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posted by martyb on Wednesday September 21 2016, @07:20PM   Printer-friendly
from the more-or-less-getting-more-done-with-less-people dept.

Having underemployed workers can lead to two outcomes that benefit an organization—creativity and commitment to the organization—according to a new study by management experts at Rice University, Chinese University of Hong Kong at Shenzhen and Chinese University of Hong Kong.

Statistics have shown that a significant proportion of workers worldwide are underemployed or working at jobs that are below their capacity. Researchers have estimated that underemployment ranges from 17 percent to two-thirds of the workforce in Asia, Europe and North America, according to the study.

"Our results have important implications for managers," said study co-author Jing Zhou, the Houston Endowment Professor of Management at Rice's Jones Graduate School of Business. "Managers should not assume that employees will always respond negatively to their perception of being underemployed. Our results suggest that managers need to be vigilant in detecting perceptions of underemployment among employees.

"When managers notice that their employees feel underemployed, they should support employees' efforts to proactively change the boundaries or formal descriptions of their work tasks, such as changing the sequencing of the tasks, increasing the number of tasks that they do or enlarging the scope of the tasks," she said. "Because the perception of underemployment may be experienced by many employees, managers should provide support to sustain positive outcomes in these situations."

Not getting enough hours to qualify for benefits is a good thing?


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  • (Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday September 22 2016, @02:08AM

    by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Thursday September 22 2016, @02:08AM (#404987) Journal

    Seriously. If you cannot work out what the problem with Wage Slavery is then you are 100 years behind the times. (even Lincoln lamented this situation)

    Perhaps instead of dialing some straw man up to 11, we could discuss the topic at hand? I have yet to advocate wage slavery.

    When I was a kid in the 80's they showed us pictures of how robots would mean we all get to work only a few days a week and be free for the rest.

    So we should starve a few billion people just because you saw pictures when you were young? There's isn't a magic wand that gets you from seven billion people with most in some degree of poverty to everyone working a few days a week. A lot of people need to work a long time to make that possible.

    Your dystopian dreams disgust me.

    And your detachment from reality bores me. It's been done better by other small-minded people.

  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by Francis on Thursday September 22 2016, @02:58AM

    by Francis (5544) on Thursday September 22 2016, @02:58AM (#405005)

    Why would anybody starve? We just cut everybody's hours and give them a raise in pay to ensure they've got the money necessary to pay for things like food and board. It's not rocket science and we've got more than enough money and production capacity to make it happen. As it stands more than half of the profits go to a small percentage of the population. Taking even half that money would easily allow people to cut back on their hours substantially without going hungry or lacking housing.

    As it stands now, fewer and fewer people are actually involved in the agriculture necessary to support us. None of them would be going out of business, as it is we have to pay large sums of money to ensure that they don't overproduce their produce and tank the price.

    The only other thing that would change would be that the mega-wealthy would only be super-wealthy. They might have to make hard decisions like whether to have a second yacht or that house in the Hamptons, but not both. The world would hardly come crashing to a halt.

    • (Score: 3, Insightful) by khallow on Thursday September 22 2016, @04:17AM

      by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Thursday September 22 2016, @04:17AM (#405022) Journal

      We just cut everybody's hours and give them a raise in pay to ensure they've got the money necessary to pay for things like food and board.

      I find it interesting how the solution here to automation and global poverty is "let's make everyone useless". This is a small-minded person with ambition! I'm not as bored now.

      As it stands now, fewer and fewer people are actually involved in the agriculture necessary to support us. None of them would be going out of business, as it is we have to pay large sums of money to ensure that they don't overproduce their produce and tank the price.

      We want more than just some food.

      The only other thing that would change would be that the mega-wealthy would only be super-wealthy. They might have to make hard decisions like whether to have a second yacht or that house in the Hamptons, but not both. The world would hardly come crashing to a halt.

      You've just made capital far more valuable than labor with your scheme. Why would the mega-wealthy, whose wealth is tied up in capital and similar assets become less wealthy relative to laborers whose value you forcibly reduced?

      • (Score: 2, Insightful) by Francis on Thursday September 22 2016, @03:27PM

        by Francis (5544) on Thursday September 22 2016, @03:27PM (#405159)

        You sir, are a dumbass.

        With the productivity gains of the last century in particular, there's no need to have everybody working 40 hour work weeks with no sick leave or vacation time. The work that you're advocating for is mostly busy work. At some point, productivity will reach a point where the only way to have full employment will be to either pay people to move boxes from one side of the warehouse and back over and over again or cut people's hours down to something that reflects the time necessary to do the work.

