Tag Archives: jobs

Sunset Clauses

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Here’s another example of their utility. To help out the furloughed and fired during the current Wuhan Virus situation, the Federal government enhanced existing unemployment insurance payouts with an extra $600 per week. The plus-up doesn’t expire until the end of July, more than three months hence.

Many businesses, especially the small and mom-and-pops that are at the heart of our employment environment, are starting to re-open as they figure out ways to operate at least partially or as State-level restrictions start to ease.

However.

Employees say they’ll take the unemployment check for as long as they can make more money by not working. One internal Trump Administration analysis estimates that this work disincentive applies to millions of Americans.

That’s not laziness, as the Wall Street Journal‘s editorial correctly emphasizes. That’s workers making economically sound, rational decisions. Especially at the lower end of the economic scale, taking a functional pay cut to go back to work is…suboptimal.

Such a plussing up of unemployment payouts could have been made marginally acceptable—this particular jobless spike came about due to Government fiat rather than business decisions or economic cycles—had the addenda been accompanied with a hard milestone rather than an arbitrary date. A milestone like, oh say, an employer being ready to hire back and offering to do so, or a more blanket State-level easing of restrictions that would allow ranges of businesses to start re-expanding their operations or re-opening altogether—and so hiring or re-hiring.

It’s possible this oversight can be fixed in the next round of Wuhan Virus situation responses, but I’m not holding my breath.

GIGO

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Garbage in, garbage out. That doesn’t only apply to modeling or to the utility of software functions.

Deutsche Welle had an article earlier discussing the potential of the present Wuhan Virus situation and the emphasis on working from home to drive increasing digitization of the work being done.

[M]any firms and a considerable proportion of workflows in administration and the education system are still paper-based, using postal letters and fax machines. However, the coronavirus crisis has been a wake-up call for many of them.
Smaller firms are now hoping to jump on the bandwagon, [Bitkom Head of Digital Business Processes Nils] Britze notes. “By using cloud technology, every company can quickly find a digital solution to processing documents or setting up video conferences.” Direct investment in IT infrastructure complete with servers would have been too costly for many, but cloud-based services have proven a real game changer.

However, and this is key, Britze also pointed out that

just using digital tools to improve workflows isn’t enough. Work processes have to be enhanced across the board to use the full potential of digitization. “If you just digitize an inefficient analog process, you end up with an inefficient digital process[.]”

Even work processes optimized for digitization and a work-from-home environment, though, are insufficient. That home environment must be optimized for the work, too: there is a large reduction in direct oversight, and there are myriad distractions in the home environment that need to be handled, also. Folks aren’t fundamentally lazy, but routinely working from home presents a business work culture change that wants handling that’s as carefully done as the digitization itself.

Digitization, after all, is like most things in the human endeavor: it’s is a tool, not an end, and the utility of any tool is in the efficiency of the use of it, not in its mere existence.

Employment Insurance

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This is Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidate Joe Biden’s latest brain…storm.

The presumptive Democratic presidential nominee proposes getting all 50 states to adopt and dramatically scale up short-time compensation programs—also known as work sharing—in which businesses and companies in distress keep workers employed at reduced hours, with the federal government helping to make up the difference in workers’ wages.

That’s not going to do anything other than shift a part of a worker’s pay from the company employing him to us taxpayers.  With Uncle Sugar—that’s us—picking up part of the tab, companies would have no incentive to keep workers employed fulltime, much less pay them a full wage. They would have an incentive to claim this or that distress.

Such a move also would distort cost-signaling by masking the true cost of labor to a company. That would flow, in turn, to inaccurate price signaling in the market place, since the prices buyers would see would not be tied to the seller’s true costs.

This is just another example of Progressive-Democrats looking to expand their welfare cage and gild it with taxpayer money.

Reporting To/Working For

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Texas Governor Greg Abbott (R) is going to release an Executive Order this week outlining requirements for safely beginning to reopen the Texas economy as the Wuhan Virus situation begins—begins, mind you—to start [sic] to wind down.

The details of the order were not immediately clear.

The NLMSM isn’t, yet, particularly upset by this lack of clarity at this point, and neither should they be. Still, the statement invites a remark from me (if for no other reason than that it’s my blog, and I’ll blog if I want to, blog if I want to, blog if I want to).

The details needn’t be made available to the press at all before the EO is published for the public’s consumption. That’s not a matter of withholding information from the press, it’s a matter of priorities.

Abbott doesn’t work for the press; he works for us Texas citizens. Of course he should report to his bosses before he reports to anyone else. The press is only a tool—and not the only tool—for carrying out that responsibility.

Full stop.

Progressive-Democrat Extortion

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The Progressive-Democrats in Congress held up the last Wuhan Virus Federal aid program for four critical days, led by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D, CA) and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Pelosi (D, NY). These persons tried to force inclusion in the aid an array of programs irrelevant to it but central to the Progressive-Democrats’ ideology and platform.

They’re at it again. The new aid effort, currently under way in the Senate, is centered on small businesses and their employees: an additional $250 billion for the Paycheck Protection Program

Two top [Progressive-]Democrats—House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer—in a statement on Wednesday morning said they want the additional $250 billion for PPP to get packaged with other provisions, such as $100 billion for health-care institutions, $150 billion for state and local governments and extra help for food-stamp recipients.

These two, and their cronies in both houses of Congress, are holding up the aid while they try to force inclusion of $100 billion for health-care institutions, $150 billion for state and local governments and extra help for food-stamp recipients.

This is just naked extortion. Nice aid program you have there. You need to pay some protection fees for it.

Never mind that additional funding—from some source, not necessarily on the taxpayers’ backs, but maybe so—for hospitals, et al., for state and local governments who’ve a long history of fiscal irresponsibility, for those on food stamps could easily be discussed and debated in a separate bill or three.

Never mind, too, that not a single red penny of the $150 billion already appropriated for health care and medical-related stockpiles has been spent. Piling more money behind that bottleneck serves no purpose beyond virtue-signaling.

No. Small businesses and their employees can just go hang unless Progressive-Democrats get their demands met. As The Wall Street Journal put it, [t]ens of thousands of small businesses are heading for bankruptcy without short-term liquidity from the feds. That’s OK, though, if Party can’t get its demands met.

Again, no. Paying the vig, paying the ransom—paying the Danegeld just gets the payer stuck with the Dane forever.