Patrick in reply to Tod Kelly says:

@jm3z-aitch

Let’s say Wal Mart shifted to a model of full time employment, using part time labor obly minimally to fill in around the edges of the busiest hours. This means it needs fewer total employees.

Is this, on net, a better or worse outcome? Why? From whose perspective?

Assuming that the employee pool overall is largely comprised of folks who would benefit from the structure of a full-time job (i.e., people other than say high school/college kids who never intend this to be full-time employment) this is a likely better outcome for everyone, I’d say, on a raw efficiency basis.

Even accounting for the additional people we’d have on the dole, we’d have better morale among the workers, a more stable income for them, the employers would be benefited by increased problem domain experience, since the cost-cutting performance incentives would be minimized (presuming, of course, that all their competitors are under similar constraints), and the price difference in the goods sold would be (I suspect) rather small given the economy of scale.Report

Patrick in reply to Tod Kelly says:

Close enough for it not to matter.

Granted, there’s probably a limited subset of the population who (a) requires steady work (b) thrives on an environment where context-switching in extremely high and (c) really wants to hold down multiple part-time jobs rather than a single full-time one, but I doubt this is both (a large population) and (one particularly suited to working at Wall-Mart).

Part of this, I’ll admit, is based upon my own bias about retail and efficiency. Retail, being a seasonally-impacted job sector, has a tendency to err on the side of providing part time employment (even though part time employees will be less efficient than full time ones) because the profit margins are so thin and they’re basically playing a Prisoner’s Dilemma against each other, winding up with the least optimal outcome but the predictable one because of defection.

Maybe I’m missing something, though. Who do you think benefits from this norm, James?Report

Patrick in reply to Tod Kelly says:

I am so not following the logic here, Patrick. I assume it is that I have not had enough coffee this AM.

The combox is probably insufficient.

I’ll add it to the list of things I should flesh out better.Report

Patrick in reply to Tod Kelly says:

I can’t believe anyone here is seriously calling this the lump of labor fallacy. Y’all ought not use words if you don’t know the meaning.

Oh, I know what it means, James. I’ll just quote Wikipedia right here to show that I at least read that much: “In economics, the lump of labour fallacy (or lump of jobs fallacy, fallacy of labour scarcity, or the zero-sum fallacy, from its ties to the zero-sum game) is the contention that the amount of work available to labourers is fixed. It is considered a fallacy by most economists,[1] who hold that the amount of work is not static. Another way to describe the fallacy is that it treats the demand for labour as an exogenous variable, when it is not.”

The money line in there is, “Another way to describe the fallacy is that it treats the demand for labour as an exogenous variable, when it is not.”

If an economist is going to make that claim, saying that it then follows that altering the amount of work in a day by reducing the workday will not necessarily lead to an increase in unemployment, then the same exact reasoning follows that increasing the workday will not necessarily lead to an increase in unemployment, because labor either is or is not an exogenous variable, and the assertion is … wait for it… made by most economists is that it is not. I’m on board with that. That cuts both ways.

Liberals are the ones claiming part-time Wal Mart jobs are about the worst out there.

Um, really? Let me turn this contention on its head… can you show me someone who says that Wal-Mart jobs aren’t about the worst out there? I think it’s pretty commonly held that Wal-Mart jobs suck? Why do you have to bring “Liberals” into it? Do I need to state again that I’m not one? Maybe we should throw another gun post up so I can comment on that and be cast out by the Liberal Cabal again?

So we can assume that those who stick to part-time Wal Mart jobs are those who can’t get anything but the worst jobs out there. If they lose those jobs, well, they’re not going to get something better presumably, or they would already have been shifting to those (and remember, we’re talking about the least productive of the people in the worst jobs out there, because if Wal Mart shifts people to full time, it’s going to be the more productive ones, not the least). They presumably can’t find anything much worse, because they’ve already got the worst jobs. Possibly they can find jobs equally bad, but with a stagnant economy and an unemployment rate that’s not budging much, there’s probably not many of those either, at this time.

