Some attempt to do something which gets the unemployed back to work could be good, but trying to create make-work by using more people than a job requires is not.
will create long term problems for society as a whole.
Most jobs are already needless. Consumerism helps to keep wheels turning. As the time goes, situation is going to get worse. The question is how society is going to get restructured if 80% of its workforce can't produce anything viable anymore (i.e. produced cheaper without involving said workforce)?
Personally, I think the article is refreshing because of its no-nonsense and no-bullshit approach. I've been in too many corporations that keep telling us employees how much they love us while creating an increasingly hostile environment at the same time.
Sure, you automate the factory, so you fire the workers, but they're not machines or work animals that can just be put out of their misery. The capitalist approach is that their working wage is large enough for them to save money to tide them over. Well, look how well that works in practice. What's the average household debt in the US ?
Our society would benefit if instead the corporation hired 20 additional employees, and everyone worked at 100%.
On the other hand, perhaps everyone is better off if those 20 people go out and start companies that create jobs?
This number was determined during the industrial revolution to be the general maximum working hours for productivity to remain constant over a long period.
Which is to say, over 40 hours it was observed that factory workers' productivity decreased over the long term.
Without scientific evidence, I would say it's a pretty good estimate for software work also.
Let's say that the company sells a serving of food for $4, or clothing or clean water or some other neccessity of life, which would go up by 25% to account for the need of that company to feed 25% more mouths.
Suppose company A (your exemplar company) raises its prices from $4 to $5 and company B holds its price constant at $4 (and maybe works its staff 50 hours a week). Which company would you expect to be more successful in the marketplace? Which company would you expect would ultimately employ more people over time? I'd bet on company B.
And given normal turnover, retraining would become a higher portion of that corporation's costs permanently, resulting in permanently decreased productivity.
Overworking only works for a few months, after which people's health will start to suffer. All these managers are deluding themselves if they think this is going to keep on indefinitely. OTOH, if some people were underworked and they are just starting to pull their weight, that's another matter.
But what do I know, I am just an engineer ;).
If I can sell 10,000 widgets for $100 each that doesn't mean that I can sell 1,000,000 widgets at the same price. And if I try to produce that many widgets in the hope of selling them, I'm liable to drive the price of widgets down so far that I'll lose money on all of them!
In other words while the auto industry could produce more cars than anyone wants to buy, it would be a really, really bad idea for them to do so.
In production there is a point of diminishing returns. And after you're at that point, increased productivity frequently results in cutting back people to return production to an optimal level.
In the recent Sunday Times Rich List (of the top 1000 richest people in the UK), 751 were "self-made" with only 249 having inherited their wealth. Most of the billionaires had humble beginnings. There is no defined "upper class" or level of wealth that's impossible for people born into the least economically beneficial situations to attain.
The upper class is a tightly-connected group of people who work to consolidate power, social resources, and wealth within their own ranks. Most of them are parasites and a lot of them are criminals whose politics are regressive.
Most rich people are technically upper-middle class. In fact, if you weren't born upper-class, upper-middle is as high as you can go (your children and grandchildren have a shot, though).
That isn't to say that unemployment is desirable, and at current levels, it's almost certainly destructive. But the measures required to take unemployment from, say, 2-3% to 0 may cause more harm than good.
That said, this is an economic standpoint, rather than a social one, but hopefully I'm not being too opaque with my bias :-)
Maybe I'm just old fashioned, but the solution would seem to be not hiring people based solely on short-term requirements. In other words, hire people that are good no matter what the requirements are.
But then again, this is HR departments we're talking about.
But job-hoppers are still evil, right?