There is a market for slacking

[ipaps]

Say there are 10 CAD specialists who work for some companies around. It normally takes them 8 hours per day per person to finish the jobs. Now if the specialists start to work hard and make themselves work twice as fast as before, do they get a raise? No, because the demand for specialists is halved and the supply stays the same. They'd reduce their own salary by exhausting themselves.

On the contrary, if the specialists slack here and there, they create a greater demand for themselves, increasing their own value.

Bye bye hard working, myth busted!

 

[SteadyMercury]

Be the CAD specialist who works hard and finishes everything in half the time, charging 50% more per hour. Companies work with you because they get their CAD work done faster and cheaper (50% higher but only charged for 4 hours to finish task) and you get a 50% raise for the same 8 hours of work.

 

[ipaps]

Be the CAD specialist who works hard and finishes everything in half the time, charging 50% more per hour. Companies work with you because they get their CAD work done faster and cheaper (50% higher but only charged for 4 hours to finish task) and you get a 50% raise for the same 8 hours of work.

Inspired by such diligence, all other CAD specialists starts to work as hard. What took 10 CAD specialists to do each day, now take only 5. Soon the companies announce cut-off to save cost. 5 CAD specialist lose their job.

In the end, the companies reduce their cost on CAD specialists by 25 percent. CAD specialists as a whole lose 25 percent of their income.

 

[SteadyMercury]

Company costs are reduced thru increased productivity, and the widgets are now sold for less than they used to be while still generating more profit. Several new companies open up after seeing the opportunity for profit making the widgets.

In the end, CAD specialists are back up to 10 to support the burgeoning industry, CAD specialists make more money, and the consumers enjoy both the wider selection and cheaper prices of widgets.

 

[editec]

Productivity is up enormously in American industry.

Yet worker wages continue to fall.

Can YA'LL figure out where the extra profits are going?

You can do it.

Ya'll are, after all, experts in capitalism and economics, right?

 

[SteadyMercury]

Yet worker wages continue to fall.

They fell during the recession, but are pretty much back to pre boom-then-recession levels:
Table 1. Median usual weekly earnings of full-time wage and salary workers by sex, quarterly averages, seasonally adjusted

Ya'll are, after all, experts in capitalism and economics, right?

God no not me.

There are a few like OldFart, Toro, pinqy, etc. that strike me as having a claim to genuine expertise, but they are the exceptions. The rest of us just talk out of our asses.

 

[Moonglow]

With a deeper voice...

 

[ipaps]

Company costs are reduced thru increased productivity, and the widgets are now sold for less than they used to be while still generating more profit. Several new companies open up after seeing the opportunity for profit making the widgets.

In the end, CAD specialists are back up to 10 to support the burgeoning industry, CAD specialists make more money, and the consumers enjoy both the wider selection and cheaper prices of widgets.

Say that the companies reduce their cost by 25%, and sell products cheaper, but not greater than 25%. But the reduced cost is from reduced CAD specialists income, witch is 25%. Not just that, of the 10 specialists, 5 of them is without income and cannot spend much, the other 5 is exhausted so they go strait home after work and hit the bed.

 

[SteadyMercury]

No we covered that. CAD specialists are charging more because they are more productive since they decided to work instead of slack. Demand for their work increased so all 10 are employed.

Straight home after work to hit the bed just because they worked a full 8 hour day? Man how do the rest of us manage to do so.

 

[srlip]

corporations get to hide LOTS of profits in their so called "retained earnings" account, which is supposedly needed for future expenses of the corporation. To a certain extent this is correct, more so in some industries than others.

 

[ipaps]

No we covered that. CAD specialists are charging more because they are more productive since they decided to work instead of slack. Demand for their work increased so all 10 are employed.

Straight home after work to hit the bed just because they worked a full 8 hour day? Man how do the rest of us manage to do so.

Where are they covered? Or do you mean covered up? What you described make me think of the happily ever after ending. But maybe you're right, and I'm not sure about this slacking strategy myself.