America's Second-largest Employer Is a Temp Agency 541
cold fjord writes "From the Examiner: '...the second-largest employer in America is Kelly Services, a temporary work provider. ... part-time jobs are at an all-time high, with 28 million Americans now working part-time. ... There are now a record number of Americans with temporary jobs. Approximately 2.7 million, in fact. And the trend has been growing. ... Temp jobs made up about 10 percent of the jobs lost during the Great Recession, but now make up a tenth of the jobs in the United States. In fact, nearly one-fifth of all jobs gained since the recession ended have been temporary.' The NYT has a chart detailing the problem."
lack of unions and workers rights (Score:3, Interesting)
and some places make you an 1099 but boss and work you like an W2 one.
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I haven't seen a legitimate use of a 1099 in my life.
Re:lack of unions and workers rights (Score:5, Funny)
No doubt. Legitimate users of 1099s are competent, top of their field people. Obviously _you've_ never seen one.
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I haven't seen a legitimate use of a 1099 in my life.
I use to do some contract development work in my spare time (Scripting and putting together Winamp3/5 skins) and would get a 1099-MISC form at the end of the year. It was pretty darn legitimate. Wasn't constant work and was on a per-skin basis.
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Oh, I'm sorry, I meant in the corporate world. It's an important clarification, I suppose.
Re:lack of unions and workers rights (Score:5, Informative)
Speaking of workers rights... Can anyone explain to me why "Computer Professionals" are specifically exempted from overtime pay [dol.gov]? Why is my overtime less valuable than someone else's overtime?
Let me guess: Is it because some large IT firm slipped substantial campaign contributions to the right legislative whores?
Re:lack of unions and workers rights (Score:5, Insightful)
It has nothing to do with "your time" it has to do with being on your feet and doing physical labor for 60hrs+, the physical toll that has on the body and trying to discourage employers from scheduling those kinds of shifts by making it cheaper to hire more people instead. Lastly, your employer isn't required to pay you overtime or give you comp time, but they certainly can if they so choose. Mine does. It's up to you to chose a job that fits your lifestyle. You have a white-collar job even if you don't really believe it. The people doing the manual labor in this country need special protections that you and I do not. What you and I find irritating, may injure or even kill someone working in a factory.
Re:lack of unions and workers rights (Score:4, Informative)
Done both, the food service industry and computer hacking. 16 hours a day on your feet in the food service industry takes a severe toll on your body.
On the other hand, 16+ hours a day, for months or years on end, writing software is just plain lethal. Anybody telling you different is lying! Between the lack of decent food, the inability to shop for groceries, the chronic starvation, the chronic sleep deprivation to the point of hallucinations, the destruction of my body's immune system... It's a really bad deal.
Sad thing is, I found I could take a desk job as a security guard and make more money than writing software. I needed two jobs, but I work far fewer hours than I used to and it's all just sitting around reading books.
Welcome to America.
Re:lack of unions and workers rights (Score:5, Insightful)
It's all for naught anyways. Our population and technology has out paced job growth. We need to realize there simply wont be any more jobs for the majority of the population as time marches forward. Unions wont matter, free markets wont matter. The only thing that will matter is how governments will deal with rationing out services to their population. Eventually everything will just be entirely automated, so we will have to deal with a lot of free time to continue our educations and explore the world. Stuff like arguing over unions, capitalism, socialism is pointless. We're on the cusp of it all being entirely irrelevant.
Re:lack of unions and workers rights (Score:5, Interesting)
Russell called it a long time ago, and look at where we are now. Sometimes I wonder if we'll really transition to a post-consumerist, post-scarcity society, like Paul Fernhout often describes here, or if we'll keep endlessly inventing jobs and functions that do not add to our lives but are infinitely scalable as long as at least two parts are fueling the market in opposite ways, like advertising, laywering, pateting, lobbying etc.
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Feudalism.
Entertainment and Servants. The rest starve.
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Both. Scarcity will disappear for a larger portion of the population, but imo wealth is already just consuming higher-end versions of the same toys.
There will be a point where labor+logistics within the country will be a equation, but fuel costs and overseas instability will have to rise.
