Monthly Archives: August 2023

Unionized Laziness

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The United Auto Workers union is bent on being the epitome of it. UAW’s President Shawn Fain:

I think we should push a 32-hour work week.

In return for working less, the union is willing to settle for

  • Increased paid time off
  • Double-digit raises

In an ideal world, Ford, General Motors, and Stellantis, along with the other major car companies that assemble their cars in the US, will have the stones to tell the union to take a hike. American companies are not job welfare entities, they exist to produce goods and services for consumers and to make profits for their owners.

If the union wants to have a light work week and big pay, it should start its own car company and operate within those parameters.

It’s Safer This Way

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Recall that, in the wake of Vice President Kamala Harris’ (D) slur regarding Florida’s updated education curriculum, Governor Ron DeSantis (R) invited her to Florida to discuss with him that curriculum.

Harris doesn’t want to. She made it to Florida, though, to talk to the 20th Women’s Missionary Society of the African Methodist Episcopal Church Quadrennial Convention. That’s where she made her excuses and backed away.

They attempt to legitimize these unnecessary debates with a proposal that most recently came in of a politically motivated roundtable[.]
Well, I’m here in Florida, and I will tell you there is no roundtable, no lecture, no invitation we will accept to debate an undeniable fact. There were no redeeming qualities of slavery.

The core of her excuse-making is that strawman of hers, a dolly she’ll have to play with by herself. No one is suggesting, including in the curriculum, that there are, or were, any redeeming qualities of slavery. Nor was that the subject of the discussion DeSantis offered; he offered to discuss the curriculum and how it proposed to teach, in the proximate matter, black history, including slavery, in the United States and in Florida.

It’s easy to sit in the safety of the sidelines and carp. It’s cowardly, too, but it’s entirely consistent for the border tsar who’s never been to our southern border.

Who Interviewed These Folks?

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I have to ask because:

Roman Devengenzo was consulting for a robotics company in Silicon Valley last fall when he asked a newly minted mechanical engineer to design a small aluminum part that could be fabricated on a lathe—a skill normally mastered in the first or second year of college.
“How do I do that?” asked the young man.
So Devengenzo, an engineer who has built technology for NASA and Google, and who charges consulting clients a minimum of $300 an hour, spent the next three hours teaching Lathework 101[.]

How was this newly minted mechanical engineer even hired when he didn’t know the basics of mechanical engineering (how was he able to graduate with a degree when he didn’t know such a basic thing, but that’s for a separate article.) Why wasn’t he given a quick test of the basics? Newly hired secretaries administrative assistants get tested on basics like typing and telephone etiquette and etc. Why wouldn’t any new hire be tested on the basics of the job for which he’s being hired?

Employers are spending more time and resources searching for candidates and often lowering expectations when they hire. Then they are spending millions to fix new employees’ lack of basic skills.

It isn’t just mechanical engineering, either, it’s

  • structural engineers unable to answer questions about the use of trusses in the construction of bridges and roadways
  • nursing students struggling to pass a certification exam
  • new call center workers have problems with soft skills
  • Zoo seasonal workers not looking to be productive; if someone isn’t managing every second and keeping them busy, their inclination is not to self identify what they can do—it’s to do nothing

The list goes on. And on. And on….

In the alternative, instead of taking whatever noob wanders in from the sidewalk, or dropping too many dimes on ad hoc spot training, where are the employers’ more formal, organized remedial training programs? What are these employers doing to work with the schools to help them better train their students/recover more quickly from the effects of the Wuhan Virus Situation and the associated remote learning, which aside from failing generally, didn’t get the newly minted mechanical engineer the hands-on design training he should have had?

Deflationary Pressure in the PRC

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A quick note. As The Wall Street Journal writes, the People’s Republic of China is facing the threat of economic deflation.

Prices charged by Chinese factories that make products ranging from steel to cement to chemicals have been falling for months. Consumer prices, meanwhile, have gone flat, with prices for certain goods—including sugar, eggs, clothes, and household appliances—now falling on a month-over-month basis amid weak demand.

There are a number of causes for the nation’s falling prices, including to some extent, the deflationary pressures being relative to the inflation spike that the PRC experienced as the world came out of the economic dislocation the Wuhan Virus Situation engendered.

However, there’s another factor—a critical one IMNSHO—that pushes for deflation in the PRC. That factor is the nation’s shrinking population. With fewer people even available to buy things, demand necessarily must fall, and if the supply of goods and services doesn’t fall commensurately, prices will come down. If those prices already are flat, or falling, then they’ll only fall further. With that lessened demand, the only way producers can stay in business is to reduce production—to reduce payroll costs, either by reducing pay, laying off workers, or some combination of the two. That reduced income will drive further reductions in demand.

Deflation sets in, and it deepens.

The Quiet Part…

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…out loud, to coin a hackneyed, but cogent, phrase.

On the matter of Federal government industrial farm policy, the Biden administration has made itself crystalline. This is the backdrop:

In January 1994, the North American Free Trade Agreement went into effect, followed by other trade pacts, which significantly increased commercial opportunities for American farmers. Those arrangements have borne great fruit: US agriculture exports stood at $196 billion in 2022, up from $62.8 billion in 1997.

President Joe Biden’s (D) National Security Advisor, Jake Sullivan, doesn’t like that, but in a recent speech, Sullivan went even more broad than just NAFTA, to openly disparage the general policy environment surrounding the development of that treaty. Sullivan lamented that this era of policy was one that

championed tax cutting and deregulation, privatization over public action, and trade liberalization as an end in itself.

Because leaving more money in the hands of us ordinary citizens by taking less of it as taxes, by reducing our cost of doing business by getting regulations out of our way, is inherently bad, says this maven of the Progressive-Democratic Party. Even more: public action must take precedence over private action—because, apparently, Government Knows Better than us ignorant ordinary citizens. And trade liberalization, which further reduces our costs, is a bad end in itself.

This demand that Government must control what our private enterprises produce is a well-understood and textbook…ideology…regarding the importance of government control over our lives. And it’s a central plank of the Progressive-Democratic Party platform.