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Efficiency and employment
Author: Michael Newman
One person's “secure, pensionable job” is somebody else's idea of a life of boredom, and might suggest to a third person an inefficient bureaucracy. One person's “economic dynamism” is somebody else's economic insecurity. There are a lot of ideas of how a good job looks like, but I guess it' s of common sense that everyone wants to have payable, I'd rather say well-payable job, be sure that tomorrow or next day she or he will be able to worksomewhere and get wages for it. But what we see now is the situation under which it's not always possible to work – a huge rate of unemployment confirms it. There are a lot of reasons for it, and one of them is enormous economic changes and their impact on social production (security). Deregulation of financial markets, privatization of formerly nationalized industries, restructurisation as a result of advances in computer technology, expansion of Asian trade, transition of the formerly communist regimes in Central and Eastern Europe to market economies. The list of changes in economy seems to be endless. Faced with global competition, many companies felt the need to become more efficient, i.e. they needed to employ fewer people. Part-time employment, temporary (casual) employment, long-term unemployment have grown rapidly, throughout Europe and this has resulted in high social unrest and much higher rates of crime. One the one hand we can see the growing gap between rich and poor, unemployment and low pay which are no longer the sole measure of inequality and lack of social being. Even those on average incomes and above can become victims of pressures beyond their control. They too can be left partially or completely excluded from their social networks. But on the other hand I'd like to say witness for employees. Sometimes they need to reduce their core staff if they want their firms to survive. As companies have come under intense and growing pressure from pension funds and insurance companies to deliver the highest financial returns in the industrialized world. So to get profit companies reduce, as I've already mentioned, their core staff and hire additional workers on contracts which will allow them to be shed quickly if times get rough. These attempts of making labour markets more flexible, in fact, had and will have some advantages. In past it's particularly considered to have encouraged inward investment, because companies didn't think they were going to get stuck with very high labour costs if the demand that they were expecting for their products wasn't quite fulfilled. However, while it's been very good for companies, because it's made it easier for company management to keep their labour force exactly matched to the level of demand they are experiencing, it's had a number of drawbacks in terms of public policy. The famous example is of Burger King, where young workers clocked on when customers appeared; this reduced their wages to a derisory level but ensured that they were only paid for the minutes they were needed. All these caused a marked growth in forms of work that are not ‘tenured'. With full-time workers only qualified for tenure after two years, the recent pick-up in full-time work means little. They can be laid off within two years as easily as they were hired. So we see that the rapid growth in the number of part-timers without any formal job security, contract workers sacked and then rehired as self-employed, temporary, part-time self-employed and agency workers is the true indicator that employment conditions have changed; even those employees who want to hold out against the new trends are forced to conform. If they allow their wage cost to rise above the industry average, they face loss of market share and financial distress. As a result of all these problems some decisions should be made in order to stabilize the situation. A very obvious measure is to try and make sure that people who are unemployed are given, offered a relatively good level of training, so that they are made a bit more attractive to employees. Other measure that governments have tried to use, particularly in Britain, is to offer employers who take on long-term unemployment reductions in social security benefits. In the European Union the EU Treaty was signed in Amsterdam to improve the situation in employment. The following developments were planned within a framework of EU employment guidelines: -Improving the employability of the young and long-term jobless. Countries are expected to review their existing training systems and shift the attention from passive measures to more active moves into the labour markets. -Easing the transaction from school to work to ensure young people are better qualified for labour market than in the past. Employers and trade unions are supposed to play their past (removing obstacles to traineeship and work experience) -Urging member states to utilize new technologies and innovations in local labour market and in the social economies to create jobs that link needs to new work. -Reforming the tax systems of member states to make them more ‘employment-friendly' -Modernizing (upgrading) work organization (introducing more flexible working into enterprises and sectors), calculating working time on an annual rather than weekly or monthly basis, developing part-time employment -Creating more adaptable forms of fixed-term contracts -Strengthening equal opportunity's policy in the labour market All these steps are being implemented within the framework of coordinated macro-economic policies. It is hoped a new dynamism and climate of confidence will emerge to beast employment and re-energize European labour markets.
Article Source: http://www.articlesbase.com/organizational-articles/efficiency-and-employment-1286028.html
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