Category Archives: jobs

Nationalizing Private Enterprise

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OK, State-ifying private enterprise, for now, if this proposal goes through. Some California Progressive-Democratic Party legislators are setting up legislation that would have California pay unemployment benefits to strikers. The move also would put businesses and workers, both, at some risk from Government control, but never mind that.

A group of California Democrats are expected to propose handing out unemployment benefits to striking workers.
Language expected to be released in the coming days or weeks to provide striking workers with benefits from California’s unemployment insurance program that is $18 billion in debt. The move comes amid historic strikes by both screenwriters and actors, forcing many movies and TV shows to halt production.

This move would lessen the incentive for workers and their unions to build up strike funds. Uncle Sugar—or for now Daddy Gavin—will pick up increasing portions of the strike tab.

But this move is more dangerous than that in the longer term. This is an active assault on the free enterprise system that’s at the center of our economy, whether that’s the intention of this move or not.

Workers pay each other during strikes. That’s what a significant fraction of their union dues are for: setting up a strike fund so while workers are on strike, and so not being paid by their employer, still have money coming in to cover their critical expenses. The bigger the strike fund, the longer the strike can last, and the more the business(es) being struck can be damaged. It’s hard to find a bigger strike fund than Government’s control of its citizens’ tax remittals, which under this proposal would supplant union dues.

This move, if realized, would lead to Government saying to any business, individually or collectively, “Nice business you got there. Be too bad if your employees didn’t come to work for a while.”

This move also would put the labor force at risk of government control. With strike funding coming from Government under the guise of unemployment benefits, Government would be in a position to reward workers for not working striking, when Government wants to use them to pressure a Government-disfavored business. On the other hand, Government would be in a position to punish withhold benefits from workers who don’t strike this time from those who do strike on their own initiative at a later time, or who strike without Government’s prior permission.

Private Enterprises as Government Jobs Welfare Programs

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That’s the position of the Pennsylvania Progressive-Democratic Party’s Representative G Roni Green. She’s proposing, with an absolutely straight face, a State law that would require businesses with 500 or more employees to cut their employees’ 5-day, 40-hour work week to 4-day, 32-hour work weeks—with no change in pay. That’s a government-mandated 25% pay raise.

Jobs welfare doesn’t get much better than that.

Green’s rationalization centers on two premises. One is that society looks and operates differently than it once did in 1938 (when the government-mandated 40-hour work week was enacted). That’s true enough. Society has grown more complex, more technologically capable, and consumers’ needs (consumers being, after all, at the core of society) have grown quite a bit.

All of that, though, requires continued and increasing employee productivity to enable us Americans to continue, and continue to improve, our standard of living. That growing productivity isn’t possible with the proposed 25% reduction in hours of productivity Green is proposing.

That last brings us to Green’s second rationalization.

Technological advancement alone have [sic] significantly increased the productivity of workers allowing more work to be accomplished in less time.

That’s also true. Indeed, technological advancements have advanced to the point that entire worker jobs have been replaced. Technology does a lot of things that employees currently do at least in part. One result of Green’s move, were it to become law, likely would be a further reduction in employee hours, this time on business’ initiative: to substantially less than 32 hours, converting full-time employees to part-time, with commensurate reduction in pay and in most cases reduction or outright elimination of benefits. The eliminated hours of work would be done by robots…technology.

Green further claims (as cited by Fox Business) research [that] has shown that companies have been able to adopt a shorter workweek without compromising productivity. What isn’t looked at in such “research” is the degree to which such a shorter work week caps productivity growth so that there is no longer any improvement, merely maintenance. So much for keeping up with “society’s” increasing complexity and consumer needs.

Technological advancements—spurred by this government interference—will accelerate this trend in reducing human employment and reducing human income.

I Have a Question

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It seems that employers offering/allowing remote work at least some of the time, are better able to hire quickly than employers who require full-time presence in the office for work. The subheadline nicely sums up the article’s thesis.

Employers offering flexible work options are hiring at a faster pace than those requiring full-time office attendance

And the lede:

With employers fighting for a limited pool of office workers, those offering remote-friendly jobs appear to have the upper hand.

Upper hand compared to what? That brings me to my question, which is this: what’s the quality of work done by the part-time remote employee compared with that of the full-time in-the-office employee?

OK, a second question: what’s the quality of employee who works remotely at least some of the time compared with the employee who works in the office full time?

A bonus question: what’s the quality of the quickly hired employee, or the quality of the work done by him—the partial remote employee, for instance, but not exclusively so for this question—compared with the employee who’s hired after some time spent by the employer in the search?

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.

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?