Why should we assume any of these things? Here, let me toss some other assumptions your way (not all of which I agree with, mind you, but if we’re throwing out assumptions let’s go for the grab bag)… we could assume that there used to be full-time employment and there isn’t any any more because Wal-Mart moved into town and (using their rent-granted if not rent-seeking behavior) they used their ability to leverage price cuts at a temporary loss to drive everybody else out of business, shuttering those full-time job providers. We could assume that Wal-Mart, given the edict to give full-time employment, given that their competitors would also have to give full-time employment, would keep the vast majority of their workforce and pass costs along to the customers. We could assume lots of other things too.

Sure, over time the economy should recover and create jobs for them to fill (although how fast depends upon many things, including whether we mandate living wages and employer-paid health plans), but I’m talking about what those people do until then.

Now you’re sounding like a liberal.

It’s about the laid-off-workers’ productivity and the current state of the economy. It’s not about lump of labor at all.

Now you’re really sounding like a liberal.

Or are you claiming Wal Mart doesn’t have a fixed quantity of labor that it needs to have performed, so it could actually shift all part-time workers to full-time, not letting any of them go, and not have a bunch of them standing around diddling themselves?

Um, I would say that Wal-Mart does not have a fixed quantity of labor that it needs to have performed, and so would you. Wal-Mart’s labor requirements are a function of how much buying people do at Wal-Mart, right? This is influenced by a number of factors, seasonal ones, general state of the economy, sure… and also how much money people who shop at Wal-Mart have to spend. Which, yanno, would go up if places like Wal-Mart actually paid full-time competitive employment labor prices, right? I mean, not just Wal-Mart, but all of the job providers in that section of the economy?

Because that’s not the lump of labor fallacy, either (because that fallacy is about the economy as a whole, not a particular firm or even industry), and we run into the issue of short, medium, and long-term adjustments by firms in response to demand, which is a whole separate issue.

Sure.

Two huge problems here. First, how do they not have an unemcumbered ability to find a no-welfare job now, that they will have when they’re on welfare?

Uh, have you tried looking for a job when you have a job vs. when you don’t have a job? The first one is a lot less stressful, but the second is orders of magnitude easier for the simple reason that you don’t have to juggle your job demands with your actual looking for a job activities.

Second, if it’s such an upside for them, why are they sticking to their crappy part-time Wal Mart jobs instead of taking that path?

Well, I can think of all sorts of grab-bag reasons why. Maybe their state Welfare construct limits payouts to people who work. Maybe some well-meaning GOP legislators demand workfare instead of welfare? Maybe if they make more money than what they make at their Wal-Mart job they’ll lose their welfare benefits? You know, there’s all sorts of perverse incentives that have been created in the welfare system by well-meaning folks who are just inspired by the Puritan ethic of work. And by people who just want their not to be a welfare system at all, as well.

Maybe they’re just too stupid to figure it out on their own and need some good caring liberals to tell them what’s best for them?… Well, it’s good you know better for them than they do.

James, it’s pretty rare that you lose your shit and just start projecting like this to me, so I’ll let this pass, but this is strike two. Knock it off.

Maybe a lot of those people prefer to work part time so they’re not completely on the dole, so they feel at least partly self-sufficient instead of completely dependent upon others–pride matters, too, and sometimes particularly for those who don’t have much else.

See, now, if I’m being snarky I’d… oh, never mind. No, I’ll say it anyway. I think the Puritan work ethic is just as much a millstone on public policy discourse as blanket anti-corporatism.

I don’t give a flying rat fuck how people feel about policy, James (this is one reason why I’d make a terrible liberal).

Well, no, let me amend that… I care about how they feel only to the extent that it affects the ability to implement policy, which I realize is a very real thing, especially in this country where every policy stance has to have a polar opposite that is picked up by the other side and everybody relies on negative marketing.

I care about outcomes. If the measurable outcome of disincentivizing part-time work to the extent that it becomes problematic for corporations to rely upon it… is that people get sustainable employment when they are employed and the people who aren’t employed get access to resources that get them sustainable employment, I really don’t give two shits if someone has to go through some self-doubt and self-assessment because they take public assistance.

