Okay, here’s a modest proposal I’ve been thinking over:
How’s about we go to a maximum 40 hour work week? I keep reading and hearing about how productivity is going up while employment piddles along because people are being forced to work double shifts, sometimes (coughWalmartcough) without overtime pay. I know back when I was still employed I considered 60 hours a normal week. So how about we just take a cue from the rest of the industrialized world, and delimit the amount of labor a business can extract from a single worker?
It seems like this would result in a wave of hiring, at least to me. I think this would also have to have some impact on pay, since without the lure of high overtime rates workers would have to get something resembling a living wage up front. And if you want more, you could always moonlight.
One factor to consider is that there is a fixed amount of employee overhead for health care, vaction time, and other benefits. This overhead often exceeds $10,000 per year. By asking employees to work more than 40 hours per week, employers can minimize their employee head-count and therefore minimize the amount of overhead.
I have to agree with you. You are not nuts. This is a good idea.
What is preventing us from doing this is that bald headed manager * yelling at you, threatening your job, if you don’t finish this report before the weekend. At the time, you don’t care about the overall economy. You only care about the upcoming weekend.
I work in distribution of products (can I get any more vague?). I deal with headaches and emergencies on a daily basis, mostly caused by people’s unwillingness to accept real world logistics.
“My parts are in Spain? So I’m going to have the tomorrow?”
“Uh, no. Across the ocean, through customs, will take atleast a week.”
“A whole week? Argh!”
“I said atleast a week.”
“Argh!”
I deal with these bald headed managers at my company as well as at my customers’ companies everyday, all day long. Business lives and dies by the month end quota. People promise things that they cannot realistically achieve. The result is a bald headed manager yelling at you for not getting enough done. Thus, we work longer hours to make up for these unrealistic expectations.
This is engrained in the US business psyche.
*No representation of any bald headed manager, real or fictitious, is meant to offend any readers here.
A majority of people would happily accept inflation if the chances of them becoming unemployed for any significant length of time was efectively zero.
Unfortunately , the minority who don’t think this way are the richest 1% who own 18% of the wealth here in the UK and an incredible 40% of the wealth in the US: Inflation to them means significant erosion of their assets, and so any level of unemployment lower than around 4% is considered “too low”.
Gazpacho made a good point. This system (or something very similar to it) is in effect in France. IIRC, it’s a 35 hr work week, but I don’t remember how extensive this it-- ie, how much industry is covered by this rule. Dod you really want to subject the US to French unemployment rates?
My primary objection to this is one of simple freedom. You are telling someong they are not allowed to work more than 40 hours a week even if they want to. What if I don’t want to moonlight? What if I have kids to take care of at night? What if I can’t find a moonlighting job?
“You can always moonlight” = “let them eat cake”
You cannot legislate wealth. If you could, you could just legislate companies to pay a “lviing wage” to people out of work and dispense with the whole unemployment concept to begin with.
My last job, I pulled 60 hour weeks, if I was lucky. Several weeks I topped 80. For all this trouble, I got a big fat $0 in overtime compensation pay.
Oh wait, that must be because I wanted to. And now I’m such an elitist for suggesting that instead of diverting the overhead and salary for another worker to my incompetent and vastly overpaid boss, we should have hired an adequate workforce.
:rolleyes:
This isn’t a corporate culture thing. This isnt’ a freedom of business thing. This is a US not doing something intelligent the rest of the civilized world already did, and getting economically clobbered for it thing.
No. In fact, Inflation often hurts ordinary people even mroe than the elite. The big problem here is that it destroys wealth. So even if you are getting a job, you may not actually be able to buy anything out of it.
Right. The reason the US economy had a slump was because workers had too much overtime, and not because of all those things like 9/11 or the end of the tech boom.
Cite? Particularly when its a matter of public record that France is the one being hammered?
Which means that your company needs to reassess its direction and you need to look for a new job. And eyah, it might take a while. Tell him you simply cannot do the amount of work he wants you to do. Because its the truth and he isn’t paying you. And if he’s a good man he’ll accept that. And if he isn’t, go somewhere else. Even in the slump we had job growth and new opportunities. If you think there’s nowhere to go, you are wrong.
Bullshit. They will accept inflation up until they have to fill their gas tanks, buy clothes or go to the grocery store and notice that prices have gone up.
Zero unemployment is impossible. There will always be some level of frictional unemployment due to bad fits and people switching jobs and whatnot.
The solution to unemployment is to create job opportunities. Encourage existing businesses to grow and encourge the development of new businesses.
Wealth is not a finite commodity so those numbers have no social meaning. Bill Gates can double his wealth and it does not affect me negatively. In fact, if he does increase his wealth it will be the end result of increased jobs. If that were not the case then the standard of living would be higher in England based on the ratio’s listed above.
Of course, my mistake, by “zero unemployment is possible” I should have said “zero long term unemployment is possible for the willing” since there will always be residual unemployment from the unwilling, those between jobs, those in seasonal jobs or those having to retrain due to obsolete skills. I also admit that unemployment and inflation are not necessarily two sides of the same coin (as indeed argued by the first article I linked to).
However, I stand by my argument that unemployment is a tool used to control inflation. Without a labour shortage, workers demand greater wages (since nobody will offer their services at a lower rate), and so unemployment of any lower than, say, 4% is considered a risk to inflation. Interest rate rises are known to throw people out of work, thus creating a group of people willing to sell their services for a smaller sum and hence controlling inflation.
I also maintain that “A majority would prefer inflation to the risk of unemployment”, although I admit that I should have made it clear that a “balancing” exercise was taking place. Of course inflation has deleterious effects on everyone, such as price rises and savings erosion. However, this effect is mitigated for those people who have debts rather than savings, and considering the genuine distress caused by long-term unemployment I contend that most would prefer inflation to rise rather than the risk of unemployment rising. (Those of us lucky enough to have assets and few worries about long-term unemployment are necessarily more repelled by inflation, granted.)
And yes, I still maintain that, even though there might be numerically more people who would have this preference were they able to experience the two situations and compare, the decision is ultimately made in favour of unemployment over inflation by a richer minority. How? Because the poor don’t vote.
first column year
second column unemployment rate
third column inflation rate
It sure looks to me like low inflation has a much better chance of low unemployment.
Curiously, this argument (or a similar one) has been advanced before.
The labor movement for a 40 hour work week grew out of ‘share the work’ demands during the panics of the late 19th century. And we’ve certainly adapted to that.
I’m not saying it’s a good idea this time. Just that dismissing it out of hand ignores similar episodes in history.
It might work just fine for the guy at Micky-D’s being forced to work long hours and not getting paid.
But not everyone is in that position. My husband is an asst. professor. He works incredibly long hours. Part of this is trying to get tenure. Part of this is that there is no one else else at the university (or possibly in the county) who knows enough about his specific experiments and micro-specialty to do the work. But most of this is that he loves his job and is a workaholic.
Would this law apply to folks like him? To medical residents? To CEOs? To everyone?
The inflation game is a race. Since inflation, over time, makes money worth less, the price of goods and services rises.
So it’s a race against inflation and time. In order to beat the game, one has to earn more and more money. That means either becoming more competitive, more efficient, or working more hours to compensate for the difference that inflation makes.
Sure there are places where there is 0% unemployment. It’s called Communism.