It is very difficult to identify the 'flow' of labour force from statistics on occupational status. This write-up looks into utilisation of labour as a 'flow'. We have tried to address the following questions: To what extent does a worker engage himself or herself in more than one economic activity? What is the response of work effort with wage rate? Does a worker put in more labour hours with rise in wages (income effect) or enjoy leisure (substitution effect)? Is employment created for the labour force being supplied by the market or it is self-generated? How much of the labour time is being devoted to economic activities and how much towards domestic works? Do women work for more hours than men? For delving deep into the dynamics of labour absorption in rural areas, a time-budget analysis of the working hours is needed. To this effect, one can collect daily engagements of working members in sample households with duration of time in workplaces for four days preceding the date of survey.
In rural areas, people are engaged in different types of activities that may broadly be segmented into two categories. First, there are household works often labeled as 'domestic activities' - processing food, cooking, children's care, educating children, housekeeping, cottage industries for producing goods for use by the households etc. These are, in fact, the so-called 'expenditure saving' activities - mainly conventional activities where mostly women are engaged in and are rarely documented or shown in national statistics. If one can impute value to them, the national income will increase substantially and women's contribution to national income will be highly visible. Of late, men are increasingly getting involved in these types of activities. The second category relates to economic activities against which some monetary payments (wage) are attached - the so-called 'income generating' activities. These include crop and non-crop production, labouring in others' land and business, services, agro-processing and cottage industries for producing goods and services for the market etc.
In this context, readers could be reminded of the theoretical foundations of the supply of labour. The shape of the supply curve depends on two important impacts: income and substitution effects. With a rise in wage level, a worker can earn more by putting in less hours of labour. The residual time may be used for rest or entertainment. Initially, however, labour hours increase with increase in income (called substitution effect) but, at a later stage, that could decrease with rise in the wage rate (called income effect). That is why the supply curve of labour may not rise smoothly upwards, but could bend at some point to reduce the supply of labour. This is called backward bending supply curve of labour. In other words, the negative income effect from higher wages has outweighed the positive substitution effect.
Another reason could be there to reduce the supply of labour: a negative cross-substitution effect between, say, rise in women's wages and husband's hours of work. As women work more, and when the time of husbands and that of wives in home work are substitutes, part of the decline in male labour force participation would reflect a reallocation of time for men from market work to domestic work which happens in societies with high income levels.
In this article, we have defined a worker or labourer as a person who is engaged at least for one hour in activities that increase or save income for the household. Under this definition are included both full-time and part-time labour whereas in the discussion on occupational status mentioned in general researches, we dealt with only full-time workers. Under this new definition, we observe that the number of working members per household has declined. But while male working members showed a downward turn, female working members depicted a marginal rise. The reasons for the decline in the number of workers include, inter alia, a reduction in household size from decline in fertility, migration of working members to cities and abroad, and increase in school participation in the secondary and tertiary levels.
It also appears that in the comparable periods of 1980s and recent past, the duration of economic labour performed by an average worker has been reduced substantially from about four-fifths to three-fourths. This happened due to a reduction in labour force participation by men with the share of women in the labour force remaining almost the same. Two factors could be adduced to this trend: first, men have growingly been attracted to domestic activities, and hence their relative contribution to economic activities has gone down. Second, the subsistence pressure of the households in the past forced young and old labour force to engage in economic activities and for those in active age groups to put in longer hours to earn a subsistence wage. Late Professor Abdullah Faruq called them 'the hard working poor'.
In recent years, the subsistence pressure has eased somewhat with improvements in poverty situation and hence with economic solvency, the poverty-induced longer work hours have been reduced. The old take retirement if they can afford, and the young go to schools abandoning child labour.
During the period under study, the duration of work effort has declined for both male and female labour force. The change is remarkable in the case of women workers as they put in 8.35 hours in recent past compared to 9.20 hours in the 1980s. That means, in the past, women used to work for more hours (in domestic and economic activities together) than men; now men work more than women.
The 'magical' change in the duration of labour for women deserves an explanation. First, the reduction in fertility rate has saved for women time for involvement in childcare. Second, from some hard but cost-effective engagements - for example in boiling paddy, paddy husking through 'dheki' and other manual works - women have reduced the level of engagement as new technologies have entered the market. Now mobile threshers are at the doorstep to substitute women's' efforts for milling rice at early in the morning with dheki. Rice mills for parboiling of paddy and processing of rice are easily accessible. The house floors are paved, and hence women do not have to spend too much time for clearing dusts.
The writer is a former Professor of Economics at Jahangirnagar University.
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