BLS and Parkinson’s Law

It is a commonplace observation that work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion. Thus, an elderly lady of leisure can spend an entire day in writing and dispatching a postcard to her niece at Bognor Regis. An hour will be spent in finding the postcard, another in hunting for spectacles, half-an-hour in a search for the address, an hour and a quarter in composition, and twenty minutes in deciding whether or not to take an umbrella when going to the postbox in the next street. The total effort which would occupy a busy man for three minutes, all told, may in this fashion leave another person prostrate after a day of doubt, anxiety and toil. Granted that work (and especially paper work) is thus elastic in its demands on time, it is manifest that there need be little or no relationship between the work to be done and the size of the staff to which it may be assigned. Politicians and taxpayers have assumed that a rising total in the number of civil servants must reflect a growing volume of work to be done. Cynics, in questioning this belief, have imagined that the multiplication of officials must have left some of them idle or all of them able to work for shorter hours. But this is a matter in which faith and doubt seem equally misplaced. The fact is that the number of the officials and the quantity of the work to be done are not related to each other at all. The rise in the total of those employed is governed by Parkinson's Law, and would be much the same whether the volume of the work were to increase, diminish or even disappear. The validity of this recently discovered law must rely mainly on statistical proofs, which will follow. Of more interest to the general reader is the explanation of the factors that underlie the general tendency to which this law gives definition. Omitting technicalities, we may distinguish, at the outset, two motive forces. They can be represented for the present purpose by two almost axiomatic statements, thus:
Factor I. An official wants to multiply subordinates, not rivals, and Factor II. Officials make work for each other. To comprehend [those factors], we must picture a civil servant called A who finds himself overworked. Whether this overwork is real or imaginary is immaterial. For this real or imagined overwork there are, broadly speaking, three possible remedies:

1. He may resign.
3. He may ask to halve the work with a colleague called B.
5. He may demand the assistance of two subordinates to be called C and D.

There is probably no instance in civil service history of A choosing any but the third alternative. By resignation he would lose his pension rights. By having B appointed, on his own level in the hierarchy, he would merely bring in a rival for promotion to W's vacancy when W (at long last) retires. So A would rather have C and D, junior men, below him. They will add to his consequence; and, by dividing the work into two categories, as between C and D, he will have the merit of being the only man who comprehends them both. When C complains in turn of being overworked (as he certainly will), A will advise the appointment of two more assistants to C [and two more assistants] to help D, whose position is much the same. With this recruitment of E, F, G and H, the promotion of A is now practically certain. Seven officials are now doing what one did before. From this description of the factors at work the student of political science will recognize that administrators are more or less bound to multiply.

The [Admiralty] officials would have multiplied at the same rate [78.45%], had there been no actual seamen at all.

The colonial territories were not much altered in area or population between1935 and 1939. They were considerably diminished by 1943, certain areas being in enemy hands. They were increased again in 1947, but have since then shrunk steadily from year to year as successive colonies achieve self-government.

This [analysis] gives an average increase of 5.89 percent each year, a percentage markedly similar to that already found in the Admiralty staff increase between 1914 and 1928. And this increase, while related to that observed in other departments, has nothing to do with the size - or even the existence - of the [British] Empire [at all].

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