” (1950, pp. 338-339). Since almost all the Northern textile states already had legislation prohibiting night work for women, however, it is apparent that this alleged social revolution must have been limited to the South. It is indeed the devastating impact of Southern competition during this period that made the night work issue so explosive. Louis Galambos recounts the persistent and nearly successful efforts of the Cotton Textile Institute to push through night work prohibitions between 1927 and 1932 (1966, pp. 116118, 141-169). It was an unabashed attempt to mobilize reform groups in support of a plan to restrict output, while avoiding antitrust prosecution. The crusade did, however, accurately reflect the views of many manufacturers that night work was a form of “cutthroat competition” which was at the root of the industry’s problem. This reading of the historical record cannot be sustained. It is true that the practice of night work in Southern textiles expanded during the 192Os, but it was not an innovation at the time of World War I. There are numerous reports of mills running “day and night” during the 1890s in such journals as Manufacturers Record, and notices of mills using electric lighting are common.’ As early as the 188Os, virtually all Japanese cotton spinning mills were run on a 24-hr basis, using electric lighting. Closer to home, a 1909 study of the Mexican cotton industry reported that mills in that country “run night and day, and usually figure on 135 hours a week,” more than twice the average for the South as of the early 1920s (Clark, 1909, p. 29). Table 1 presents some limited time series evidence on night work in North Carolina; the data do not support the idea that a revolutionary break occurred during the war years, though they do show a gradual expansion during the 1920s. Evidence from BLS surveys suggests that the pattern was fairly general in the South, night work expanding as demand conditions worsened. In 1926,41% of Southern mills reported night shifts, 42% in 1928, and 64% in 1930 (BLS, Bulletins 446, 492, 539).
Furthermore, the explanations offered by employers as to why they did not run night shifts at all times almost always stressed labor supply ’ For example, “The Cherry Cotton Mill of Florence, Alabama: an electric light plant has been installed in the mill, and the management is preparing to put on a night force of operators” (November 9, 1894, p. 225).
NIGHT
WORK IN SOUTHERN
TEXTILES
343
TABLE 1 Percentage of Firms and Percentage of Labor Force at Firms Reporting Night Shifts: North Carolina 1905-1926
1907 1908 1909 1910 1911 1912 1913 1914 1916 1918 1920 1922 1924 1926
Firms (%)
Workers (%)
23.0 21.4 18.5 15.3 14.1 16.9 17.3 19.0 23.3 24.0 26.1 40.5 11.9 36.0 43.5 52.7
34.0 31.6 27.7 23.0 14.3 15.2 14.9 15.6 24.1 21.5 24.5 36.7 10.5 38.1 42.6 57.2
Source. North Carolina Bureau of Labor and Printing, Annual Reports 17-35.
conditions. In an interview manufacturer” stated,
conducted
in 1907, a “prominent
cotton
When labor was plentiful, in the early days of the cotton industry in the South, people came from the farms begging for work. They were so anxious to secure employment that the fact of its being night work did not matter. Then the mills were sure of securing as good a class of operatives for night shifts as for day shifts and night work was as profitable as day work. But from 1900 on, when labor began to be scarce, this condition vanished. The better class of operatives could always get day work. This left the least intelligent to do night work; hence the product of such work was of inferior quality and less profitable than the product of day work. (USDL, 1910, pp. 284-285)
The volume of night work complaints during the depressed 1890s as opposed to the prosperous years 1904-1907 seems to bear out this interpretion (North Carolina Bureau of Labor & Printing 1895-1907). Further testimony may be found in the responses of firms to a question on a 1919 US. Housing Corporation form asking how many shifts they ran and why. In Charlotte, North Carolina, only 2 of 20 textile firms reported two shifts, and virtually every one of the one-shift firms gave “scarcity of help, ” “lack of labor,” or “labor shortage” as the reason9 9 Files of U.S. Housing Corporation, 34, 48, 219-220).
National Archives. See also Smith (1960, pp. 20,
344
SHIELLS
AND WRIGHT
In an earlier article, Wright (1981, pp. 621-628) presented evidence that the Southern textile industry in the 1920s was characterized by excess labor supply. The background for this situation was the striking increase in nominal and real wages between 1914 and 1920, coinciding with depressed conditions in Southern agriculture thereafter. The crux of the evidence is summarized in Fig. 5, which traces the course of farm and industry wages between 1880 and 1933. Throughout the 192Os, Southern cotton textile labor appeared to be priced above its opportunity cost, as represented by farm wages. Patterns of night work fit quite closely the predictions of our model. Where premia were formerly paid, they declined or disappeared (Blicksilver, pp. 69-70). Families were required to supply night workers as a condition for entry into the mill village. We even find, as our model predicts, that the night shift expanded while the day shift contracted. Table 2 shows that the 1920s were characterized by a decline in the full-time work week as well as a decline in the percentage of full-time hours actually worked. As one observer noted (Women’s Bureau, 1928, p. 7), A strange comment on shift work is offered by the combination of night work with short time. In many places, even with the mills running three or four days a week, the night shifts still continued.
