Or just invest in industrial robots.Originally Posted by Williamsmith
Or just invest in industrial robots.
Or just say: "Hey, we're making massive profits!" And then leave it at that.
Or keep turning people into robots. After all, I am pretty close to one now. And I know many who are too.
A local business I help own and operate decided several years ago to pay our workers a living wage. This was. substantial commitment on our part - this is a very expensive part of the country to live in, and you can't generally manage to hire reliable unskilled labor for $15/hour.
We went down this path partly out of a sense of social justice and honoring labor and all of that. But frankly, mostly for self-serving reasons - employee retention, emote reliability, quality and predictability of work output, and all that evil business stuff. Most of our jobs require some specialized training and skill, and the use of judgment. Retraining new people every year, only to have them quit after two weeks of hard work wasn't really economical.
To find this increase in payroll expenses, we doubled the price of our product, and *eliminated many of the unskilled positions* by investing in machinery or hiring specialists to come in to perform just the needed work.
At the end of the day, we now have positions that pay a living wage, but fewer positions overall. So, that's a win for the people who retained their jobs, maybe a lose for those who found that glueing wine labels onto bottles wasn't worth $20+/hour.
it makes as much sense as the present model which is massive debt (that's how people buy things these days, not wages but massive debt). Even if it makes narrow sense for business, consumer debt is certainly not making sense in the big picture as a way to run an economy - with all the periodic default on debt it implies.Am I really the only one here who thinks this mythical Ford economic model does not make sense?
Sure Ford was a rather dislikable fellow often of rather fascists political opinions but that is neither here or there. It makes business sense if it's a tight labor market (probably the condition Ford himself ACTUALLY faced), if labor is a fairly small cost of production anyway (this is often the case), if a company benefits significantly enough from happy workers (service work might actually benefit a lot from this) or from having it's pick of workers for it to be more than worth it (Costco), or if there aren't extreme competitive pressures to lower wages (competing with China on labor costs or something - good luck with that - $15 a DAY might be too much if that's what you are trying for).
Trees don't grow on money
Specific example I didn't manage to get typed in above:
Pruning grape vines properly and tending to their trellising is a semi-black art. You can train someone how to do it in a few hours, then they need supervision for the first few hundred hours, and the new person tends to screw up a bit, which messes up the vine and the yield. Also, it's pain-in-the-bleep work, and a bit physically demanding.
Someone who is *good* at it is 4-8x as productive as someone who is merely "OK" at it, or new to it.
So, previously to get this job done, we hired 3-4 people, at $15-$20 an hour, and then spent additional payroll for someone to train and supervise them. It was a constant pain hiring, training, and retaining novice workers.
Now we pay one guy $30+/hour, who does the work of 3-4 novice workers, in less time, with better results, while freeing up our other skilled staff to attend to other functions. He always shows up, doesn't quit because "the work is hard", and gets the job done very well.
Result: one living wage job created, 2-3 jobs eliminated. Payroll *reduced*. Pain-in-the-bleep staffing/training issues eliminated.
That's happening all over the country. The problem is what to do with the unneeded workers. Have government support them, directly or indirectly from taxes on a diminishing cadre of highly compensated "makers"? Force them on businesses? Will the politics of the later 21st century focus on the size of the dole 80% of us have to live on?
Some other nations are doing some interesting things to cope with this problem of "unneeded" workers.
For instance, in Brazil's major cities, people are living in the landfills. They scavenge things, sell something here or there, built a small hut out of trash and refuse, and they also beg and get a little charity. Some have part time jobs doing this or that.
It is a simple life really, and they might be impoverished, unhealthy, and desperate...but they're happy!
The Swiss considered simply paying everybody an income decoupled from work, but decided against it. I hear the Dutch, the Finns and the Canadians are planning experiments in the same vein.
Other countries try addressing the problem with regulations making it extremely difficult to shed employees no matter how they perform, but that tends to make firms reluctant to hire new staff, especially if they are young or inexperienced.
We could consider putting more people on government payrolls in CCC type arrangements.
I'm not sure what the solution will eventually be.
Maybe the robots will be super-productive, and we'll end up like:
https://archive.org/stream/galaxymag...ge/n7/mode/2up
If we end up having an economy of abundance of goods/materials and "excess" free time, might be worth looking at the how the First Nations cultures of the Pacific NW coast developed.
I wouldn't mind being able to live in a reasonable home, devote most of my time to my research and projects, and recieve an allotment of enough goods/services to live happily on, without the nonsense of all this money-and-accounting that's necessary to do that sort of thing today.
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