Perhaps the people in France are doing that, on a level you are incapable of understanding due to your philosophical prejudices.
At least since the 80s I have been hearing conservatives salivate with glee over the imminent collapse of the European economy due to all the socialistic safety nets they provide for workers instead of allowing them to go homeless and starve, etc., as any decent capitalist country would do. Instead, the European economies seem to be getting on par with the US economy and surpassing it certain respect.
I’m just wondering how many decades it will take for conservatives to learn the obvious lesson here. My guess would be … at least 10, if they are indeed capable of learning it at all. They are so entranced by the short-term benefit of low wages that they are totally oblivious of the benefits of a strong middle class.
I’d double-check at least one of the organs on that list if I were you. Possibly two.
Are you really so oblivious that you don’t understand that one person losing one of several employees is not nearly so endangered as a person who has lost their sole or major source of income? Is all your experience with work strictly theoretical, or what?
The hidden assumption within your argument is that it is all right for you to treat human beings like crap so long as it makes more money for you. I reject that assumption. Joe is not a machine part to be used and discarded.
Simply, I don’t consider property as sacro-saint. I explained why many times in old threads arguing with libertarian.
I agree 100%. I am concerned over the idea that one must make themselves ‘invaluable’ in order to maintain their livelihood. At what point do you stop working to live and begin living to work?
I am also a bit distressed at the cavalier dismissal of the concept of ‘need’ having to do with anything. If Joe can’t meet his needs via honest negotiation with his employer, then I don’t see why he can’t see the government for redress. Get rid of both of those options, and do you think that Joe will balk at meeting his needs through extra-legal means? Would you blame him?
Perhaps what you are incapable of understanding due to your philosophical prejudices is that as long as competition and a free market is allowed to flourish, if I treat people badly they can more easily find employment elsewhere. Ditto if I’m running “fat”. If I am taking the profits from my company and buying yachts while my employees are treated “shittily”, I’ve just created an opportunity for you to start a competing company run on a more egalitarian model. Mind you, if my employees are treated well and are content, I should be able to buy all the yachts I want.
The fact is that the more difficult you make it for companies to adjust to challenging times the less attractive you make it for people to start companies. And that is the worst news for the working man as it results in fewer options for him. The more options he has, the more power he has in the job market.
I grant you that theoretically you can build a model that would change what it means for a company to make decisions based on it’s own self interests. It’s called socialism.
I think what you are saying is that you consider a job to be (more or less) the property of the worker, rather than the employer, and that therefore the property right of the worker is more important than the employer. Yes?
Regards,
Shodan
You might want to remember that his screen name is Liberal. I am sure it was inadvertant, but it has been an issue in the past.
Yeah, but in the real world, your logic breaks down, or more to the point, your assumptions are false in several important respects.
Let’s say I have a business that has small profit margins. If I am forced to keep an unproductive worker employed, my margins are affected because I’ll either have to ask my other employees to do overtime to compensate for the unproductive worker (UW), or I’ll have to hire yet another person to make up for the lack of productivity from the UW. Either way, I’m paying more for the same result. If this scenario is repeated, the impact on my profit margins can become severe enough that I have to shut down. Now, everyone’s out of a job because the government forced me to retain UW’s, and the business that I worked so hard to build up has been destroyed, for the sake of a few deadbeats.
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OK, here’s where we have a difference that may be resolvable. The UW you are describing is such a fuckup that he is bringing the business down. I have always maintained that it is all right to let go of an employee who won’t or can’t do his job. But the argument that you seem to be advancing, and that has been advanced elsewhere in this thread, is that it is all right to let go of a capable worker in favor of a more capable worker. Let’s say worker Mary is capable of processing 10 blivets per hour. This is all he is really expected to do, keeps the workflow moving along, etc. Then an employer discovers that jobseeker Jim can process 15 blivets an hour. This creates a marginal increase in profits. So worker Mary is out on her ass … sucks to be Mary, seems to be the sentiment here.
But it’s not just productivity that’s at issue. There’s a well-known trend for companies to toss out older middle aged workers when their salaries and health insurance claims go up. In this case the layoff has nothing to do with worker Dan’s performance, just the expense of keeping Dan on.
This all works very well for the corps, but what about Dan and Mary? Sucks to be them, I know. But maybe Mary is a single mother who now has to move back in with her parents because she can’t find another job and can’t pay rent. Maybe Dan finds another job, but at much lower wages, with no health benefits, and his kids are suddenly going to have a tough time getting any kind of post-secondary education, while he and the Mrs. have a much tougher time managing their health problems as they age.
When you fire someone, these things happen. They have a ripple effect throughout society. I consider companies that let people go without any kind of safety to be like the old-time firms that just want to dump their wastes in the rivers and streams without any concern whatsoever for the environment. They argued that having environmental regulations kept business expenses up and made it harder for them to hire. Then the Cuyahoga River caught fire from all the pollutants and people out west starting finding lead and mercury and whatnot in their water from all the mining operations, and suddenly people figured out there was in fact a social cost to all this dumping companies were doing.
We finally got business to acknowledge that government can and should manage the environment for the benefit of all.
