Quote from: asdf on January 21, 2013, 05:58:42 AM

Quote from: Kluge on January 16, 2013, 12:51:35 AM

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

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!

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).

so cashiers are "working beyond what they are able", but the company is "overstaffed"? This makes no sense...

Quote from: Kluge on January 16, 2013, 12:51:35 AM

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).

The point is, the company will make the most economically rational decision they can. If that means they must fire workers, then that's what they should do. If they're making bad business decisions, then they deserve to go bust and let some more productive entrepreneurs buy up their capital. Otherwise they're just wasting resources.

Are you going to pay someone to mow your lawn, even if it was just mowed, because they need the work? Yeah, the lawn mowing guy gets the cash he needs, but he's productivity is wasted by your subsidy and you lose that cash. Meanwhile, he should be facing reality and finding better work and you could be paying some other guy to paint your fence, which you actually need to have done. You would just be enabling a poor career path and denying the valid career of the painter. This is a poor allocation of resources and the company scenario is fundamentally no different.

The lawn mower will have to learn new skills and that's exactly what he should do. He needs to learn how to produce something that people actually want. That's how the market works.

Quote from: Kluge on January 16, 2013, 12:51:35 AM

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.

It's simple. If it's a loss for the company, then it's a loss for the economy.

Thank you so much, This really opened my eyes.