Friday, January 12, 2018

Resorting the workers

Walmart is reportedly cutting thousands of store co-managers after raising wages

There is a shifting labor share, for some reason.  If labor share goes up, then the firm needs more structure to more accurately run the business.

In this case the wages of floor labor is up, so eliminate one wage slot, leave the whole floor to one labor wage, except department managers.  Labor share increase, labor needs to become more elastic and do more complex stuff, raise the rank of the organization.

When labor share drops, labor organization gets simpler with fewer wage slots.. It becomes efficient to perform some thin value added, like a small corner store.

This process is not asymptotically safe, it has the coffee cup slosh effet, hard limits that need to be reached. In generator language, there is no node by node isomorphism that observedly moves to toward an equilibrium.    We see this in the cost of gaining inside information about the employees.  They have been deadended in static jobs, or semi-employed. Hiring managers have to go back and re-market all their hires, essentially recreate an internal labor market. 

The hiring managers and department managers invariably build the external market, which suddenly coalesces and stops the layoffs. Wer begin remarketing workers.  So there is this gap, this quick run up in unemployment as we wait the hiring managers, and in that gap labor is a bit lost, has no equilibrium to aim for.

Arnold Kling actually got this right years ago. I never really cared until WeWork started getting innovative. 

These  folks for example:

Trump Slashes Federal Bureaucracy, ‘Morale Has Never Been Lower.’

The labor market has to build a hiring system to reveal their inside skills. Most will retire early, we get pension stampede. We gonna have that problem in spades in California.

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