| Title | HP and Microsoft Prove it Again: Big Business Doesn't Create Jobs | |
| Date | Wednesday July 23 2014, @10:22PM | |
| Author | martyb | |
| Topic | ||
| from the all-jobs-are-not-the-same-either dept. | ||
The Register has a report claiming that it is small and medium sized businesses that create jobs. While that is too sweeping a generalisation, it points out the problems regarding layoffs from both Microsoft and Hewlett-Packard because, the article claims, they have lost their way. From the article:
The recent news of layoffs from computing giants provides proof, once again, of an old economic saw. It's not actually big businesses that create jobs, it's the small and new ones that do.
Our problem is that we've a political class (yes, all of it) that doesn't really quite get this. They would like there to be lots of jobs, of course, but they think that the way to get them is to suck up to to give privileges to large extant employers instead of the people who actually do create jobs.
Microsoft is laying off 18,000 because they're not sure what they should be doing (other than indulging in corporate doubletalk that is). HP is going to lay off even more people because, err, they don't know what they should be doing either. And all of this really shouldn't be a surprise to observers of the scene economic. We expect big business to continually be shrinking its workforce. Perhaps not with quite this sort of vehemence but over time it's the standard assumption.
[....]
Each year the UK economy destroys some 3 million jobs. Yes, really, 10% of all jobs disappear each year. Some of this is bankruptcy of firms, some of it is technological advance (to the extent that the first isn't caused by the second). Each year the UK economy also creates some 3 million jobs. The change in unemployment is the balance between those destroyed and created numbers and what happens in recessions isn't that, particularly, more people get fired or more companies go bankrupt. It's that many fewer new firms start up, many fewer small ones expand. And it's that which produces the imbalance that leads to higher unemployment rolls. Not a greater destruction of extant jobs, but an absence of job creation.
While this might not seem to ring true to the many that are currently out of work and struggling to get by, the article does give more explanation and provides much food for thought. What do you Soylentils think?
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printed from SoylentNews, HP and Microsoft Prove it Again: Big Business Doesn't Create Jobs on 2024-04-25 01:34:43