Category Archives: jobs

Prop Up That Industry

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German Chancellor Olaf Scholz wants more government pressure on support for battery cars, their manufacture, and their sale to an uninterested public.

German chancellor Olaf Scholz has called for the introduction of Europe-wide measures to increase uptake of electric vehicles, in a speech at Ford Motor Corp’s factory in Cologne, just weeks after the US car maker outlined plans to lay off 4,000 of its European workers.
In the speech at Ford’s EV factory on Tuesday, Scholz argued Germany should work to facilitate the “leap forward” towards “electromobility” by providing “support” for the country’s car industry, including by subsidizing energy costs for EV battery makers.

And this bit of contradiction:

Scholz said the support for the car industry should also aim to protect worker’s jobs….

He can’t have it both ways, except through government-mandated featherbedding. It takes fewer workers to build an electric motor and a battery car than it does an ICE motor and an ICE-powered car. It takes fewer suppliers to supply fewer parts, and fewer employees at each supplier, to provide the simpler components of a battery car than the more complex components of an ICE car.

The ripples go on from there: secondarily, all those mom-and-pop stores—diners, grocery stores, bars, entertainment venues, and so on—will get fewer customers from those smaller work forces at the EV factories and supplier plants, resulting in fewer mom-and-pops and fewer employees in surviving mom-and-pops.

No. If the battery car industry still needs overt government fiscal subsidies and mandates aimed at pressuring consumers to spend their own money on even subsidized battery cars, those vehicles and that industry aren’t ready for operation.

The only legitimate support for battery cars is the consumers’ interest in buying them in a free, competitive market shorn of government pressures. That interest isn’t yet there.

Irrelevant

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Or it should be. Biden administration folks, on the way out the door, are jumping to employment at the special interest groups and lobbyists who influenced their decisions while they were in office, and they’re doing it at a higher rate than prior administrations. For instance:

Even though Trump has vowed to roll back the Biden-Harris administration’s climate agenda, these relationships will be maintained and could be strengthened as former federal employees under the current administration go to work for climate groups that will continue to lobby the agencies in support of the activists’ preferred policies.

Not necessarily.

If the incoming Trump administration personnel are true to the terms of their selection for nomination, and if the kitchen cabinet DOGE group, with their goal of reducing the size of the Federal government work force (among other goals), has sufficient influence in Congress, those lobbyists and special interest groups should have little influence, especially with fewer bureaucrats available to be…lobbied…and so easier to keep under control by their government bosses.

In an ideal operation, they should be irrelevant altogether. Especially, they should be ignored if they’re employing ex-Biden administration officials, given those worthies’ utterly failed, damaging even, policies.

A Bureaucrat with an MD…

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…chimes in. Robert Califf, MD, two-term US FDA Commissioner, and long-time government bureaucrat wants the government’s bureaucracy left alone.

As the world’s largest bureaucracy, the US government has ample room for improvement.

Awfully decent of the old boy to acknowledge some minor issues. Then he writes this in his Letter:

…a broad call for support from the workforce would be much more likely to succeed than castigating the workers who have chosen to serve the American public. Instead of suggesting “large-scale firings” and asserting that “if federal employees don’t want to show up, American taxpayers shouldn’t pay them for the Covid-era privilege of staying home,” Messrs Musk and Ramaswamy would be well-served to inspire the workforce to work with them to become more efficient.

This is an example of why bureaucrats who happen to have medical degrees must have their words taken only skeptically.

No one is castigating the workers; Musk and Ramaswamy instead are insisting that those let go not be stigmatized by that while insisting they be given generous severance packages and plenty of notice to find other work before their government jobs end.

Government isn’t the only place employees need to resume working from workplace offices or cubicles—corporate America also is waking up to the need for in-place, face-to-face interactions and collaborations. It’s entirely appropriate to require government employees work full time in the offices and cubicles alongside their colleagues. Those who resist are those resisting the teaming and collaboration that is so necessary to work and so much more effectively done when done in person, and those persons are reducing the efficiency and limiting the potential of their teams. They should be let go.