Such as
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/01/making-it-in-america/308844/ [theatlantic.com]
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/12/a-simple-graph-showing-the-american-manufacturing-worker-is-suddenly-an-incredible- [theatlantic.com]
Re:lack of unions and workers rights (Score:5, Interesting)
I think this article is exactly about my primary concern with the idea of a return to manufacturing in the US. Most people think China and Mexico's big advantage is cheap labor. But manufacturing's been in my family for a long time and many of my relatives run large plants. The hourly wage of the employees is a factor, but not nearly as important as many people think. The real problem is being able to scale operations up and down quickly. Can I hire 500 people and have them on the line within a month? Equally, can I let go 500 people just as fast? In mexico and china you certainly can. And with the size of their operations there they might be able to shift those people over to something else. In the US with all of our labor laws you can't do that sort of thing quickly and the loss of even a small contract for a manufacturing plant has devastating repercussions on the floor, with salesman scrambling to find new work quickly. Then when you're at your peak you're turning down contracts for fear of employing too many and having to let them go later. I'm not suggesting that or labor laws are bad on the whole, they are good for society just bad for manufacturing plants.
Re:lack of unions and workers rights (Score:4, Interesting)
Re: lack of unions and workers rights (Score:5, Insightful)
My brother retired from a supermarket where he was the meat market manager. About 6 months later he found himself sitting on the couch gaining weight and decided to get a job to have something to do. He got a part time job at another store and worked there about a year before quitting. The reason? His part time job went from 30 hours a week to 60. They were working him to death and he couldn't get them to let him take time off. He had to quit to go fishing.
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A job, per se, is meaningless. Jobs don't exist to give you a way to pass the day - they exist because we'd like to make nice stuff to have. Productivity is just a way to measure the total of all the nice stuff we're making. The ideal is all possible nice stuff and no need to work, not the reverse!
This is why population control matters (Score:4, Funny)
In most countries the number of birth/1000 is decreasing and it appears to be tightly coupled with the economic state of each country. In addition, there is nothing new about humans being replaced by machines (Farmers, phone operations, lumber cutting...). It has been happening since before the 1800 yet we live hundreds of times better than they did in the 1800. Human kind has a way of making it work out. As long as we keep working on world issues we will make it.
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I think the strongest correlation was made between birthrate and the educational level of women.
Outside of that, I think "making things work out" tends to align with bacterial cultures... exponential growth until resources are depleted. If we're not in a growth phase, we're probably going to overpopulate until our living conditions are miserable. Unless, maybe, we build more academies for women. Hmmm....
Re:This is why population control matters (Score:4, Interesting)
I think the strongest correlation was made between birthrate and the educational level of women..
there was a program on PBS, a reasonably employed woman (not rich but not poor) in India said when she was a young girl, she noticed the more well-to-do families had fewer children than the poor families with lots of children. She determined to not have a lot of children with she married, and get an education before marriage. Documentary went on to illustrate that is not easy for women to do because much of the culture consider women should not have rights to make those kinds of decisions.
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No, today we have names for diseases that we didn't have names for then. The diseases (except for maybe AIDS) were in the human population at that time, they just weren't studied, were lumped in with other diseases, or thought to be an unavoidable consequence of old age.
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inventions were more plentiful and beneficial to society than they are today
I truly cannot comprehend how you can believe this is true.
Last month, my wife and I were able to travel from a small city in the US to London. Spent a few days there. Took the train to the south of France, rented a car, drove to a little town in northeastern Spain, went to a friend's wedding, drove back to France, took the train to Paris, and spent a few days there before flying home. In 1800 you couldn't do that in two weeks - you would have taken two months for one of the Atlantic crossings. Travel to
Enjoy the ALEC Flavor-aid? Look at Ohio, then. (Score:3, Interesting)
Unfortunately for you, the Buckeye State managed to defeat a stricter-than-Walker bill and the state is still doing fine. It also helps that the Republicans here know well enough to leave labor relations issues alone lest they incur a third 1958-level event [google.com].
If you want an example of how labor and business can cooperate, Ohio would be one of the better examples. Certain must-pass bills that are considered business-friendly in other states (the ALEC-written, multiply deployed Walker bill as well as the Ohio
Re: lack of unions and workers rights (Score:4, Insightful)
employers don't want to paying for health insuranc (Score:4, Interesting)
at least under the new bill part timers and temps can get real health insurance with out pre existing conditions or mini med planes that don't cover much.