        Personally, I think it makes a ton sense to just let people have the time off that they've earned.

        And BTW, food, shelter, clothing, transportation and medical care is most of what most people actually want. Everything else is more or less entertainment and leisure time. There's absolutely no reason why we can't provide people with that with a 20 hour work week. It would just require the rich to only be very wealthy rather than mega-wealthy.

        • (Score: 2, Insightful) by khallow on Thursday September 22 2016, @04:29PM

          by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Thursday September 22 2016, @04:29PM (#405177) Journal

          With the productivity gains of the last century in particular, there's no need to have everybody working 40 hour work weeks with no sick leave or vacation time. The work that you're advocating for is mostly busy work. At some point, productivity will reach a point where the only way to have full employment will be to either pay people to move boxes from one side of the warehouse and back over and over again or cut people's hours down to something that reflects the time necessary to do the work.

          If it's all "busy work", then you don't have productivity gains by definition. I find this cognitive dissonance intriguing where the more useless we make people's labor somehow the more useful work they do! Maybe we should reconsider who is the "dumbass" here?

          And of course, you gloss over my quite relevant observation that devaluing human labor is just going to shift the wealth of society even further to the people whose wealth is not dependent on labor, namely, those mega-wealthy.

          And BTW, food, shelter, clothing, transportation and medical care is most of what most people actually want. Everything else is more or less entertainment and leisure time. There's absolutely no reason why we can't provide people with that with a 20 hour work week. It would just require the rich to only be very wealthy rather than mega-wealthy.

          If only we didn't have behavior of real people to sully your worldview!

      • (Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Thursday September 22 2016, @03:56PM

        by bzipitidoo (4388) on Thursday September 22 2016, @03:56PM (#405167) Journal

        I really think a profound change in work culture is in our near future. We're still on the Protestant Work Ethic. It is strange how our technological advances were fondly imagined as eventually making our children's lives easier, but it never seems to work out that way. In the 18th century people worked their butts off on the damnedest chores. People made their own clothes, "homespun", and that took incredible amounts of very boring work to do. First, needed a suitable crop, which might be flax, or might be cotton. The work of planting and harvesting was done by hand, horse, and oxen. The harvest had to be worked into threads, which was done with a human powered mechanical aide, a spinning wheel. After that, the threads had to be woven into cloth with another human powered device, a loom, then finally the cloth was cut and sewn into clothing. The Industrial Revolution ended all that. Freed an awful lot of hours, and what was done with that free time? Went straight into factory work.

        Will the same thing happen this time? I doubt it. As robots take over blue collar jobs, we'll just find other ways to sink our time into different work, and feel all smug and virtuous about it? Except the people who don't have the skills and imagination to do white collar work, what will they do? And don't feel that white collar jobs are much safer, not with computers now able to do a lot of the heavy lifting there. When computers and robots can do everything we now do, better than our best people can do it, then what? Computers can whip us at chess, and recently did the same in go, they're getting better at driving cars, and there are plenty of gadgets such as the Roomba. I don't see that happening in the next 20 years, I think many people are overly optimistic about the speed of progress. But it will come, perhaps by 2100. How about a computer politician for president?

        • (Score: 2, Insightful) by khallow on Friday September 23 2016, @01:18AM

          by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Friday September 23 2016, @01:18AM (#405369) Journal

          As robots take over blue collar jobs, we'll just find other ways to sink our time into different work, and feel all smug and virtuous about it?

          Why do you think work is about feelings?

          Frankly, there is too much terrible argument in this discussion about humanity's supposed future labor obsolescence. Francis complains that we're too productive giving "busy work" (which by definition is near completely unproductive) as an example. meustrus thinks we should optimize for better metrics. But his emphasis on things like income inequality and paying more for less labor (which is great if you're the worker and not great if you're the employer getting less as a result) indicates to me that he's thinking about the wrong metrics (which are just as bad as GDP and official unemployment rate).

          Then we get to the counterproductive measures. When you make labor far less valuable (keep in mind that employers pay you for the value you generate - less hours means for the majority of jobs, less value generated and hence, less wealth generation to share with you in the form of wages), then anything else such as capital becomes more valuable in comparison. For all the people paying lip service to income inequality, crippling our ability to earn more will just make that income inequality much worse.

