Tuesday AM

A Swedish city (Gothenburg - above) has embarked on an experiment in limiting the workday to six hours in an effort to improve productivity.

A section of employees of the municipality of Gothenburg will now work an hour less a day than the seven hours customary in the Scandinavian social democracy famed for its work-life balance.

The measure is being self-consciously conceived of as an experiment, with a group of municipal employees working fewer hours and a control group working regular hours - all on the same pay. The groups’ performances will then be compared.

It is hoped that the experiment will ultimately save money by making employees more productive in their working hours.

Mats Pilhem, the city’s Left-wing deputy mayor, told The Local Sweden that he hoped “staff members would take fewer sick days and feel better mentally and physically after working shorter days".

The measure comes as a new labor agreement in France orders employees to avoid checking their professional emails and phones after work while employers are legally obliged to ensure workers come under no pressure to keep up-to-speed out of working hours.

Anna Coote, Head of Social Policy at the New Economics Foundation, a UK-based think tank, welcomed the proposals.

“Shorter working hours create a more committed and stable workforce,” Ms Coote told The Telegraph. “There are indications you can make savings by reducing working hours,” she added, citing an experiment in Utah where public sector workers were given a three-day weekend.

According to OECD data, there is a correlation between shorter working hours and greater productivity. 

The Greeks are the hardest working members of the OECD, putting in more than 2,000 hours a year compared with the Germans’ 1,400, but their workers are 70 per cent less productive than their Teutonic counterparts.

Blue collar workers in the US work about 8 to 10 hours a day and in some cases work 12 hour days with 3 days off one week and 4 days off the following week.  

However, white collar workers continue to spend around 50-60 hours on the job while feeling guilty if they do not work at night and on the weekends as well.

Do As I Say, Not As I Do

Recently,  an article was published  that hopefully will permanently ruin any connection that  the Silicon Valley tech billionaires have with their supposedly  libertarian worldviews. 

This article reports on a court case that alleges that Apple, Google, and other Silicon Valley companies actively conspired to keep their workers' wages down. 

According to documents filed in the case, these companies agreed not to compete for each others' workers dating at least as far back as 2005. Workers in the industry have filed a class action suit that could lead to the payment of billions of dollars in lost wages.

This case is interesting in that there is theft of large amounts of money by some of the richest people on the planet from their employees; but, bosses steal from their all the time and there is no surprise that rich people were willing to break the law to get even richer.

The real news here is how the Silicon Valley barons allegedly broke the law. The charge is that they actively colluded to stifle market forces. They collectively acted to prevent their workers from receiving the market-clearing wage. 

This means not only that they broke the law, and that they acted to undermine the market, but that they really don't think about the market the way libertarians claim to think about the market.

The classic libertarian view of the market is that we have a huge number of people in the market actively competing to buy and sell goods and services. This point is central to their argument that the government should not interfere with corporate practices.

For example, if we think our local cable company is charging too much for cable access, our libertarian friends will insist that the phone company, satellite television or other competitors will step in to keep prices in line. 

They would tell the same story if the issue were regulating the airlines, banks, health insurance, or any other sector where there is reason to believe that there is limited competition.

If we think that workers are getting low wages, then the answer is to improve their skills through education and training, rather than raise the minimum wage. If workers were worth more than the minimum wage, then the market would already be paying them more than the minimum wage.

If we think about family leave, sick days, or other benefits. Libertarians would say that if workers value these benefits, they would negotiate for them and be willing to trade off wages. There is no reason for the government to get involved.

However, the Silicon Valley non-compete agreements show that this is not how the tech billionaires believe the market really works.

Of course, the “invisible hand” as mentioned by Adam Smith in his Wealth of Nations, presupposed that the marketplace would be self-correctly and that no one entity or person would ever do anything to hard themselves or their entity.  

Obviously, Adam Smith did not predict that greedy billionaires would do just about anything to protect their billions.

WORKING POOR

The working poor are working people whose incomes fall below a given poverty line. Depending on how one defines "working" and "poverty," someone may or may not be counted as part of the working poor. For example, discussions in the United States about defining working poverty often fall on different sides based mainly on the two-party distinction. In nations with multiple parties, the discussions may be more refined, but a variety of opinions exist how the working poor compare to the nonworking poor.

While poverty is often associated with joblessness, a significant proportion of the poor in the US and Canada, but also Italy, Spain, and Ireland are actually employed. The wages the working poor receive are insufficient to provide basic necessities and lead to people making choices between having food on the table or having a table. Largely because they are earning such low wages, the working poor face numerous obstacles that make it difficult for many of them to find and keep a job, save up money, and maintain a sense of self-worth. 

Particularly having an official working poverty rate can make the definition more important than the people. The US, for instance, has remained a somewhat stable level of the working poverty rate over the past four decades, but many social scientists argue that the official rate is set too low; that the proportion of workers facing significant financial hardship has instead increased over the years. The same is true for other nations, where the hardship for the working poor is also not expressed well.

WASHINGTON,Jan 15 (Reuters) - The number of U.S. families struggling with poverty despite parents being employed continued to grow in 2011 as more people returned to work but mostly at lower-paying service jobs, an analysis released on Tuesday shows.

More working parents have taken jobs as cashiers, maids, waiters and other low-wage jobs in fast growing sectors that offer fewer hours and benefits, according to The Working Poor Project, a privately funded effort aimed at improving economic security for low-income families.

The result is 200,000 more such working families - the so-called "working poor" - emerged in 2011 than in 2010, according to the report, based on analysis of the most recent U.S. Census Bureau data.

About 10.4 million such families - or 47.5 million Americans - now live near poverty, defined as earning less than 200 percent of the official poverty rate, which is $22,811 for a family of four.

Overall, nearly one-third of working families now struggle, up from 31 percent in 2010 and 28 percent in 2007, when the recession began, according to the analysis.

"Although many people are returning to work, they are often taking jobs with lower wages and less job security, compared with the middle-class jobs they held before the economic downturn," the report said.

"This means that nearly a third of all working families ... may not have enough money to meet basic needs."

Social scientists from many nations argue that changes in the economy, especially the shift from a manufacturing-based to a service-based economy, have resulted in the polarization of the labor market. This means that there are more jobs at the top and the bottom of the income spectrum, but fewer jobs in the middle. 

And fewer jobs in the middle mean a reduction of the MIDDLE CLASS.  Of course, from a business perspective as companies protect margins, it would be inconceivable to think that this shift was intentional.  Although…