And yes, I’m fully aware that this means that we need good safety net construction particularly in down economic times. I’m okay with that.

If the measurable outcome is that things get worse, then I want to change the policy.

That’s just me. I realize not everybody is like me, but if you want to go argue with them, do that.

I’m just absolutely amazed that after all the bashing of Wal Mart for not paying people enough to get all the way off welfare, the only answer I’m getting is, “well, at least some people will be better off, and the ones Wal Mart fires can just go on welfare.” It’s a pity cognitive dissonance doesn’t come with louder warning bells.

Jesus Christ, dude. Okay, let me spell this out for you in “I’m not giving you the liberal argument” clarity:

My objection to Wal-Mart isn’t that they’re paying people too little. I think that they are, but that’s not my objection.

It’s that they’re using the existence of the welfare state and government assistance to pay people less than they otherwise would have to pay them to do the same job. They’re passive rent-seekers, basically. They’re gaming/free-riding on the social support mechanism that was originally implemented to help people who weren’t working (I have another objection, but I can’t talk about that here, although if you want to chat about it some day fire me off an email).

And my objection to Wal-Mart’s business practices really doesn’t have anything to do with the discussion I’ve been having here, so I’m not even sure why it’s relevant.

Anyway, I’m off to bed now. I’m not sure if I’d find these arguments any less irritating on a good day, but it’s not a good day and I’d rather quit before I get too unpleasant.

Too late!

Assume three possible outcomes for the currently-part-time Wal Mart employee.

1. Be promoted to full time work.
2. Retain the status quo.
3. Become unemployed and go full time on welfare.

Okay, no problem.

I think we can agree most would list #1 as their top outcome. (Some proportion will prefer part-time work for various reasons having to do with family, health, sufficient spousal income, what have you, but most I assume would prefer to work more.)

Awesome, we agree on that too!

Unfortunately for them, they don’t really control that, so that outcome remains out of reach (at least at Wal Mart, but they don’t seem to be finding full-time work elsewhere, either).

Sure.

The question then becomes, which of the other two choices they most prefer.

Wait, what? Um, no.

You argue they would prefer 3 to 2.

No, I would argue that they would prefer the surety that most of them would get (1) if only some of them get (3). Well, sure, some of the crappier members of the workforce would vote for (2), because the status quo is they get to keep their job until some other pressure convinces their boss to let them go, but given the fact that most people over-value their own contributions, I’m guessing that still plenty of terrible Wal-Mart workers would go with it. Assuming of course that (3) in their locale hasn’t been totally engineered to suck, which is a huge assumption, granted.

But simply the fact that so many of them stick to the status quo suggests they’ve revealed a preference for 2 over 3.

I think you put far, far too much faith in the fact of their current employment status reveals some preference for the conditions under which they work, which discounts so many contributory factors to their decisionmaking that might be economic and tied to our system of welfare or simply loss aversion or any one of a number of other factors. I mean, c’mon, James, people worked in the early 20th century under conditions that we’d all agree now were horrible, and when they had the option not to do so, they all took it, right? Not by quitting their jobs, but… this is how we got unions in the first place? And then labor laws?

You have to get around that brute empirical fact to make your argument.

I don’t find that fact particularly brutal.Report

Patrick in reply to Tod Kelly says:

Hm, okay, food for thought.

That sounds like a pretty terrible predictor for employee quality, especially in a down economy, but nobody ever said employers used good predictors in hiring.Report

Patrick in reply to Tod Kelly says:

Well, I know for a fact that in the tech industry, if you’re working for a tech company they care first for your referral and second for your demonstrated history, and not at all about whether or not you are currently working unless you’ve been out of the game long enough that your skills might atrophy, and even then the referral and the demonstrated history probably trump that all to hell.

Working in the tech industry for a non-tech company is different, but I don’t see tech interviewers caring much about where you work now.

But that’s the one industry with which I’m reasonably familiar enough to make an assessment.

In education (the second one industry), they don’t seem to care much either, all of the major driving factors in education have very little to do with how long you’ve been working and everything to do with other things, depending upon what job you’re taking.