We ran a simple regression provide a preliminary test of wages encourage night work. OLS for the period 1905-1926 NWL
on the North Carolina nightwork data to our hypothesis that high, disequilibrium The following results are obtained using (t ratios are in parentheses)“:
= 27.23 + 2964(WTEX-WFARM)/WPI (2.69) N = 16 R2 = 0.392 D-W = 1.28
+ 40.07@ - Q)/Q (1.05)
i0 The data on WTEX comes from Bureau of Labor Statistics industry wage surveys, conducted annually 1905-1914, then biannually 1916-1926. WFARM is from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (1942). Since our model incorporates both firm and household decisions, either the WPI or the CPI, or both, could be used as deflators. We use the WPI because it is a better historical series, and because the relevance of existing cost of living indices to Southern textile mill workers is questionable. The measure WTEX- WFARMI WPI was scaled up by 1000. Q is North Carolina output of cotton cloth in bales, adjusted to a constant weight, where both figures are taken from the annual surveys of the Commercial and Financial Chronic/e. Q = 538.63 + 38.24T, where T is incremented by one from 1905 to 1914 and by two thereafter. There was some problem in synchronizing the dates of the various yearly series. The North Carolina State Labor Bureau surveys of night work appear to reflect levels of nightwork at the beginning of the year, while the BLS wage surveys were taken irregularly throughout the ensuing year until 1922. We chose to match night work observations for 1905-1922 with the previous year’s wage, except for 1924 and 1926, where the wage survey was taken in January.
NIGHT
WORK
IN SOUTHERN
TEXTILES
345
346
SHIELLS
Data
AND TABLE on Hours
WRIGHT 2 of Work
1907 New England
1924
South
New England
South actually 73 80 77 75 79
Ring spinners (F) Speeder tenders (M&F) Spoolers (F) Doffers (M) Weavers (M&F)
83 87 86 82 88
Percent 82 78 78 81 80
of full-time 78 83 83 81 84
Ring spinners Speeder tenders Spoolers Doffers Weavers
48.7 50.7 50.0 48.0 51.2
Hours 51.2 49.1 48.6 51.0 50.1
actually 39.8 42.1 41.3 40.9 42.3
Full-time
1928
hours
worked, 40.4 44.4 42.4 41.8 43.7
New England worked 81 83 85 82 86 per week 41.5 41.7 42.2 42.3 43.0
1900 1902 1904 1906 1908 1910 1912 1914 1916 1918 1920 1922 1924 1926 1928
66 66 66 65.7 60.1 60 60 60 60 56.5 54.0 54.2 55 55 55
Source. USDL Bulletins
-
(1910): 371, 492; Bulletin
In this equation NWL workers employed at 1. (WTEX-WFARM)/WPI WTEX, the wage rate gives a base wage in
Weavers (S.C.) 66 66 66 65.5 60.4 60 60 60 60 59.9 54.3 54.9 55 55 55
65 71 71 71 71 37.1 40.0 39.5 39.3 39.6
per week Slasher
Spinners (S.C.)
South
tenders
(S.C.)
(N.C.)
tGa.1
60 60 60 60 60 60 55 55 55 55 55
65.3 62.5 60 60 60 60.2 55.2 55.2 55.3 55.5 55.4
63.2 62.2 60 60 60 60 56.4 56.8 55.9 56.3 56.3
1, pp. 262-269,
BLS
Women and Child Wage-Earners,
Vol.,
604.
