Dave Stadt wrote:

Saw a tid bit on the news a week or so ago. For 40 months in a row the
number of manufacturing jobs in this country has gone down. In the mean
time worker productivity has gone up significantly. Don't know if any
conclusions can be made but it sounds suspicious.

That's simple. At least 1/3 of the cost of an employee is overhead. If the
company involved has a good retirement and benefits package, the cost is more
like 2/3. Even if you have to pay time-and-a-half, it's cheaper to work two
employees 12 hours a day than to work three employees 8 hours a day. The only
problem is that, if you keep employees working lots of overtime, after a few
months, they get tired and the amount they do per hours goes down. You may fix
that by setting the workday at 14 hours, but at some point, the overtime pay
gets to be more than just hiring another person.

If your employees are "professionals", however, you don't have to pay them for
the overtime. The real problem there is that many of these people were working
long hours well before the current recession, so there's not a lot of room for
"productivity" increases.

So. If you increase the work day from 8 to 12 hours and fire every third person,
the number of jobs just went down by 33.3% and productivity went up by 33.3%.

George Patterson
Some people think they hear a call to the priesthood when what they really
hear is a tiny voice whispering "It's indoor work with no heavy lifting".