Re:employers don't want to paying for health insur (Score:5, Interesting)
‘Bingo’: Iowahawk sums up the jobs report in one tweet about Taco Bell [twitchy.com]
David Burge @iowahawkblog [twitter.com]
Unemployment report in a nutshell: the Taco Bell that had 30 40 hour workers now has 40 30 hour workers.
Behind the Dismal Jobs Numbers: The ‘New’ Economy Takes Shape [pjmedia.com]
Re:employers don't want to paying for health insur (Score:4)
I understand your attraction to the single payer model. It is true, they could have tried to go that way, but I don't think there was enough political support to do it. There are other ways they could have gone as well that might have been better than what they got. Instead Congress passed a bill on a pretty much party line vote that was whatever they could scrape off the wall in the hopes of just passing anything and then patching it up after it passed. I guess we'll find out what the consequences are.
PRUDEN: Obamacare called ‘The fiasco for the ages’ [washingtontimes.com]
You might find some irony in this:
Richard Nixon -- the last great liberal [foxnews.com]
Nixon was not only a fervent supporter of the Clean Air Act, the first federal law designed to control air pollution on the national level; he also gave us the Environmental Protection Agency. The creation of the EPA represented an expansion of government that would face fierce opposition were it being debated today. The EPA is also one of the agencies on Capitol Hill that the business community most detests—along with the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, which polices working conditions. OSHA is another Nixon creation.
Herbert Stein, chief economic adviser during the administrations of Nixon and Gerald Ford, once remarked: “Probably more new regulation was imposed on the economy during the Nixon administration than in any other presidency since the New Deal.”
How many remember that Nixon was a champion of affirmative action? “Incredible but true”, as Fortune magazine put it in 1994 when Nixon died, “It was the Nixonites that gave us employment quotas.” Though many credit John F. Kennedy or Lyndon Johnson with initiating affirmative action, it was rather Richard Nixon who first sanctioned formal goals and time frames to break barriers to minority employment.
Social Security benefits, a cornerstone of the Democratic Party platform, were also crucial to Nixon’s policies. He ushered in a minimum tax on the wealthy and supported a guaranteed income for all Americans, a move that would rile today’s Republicans to unprecedented heights.
And finally, consider health care: Nixon’s proposed reform would have required employers to buy health insurance for their employees and subsidize those who couldn’t afford it. Nixon’s version of national health care was a far more liberal concept than Bill Clinton’s or Barack Obama’s—and it failed because of Democratic opposition, not lack of support from Nixon’s own party. (Ted Kennedy later said that opposing Nixon’s health-care plan was one of his biggest political regrets.)
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Lack of commitment (Score:5, Interesting)
I quit that place despite being one of the rare full timers, because I decided I'd much rather work on computers directly than just talk to people about them.
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Employers are afraid to commit and invest in their employees any more.
You make it sound almost reasonable
I don't think "afraid" is the right word. Employees are no longer interested in investing in their employees by training them. Of course there is a good chance that well-trained and secure employees would be better for the company... but that's a long-run talk which does not generate a bonus in the current quarter.
I don't think this is about "picking the best" from the temp employees. I think it's about reducing costs.
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Employers are afraid to commit and invest in their employees any more.
You make it sound almost reasonable I don't think "afraid" is the right word. Employees are no longer interested in investing in their employees by training them. Of course there is a good chance that well-trained and secure employees would be better for the company... but that's a long-run talk which does not generate a bonus in the current quarter.
I don't think this is about "picking the best" from the temp employees. I think it's about reducing costs.
I think you're right. The last few "big" companies that I worked for had concerns about hiring new employees for a few different reasons. One is the training time (which granted, wouldn't be diminished for a temp employee), but a bigger one is all of the benefit bullshit. Employers have to pay into unemployment for all of their "official" employees, and if they have to fire someone because they can't do the job then they're stuck for it. On top of that is the fact that during the recession a lot of peop
Re:Lack of commitment (Score:5, Interesting)
I have seen this attitude on the job hunt lately myself.
