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