On that matter of efficiency, this is best achieved with a smaller workforce operating under narrower scoped of responsibilities, tasks, and goals.

Califf is a senior bureaucrat in a government “medical” bureaucracy looking to preserve bureaucrats’ job. Nothing more.

Chopping Blocks for DOGE

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There are several such in the form of overlapping and shared responsibilities across a variety Executive Branch Departments and Agencies.

Three that come to mind are anti-trust enforcement, which is shared between DoJ and FTC, among others; environmental concerns, which are shared among EPA, Interior, Energy, and DoJ among others; and energy development/production, which is shared among Interior, Energy, and EPA, among others.

There are many more.

What DOGE needs to recommend and what President Donald Trump (R) and Congress (because much of this must be done statutorily) need to do is designate one Department/Agency in each of those areas as the Responsible Department/Agency, remove all responsibility, including the Civil Service positions and authority to consult “outside experts” from the other entities, and return the associated personnel to the private sector (no reallocating them to other areas of the Federal government). This both streamlines government and reduces its size by eliminating the jobs altogether.

With regard to DoJ in particular, that Department’s role in any of this should be limited to bringing cases to court; those personnel are enforcers of existing law, not definers of what the law is or should be (though, in the latter case, they certainly can recommend to Congress).

Another target rich environment for DOGE is entirely within the Pentagon. Defense systems development and acquisition is entirely too byzantine, and that labyrinth contributes in large part to the excessive amount of time—years—it takes the Pentagon to develop a system from an initial idea and to the excessive amount of time—more years—to acquire the systems in operationally useful numbers, once a decision to acquire is made. Those interminable delays also vastly increase the costs of both development and acquisition. Here, too, the Responsible Office needs to be designated, and the number of bureaucrats required to sign off (and the number permitted to sign off) need to be reduced, with the others (particularly the erstwhile required signers) returned to the private sector.

The Pentagon moves need especially to be centered on reducing the civilian workforce and on increasing the role and the responsibility of the Combatant, Transportation, and Materiel Commands, with the Combatant commanders being the sole definers of their requirements and numbers, Transportation and Materiel being the definers of the requirements and numbers needed to satisfy the Combatants’ requirements.

The moves and cuts need to be draconian, too; half measures will only perpetuate the current waste and opportunities for waste.

Labor Unions, Labor Workers, and Employers

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The lately formed Republican Party coalition, led by President-elect Donald Trump, consists of business-friendly and labor-friendly folks from opposite wings of the party.

Opposite, though, is not the same as opposing, a distinction the misconception of what’s involved masks. For instance:

People close to the transition said Trump’s potential appointments to key labor positions could include old-guard Republican functionaries, corporate executives, or individuals who are closer to the New Right and see themselves as more pro-worker.

Maybe and individuals who are pro-worker.

This makes plain the misconception:

[U]nion officials said Trump’s record is at odds with his pro-worker rhetoric. “It’s going to be a rude awakening for a lot of folks who wanted to take Trump at his word,” said Steve Smith, a spokesman for the AFL-CIO, which campaigned for President Biden and, subsequently, for Vice President Kamala Harris. “They talk a big game when it comes to workers, but…they’re going to attack the working class.”

Not at all. It’s entirely possible—useful, too—to be both pro-company and pro-working class while simultaneously opposing today’s unions. This is especially the case with today’s unions, where union management, far from concerning themselves with their membership—those working class folks—concern themselves more with what’s good for them personally.

That misplaced concern includes threatening employers with destruction of their businesses—striking and denying the businesses’ ability to function at all unless and until the union managers get their demands satisfied—and with ripping off workers with their efforts to force unionization in businesses where employees continually reject unions in labor votes. Union management in the past ripped off workers even more blatantly by exacting tribute union dues from workers whether they were union members or not. Court rulings have slowed that particular abuse, but they’ve not eliminated it.

What’s needed, and what becomes possible with the incoming administration, is bringing those pro-business and pro-labor folks into the same room to work out processes that benefit both, without the middle man union management in the room clouding things up and constantly trying to pit the one against the other, rather than helping them collaborate on business-labor policies.