Anecdotal, sure, but here's my favorite story lately: Thru some networking, I managed to grab ahold of the HR Manager at a company recently, and apply to a job that sounded pretty cool. After a few interviews and tests, HR called to make me an offer like this: "Hi, we'd like to make an offer!", "OK, great! What are you thinking?" "Well, we will give you salary of your past employer + 1$/hr AND have you work through one of our trusted third-parties". "Wait... what about a third-party??". I had to tell the guy that I contacted him because I wanted a FULL TIME WITH REGULAR BENEFITS position, not temp/part-time contract. If I wanted that, I could have called the temp agency myself. The hours expected of me, for the marginal pay increase but lack of benefits on a 3 month contract with only vague allusions to future career, made me decline it. I have no idea what they were thinking, that such a "package" is attractive. I heard the usual "we need to make sure it's a good fit" deal, but my attitude is you either believe me at my skills or don't. That statement is just trying to get free work out of me, and I don't appreciate it.
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As long as employers chew up their workers fairly quickly it tends to work out cheaper for them to hire temps. No severance pay, no benefits, no paid holidays or maternity leave, basically just low wage disposable labour.
I don't know how it works in the US but companies that do this are basically benefit scroungers. They don't want to pay a wage people can live on or provide any kind of job security, so the state has to do it with tax breaks and income top-ups, and by supporting the unemployed between temp
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Computers suck, when I grow up I want to be a fireman.
Re:Lack of commitment (Score:4, Insightful)
Having worked in IT for over a decade now, I can say that computers do suck. I don't know anyone with my amount of experience that isn't burned out to the point of having no soul left. Problem is, being burned out, motivation is extremely low so that makes it difficult to find something you WANT to do. Then the effort of retraining. The risk of quitting, finding a new job. So you stay in IT because, hell, at least you know what to do and it brings in a pay check.
If anyone has a good solution please let me know.
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And the grass ain't any greener. There are so few fires these days, firemen wind up ferrying people who can't afford an ambulance ride to the hospital (or are simply crazy). When there actually is a fire, fire departments compete to see who can get to it first (and thereby actually get to do the hero thing they signed up for) and then be disappointed when they arrive a few seconds too late and another department has made it there first.
Economy Needs To Transition (Score:4, Interesting)
Here is our opportunity to lessen our average work week to be less than 40 hours. Now we just need our safety nets to keep up with the fact that a large percentage of the population will probably be working less than 40 hours per week in the future. In my opinion either the percentage of part time workers will continue to rise or the number of unemployed will start to rise. Hopefully we decide to fix the social problems caused by this with welfare programs instead of higher minimum wage laws this time (since small minded regulations create these problems in the first place).
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Why do our safety needs to keep up. We have more safety net than at any prior time in history. Instead of treating the symptom maybe we should tackle the problem. Before 1970 very few households were two income. So somehow with ~40 hours of labor invested outside the home a comfortable standard of living could be maintained. Now days that otherwise comparable family in terms of living standard, education, etc, has to have two people working putting in a total of ~80+ hours outside the home; all while w
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Its true to an extent. We do have things and have to bear the cost of supporting things that did not exist in the 1970s. Its comparable though. Cellular phones are a perfect example. I no longer maintain a land line phone, I know lots of people do but they don't need to do so.
Even if I chose to keep my cellular as an additional luxury over the land line, its still not a major drive on my balance sheet. If you really look at things that suck up most of the money, its property taxes, property values, fue
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If you guaranteed me $50k/year for the rest of my life, I'd walk out tomorrow.
Guaranteed doesn't necessarily mean you don't work at all. It could mean that there are a large number of part time 10-20 hour per week jobs. Probably personal assistant jobs for the wealthy and upper-middle class that are too hard to do with robotics.
If you told two teenaged kids that you'd give them $50k each without having to work for it, or $50k per "family" if they get married, you'd see a lot more unmarried couples. You must be horribly naive if you think that $100k per year tax free isn't going to be a huge draw.
Sorry that I didn't write a 5000 word document listing exclusions and exceptions, and instead expected people to understand my obvious point instead of being pedantic. I meant $50k per household. That may be given out as $25k per adult, or by some other means,
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Do you not realize what you just proposed? An involuntary servitude system where the poor get to work as "assistants" to the rich. Not involuntary? If you want to eat ...