But I haven’t worked for a blue collar job in forever and the last time I went cold with no documented work experience into a blue collar job application I was fifteen.

Still, it’s food for thought. There’s a lot of potential confounding factors involved in Chris’s contention, but that doesn’t mean I can discount it out of hand.Report

Patrick in reply to Tod Kelly says:

Yes, I get that can easily be the case.

But now I’m curious if there’s research that’s corrected for confounding factors that still shows a bias towards hiring people who are currently employed.

It could be.Report

Patrick in reply to Tod Kelly says:

There’s a point at which a comment is too long, and contains too much incoherence to be effectively countered.

This is your third strike. James, I’m not going to play your new Blaise. If you’re going to engage with me, please do so thoroughly and without dismissive language. I’m a reasonably smart guy, okay? If you think something is incoherent, there are four possibilities:

One, I’m an idiot (can we agree that there is sufficient evidence in our previous interplay to suggest this isn’t the case?)

Two: I’m having an embolism (I think we can discard this one)

Three: I’m communicating with some assumptions you don’t understand (which is on me, sure, but then the right thing to do is ask for clarification, not be a jerk?)

Four: I’m missing something important (which is totally possible, but then investigation might be in order, which will be made more difficult if you’re going to be a jerk?)

If I’m going to the trouble of writing a long comment, at the very least, you could respond to the more important parts of the long comment, instead of writing your own long comment that barely addresses those important parts? If you don’t recognize the important parts, maybe I’m communicating badly (and that’s on me), but if you don’t recognize an important part, maybe that’s an indicator that something’s missing from the conversation?

And when you respond to a long comment with a long comment that clearly misunderstood something, (note, I said specifically “No, I would argue that they would prefer the surety that most of them would get (1) if only some of them get (3)”, a possibility that you hadn’t included in your response, so clearly something was missing, right?) try getting a the heart of the lack of communication that’s clearly going on, instead of being a jerk?

You still mistakenly believe I’m talking about the lump of labor fallacy when I’m talking about short and middle run economic effects

I am going to step aside for a moment and offer an observation:

I understand your position. Fully. On board. Okay? I think I made that quite clear, right here:

* If the measurable outcome of disincentivizing part-time work
* to the extent that it becomes problematic for corporations
* to rely upon it… is that people get sustainable employment
* when they are employed and the people who aren’t employed
* get access to resources that get them sustainable employment

See, I’m totally aware that in the short term, we might cost someone some part time work.

You don’t seem to grasp that I am doing an internal critique, working from the liberals’s own economic complaints and concerns about Wal Mart. If you don’t get that, then you’re missing my point.

James, should I point to the 9,345,321 times on the blog where you have said – and rightly so – that you’re tired of liberals telling libertarians what they believe, and that you wish people would just engage you, standing right there?

If you want to offer a critique of an argument, I would say the best thing to do is write a guest post that lays out the argument and then critiques it. Because you’re critiquing an argument that hasn’t been explicitly made, which has led us down into the weeds.

If you want to have a discussion with me, here in the combox, then let’s do that.

If you want to offer a critique of an argument that I’m not making and then get all huffy with me when I start talking to you, then we’re probably wasting our time.

(I will, however, cop to some culpability here since the tangent that we’re on is partially due to me offering an oblique critique of the lump of labor fallacy argument, as an argument.)

But I’ll respond in good faith, one more time:

1. At any given time, Wal Mart has a fixed amount of labor it needs to have accomplished.

This is misleading (retail work isn’t like that) and overly restricts the conversation, but okay let’s go with it for a minute. And yes, I’m totally 100% aware that this isn’t the lump of labor fallacy. In fact, let’s stop talking about that altogether.

2. Wal Mart can either spread that labor out among
2a: a set of workers, x, with each working part-time, or
2b: a set of workers x-n.

Yep, sure, I think we all knew that already.

3. In the case of 2a, the set of workers em all are receiving partly private income and partly public support (at least in the short run).

