The Economics of Featherbedding

Abstract

Union efforts to maintain or increase members' wage incomes and employment opportunities by imposing a variety of make-work rules and policies on employer units motivated largely by a desire to minimize the insecurity of income and employment arising out of changes in the supply of and demand for labor. For reasons which not relevant here, such practices have come to be known as featherbedding, a term which contains more than a faint suggestion of opprobrium. Ross, for example, has observed that featherbedding practices are customarily illustrated by exhibiting a familiar Chamber of Horrors which includes The Unwanted Spray Gun, The Third Man in the Diesel Cab, Ten Bricks in the Hod, The Uninvited Stagehand and The Twice-Threaded Pipe; and Aaron has flatly asserted that they can safely be assigned to the category of horribles, along with Monopoly and the man-eating shark. But name-calling is no substitute for analysis, and while the literature contains much of the former, frequently coupled with suggestions as how best to extirpate the evil, it reveals comparatively little of the latter. This article is an analysis of the economic aspects of featherbedding under conditions of monopoly and competition in the product market, and particularly of the impacts of alternative featherbedding rules on output, price, and the distribution of income. (Author's abstract courtesy EBSCO.)

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