          For example, I put more than half my income into stocks in large part because that's a better wealth generator in today's dysfunctional employment climate than working. If someone like Francis gets a clueless law dropping the hours I can work (and of course, assuming I can't get around that law by working two jobs or simply breaking the law and not reporting income), then what am I going to do that's going to justify the income I was getting? It's a two way street. My employer pays me because I generate more than I cost. Work less and I generate less in my job. But on the other hand, my stocks will do better relative to my income. That might be sufficient to avoid a huge decline in standard of living, assuming of course, that the cost of living collapses too in this brave new world.

          Also let us note the two economic effects that have so far prevented humanity's labor from declining in value: comparative advantage [wikipedia.org] and Jevons paradox [wikipedia.org]. There remains stuff that is better for humans to do, even stuff that can be done better by robotics, because robotics is better used elsewhere. And when you make human labor more efficient and hence, more valuable, you increase demand for it. Automation is a huge way human labor, even of the relatively unskilled sort, can be made more efficient and valuable.

  • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday September 22 2016, @07:48PM

    by JoeMerchant (3937) on Thursday September 22 2016, @07:48PM (#405247)

    So we should starve a few billion people

    Billions aren't starving because they aren't working, billions are starving because the food isn't available to them.

    Arbeit Macht Frei has been touted forever, and it has been a lie ever since men started "owning the land." Work keeps you busy, it doesn't make you free, or get you the things you need.

    If all the poor had more money, whether they got it from working, or had it given to them, that money wouldn't help them out of poverty, it would just increase the price of the things they need. Making the resources they need available to them will help them out of poverty. Reasonably clean water, food, shelter from the elements, safety from crime, education, medical care. Given that, the poor can get past the major problems of poverty, and put more of their time and effort into providing these same things for themselves and others, rather than just surviving whatever crisis they are currently having, or about to have.

    Crisis is very inefficient, people in crisis are not good members of society - they are a burden to everyone else. People who "work all the time" are more apt to end up in a crisis, and sometimes it takes more time than money to handle a crisis.

    --
    🌻🌻 [google.com]
    • (Score: 2, Informative) by khallow on Thursday September 22 2016, @09:48PM

      by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Thursday September 22 2016, @09:48PM (#405295) Journal

      If all the poor had more money, whether they got it from working, or had it given to them, that money wouldn't help them out of poverty, it would just increase the price of the things they need. Making the resources they need available to them will help them out of poverty. Reasonably clean water, food, shelter from the elements, safety from crime, education, medical care. Given that, the poor can get past the major problems of poverty, and put more of their time and effort into providing these same things for themselves and others, rather than just surviving whatever crisis they are currently having, or about to have.

      No that would be false because if they're working, then their labor created things of value which money would be spent on. That's a deflationary effect. And we already have reasonably priced stuff (aside from the things that we're inflated the price of, like education and medical care, in a counterproductive attempt to make them better, more accessible, or more affordable). They're still poor.

      • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday September 23 2016, @12:50PM

        by JoeMerchant (3937) on Friday September 23 2016, @12:50PM (#405505)

        that would be false because if they're working, then their labor created things of value which money would be spent on. That's a deflationary effect

        That type of deflationary effect is very strong in a medieval kingdom where the king is benevolent and lets the peasants farm as much land as they are willing to work, in exchange for a "fair" tax. The effect is much more limited in a favela where there are more people than there are resources to work on/with.

        A lot of what needs working on in today's world is not the production of stuff, we seem to have that one nailed - awesome brand new bicycles for under $100, tools that cost less than the raw materials you use them to work on, simple foods that cost next to nothing. In the US, you can buy and maintain a decent, running, air-conditioned car (that should last for 5 or more years) for less than it costs to insure and fuel it for a year. And, of course, the storage and communication of information has already passed a singularity event... it's so cheap that people are still trying to figure out what to do with it.

        The "free market" is still flailing about, assigning higher value to things that people with money want. Mostly, people with money want: more money - there's been plenty of labor devoted to making money for people who already have more of it than they need, and those pursuits aren't helping poverty, or the ecology.

        --
        🌻🌻 [google.com]
        • (Score: 2, Insightful) by khallow on Friday September 23 2016, @01:21PM

          by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Friday September 23 2016, @01:21PM (#405514) Journal

          That type of deflationary effect is very strong in a medieval kingdom where the king is benevolent and lets the peasants farm as much land as they are willing to work, in exchange for a "fair" tax. The effect is much more limited in a favela where there are more people than there are resources to work on/with.

          The effect has nothing to do with tax collection or medieval kingdoms though they too benefit from it. When your labor makes things that people spend money on, that creates a deflationary effect. And I disagree that it is diminished even a little by the existence of your favela. It's not a matter of resource scarcity.