You already have to work if you want to eat. I simply proposed a potential line of jobs that don't exist today because of minimum wage laws that could become a large portion of the workforce. I wouldn't do my own dishes or my own laundry if it only cost a few dollars per day to have these things done for you. And many people would love to have jobs where all they had to do is work 10-20 hours doing household chores but still have a lifestyle comparable to today's middle class. You may call them servants, bu
Re:Economy Needs To Transition (Score:4, Insightful)
These are mutually exclusive. Welfare programs have to be paid for by taking money from somebody. If you're reducing the amount people work, you're cutting their pay (ask all the government workers who now have mandatory furloughs; less working hours is a cut in pay), and then on top of that you're asking to take more money from them to provide money for people who are not working.
They are only mutually exclusive if productivity never increases. Our society has been able to function more or less effectively even when the rich get the lion's share of the benefits of productivity increases because the average person has also had their standard of living increase. But once automation really sets in to the point where the middle class is not necessary for our modern economy (like 98% of civilized human history), the wealthy will either have to start mass murdering protestors or start giving the newly unemployable masses a good quality of life.
We have seen a strong expansion of the upper middle class over the past few decades (which almost didn't exist before the 80s). I see this continuing until there are three clear classes: lower class, upper-middle class, wealthy. The upper-middle class and wealthy will have to give the lower class a standard of living high enough to prevent revolt, which will probably mean part time jobs and welfare programs.
Our society is already post-scarcity (Score:2)
We no longer need 40-hour work-weeks in the US. The productivity of the average worker is really damn high. But we've decided that cutting back hours to what's needed justifies a massive pay-loss.
This manifests in temp-jobs, migrant workers, bored salaried office workers dragged into offices for 40 hours a week. The net result is a less stable society, with a high GDP, and awful wages.
Please note this post represents an observational opinion that doesn't not necessarily represent a rigorously studied p
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Most people I know work far more than 40 hours a week because of all the cuts to make the workforce more "efficient". Temps are hired to fill in during especially rough times.
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Most people who work 'far more then 40 hours a week' would get more done (and do it better) if they worked 40. In reality most of them are playing the 'facetime' game.
They should jump up and down until their balls drop, then explain to their boss that burned out people almost always do negative work. Constant overtime is a sure sign that they are not managing their managers.
get rid of salary no overtime pay or make it 100K (Score:2)
get rid of salary no overtime pay or make it 100K mini pay to have it like that.
also have a double OT pay kick it at 50-60 hour weeks
Maybe even make 35 the new full time with ot starting at hour 36.
And yet... (Score:4, Interesting)
Yes, having the 2nd largest employer in the country be a temp service speaks volumes about the alleged recovery and job market.
The first-largest is Wal Mart, which is pretty much the same, and horrible.
(2.2 million employees, 1.3 mill in the USA)
Yet curiously omitted from the figures?
Total number of US government employees? 2.8 million.
Total local/state employees? 19-some million.
So ~20 million people in this country get their paycheck from the government....that's what, about 7% of the entire electorate owes their income to the gubbermint? One might argue that due to a clear conflict of interest, they perhaps shouldn't get votes.
Some people would say that's even MORE revealing about the US (so called), not to mention the tendentiousness of the reporting on the story that it's NOT EVEN MENTIONED.
Re:And yet... (Score:4, Insightful)
Every American is the beneficiary of the government in some way or form so we all have conflicts of interest. It's not like these workers can somehow vote in a way that impacts their compensation or that they are all that well paid compared to the private sector in the first place.
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Look at what FDR had to say about public unions. You are just wrong. They are overpaid, underworked and proud of it.
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Oh, the 7% of U.S. population doesn't get their wages from the government, they get their wages from the rest of the population - and only the part of the rest that pays taxes, with corporate tax payments being some sort of a joke these days. Remember: the government doesn't make any money, nor do they have any. They get it from the rest of us via taxes.
Re:And yet... (Score:4, Insightful)
To be fair, I get my salary from the rest of the population, too. If people didn't purchase my companies products I assure you I wouldn't get paid once the cash reserves dried up.
Re:And yet... (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah but in your case the rest of the populace gets to choose whether to buy your stuff or not.
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No the problem is the government does "make money" and in doing so steals the wealth of everyone.