is the percentage of North Carolina cotton textile firms working night shifts, as presented in Table is a measure of labor market disequilibrium. for female spinners in North Carolina farm labor, the textile industry. WFARM, the wage rate for
NIGHT
WORK IN SOUTHERN
TEXTILES
347
North Carolina farm labor, reflects labor’s opportunity cost. The gap between these wages is then expressed in real terms by deflating by the wholesale price index. The coefficient on the wage gap term is positive, as expected, and statistically significant. The second independent variable, (Q - $)/Q is a proportional measure of the deviation of North Carolina’s output of cotton cloth from a simple time trend. The coefficient on this variable is not significantly different from zero, but then our model predicts that the direction of cyclical movements in nightwork in a single industry will be ambiguous. The shortcomings of this crude regression on aggregated data are undoubtedly severe, but the results lend at least some credence to our proposition that during this period the relationship between textile wages and night work was positive. The launching of the National Industrial Recovery Administration in 1933 requires a distinct break in the historical narrative, The NIRA provided exactly the kind of enforcement authority that the industry association had long been looking for, and the cotton textile code (the first one adopted in the nation) enacted a strong version of night work prohibition, in conjunction with the 40-hr work week and minimum wages for labor (Galambos, 1959, Chap. 9; Weinstein, 1980, Chap. 1). As Fig. 5 indicates, the minimum wage provisions represented a substantial increase in hourly payment in the South, raising them still further above levels that already exceeded opportunity costs by a wide margin. These circumstances would have increased night work according to our model, but the code prohibited firms from running their machinery more than 80 hr per week (the so-called 40-40 plan). The industry experience after the demise of NRA in 1935, however, is striking: the higher wage scales and shorter work week were generally retained,” while the hours of machinery again increased. Firm-level information on night work practices in the 1930s is difficult to find, but a 1937 survey reported that the second shift had become “all but universal,” with 35% of Southern firms .making some use of a third shift (BLS Bulletin 663, pp. 27). Figures on spindlehours per spindle as compiled by the Commerce Department tell a similar story (Table 3). They show that “capacity utilization” rose ,in the depression years of 1936-1937, 1938-1939, and 1939-1940 to levels exceeding any previous experience. Presumably, the reason we do not have published shift work surveys from the late 1930s is that the political campaign to abolish night work had become hopeless. From 1933 onward, Southern industrial employers were under continuing federal pressure to raise their wages toward national norms. The labor provisions of the NRA were restored by the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, and Subsequent increases in the level and coverage of the federal ‘I Detailed documentation of stickiness of wages and wage structures may be found in BLS Bulletin 663 (1938), particularly the bar graphs on p. 118.
348
SHIELLS
Spindle-Hours 1921-1922 1922-1923 1923-1924 1924-1925 192.5-1926 1926-1927 1927-1928 1928-1929 1929-1930 1930-1931 1931-1932 1932-1933 1933-1934 1934-193s 1935-1936 1936-1937 1937-1938 1938-1939 1939-1940 Source.
per Spindle,
AND
Southern
WRIGHT
TABLE 3 States, 1921-1957
2976 3389 2937 3171 3274 3625 3527 3627 3236 2851 2801 3483 3067 2825 3431 4111 3180 3779 4232 Computed
from
Statistical
(Years
ending
July
1940-1941 1941-1942 1942-1943 1943-1944 1944-1945 1945-1946 1946-1947 1947-194s 1948-1949 1949-1950 1950-1951 1951-1952 1952-1953 1953-1954 1954- 1955 1955-1956 1956-1957
Abstracts
of the United
States,
31) 4920 5855 6042 5590 5352 4882 5275 5425 4574 5084 5795 5040 5509 5141 5423 5609 5536
1923-1958.
minimum wage have all had their major “bite” in the South. In light of this history, it is notable that by far the largest increases in average weekly plant hours over the period 1929-1976 occurred in two low-wage Southern industries (see Table 4), textiles and tobacco. Equally noteworthy for the textiles industry is that this transition occurred during a time when shift work premia were small and steadily declining in real terms. According to BLS wage surveys, the prevailing third-shift premium remained at 5e per hour between 1946 and 1975. In what is itself a remarkable example of wage stickiness, the premium had been placed at 5e by a decision of the War Labor Board in 1945 (War Labor Reports, 1945, pp. 793-818). We do not, of course, mean to deny the obvious facts that lighting technologies, lifestyles, and many other relevant variables have changed over this period, but we suggest that the surplus labor conditions which prevailed during these years encouraged the industry to build night work into its plans in a permanent way. III. CONCLUDING COMMENTS We can only conjecture at this point about the scope of potential applicability of the sort of model we have developed. In a modem industrial economy, the combination of circumstances required may be somewhat rare: competitive conditions in the product market along with wage rigidity in the labor market. There may be other historical applications, however, from earlier periods. Brody (1960), for example, states that the expansion
NIGHT
WORK IN SOUTHERN
TEXTILES
349
TABLE 4 Average Weekly Plant Hours, 1929-1976, Major Industry
Food Tobacco Textiles Apparel Lumber Furniture Paper Printing/publishing Chemicals Petroleum Rubber Leather Stone, clay, and glass Primary metals Machinery Electrical machinery Transportation equipment Instruments All manufacturing
1929
1976
88.0 49.2 66.8 46.0 58.2 50.3 128.7 62.7 108.1 157.8 103.7 49.4 104.6 125.5 55.7 49.6 60.5 59.5
90.3 104.4 t1.5.6 46.3 62.6 52.6 139.6 82.8 138.2 162.9 120.0 45.6 119.3 142.4 83.5 77.0 88.8 76.6
Percent change 2.6 112.2 73.0 0.6 7.6 4.6 8.5 31.6 27.8 3.2 15.7 -7.7 14.1 13.5 49.9 55.2 46.8 28.7 24.7
Source. Foss (1981, p. 59).
