It's surprising to me that there has not been more comment on
the working man's habits re: overtime pay. Perhaps there are not enough
working class participants on FW?
Let me say that the idea that someone who only sometimes
supervises a few others would now be exempt from overtime pay seems a bit
Orwellian, another social engineering feat designed to keep more people on the
bottom and the top tier securely much higher above them.
If you have not worked in the private sector and had your
work performance and job under threat by management expectations about work
load then the examples of abuse of overtime pay and employee loafing may seem
all too true. I contend that at least in the US private sector, this is
less and less the case, as does the proliferation of books and studies done on
the subject and the home life leftover from it these days. Yes, there are
famous examples of abusing the system, but like Reagan's "welfare mom who
drove a Cadillac" these examples get overused as justification for
punitive conditions in the workplace. Speaking from the bottom of the
food chain, this seems oppressive and suggests the excesses of power may be
over reaching, adding another brick to that permanent class distinction wall.
Human nature, as Brad notes, is to test the limits or float
when there is no real threat to survival. As a group, I am suggesting
that the group is threatened. This leads to the very human response of
keeping one's head down. We saw this during the Industrial Revolution, up
to the point that things had to change. And that's where the policy
makers need to listen to the behavioral scientists and the historians, not just
the traditionally math-bound economists.
(see REH’s posting of Calculating the Irrational in Economics today or
go to http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/28/arts/28BEHA.html.)
Below and attached, an article from today's WP giving witness
to what many know all too personally, which makes the Bush2 moves to change job
descriptions and overtime compensation seem that much more greedy and
politically ill-advised. The question is, will this be a temporary
condition of underemployment, or as FW still discusses from time to time,
permanent? - KWC
Excerpts: Forced Down or Out in Grand Rapids:
In Manufacturing-Heavy Region, Economy Is Disrupting Thousands of Careers
By Jonathan Weisman, Washington Post Staff Writer, Saturday, June 28, 2003;
Page E01 @ http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A43062-2003Jun27.html?nav=hptoc_b
...Van Luyn's occupational fall may seem
extreme, but workers here and across the country are making similar compromises
to avoid joining the unemployed. The stubborn 7.3 percent unemployment
rate around Grand Rapids is itself a shock for an area accustomed to the
success that residents figure comes naturally from hard work and a conservative
lifestyle. But unemployment rates
understate the tumult and tragedies of a labor market that has forced workers
to give up hours and overtime, lose pensions and health benefits, and trade
down stable, well-paid jobs for uncertain, increasingly lower-paid ones.
It is difficult to track such turmoil in statistics, but labor economists point
to one number watched by the federal government to illustrate what they call
"underemployment." Between the trough of July 2000 and this May, the last
month for which statistics are available, the
number of workers who say they have unwillingly taken part-time jobs because of
slack work conditions or because no full-time work was available has risen
nearly 47 percent, to 4.6 million from 3.1 million.
... The recessions of the early 1980s and early 1990s
disproportionately struck workers without high school and college degrees, said
Lawrence Mishel, president of the Economic
Policy Institute. During the
recession of 1980-1983, employment fell by 5.6 percent for high school dropouts
and 3.9 percent for those who never attended college, compared with 2.4 percent
for workers with some college education. In contrast, since mid-2000,
unemployment has risen by 2.3 percent for high school dropouts, 1.8 percent for
high school graduates, 2 percent for workers with some college education -- "an egalitarian recession,"
Mishel said.
Keith Hudson wrote:
> Hi Karen,
> I can't possibly comment on the American overtime scene, but what I do
> know is that it has been a racket in England for a long time. Initially
> in industry 20-40 years ago, but now common in the public services.
Let us remember St. Erving of Goffman, the great student
of real human relations under conditions distorted by
asymmetrical social power (e.g., his book _Asylums_,
where he studied how mental patients "worked the system" in
mental hospitals).
I think it's to be expected that wherever persons are
subjected to a system, they will look for ways to "work"
it (like water seeks for fissures in the container that holds it).
The best ways to work a system, of course, are ones that
use its rules against themselves, but often a person
does not discover any such...)....
There is, perhaps, one exception: those whose positions
come with perks built-in, like CxOs whose lunches *are*
business expenses. Of course even these persons
sometimes try to work the system (despite the fact
that the system is already working for them...). "The
public" does not look favorably on executives who are not
content with their "legitimate" emoluments of office
and "cook the books" for "personal gain" -- as if they
weren't getting more than enough personal gain from their
positions de jure! I think there must be some
persons who are "sick" -- such as millionaires who
get caught shoplifting instead of just paying
for what they want from their bottomless pockets.