I would argue that there’s a social cost when companies dump people, too, and that government can and should manage that for the benefit of all. But we’re back where we were in the 60s, with the companies fighting ANY restriction on what they can do. Meanwhile, European economies continue to thrive, because they arent’ discarding their skilled people like they were used candy wrappers. I would suspect there is a huge hidden economic benefit to the European social safety net that conservative leaders on both side of the Atlantic would like to ignore, just as we now acknowledge that there are economic benefits to maintaining a clean, healthy environment. (Well, some of us.)
The French unemployment rate is almost double that of the United States. To correct that situation the French government mandated a 35 hr work week, thus making the labor market less efficient. The result was an increase in unemployment. What are you proposing that the French know that we don’t?
I am sure you know the business buzz word: “Management of Expectation”. In other words, when you are in business, you have to make sure that you do not promise your customers what you cannot possibly deliver. In other words, don’t sell Real Estate on planet Mars, because it will come back to haunt you.
And yet, as a businessman, you have no idea how to manage your own expectations from your employees. You want them to deliver 1,000 %, while you think you are paying them too much. Let’s face it, as an employer, you are after “improving productivity”. What does that mean in terms of Profit/Labor-cost ratio? Let me ask you, What percentage of employers, do you believe, have a “double standard” when it comes to “Management of Expectations” from their workers?
After all, it is YOU, the employer, who is the judge and the jury to decide which employee “won’t or can’t do his job”. As far as I am concerned, no matter what I do for you, you may think that is not “good enough” for YOU. Where is the jury to judge your "Management of Expectations?
I’m only going to dip a toe into this thread as I’ve seen in the past the futility of trying to debate with the faithful on economics and such. But I was reading this article today and thought I’d toss it in.
Admittedly, I’m one of those ‘conservatives’ who is waiting and watching for nations like France to either do a radical (and painful) shift, to basically fall off the charts economically and become a 2nd or even 3rd rate economy…or to fall apart completely, economically speaking. I think that putting SOME market driven elements back into their economies has saved a lot of the European nations and done wonders in countries like the UK. All I can say is, unless my own world view is completely wrong the situation as it is in France today is not sustainable…something has to give. They may be able to bump along for years or even a decade or two, but the wall is approaching IMO and its going to be pretty ugly when they smack into it.
Just my opinion of course…I could be wrong.
-XT
There is no fixed acceptable expectation. If the company doesn’t hire the worker able to process 15 blivets an hour, some other company will. Leaving the first company in a worse competitive position, which, taken to the extreme, would eventually force it to close down.
There was a country in Europe, can’t remember which (Norway?), which tried with some laws making it illegal to fire workers over 60. Resulting in more unemployment than ever for middle aged workers as no company with a sane mind would ever hire persons they couldn’t get rid of again. The same results have been seen in Denmark with laws prohibiting sacking pregnant women. They have resulted in companies much more reluctant to hire on young women, and doing all sort of things to see if she may be pregnant or planning a baby.
Neither do I consider property to be sacrosanct. There are far more important things to me than possessions, which you would know had you participated in some of the old theology threads with Libertarian. 
I’m just trying to get you to explain why a woman’s company is somehow less hers than her house is — unless you do in fact believe that people should be allowed to squat and pitch tents in her yard.
Its that whole ‘unintended consequences’ thingy Rune…it tends to bite one on the ass when one is not looking.
Knowing you guys will LOVE the source, I’m going to post this as well though it doesn’t directly impact on the OP’s question. Its obviously and older article (from 2003) so perhaps things have radically changed since then…I’m not sure, I just happened to find this on on a quick search of how well France’s economy is doing these days.
Enjoy!
-XT
I would argue that there are many many unemployed Frenchmen who are living much more comfortably that Americans employed at low-wage jobs. Many of our jobs offer no health benefits and wages that don’t cover living expenses, and limited work hours, so that a worker must hold down two such jobs. I have read in the Atlanta Constitution about an elderly Atlanta IHOP waitress living in a shelter maid of boxes because she couldn’t afford an apartment. I would consider people living on such margins to be semi-employed, at best.
In fact, the US Dept. of Health and Human Services estimates that we have up to 600,000 people homeless people in the US, 40 percent of whom work . (Cite.).
In fact, even those working poor who can get a roof over their heads often have only the emergency rooms that are required to take indigents as their last-resort sources of medical care. So I would argue that it is far better to be unemployed in France than a working poor person in America. Now, as for business, some businessmen have come to understand the problems that deep poverty brings. Here’s a CEO in Business Week who seems to get it:
Honestly, there’s no point in slinging ad hominems around. If you think that I’m oblivious, then your responding to me is insane, isn’t it? Why you select endangerment as the ground to level when an employer and employee part company is unclear. Merely consider what would happen if you enforced your theory. Shutting down the employer just because an employee leaves harms any number of other people as simply a matter of scale. If endangerment were something to level, then you ought to advocate social guarantees to people who skydive, since they face far more danger than people who do not. If all risk and reward are made equal, then why should anyone risk a business venture that employs people at all?
Not at all. I’ve worked for forty years, and have owned two companies. I believe you’ve already acknowledged that you have no experience with business ownership, haven’t you? If theoretical musings are such a bad thing, then maybe you ought not to be posting. Or did you mean that they are bad for everyone besides you?
You’d have been wrong 20 years ago, perhaps you will be wrong now. I think it very likely that you will be wrong, myself.