          The "free market" is still flailing about, assigning higher value to things that people with money want. Mostly, people with money want: more money - there's been plenty of labor devoted to making money for people who already have more of it than they need, and those pursuits aren't helping poverty, or the ecology.

          So what? Your observation, the little of it which has any correlation with reality, just is irrelevant. It doesn't matter to me in the least that items rich people want are expensive. I don't go for ostentatious displays of wealth like fancy mansions or cars, for example (which incidentally are not "more money"). I certainly don't care that there's a bunch of rich people who want to get richer. And contrary to your assertion (which a key area you ignore reality here), those who enable such pursuits help both poverty and ecology (much of the latter just by virtue of the former) as well as income inequality (by pulling wealth away from those rich).

          Broken economic models which find their way into public policy are a greater threat to us than rich people, and you have a great broken model here which would look magnificently ugly in law. One can't just say that wages are inflationary while ignoring that wages are payment for the creation of value which is deflationary, and generate public policy that isn't highly self-destructive.

          • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday September 23 2016, @01:52PM

            by JoeMerchant (3937) on Friday September 23 2016, @01:52PM (#405526)

            \It doesn't matter to me in the least that items rich people want are expensive.

            The point you missed there isn't "things for the rich" it's "more money for the rich." Pursuits like flash trading, reverse shell merger acquisitions, legal maneuvers which are too expensive and complex for people with limited resources, but yield huge monetary returns for the people who already have enough money to do them.

            I'm all for yachts, mansions, and $24K designer dresses - if the rich want to spend their money in large quantities, that's a good thing. When the rich use their money to corner the market on money, that becomes a problem.

            --
            🌻🌻 [google.com]
            • (Score: 1) by khallow on Friday September 23 2016, @02:27PM

              by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Friday September 23 2016, @02:27PM (#405546) Journal

              The point you missed there isn't "things for the rich" it's "more money for the rich." Pursuits like flash trading, reverse shell merger acquisitions, legal maneuvers which are too expensive and complex for people with limited resources, but yield huge monetary returns for the people who already have enough money to do them.

              Still don't care. We have better things to do with our society than take lollipops out of the hands of rich people.

              When the rich use their money to corner the market on money, that becomes a problem.

              Note that didn't happen in any example you've mentioned to date.

              • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday September 23 2016, @03:55PM

                by JoeMerchant (3937) on Friday September 23 2016, @03:55PM (#405580)

                When the rich use their money to corner the market on money, that becomes a problem.

                Note that didn't happen in any example you've mentioned to date.

                Wealth distribution in 2012:

                According to the OECD in 2012 the top 0.6% of world population (consisting of adults with more than 1 million USD in assets) or the 42 million richest people in the world held 39.3% of world wealth. The next 4.4% (311 million people) held 32.3% of world wealth. The bottom 95% held 28.4% of world wealth.

                Yes, this is how it has been since the times of slaves building pyramids. We can do better. As the population grows to a level that consumes more than half of all available resources, we need to do better.

                --
                🌻🌻 [google.com]
                • (Score: 1) by khallow on Friday September 23 2016, @05:02PM

                  by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Friday September 23 2016, @05:02PM (#405618) Journal

                  Yes, this is how it has been since the times of slaves building pyramids. We can do better. As the population grows to a level that consumes more than half of all available resources, we need to do better.

                  And we are doing better, but not because we supposedly care about wealth or income inequality. It turns out gainfully employing people leads to reduced income inequality globally. Who knew?

                  As to your rather irrelevant data about rich people owning a lot of stuff, most of that wealth is useless to you. The first thing you would probably do, if you got it would be to sell it significantly below its supposed value to one of the 0.6% for money you can use. That's the nature of the fantasy wealth that we supposedly should care about.

                  It also just isn't that much wealth inequality. The bottom 95% owning 25% of asset wealth is pretty high IMHO. I just don't see what the problem is supposed to be.

                  And I notice yet again that you have yet to show an example of rich people "cornering" money with money in markets, not that your babblegook has anything to do with markets or how they get used. Maybe you need to hit the market on the side a few times until an example falls out? It works for TVs and ice trays. Markets can't be that different, amirite?