"Many things are strange, but strangest of all is
man...."
(--Sophocles, _Antigone_, "Ode to Man")
\brad mccormick
> In the 70s when I worked for 20 years in the automobile industry in
> Coventry I saw one automobile firm after another (five altogether) go
> into bankruptcy because of overtime rackets and incompetent management
> who hadn't the nerve to stop it.
>
> In the factory in which I worked, we made more farm tractors than any
> other factory in the world -- about 2,000 a day (1200 on day shift, 800
> at night). The overtime racket was such that the typical worker earned
> more than his foreman, and more than at least one management level above
> him. I had a staff of 120 chemists, metallurgists and engineering
> inspectors and earned less than any of them. (I compensated by
> delegating every last bit of my job, and I spent my time reading. I
> reckon I'd read my way through the equivalent of two or three university
> degrees during that period. Unfortunately, not economics. I've had to
> learn that in old age since joining Futurework!)
>
> Just how much of a racket it was was revealed during Edward Health's
> Prime Ministership in the 70s when the coal miners went on strike. After
> the coal stockpiles went down, power stations were reduced to only three
> days a week of producing electricity. Thus, at Massey-Ferguson, five
> large factory workshops, each the size of four football fields, were
> thus without power and were silent for two days a week. You would
> imagine therefore that the production of tractors would have gone down
> from 10,000 a week to 8,000, wouldn't you?
>
> You would be wrong. We produced just as many as we normally did for as
> long as the coal strike lasted. And how was that? you may well ask. The
> reason why was that, in normal times, the machine tools and the assembly
> track were only producing about 80% of what they were capable of during
> the week. The machine tools were kept running (and consuming
> electricity) while they weren't producing so that the managers could
> hear them running and pretend that that they were working normally. The
> assembly track was run at 80% of its optimum speed but, once again, the
> managers would pretend that it was running normally.
>
> The workers, of course, were saving the balance for the week-end. They'd
> all come in on a Saturday at double-time pay and polish off the
> remaining 20%. That's why, for as long as the three-day week lasted, it
> actually made no difference at all to final production numbers. The
> workers didn't earn overtime for this period, of course, but at least
> they took home basic pay.
>
> Government postal workers today also have their overtime rackets.
> Letters that are received at the local sorting office on a Friday night
> shift for Saturday delivery are not sorted but divided into two lots.
> One lot is sorted for delivery the next morning; the second lot is
> sorted during overtime on Saturday for Monday delivery. There is, of
> course, "normal" overtime for letters that arrive at the sorting
office
> during the week-end for Monday delivery -- but of course it isn't
> delivered on Monday but on Tuesday. Sometimes my subscription Economist
> which should be delivered on Friday, doesn't get delivered until Monday
> or even Tuesday. But by then I've usually bought another copy from a
> shop. So the Economist frequently does well out of the postal workers!
>
> As far as I can judge, overtime is probably a racket everywhere, and it
> sounds as though it's well grounded in America, too! But I'm surprised
> that it is a matter for legislation. Good management and responsible
> trade unions are the answer, not legislation. If only the workers would
> realise that in fiddling overtime they're actually diminishing their
> case for a better basic wage. Over the longer term they're probably no
> better off financially for losing their leisure time. But that's part of
> man's irrationality in economic matters.
>
> Keith Hudson
>
> At 15:05 26/06/2003 -0700, you wrote:
>Talk about a campaign issue! Maybe the White House is waiting for a
>> retirement announcement at the Supreme Court before making these plans
>> more public, anticipating lawsuits? - KWC
>>
>> *8 million may lose OT pay**
>> Bush administration proposal would dramatically alter rules for paying
>> overtime, study says.*
>> June 26, 2003: 3:14 PM EDT @
>> http://money.cnn.com/2003/06/26/news/economy/epi/index.htm
>>
>> NEW YORK (CNN/Money) - More than 8 million workers in the United
>> States will be ineligible for overtime pay under a plan proposed
>> recently by the Bush administration, a research group said Thursday*.
>> *
>> The *Economic Policy Institute (EPI**),* a liberal Washington think
>> tank, examined a proposal by the Labor Department to change the
>> criteria for paying overtime and found that it would cost 2.5 million
>> salaried employees and 5.5 million hourly employees their right to
>> overtime pay.
WEISMAN Forced Down or Out in Grand Rapids.doc