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I'm still waiting for the President's "laserlike focus" on jobs to pay off. We've had close to 7 years of what effectively amounts to institutionalized stimulus with nothing to show for it except inflated CXO bonuses and Wall Street numbers that are being propped up by the Fed.
The leadership of both parties need to jump in the Potomac.
Maybe a good thing, if we do it right? (Score:2, Interesting)
Maybe this is a good thing. Or at least, could be a good thing.
Imagine, for a metaphor, that workers are computer servers. This would be like virtualization - since the amount of work needed is often variable, being able to quickly "provision" workers could be a benefit. And having an agency that employs these people could provide more stability for the workers, in the way that Amazon and other cloud providers get more heavily-utilized servers. And, as with the computer cloud vs. dedicated server debate, em
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"When you've decided that you no longer need an instance, you can terminate it. As soon as the status of an instance changes to shutting down or terminated, you stop incurring charges for that instance."
Have a nice day.
CITATION NEEDED (Score:5, Informative)
In fact, nearly one-fifth of all jobs gained since the recession ended have been temporary.'
What in the what? I'd REALLY like to see a source on that, given that it's directly contradicted by the BLS.
http://www.bls.gov/webapps/legacy/cpsatab9.htm [bls.gov]
Since the job market bottomed, we've created 5.4 million full-time jobs and 600,000 part-time jobs. How is that "nearly one-fifth"?
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Perhaps "full time" includes "full time, temporary" jobs.
Re:CITATION NEEDED (Score:5, Informative)
You're assuming full-time == permanent,
and
temp== part-time
neither of which is necessarily true.
I did temp work once (Score:2, Funny)
Got a temp job at Deep 13. Never again!
Wealth economy (Score:5, Interesting)
People have been predicting the wealth economy for some time, but have no clear plan on how to transition to that model.
Here's an opportunity: redefine "full time" to be less than 40 hours. Our productivity is now so high that fewer people need to work, but at the same time we need to employ everyone in order to prevent unrest and revolt.
Productivity is high, so we should have more leisure time. GDP per capita has skyrocketed [google.com], it's doubled since about 1990, and the average citizen would get $40,000 per year if output was distributed evenly. That's every man, woman and child - employed or not, and every year.
Corporations have to start spending money on the people instead of cutting people out of production. Better educated workers, happier workers, healthier workers make your business stronger and give better return on investment than rehiring. Much better return than "cost accounting", which aims to make the cheapest product people can tolerate.
Government has to start rerouting wealth from businesses to the people, by way of infrastructure benefits. Free health care and free education, as well as infrastructure projects (national system of renewable power generation, universal internet service, &c) enrich the population without coddling to the lazy.
Production is met by an ever-dwindling need for human interaction. We should embrace this trend in a way that doesn't require armed revolt.
Qoth Jello Biafra... (Score:2)
Electronic Plantation [youtube.com]...
The image accompanying this article says it all (Score:5, Informative)
Link [nytimes.com]
You're not a person. You're not an employee. You're not even worthy of respect.
Single-Payer Healthcare can help resolve this (Score:5, Informative)
These people won't be served by the current system, or any system that has been proposed in the past two decades. These people would also make jobs available by leaving full time positions, which would help those who seek full-time employment currently.
But instead our "main stream media" has told us such things are "un-American" and "communist". Why will we never get single-payer health care in the US? The same reason we'll never get solar power or a manned mission to Mars; people make more money on the current system than changing it to anything else.
I've already put on my fucking asbestos. Flame away.
it's deliberate (Score:4, Interesting)
you don't want the slaves being told they have rights, do you?
Advantage to the employer of offering only part time/temporary employment through an agency:
No unions to deal with (there is no temp union anywhere)
No pensions to contribute to (part timers don't get an employer-provided pension)
No liability (for things like temps breaking their wrists - been there, worn the t-shirt, had to foot the fucking medical bill myself!)
No employers rates (things like tax/NI which is a bloody headache if you're dealing with hundreds of employees all of whim pay tax/NI and since most of them will be on PAYE, it's all on your books which means that for every employee you have to garnish their pay by 20someodd% and send it to the Treasury, on top of which a recent additional tax which is scaled according to how many *full time* employees you have)
No contracts (except with the agency, where it's pretty much a case of "I have this many spaces, I accept your rates, send me bodies.")