Yes, see, that’s the point I made when I talked about exactly this, right here:

* It’s that they’re using the existence of the welfare
* state and government assistance to pay people less
* than they otherwise would have to pay them to do the
* same job. They’re passive rent-seekers, basically.
* They’re gaming/free-riding on the social support
* mechanism that was originally implemented to help
* people who weren’t working

4. In the case of 2b, the set of workers x-n are receiving all private income and the set of workers n are receiving all public support (at least in the short run).

Yep! Great, we’re doing fine so far, you’re telling me stuff I know.

Beyond the short run, Wal Mart’s choice has no effect on the availability of other jobs in the economy, which will either be available for anyone in set of workers x to pursue or will not, so that can be set aside from the analysis.

Um, hold on. This is a big part to set aside, dude. I see the disconnect.

I’m pretty sure “the liberal argument” here would be something along the lines of:

Yes, we’re aware that Wal-Mart cannot just simply adopt business practices that put it at a disadvantage relative to its competitors and thus it will go out of business. We’re neoliberals now, not howling college communists, we get basic business economics. We recognize this is a collective action problem, that’s why we’re proposing government intervention, to correct our earlier government intervention.

See, when we implemented the social safety net, the original idea was to have it help people who didn’t have jobs while they find a new job. That has changed (particularly with changes from our friends across the aisle, who believe in a Puritan work ethic and can’t stand the idea of people not working, parenthetical included because I’m playing a liberal here and I can’t pass up the opportunity to swipe at the GOP) so that now the system supports not only people who don’t work, but people who work in unsustainable jobs.

But, see, this has had the unfortunate consequence of alleviating the pressure on the companies that offer unsustainable jobs… they would likely not be able to find someone to do the job at that wage if there wasn’t government assistance covering the difference. An unintended consequence, regrettable. We’ve learned a lesson.

Well, in fact, there’s more than a little evidence that many companies – Wal-Mart included – have actively worked both to change the welfare system so that it is more advantageous to their business model, offloading more of their costs onto the public dime, so perhaps “unintended” isn’t quite accurate. But I digress (again, liberal, can’t help the dig at corporate America).

In any event, we’re not talking about just “bitching about Wal-Mart”. That’s what those howling college communists do. We’re talking about a recognized effect of a government intervention. Just to get this out of the way, we believe that getting rid of the welfare state is something we find unacceptable, because the welfare state is there for a reason, which even crazy ol’ libertarian Roger recognizes (still in liberal voice, here, Roger, I don’t think you’re crazy myself – ed note).

So the alternative is to legally bind the decisions available to companies like Wal-Mart such that they cannot take advantage of the government safety net to subsidize their labor costs.

Because, that’s basically rent-seeking, right? Something the libertarians don’t like? You should be on board with our objection, even if maybe you don’t like our proposed solution?

One possibility would be to limit the number of part-time jobs companies like Wal-Mart can offer, something you yourself mention here. We can get into the details once we first agree that there’s something to be done, here. Yes, we’re aware that there will be consequences. Again, we can get into the details of the consequences once we agree there is a problem.

Do we agree that there’s a problem here? (ed note: this would be one of those questions that is an important one to answer, if you choose to respond to this comment)

Is one of these outcomes obviously better or worse than the other, from either a social perspective or the “collective” perspective of workers?

I happen to think so.

That (many, not all) liberals complain about 2a and not about 2b indicates that they think 2a must obviously be worse. But nobody–and not you, Patrick–has made a coherent argument in support of that.

James, a “coherent” argument would require… what?

Because I’m confessing, right now, dear sir, that you’ve jumped into a conversation with a critique about an argument that you don’t find compelling (largely based upon a hole you think you’ve found in “the liberal argument” that most reasonably intelligent liberals actually recognize is a hole, thus making it not so gobsmakingly stupid) possibly because you hold different normative assumptions, and you’re being quite dismissive of what other people are saying, probably because you don’t really grok their normative assumptions – or really, as demonstrated, even get what they’re pissed about… and now you’re saying that this is on them.

Sounds to me like a classic two-way communications problem.Report