                  • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday September 23 2016, @06:16PM

                    by JoeMerchant (3937) on Friday September 23 2016, @06:16PM (#405645)

                    you have yet to show an example of rich people "cornering" money with money

                    You don't like high frequency trading as an example? Or international tax evasion? - it takes a considerable amount of wealth to make that one feasible, but once you're there, you drop your percentage tax paid considerably. Then we get right to the crux of the matter with political bribery. Enrich a politician with $100,000 under the table and you can get millions, either in grants, contracts, or favorable business regulation changes, often at the expense of the environment - not to mention protection from competition from people with less resources who can't afford to buy more influential politicians. And, whether we're talking about bribing politicians, or negotiating in the open market with kickbacks and favorable deals to big/influential business partners - whoever starts with the biggest pile of money can grow it the fastest. Productivity, employment for the masses, protection of the environment are all irrelevant in that equation.

                    The only "advantages" that small players have in the market is relative lack of regulatory oversight, and the agility that comes from not having a huge organization to coordinate, much of which size comes from regulatory compliance activities. Give a small player the big pile of cash and 1) they attract regulatory oversight, and 2) they tend to "scale the organization" with lots of people, damping down that agility that comes from a whole team that can have a meaningful conversation over lunch.

                    I "get it" that you either a) are one of the 0.6% and see nothing wrong with the way things are, or b) love to dream about you, or maybe your children, becoming one of them someday. Simply having a decent job in the U.S. usually puts you close to the top 5%, globally. Personally, I'd rather not live in a world where "loss of job" presents the opportunity to fall so far. In my experience, these great jobs we have today aren't as secure as my parent's generation's less great jobs were, and that security seems to be getting worse as the decades roll on.

                    --
                    🌻🌻 [google.com]
                    • (Score: 1) by khallow on Friday September 23 2016, @07:02PM

                      by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Friday September 23 2016, @07:02PM (#405661) Journal

                      You don't like high frequency trading as an example? Or international tax evasion?

                      Indeed, because they aren't examples of whatever "cornering money" is supposed to be. And frankly, unless you computer trade, HFT means nothing to you. As to legal international tax avoidance, change the rules if you don't like the game. Just keep in mind that all those entitlements you get are the price you paid for going alone with the huge variety of these games. You probably will end up losing most of those as well, assuming you don't blink first.

                      I "get it" that you either a) are one of the 0.6% and see nothing wrong with the way things are, or b) love to dream about you, or maybe your children, becoming one of them someday. Simply having a decent job in the U.S. usually puts you close to the top 5%, globally. Personally, I'd rather not live in a world where "loss of job" presents the opportunity to fall so far. In my experience, these great jobs we have today aren't as secure as my parent's generation's less great jobs were, and that security seems to be getting worse as the decades roll on.

                      And we see you don't "get it". I don't care about the 0.6%. They're actually carrying their load pretty well. Your concerns are due to a temporary effect of labor competition with the developing world combined with a variety of short-sighted labor and protectionist policies in the developed world.

                      When the developing world gets to near parity with your society by 2050 I think, then the pressure will go away. Of course, the regulatory mess won't and that might be enough to drive your society to subpar employment and living standards. But you will no doubt continue to transfer blame elsewhere.

                      • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday September 23 2016, @07:19PM

                        by JoeMerchant (3937) on Friday September 23 2016, @07:19PM (#405666)

                        Your concerns are due to a temporary effect of labor competition

                        No, actually, my concerns are mostly centered on my children, who are not likely to be competitive, or even capable, in the job market when they get to the age where they are "expected to work." And so they will stay home with us, until we are unable to provide a home for them, either before or maybe a few years after we die. As long as I can work, I should be able to provide a decent home for the family, and the system as it is will do O.K. for us as long as we manage our situation wisely.

                        Assuming 30% of our home state isn't underwater by 2050.

                        --
                        🌻🌻 [google.com]
                        • (Score: 1) by khallow on Friday September 23 2016, @08:06PM

                          by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Friday September 23 2016, @08:06PM (#405698) Journal

                          No, actually, my concerns are mostly centered on my children, who are not likely to be competitive, or even capable, in the job market when they get to the age where they are "expected to work."

                          Sorry about your bad luck with the kids. But for parents who don't have developmentally disabled kids, they just won't have those problems in 35 years.

                          Assuming 30% of our home state isn't underwater by 2050.

                          You are speaking of 15 centimeters of sea level gain here. Sorry about your bad luck with your runt of a state. Maybe someone in your family will figure out how to move by the time it matters.

                          I'm sorry, but when I hear concerns like you describe, I have trouble taking them seriously. Scientists have done research on the climate and we're just not seeing the degree of melting now that would lead to significant sea level rise in a human lifetime.