No medical insurance (you're not employing the slave, you're employing the agency, *the agency* employs the slave and their employment contract more often than not has a specific medical disclaimer. See above)
No employment tribunals (you're contracting with the agency, not the slave)
Minimal wage bill (they may pay a premium for being able to hire through an agency, but it's still cheaper than employing someone full time who's not up to the task and not being able to fire them because they've technically done nothing wrong)
Maximum profit per unit labour
Advantage to the employee:
None. I don't count being able to work to pay your rent an advantage, that is a basic need along with food, clothing and medical intervention when necessary.
Re:Corporate executives are smart. (Score:5, Insightful)
No, they'll just all follow suit with Wal Mart and make sure nobody ever gets enough hours to tip over that threshold.
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at least the works can get benefits on there own.
Re:Corporate executives are smart. (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Corporate executives are smart. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Corporate executives are smart. (Score:5, Insightful)
Then all the liberals start whining about how "unfair" it is that employers try to save their businesses by not incurring new taxes
Yeah, because it's just oh so great that the businesses are "saved" by pissing on their employees and not providing them with adequate health care coverage.
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Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
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Obamacare is a Republican idea. That's the reason that it's a byzantine maze of profiteering middlemen: Republicans love their corporate welfare.
Liberals originally wanted single-payer system like that found in most civilized countries.
Re:Corporate executives are smart. (Score:4, Insightful)
Democrats overwhelmingly voted for it.
The Democrats wrote it.
The Democrats pushed for it.
The Democrats voted for it.
The Democrats single-handedly passed it.
Yet you are now already calling it a Republican bill, even before its been fully implemented. Seems to me that Democrats never want to take responsibility for the shit they do.
Before you go on some diatribe about the bill being similar to the one passed in Mitt Romney's State of Massachusetts, that State is damn near as Democrat as it gets. You dont get to escape responsibility by pointing out that a State notoriously run by Democrats implemented it first. The Democrats own the health care bill lock, stock, and barrel. Its all yours.
Admit that you guys fucked up really badly, or be proud of it. Dont try to blame others for the shit you did.
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The bill was modified several times, in attempts to get Republicans on-board to support it, yet they still stonewalled it. It would have taken too much time and effort to completely undo the Republican damage, instead it was passed as-is, because it's an improvement, with the possibility of future laws fixing it.
You can't claim it isn't the Republicans' plan, just because they decided to p
Re:Corporate executives are smart. (Score:5, Interesting)
Unfortunately, those ideas had to be included to appease Democrats from more conservative districts.
This idea that things were included to "appease districts" doesnt make sense since "we have to pass it in order to find out whats in it."
The people did not know what was in it when it was passed. Not only was no attempt made to "appease districts", there was a clear plan to intentionally keep people uninformed about it.
Clearly the Democrats were trying to appease their campaign donors, not their districts. Yes, thats the insurance companies.
Re:Corporate executives are smart. (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, that's why it originated from that well-known Republican state, Massachusetts.
No, it originated with the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank.
An individual mandate to purchase insurance is indeed just about the only possible way to try to awkwardly cram "free marketness" onto health insurance.
Completely false. Obamacare was passed with Dems having a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate and having control of the House. If they wanted single-payer, they would have made single-payer. They wanted Obamacare instead, as a hand-out to their friends in the health care industry.
You're mistakenly conflating Democrats with Liberals. There are many Democrats in tossup districts, who probably figured it would be better to fix healthcare with Republican ideas, so as to fend off challenges by Republican rivals. What Democrats probably didn't count on was that the Republican base is so incredibly ignorant, that they could be trivially reprogrammed to think what were once their own party's market-driven, individual-responsibility policies are now radical socialist handouts to slackers.
Re:Corporate executives are smart. (Score:4, Informative)
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Yep. Obamacare == guaranteed money for insurance companies, particularly since the "Public Option" was dropped.
Read up on the history of Medicare / Medicaid. It was spearheaded by insurance companies. Because they kept losing money on old people visiting hospitals. Easy answer = get the government to cover all of the old people for them!
Also notice that every bump on social security for "Cost of Living Adjustments" corresponds to an equal bump in the medicare / medicaid premium that comes out of it. In
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Here's a little assist with the history. You're a bit off.
