What happens to the economy if you offer anyone a federal job at $7.50 an hour with full benefits for 40 hours a week, doing something they are capable of?

Mostly focused on infrastructure, this could be reviewing records, paperwork, digitizing documents, road work, food production, weapons production.

Or scientific discovery, IE reading and summarizing articles, research ect.

As long as you show up, and actually do your job you get that paycheck.

We do away with all the other wage laws and hourly payment laws (benefits laws, overtime laws, minimum wage laws). Keep osha.

1/3/2013 1:21:01 PM

That's what an actual Right to Work would look like.

1/3/2013 1:22:34 PM

Assume that everyone who wants to take that job = x
Well you'd have to hire x/20 managers at $15/hour to make sure they come to work and do their job as well as organize work for them to do (which I doubt there's enough of considering we dont have a huge number of public sector openings to do this work already). Then you'd have to hire x/200 middle managers at $30/hr to make sure the managers do their job and to find groups of work for them to assign to their team, etc. etc.

I think this would require a huge rise in public spending, and possibly pull people out of more productive private jobs, forcing the price of labor up artificially (who would work at McDonalds for the same rate and no benefits?).

But it would be nice to have 1% unemployment and benefits for all workers.

[Edited on January 3, 2013 at 2:02 PM. Reason : ]

1/3/2013 2:01:38 PM

Without any more industrial or technological revolutions, there would eventually be massive unemployment again.

We are at a good time for infrastructure right now, though. Eventually you need to start making stuff with value that produces profits, though.

1/3/2013 2:03:35 PM

^ why would there be massive unemployment? Would not infrastructural allow for jobs to be created that would not previously exist?

[Edited on January 3, 2013 at 5:44 PM. Reason : dd]

1/3/2013 5:44:06 PM

The economy would collapse. I'll assume you can manage it decently, and it won't feel like the DMV...

Unemployment is not obvious from a look at simple Econ 101. You have supply, demand, price... and a crapton of product that isn't getting sold, what? This is why economists chalk up unemployment to the process of "negotiation" between labor and capital. Is unemployment absolutely necessary? Nope. Is any employment necessary? Not a single day of missed work.

I agree, 10s of millions of people would work for your program. I know this because plenty of my own fucking friends and family would work for your program. The demand for simple low-paying jobs is truly staggering. So unemployment would crater, vastly more people would be working. Over time, even people who didn't initially go work for the system would trickle in, as they lost their current job and wanted to do it temporarily, and temporarily became permanent. It would constantly suck workers.

These workers would have a very small paycheck, but they would learn to deal with it - and there is where the economy collapses. People would learn to live more frugally, and without the constant stress of job loss, they would settle into a new kind of lifestyle. Demand would be permanently depressed by these people. They would be producing less and consuming less on average than if they had to fend for themselves in the free market.

The system, as producers, would have very little motivation to bargain for higher prices. After all, their labor is relatively cheap. People buy cheap things, people make things cheaply, deflation spirals.

We have a "crash or fly" economy. It's very easy for people to become economically destitute, but the economic latter is tall, and you can get very far in terms of engagement of career and compensation. It is almost fine-tuned to maximize the differential between driving a hard bargain and not really pushing ahead very much.

It all comes down to bargaining. Since capitalism is feast or famine, then even if you have available very stable business relationships, it behooves the company to push their margins as large as possible. All of this contributes to GDP, and eventually, somewhere along the way, someone tricks someone else into creating value. The hard bargaining would grind to a halt if people had this employment security and they would personally settle for a deflated economy, that is, a depression.

[Edited on January 3, 2013 at 6:03 PM. Reason : ]

1/3/2013 6:03:13 PM

Quote :

"Would not infrastructural allow for jobs to be created that would not previously exist?"

You can't keep producing roads to meet a growing road market

1/4/2013 10:29:18 AM

I think there are a few flaws with your idea. For one, you mention jobs that they are "capable of". Yet many of the jobs you list are things things that would require education and skills that many of the nation's unemployed do not have: advanced manufacturing, scientific documentation, construction work, etc.

Some of the other jobs are also things that people probably would not want to do even if paid more than the hours: agriculture for example. Many people may rather sit on unemployment than do such physically demanding work.

There's also the flawed assumption that people are able or willing to relocate to take these jobs. Lot of people are either pinned by mortgages, family members they have to care for, etc. In fact, I would argue that's one of the bigger problems our labor market is facing right now: unemployed workers are unable/unwilling to access the areas with labor shortages (like North Dakota). Or if they could move, they can't afford to live there on $7.50/hour.

1/4/2013 5:34:42 PM

From my experience, most people that would need these jobs, couldn't do these jobs.

Not saying they're stupid (though many are), but too many people just don't or won't think about what they are doing, or apply critical thinking to what they are doing, or think about impacts of what they're doing.

I've worked under the government before; there were many good employees that did what I just stated; but far too many had no thought capability whatsoever; and many of these were trained professionals or trained technicians. The thought of the average, under/non-educated Joe doing some of these jobs is scary enough.

[Edited on January 4, 2013 at 5:41 PM. Reason : .]

1/4/2013 5:37:17 PM

We've built some pretty cool public works and make work projects in the past

1/4/2013 6:02:56 PM

what would prevent these people from lobbying as a union for a pay increase? eventually they'd be up to $50/hr like the rest of the fed gov employees

1/6/2013 9:06:41 AM

Quote :

"We do away with all the other wage laws and hourly payment laws (benefits laws, overtime laws, minimum wage laws). Keep osha."

1/7/2013 1:22:50 PM

Quote :

"Not saying they're stupid (though many are), but too many people just don't or won't think about what they are doing, or apply critical thinking to what they are doing, or think about impacts of what they're doing. "

Pretty much.

Governments for all of history have tried to figure out how to handle the dead weight of society. We don't deem it acceptable to let them live in squalor like China or India, we don't deem it acceptable to just murder them. With computers and robots, there's no real reason to have some idiot half-assing something than a robot does better, so there's increasingly less jobs to go around too.

There aren't too many options...

1/7/2013 2:03:14 PM

Implement lean policies and performance metrics. Make job performance tied to metrics. Separate the people who monitor the metrics from the actual people performing the job.

Corruption and laziness is prevalent in private businesses too. It's just a matter of having effective performance measurement policies and separation of interest. The path to public sector management gives a lot less exposure to this kind of operating discipline than in the private sector.

1/9/2013 12:57:31 PM

Quote :

"Governments for all of history have tried to figure out how to handle the dead weight of society. We don't deem it acceptable to let them live in squalor like China or India, we don't deem it acceptable to just murder them. "

We instead deem it acceptable to abandon them as children to live on Kraft Mac N Cheese, attend horrible schools they did nothing to deserve, and then arrest them for a minor offense so they can go to prison and be raped by their cellmates and beaten by the guards for months/years before being kicked back into society with even fewer legs to stand on.

edit: As a bonus, we can then take the remaining deadweight and pay them to do the beating!

[Edited on January 9, 2013 at 1:02 PM. Reason : .]

1/9/2013 1:00:17 PM

Quote :

"Implement lean policies and performance metrics. Make job performance tied to metrics. Separate the people who monitor the metrics from the actual people performing the job. "

And do what with the metrics? This is a guaranteed job we're talking about, are you going to fire them? Then how have you changed the situation from how it is now?

1/9/2013 1:54:56 PM