🚀 go-pugleaf

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: 20 Jun 94 14:06:41
From: Dale R. Worley <drw@severi.mit.edu>
To: bit-listserv-quality@uunet.UU.NET
Subject: Re: Organizational change (fwd)

In article <Pine.3.89.1.1.9406192027.A8452-0100000@yu1.yu.edu> Daniel Ritsma <ri
 tsma@yu1.yu.edu> writes:
 1:I don't think workers fear *changing* employment so much as being put
 off and not finding other employment.The fear is one of unemployment
 rather than change.Unemployment is a very real fear for many as
 advances in technology permit society to produce more with less yet does
 not ration out available work. [...]
 and some weekends during peak periods, and this in a society with a 15%
 unemployment rate.The *fear* of unemployment is particularly strong
 among older (middle-aged) workers who find themselves restructured out of
 a job after many years of "faithful" service.

 [...]  Such a viewpoint overlooks the
 structural nature of unemployment in a capitalist society.It benefits
 the corporations while blaming the victims.

I don't wish to deny the validity of your points, but there are other
aspects of the situation that merit consideration as well.One
critical one is economics:If wages are truly set by supply and
demand, unemployment must necessarily hover around the intrinsic
("structural") unemployment rate.If unemployment stays higher for
too long, people move away and/or wages drop to the level that labor
becomes cheaper than technology, and labor demand increases.
Conversely, if unemployment stays lower for too long, wages rise and
employers learn how to employ fewer people.

(Since wages in the US are generally set by supply and demand, there
are no long periods of high unemployment.In Europe, wages are
prevented from decreasing by unionization, the dole, and high minimum
wages, so high unemployment can persist.)

(This provides a good way to deflate the Republical brag that the US
economy created an incredible number of jobs in the 1980's: In any
open labor market, if workers enter the market (as they did in the
1980's), jobs for them *will* be created by economic forces, probably
due to falling wages.)

>From this point of view, the interesting question is how an employee
can come into a job that pays more than he could get elsewhere.After
all, the employer isn't going to pay more than he has to, is he?

It seems that there are three principle causes of this situation:

1. Technological unemployment -- changes in technology reduce the
demand for particular skill sets.This seems to happen, but the
number of people who are genuinely displaced seems to be small; most
seem to be able to re-tool into similar jobs, or new, high-tech
versions of their old jobs, at pay levels that are similar to their
previous jobs.(It can easily take relocation and a couple of years
for people to recover from this sort of dislocation, though.)

2. Seniority-based pay -- employees are paid based on their tenure
with the company, rather than the economic value of their labor.This
seems to be a major problem among middle-aged workers: The actual
value of their labor hasn't increased in 10 or 20 years, but they've
been getting a few percent raise over inflation each year.After a
couple of decades, it's not hard for them to be getting 50% or 100%
more than the actual value of their labor.

3. Unionization -- a union can fairly easily raise the pay of workers
(especially workers with low skills) well above the market rate for
that sort of labor.(The usual indicator of this is long waiting
lists of prospective employees.)While this works reasonably well in
the short run, in the US the company usually eventually counterattacks
by moving the factory to the American South or a third-world country.

Now, there may be other causes.But I've never seen a situation where
many workers got "stranded" by economic changes where one of the
latter two factors wasn't present, and the factor was usually
unionization.The "rust belt" of the US went through a truly horrible
restructuring during the 1980's, but it involved almost entirely
heavily unionized manufacturing industries.Smaller, non-unionized
operations (e.g., the steel mini-mills) survived and often grew
strongly.

 2:How does frequent change of jobs help "open communications".  This
 connection is not obvious to me.

If I *know* that I can get another job as good as this one, I have no
fear of telling the boss the truth.Indeed, if I know that the
company is a bunch of chiseling bastards who certainly aren't going to
pay me a penny more than I can get elsewhere, I don't even have to
check around to make sure that I could get another job before telling
the managment where they're going wrong.Nastiness on the part of
managment guarantees me that I need never fear losing the job.

Dale

Dale Worley             Dept. of Math., MIT             drw@math.mit.edu
--
Of course, the best way to defend an indefensible position is to announce
loudly that it should be above attack.  -- greg@phoenix.princeton.edu