ObamaCare's Heritage [wsj.com]
Re:Corporate executives are smart. (Score:4, Insightful)
Let me stop you right there chief. You are sorely mistaken. About most everything you said. Much of the blueprint for Obamacare came from Romney's work in MA. Romney is a Republican, and it was very much a compromise effort.That being said, real liberals (not Obama) want health care to be a fundamental right, and single payer is the most popular method for achieving the practical side of this. Republicans want health care to be a choice, a market commodity. Obamacare was an attempt to get more people covered, and slightly widen patient rights (eg coverage for people with pre-existing conditions). Additionally, the biggest mistake you can make is to consider Dems liberals. They are centrists, with a few liberals and a good chunk of conservatives (google blue dog democrats) rounding out party composition.
Re:Corporate executives are smart. (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Corporate executives are smart. (Score:5, Funny)
Careful, the cognitive dissonance cause by the sudden introduction of "facts and figures" can be injurious to an ideologue's brain.
Re:Corporate executives are smart. (Score:5, Informative)
why do most of the other countries in the developed world, that do have universal health care, deliver better overall health care outcomes for 60% less
Because they pay their doctors less [forbes.com]. When government is the primary employer or leading negotiator with physicians, they can't bargain much.
But of course doctors in those other countries do sometimes go on strike [businessweek.com].
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Re:Corporate executives are smart. (Score:5, Interesting)
- An employer who pays for health insurance for all of his employees
Re:Corporate executives are smart. (Score:5, Insightful)
I completely agree. Obamacare is very business unfriendly. A Canadian style system where the employer bears no specific responsibility because healthcare is paid out of general taxes would be much more business friendly. Toyota, for one, certainly thought so when a major reason they put a plant in Canada instead of the US was Canadian healthcare. Republicans should also value maximizing the benefit for the money spent, and Canadian healthcare, which costs only 2/3 of the US, certainly qualifies as a savings.
So why aren't Republicans, with their concerns for business friendliness and cost effectiveness, pushing for Canadian style healthcare? It's an obvious win-win.
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Yeah, I'd lean towards a minor depression, in that there have been systemic factors that prevented a real recovery(in the U.S., U.K., and only a couple of other countries, that all had something very specific in common; I'll let you guess what that is.)
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Re:Stop using the term "Great Recession" (Score:4, Funny)
The National Bureau of Economic Research [nber.org] defines a recession as:
And according to the NBER, the last recession in the US lasted from 4Q2007 to 2Q2009. We are not currently in a recession.
Re:Out with the old... (Score:5, Insightful)
And, temp can mean anything
Temp only means one thing, "we're cheating you out of benefits".
Re:ObamaCare, anyone? (Score:5, Insightful)
Companies shouldn't have to worry about providing insurance to workers, regardless. They should be able to focus on the cost of running their business with static expenses. Countries like Denmark has some of the highest individual entrepreneurship rates in the world. Why? Because the government takes care of providing health care to everyone, as well as all schooling through college. Obviously these are all funded through higher tax rates, but it leaves a lot of unknown headaches from businesses and manages to provide everyone an opportunity to succeed.
Re:It Will Only Increase Because of Obamacare (Score:5, Insightful)
Agreed.
Single-payer health care would definitely be a way to fix this.
Re:It Will Only Increase Because of Obamacare (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:It Will Only Increase Because of Obamacare (Score:4, Insightful)
Are you kidding? "Job Creators" will be the first people to whine about the corresponding tax increases to cover that kind of scheme.
People like to think money for this kind of stuff just comes from some magical pocket universe somewhere. That's not the case. Spain and Greece are great examples of this.
People need to get over this idea that the idle rich are "job creators".
It's the people who make products and provide services who create jobs and support the economy. For the most part, these people are not rich enough to be paying the top tax bracket.
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That's not the case. Spain and Greece are great examples of this.
No. Spain and Greece are great examples of a typical boom and bust where too much is attempted in a short amount of time using borrowed money in a country with large amounts of corruption and tax evasion both from greedy big shots and "Average Joe [tm]". The same is the case for Ireland and the other countries struggling the worst in Europe. Ireland had a Taoiseach (Prime Minister) who didn't have a bank account for years, but kept cash in his office safe and received "gifts" from influential businessmen. T