John Linton
It's nice to see that Goldman Sachs has had a very profitable March quarter and is making plans to begin to repay the US government its "bail out money". Similarly the other big US banks are reporting returns to profitability and upbeat forecasts so perhaps the "GFC" never did exist? Pity on the same page the WSJ reported that the US government was saying that GM should be allowed to enter Chapter 11 as it could see no way of providing the amount of money required to keep it operating in its current form.
http://online.wsj.com/public/page/news-business-us.html
So, for me and I imagine most other 'lay' people, the daily economic news remains as incomprehensible as it always has with a deluge of apparently either contradictory or meaningless information with no 'directional guidance' as far as our individual circumstances detectable. Is there in fact any 'down turn' at all in Australia? Sure the unemployment figures have risen but is that because so many jobs have disappeared or is it because the financial news has been so depressing for so long that a large percentage of companies have quietly begun to get rid of their excess employees that basically every commercial enterprise builds up during protracted periods of good times' like the last decade plus in Australia?
My observations of working in this country for more than the past 40 years is that every company I have ever worked for and every company I acquired any knowledge of could, at any point in time, have operated just as well with between 10% and 20% less employees and quite probably far more (this particularly applied to upper and middle management personnel). So the current 5.7% unemployment level is neither here not there in determining whether Australia's economic outlook is actually any different to what it was ten years, five years or one year ago or even 3 months ago.
Australia, as far as I have ever seen (and taking into account my lack of fundamental knowledge of how economies and commercial enterprises actually 'work') has comprised of commercial businesses (and of course federal, state and local government departments) that have an excess of personnel who do no meaningful/productive work by which I mean work that actually contributes to the efficient achievement of the organisation's end objectives. In even the most efficient companies I have worked in (and I include IBM in the 1970s in that list) I would estimate that no-one worked for more than around 50% of the time allocated to "working hours" with the rest of the time filled with meaningless (in the context of meeting corporate objectives) tasks and just plain 'waiting around' activities.
In fact most, if not all, companies I have worked for actually fulfilled more of a Social Services role of providing unemployable, or at least people unsuitable for the jobs they were employed to do, with semi-meaningful ways of spending the alleged working hours and days of the week. I would find it impossible to think of an employer (including my very first job with Coles at Randwick who employed me to sweep floors, clean windows and move boxes) who didn't have far too many people for even the most mundane of 'job specifications'.
In the 'old days' these obvious, even to a 17 year old, over-staffing practices were usually blamed on union interference (when I commented as a very young man/boy that their appeared to be too many counter 'sales' people and that for most of the day none of them had anything to do) I was told that as a BB (or whatever) grade store the number of people in each job category was set by the relevant union. However those days have long gone and in any event my subsequent jobs in the technology industry (or what passed for a technology industry in those days) certainly had no union involvement that I was aware of....but all of those companies had far too many people for the results they were obtaining.
My observations were at the time, and they have never changed over the succeeding decades, that Australians didn't, generally, work very hard nor did the companies that employed them expect them to - which suited me fine - it was certainly part of Australia's relaxed attitudes to practically everything that very much appealed to me then and now. It also meant that people like me who got bored easily and therefore didn't want to work as much as wanted to do something with their time more meaningful than spinning out any task's completion for as long as possible did more than other people in the same position and therefore tended to 'move on' faster than more Australian 'culture' influenced people.
I don't think anything much has changed except that every so often there is an 'economic slow down' that punishes employees of slackly managed public and private enterprises by depriving them of their jobs and therefore inflicting on those individuals, and the people dependent upon them, all of the extreme 'pain' of living without an income for some unknown period of time.
No-one seems to learn from this cycle and the same companies that have laid off their 'excess personnel' will, as soon as circumstances permit, simply hire above their basic needs again until they repeat the process when the next 'down turn' occurs - or as it seems to me at the moment - the next down turn is said to be occurring although it isn't noticeable in many of the places that are acting as if it is.
I have to wonder what would happen if so many companies didn't hire so far above their needs and therefore automatically creating positions within their organisations that are 'dispensible' and also preventing a proportion of the people they hire from ever becoming indispensible? Or, perhaps putting it a better way, abandoning 'over hiring' practices that automatically prevent people from truly progressing their knowledge and skills with another employer who has provided a 'real' position so that the organisation they work for itself becomes protected against 'economic downturns'. I don't seem to be able to phrase what I mean very clearly - but it seems to me that if every employee of an organisation was generating a share of the company's revenue and profit via their own activities then there would never be a scenario that made them 'dispensable'.
Perhaps it's just that I don't understand the first thing about how economies or commercial organisations work - it would be the most likely explanation.