Island In Trust by James G. Peoples

Author:James G. Peoples [Peoples, James G.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Anthropology, General
ISBN: 9780813370347
Google: 8nW5AAAAIAAJ
Publisher: Avalon Publishing
Published: 1985-08-11T03:48:58+00:00

The Economics of Time Allocation

I have just tried to show that differences in the availability of monetary resources, when combined with widespread preferences, do not account in any simple way for the difference in allocative patterns between the two sets of households. In this section, I argue that differences in the availability of another resource, men’s labor time, is an important reason for the observed patterns. Employment may meliorate the effects of one constraint on job households (lack of money), but at the same time it imposes an additional constraint (relative shortage of men’s labor). Once stated, this argument also is intuitive: obviously, if employed men devote a sizeable proportion of their time to wage work, then their households have less total male labor available for gardening and fishing. However, the argument is obvious only in the context of the empirically determined, local-level economic and environmental conditions summarized in chapter 5; if these conditions were different, wage labor would not affect job households in the same way or to the same degree. Before pursuing this point, I shall defend the argument with empirical data and with a microeconomic model.

The following data support the argument. First, objectively the time they spend at work consumes most of the labor time available to employed men? as Table A.4 shows, about three-fourths of their potential working time is taken up by their jobs. Further, the administration schedules the working hours of its employees as 8 to 5, Monday through Friday. This schedule greatly interferes with garden work and indeed practically precludes its continuation at previous levels. In general, the two hours or so of daylight that remain after work can be used productively by only those fortunate job holders who have garden land located near their house sites. As described in chapter 5, most of the population lives on Lelu island, but the gardens of most households are located on the mainland. As a result, for most job holders the round trip travel time to their gardens is one-half to one hour, leaving insufficient time to locate and harvest mature tree and root crops. When these considerations are combined with the cultural prohibition against subsistence work on Sunday, a prohibition that is almost never violated, it is easily realized that most employed men have only Saturday available for gardening. In sum, the 40 hour week and unfortunate scheduling of employment objectively consumes the labor time and conflicts with subsistence activities of employed men.

Second, there are statements of employed men that they have little time to engage in subsistence activities. One of the major costs of obtaining a government job was widely considered to be a reduction in the amount of time an employee could devote to agriculture. Such subjective perceptions of informants are supported by the time budget data of Table A.4, which shows that indeed employed men had very little leisure. As mentioned previously, the labor of adolescent boys to which most employed households have access potentially can meliorate the effect of employment time on total hours devoted to subsistence.

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