Patroklos wrote:Simon_Jester wrote:Thing is, what I'm suggesting is that instead of constantly retraining we should consciously scale back per-worker hours and just hire more people in the existing job categories that are not being shrunk by automation. To some extent this requires retraining, but to a large extent it does not.
So you are going to ban the hiring of more competent and more motivated workers so you can spread the love between them and a lesser candidate? Are you going to punish people for working overtime or even just the full forty?
Similar arguments were made against putting the forty hour work week in place in the first place.
There is no need to ban people from working hard, to incentivize employers to hire more people rather than squeezing their existing people harder.
Hell, we've accidentally done it already at the low end of the job market- you're not wrong about that. We have the issue of a host of part time employers that have popped up lately which hire five people working 25 hours a week on unpredictable schedules, rather than three people working 40 hours a week plus occasional overtime on steady schedules. Because that way you don't have to pay the three workers' benefits.
And yet... the only reason that presents a problem is the secondary aspects. The part time workers are being paid at a salary calibrated to provide a viable living at forty hours a week, not thirty. And the unpredictable hours take a toll. And because our entire system of ensuring that the public gets things like health care and adequate retirement savings is based on employer-provided benefits.
If we went to single-payer health care, and made employers pay people more, while shifting around the balance of taxation a bit, that might actually be a relatively healthy way to do exactly what I'm talking about. Or at least to
begin to do it.
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Again, take a look at Japan. There are employers in Japan for whom the
routine is sixty or seventy hour work weeks. If just working people harder was a vital part of economic success, the Japanese should have a per-worker productivity considerably higher than ours, and should be cleaning our clocks. But they're not- they caught up with us in per capita GDP and are now pretty much stagnant. Because it turns out that the long hours are counterproductive- the workers are under more stress, they're more tired, their employers have less incentive to come up with ways to use their time efficiently.
Working massive overtime is not a good strategy for making white collar workers productive. It is a
great way for the management culture to demonstrate cult-like loyalty to the employer, but there's no reason the rest of our civilization (or Japan's) should twist itself into pretzels to appease the MBAs.
Because half the problem is that people are automating a system so that instead of needing 400 man-hours of work a week they need 200... and then they respond by firing six workers and making the other four work 50 hours, instead of firing four and making the other six work 33.33 hours.
You've said this a few times, but do you have any proof that this is a broad trend through all or at least most of the labor sectors? This observation is sort of weird given the prevalence of part time workers. It also going to reduce wages as none of your six working 33 is as important as any of the four working 40.
Er, four working fifty.
That said, you're right that what I talked about was a generalization and that I was thinking more in terms of the middle and upper echelons of the job market.
At the low end (especially the low-wage service sector), you get the opposite process because employers
are doing what you describe and hiring more part-timers instead of fewer full-timers.
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Basically, then, the problem is that this creates an expanding low-salary labor market with many jobs that individually pay little (which forces some employees to double up and try to take two jobs), but a shrinking high-salary labor market.
And the reason that presents an issue is because there are different equilibrium states for a modern economy. You can stabilize in a position of low wages, low consumer spending, and high income inequality... or in a position of high wages, high spending, and low income inequality. The second equilibrium state is better for the general public, and in relative terms that's what the US
was several decades ago. But since Reagan we've been sliding toward the first equilibrium.
Government policies have the power to influence the balance point that the market moves towards. In this case, my main argument is that we should be pushing toward the high-income equilibrium.
That way, you get the people at the bottom (who are now underemployed in terms of hours worked) being able to function better in the economy because it brings their per-hour wages up and gives them a chance to make those low-hour jobs
adequate for them.
And you get people in the middle (who are now under pressure to work extra-hard) being able to relax a bit because they can make the classic choice of financially successful individuals- to trade some of their money (or earning opportunities) to buy back a little of their time (by working a 35-hour week instead of a 40-hour week with pressure to put in an extra six or whatever)
People at the top don't get much out this. So yes, there will be interests that don't approve of this. My argument is that they've been getting their way for decades and it isn't working out very well for America at large.
You or someone also just got done telling us how you require two full time workers per household to maintain living standards. The last time I checked 66 hours is less than 80. Or are the employers supposed to hire (and double or triple train/maintain/equip/provide healthcare for/etc.) twice the workers at lesser hours for the same weekly pay? You are talking about a steep haircut across the board I think, good luck convincing the losers (the majority of people) to vote for that close to 25% income cut.
The way you make this
happen is by incentivizing employers to pay a bit more, while gradually disincentivizing them from overworking existing employees, and trying to reduce or remove costs associated with having more employees.
For example, we already have a huge problem with our workforce not having the new skills it needs to stay competitive. Maybe spending money training your employees should be more tax-deductible... which coincidentally means that training more workers is less costly and unpleasant.
We have a problem with employers not wanting to be health insurance payers. Maybe we should go single-payer
like the entire rest of the developed world, and then employers would not have this problem, and wouldn't have to worry about paying for health insurance for the extra workers.
