Quote from: asdf on January 15, 2013, 11:00:43 PM

Quote from: Kluge on January 12, 2013, 10:59:42 PM

Quote from: asdf on January 12, 2013, 10:19:51 PM

Quote from: gabbergabe on January 12, 2013, 11:50:36 AM

Against the backdrop of an uneven economic recovery, these restructuring initiatives are designed to make American Express more nimble, more efficient and more effective in using our resources to drive growth, Chenault said in the statement.

greedy fucks, why not keep them employed, just a drop in the bucket to keep them employed with the profits they make.

Is that some kind of troll? This is an economically destructive attitude. Why pay people to do redundant work when those resources could be spent better elsewhere?

It might be good for the company, and in principal, it seems sound, but finding new work is generally a resource-consuming process itself (not just for the worker himself, but the economy as a whole as consumption possibly drops). Overall, it may be an economically destructive action to "give up" on employees rather than trying to "salvage" them (whether that means keeping them on-board assuming they'll be profit-makers later, or repurposing them to work in a similar role). Not taking a side either way, but it'd be interesting to read studies on the true impact of letting employees go.

The retrenched workers will find work in other areas of the economy where they will actually be paid to do productive work.

Keeping the unproductive people employed is just a lose-lose proposition. The company suffers and produces less goods/services and the potential productivity of the worker is wasted. You say this is greedy and you might be right, but society is much better off for this. The alternative is that everyone suffers; prices go up for everyone.

If the recovery is "uneven", it's because the government is intervening in the allocation of capital, such as enforcing the very policy suggested (interfering with the terms of employment). Jobs can't go where they're needed and the economy doesn't seem to recover... huh!

The recently-terminated will eventually be paid - possibly. A worker in a rural area where there's only one major business around would be totally screwed. They may be unable to find work for months or years, long enough to rely on charity (or in the current clusterfuck society, welfare).

Your theory is sound, but it's just a theory. Workers SHOULD find a new job where their work is worth more than they're paid. It makes sense -- they have bills to pay. - But will they? How long will it take for them to be doing nothing (which, as far as productivity goes, is probably worse than working at a loss) for them to find a new job? The skills they picked up at the old place may either be irrelevant, or the businesses could have very different policies in place, preventing maximum efficiency for the worker. Because the job is different, it's very likely the workers will not be as efficient, because they won't have as relevant experience as the job they were working (assuming they weren't temps or something).

So, let's make up a mock experiment using some made-up Best Buy corporate store. We'll say they have 20 cashiers and 20 salesmen. The company recognizes that each salesperson is technically bringing in net income for the company. However, their workload is relatively low. Many of them have more down-time than time able to work due to a lack of customers (and overstaffing). Most of the cashiers are worked beyond what they're able. Lines at this Best Buy store are thought by management to be too long, resulting in customers avoiding the store. Best Buy has two obvious options to help alleviate or solve the problem: fire some salesmen and assume customers will purchase fewer items, relieving cashiers OR retrain some salesmen to work as cashiers (keeping in mind these jobs have a lot of crossover skills).

Firing the salesmen, I'd argue, is simply giving up on the employees, and it's probably bad for the economy as a whole. By not retraining the salesmen to do something similar, you're letting them out into the wild where they now must explain termination on a resume. Should they readily find a new job (which I can assure is very difficult in a rural area), it's very possibly these people who've spent years or decades working their job will now go into a different type of job with an entirely different skill-set required. I'd argue when a company like AmEx lets go of a mass of workers like that, it's management basically just throwing their hands up and declaring "we don't know what we're doing. We don't know what to do with these people. We can't think of any way to use 'our most valuable asset' in a profitable way, and all this time, the arguments in upper-management have always been 'do we fire them, or keep them doing what they're doing?'" I can imagine a lot of scenarios where it isn't the workers' fault, but really the lazy management's inability to repurpose relatively valuable people (given they have a history with these people, they have lots of useful data).

Idunno. Lack studies to say anything authoritative, so I'm just shooting out speculation, too. It seems a little scummy to me to fire a large number of workers, though, without firing executive management. Maybe contractually give execs a special one-off monetary bonus to make the decision, but insist they can't be rehired, so they have to really think if there's absolutely no way to use these proven, skilled workers in some relevant way. Firing people just seems like a half-ass, lazy, "easy" solution. I'm really not arguing over whether or not government should be involved, though - just curious on whether or not firing "unproductive" workers is a net gain or loss for the economy once total unproductiveness in unemployment, demand decrease, and welfare are factored in. I guess, growing up, I only heard that "firing people is bad because companies make money, and they shouldn't make more money by firing people," and by the time I hit the age of reason, I was surrounded by libertarians so I've never heard any decent debates on the matter.