of shifts to 12 hr in the steel industry occurred during periods of depression in the 1890s (p. 38). And these combinations may be common in LDCs, in industries where product prices are set in world markets, but wages are held up by social pressure or “premature” minimum wage legislation. More broadly, the notion that job attributes have greater flexibility than wage rates is one that has wide potential relevance, which has barely begun to be explored in historical research. This is, of course, a disequilibrium and therefore a short-run conception in conventional terms. But the idea that periods of disequilibrium generate institutional changes which subsequently alter the character of future equilibria is to us the essence of the historical approach to economics. REFERENCES Arrow, Kenneth, Chenery, Ho&s B., Minhas, Bagicha, and Solow, Robert M. (1961), “Capital Labor Substitution and Economic Efficiency.” Review of Economics and Statistics 43. Backman, Jules, and Gainsbrugh, M. R. (1946), Economics of the Cotton Textile Industry. New York: National Industrial Conference Board. Betancourt, Roger R., and Clague, Christopher K. (1975), “An Economic Analysis of Capital Utilization.” Southern Economic Journal 42, 69-78. Betancourt, Roger R., and Clague, Christopher K. (1981), Capital Utilization. New York: Cambridge Univ. Press.
350
SHIELLS
AND WRIGHT
Blicksilver, Jack (1959) Cotton Manufacturing in the Southeast: An Historical Analysis. Atlanta: Georgia State College of Business Administration. Brody, David (1969), Steelworkers in America. New York: Harper Torchbooks (originally published 1960). Clark, W. A. Graham (1909), ‘Cotton Goods in Latin America, Part I.” U.S. Bureau of Manufactures, Special Agents Series, Report 31. Cohen, Kalman J., and Cyert, Richard M. (1965), Theory ofthe Firm, 2nd ed. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall. Foss, Murray F. (1981), “Long-Run Changes in the Workweek of Fixed Capital.” American Economic Review 71, 58-63. Galambos, Louis (1%6), Competition and Cooperation. Baltimore, Md.: The Johns Hopkins Press. Humphrey, David B., and Moroney, J. R. (1975), “Substitution Among Capital, Labor, and Natural Resource Products in American Manufacturing.” Journal of Political Economy 83. Mansfield, Edwin (1979), Microeconomics, 3rd ed. New York: Norton. Marris, R. (1964), The Economics of Capita/ Utihzation. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press. National Industrial Conference Board (1927), Night Work in Industry. New York. National Industrial Conference Board (1938-1940) Quarter/y Review of the Textiles Industry, l-11. Navin, Thomas R. (1950), The Whitin Machine Works Since 1831. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press. North Carolina Bureau of Labor and Printing. (1895-1926), Annual Reports. Reynolds, Lloyd G. (1940), “Cut-throat Competition.” American Economic Review 30, 736-747. Smith, Robert Sidney (1960), Mill on the Dan: A History of Dan River Mills 1882-1950. Durham, N.C.: Duke Univ. Press. Taussig, Frank W. (1931), The Tariff History of the United States, 8th ed. New York: Putnam, 193 1. Textile World, February 4, 1928. United States Bureau of Labor Statistics, Wages and Hours of Labor Series. Bulletins 371, 446, 492, 539, 604, 663. United States Bureau of Labor Statistics, Wage Structure. Series 2, Nos. 37, 41, 89; Reports 82, 184; Bulletins 1410, 1506, 1637, 1801. U.S. Department of Agriculture (1942), Crops and Markets, Vol. 19, no. 5. United States Department of Labor (1910), Report on Women and Child Wage-Earners in the United States, Vol. 1, Washington, D.C. United States Department of Labor, Women’s Bureau (1928), “The Employment of Women at Night,” Bulletin 64. War Labor Reports: Wage and Salary Stabilization (1945), Vol. 21. Bureau of National Affairs. Weinstein, Michael (1980), fiecovery and Redistribution under NZRA. Amsterdam: NorthHolland. Winston, Gordon C. (1974), “The Theory of Capital Utilization and Idleness.” Journal of Economic Literature 12, 1301-1320. Wright, Gavin (1981), “Cheap Labor and Southern Textiles, 1880-1930.” Quarterly Journal of Economics 96, 60.5-629. Zarembka, Paul (1970), “On the Empirical Relevance of the CES Production Function.” Review of Economics and Statistics 52.