The Grass is Always Greener

My wife thinks I am crazy because I keep looking at part time job postings on Craigslist.

"Why do you want to go back to some hellhole?" she wonders. Good question.

The simple answer is: I don't know. The more complicated and (potentially fictitious) reason is that I am  looking to find my place in the cosmos. One thing seems clear. I am restless with my status as "Retiree".

Being retired from the world of work is wonderful in many respects. You can sleep as late as you want in the morning. You have time to read the print versions of 2 papers, and have an unhurried breakfast. You can pretty much plan your day - take a walk, have lunch with friends, go to a movie.

Theoretically, you can golf and fish and wander around to your heart's content. You don't have some crazed boss demanding a status report, or wondering aloud at the staff meeting why your numbers aren't better. You don't waste two hours a day sitting in traffic. For once in your life, you finally have enough time for those extended trips to exotic places that you always talked about.

 
On the other hand, there are some drawbacks. You can't just sit around reading for hours on end and communing with nature every day, or napping like the cats. Anything gets boring if you do it day-in day-out.  Traveling can become both a distraction and a delight, but it does not fulfill you - unless you consider checking-off your bucket list as fulfillment.  And, there is the little matter of money.

If you are retired and rich, it makes things much easier.  But if you retired, collecting social security and have less than mega-millions in your  IRA, you are forced to make some trade-offs.   You cannot afford to travel all the time, and you cannot shop for trendy clothes or afford $40 haircuts anymore.

When I was younger, I was fulfilled by spending time in the garden and maintaining the grounds. I never thought of working in the yard as work because I enjoyed it thoroughly. Work is what someone else makes you do.

Nowadays, I don't anticipate Spring the same old way. The optimistic joy of gardening has gradually given way to reality-based discouragement, the groaning of stiff knees, achy backs and wildly unpredictable weather.

I have become pessimistic about climate and cynical about politics and skeptical towards anyone who claims to know the truth, has a cure for psoriasis, knows the secret to riches, wants to manage my money.
Parkinsons Law states that work fills the time allotted to it. There is a corollary to free time. If you only have one thing to do today, it will take all day to do it. We retirees are always complaining how busy we are.

Working people envy retired people. Buy after you have read two papers end-to end and checked the status of the markets, and taken a brisk walk, met friends for lunch, and so on, there is still a vague sense that something is missing.  It's that old feeling that you occasionally felt on the job that you were accomplishing something bigger than just staying busy.

Some mornings on my walk, I find myself looking at young people driving by, dressed for work with a tinge of envy. I know that odds are good that  they are probably on their way to some hellhole where the boss is overwrought asshole and the coworkers are backbiting shits.

But I can't help wondering if just maybe someone is actually  going to a place where the work is interesting and rewarding and their workmates are bright and positive with good sense of humor. To me, that would seem to be a pretty good way to spend one's day.

There Will be Blood

According to news reports, about two million French workers walked off their jobs yesterday to protest the government plan to increase retirement ages for pension eligibility. The plan that is being proposed is to raise the minimum retirement age from 60 to 62, to take effect in 2018.


The issue for the government is of course money.  Back in the good old (French socialist Party) days, there were 7 people working for every pension recipient. By 2018 there will be only 1.1 people working for every collector of pension money.  The government rightly recognizes that this is an unsustainable equation.

But the unions are determined to block any reforms.  So they are whipping up the masses to make a big show of solidarity against the government by inconveniencing everyone.  Another reason to think twice before spending one's travel dollars in a place where trains and planes may or may not be running at any given time. 

Workers in Greece recently rebelled with violence at the austerity measures being instituted by the government in the face of financial meltdown.  One of the changes involved raising the retirement age to 63.

Recently, we have even seen worker strikes in China.  Perhaps the Chinese are allowing textile workers to strike in a shrewd strategy of moving their low-paying jobs out of China to even lower cost countries such as India.  The Chinese may see the demand for higher wages as a way to drive away the low-end business and to shift their workforce to work in more lucrative higher tech products, so they can compete for the higher-end markets.

The labor unrest in France and other parts of  Europe are probably precursors to future troubles here in the USA.  The steady rise in the standard of living for workers in Western economies has set a fairly high bar for wage and benefit expectations.  The labor costs were sustainable in a boom period, but as we have seen, the principal response of business to hard times is to slash costs.  This is manifested in shifts to lower-cost suppliers (ie, places where workers are paid less lavishly) and reductions in the size of the workforce.

In the USA we have a large overpaid work force.  The successes of organized labor in getting generous benefits for the rank and file have raised both expectations and costs to an unsustainable level.  Many of the jobs that were lost during the most recent recession will not come back.  How long can we afford to pay unemployment benefits to specialized workers whose jobs have permanently gone to China or India ?  Can the entitlement promises by progressives be funded by simply taxing the hell out of the rich? 

History and a study of human nature shows that you can't take something away without a tough fight.  Unfortunately, I fear that there will be blood.

Some Jobs may not come back

A recent news item says that many of the jobs that were lost during the recession may be gone forever. The report says that corporations have "found ways to be productive with less." Being productive with less might lead us to infer that the survivors of the massive job cuts of recent years have been forced to work harder to take-up the slack.


As one who spent a few decades wandering around some pretty successful corporate hallways, I find this conclusion both naive and dubious. Productivity in the Corporate world has never been a function of employee headcount. People are inferior to machines in this regard. It is reasonable to assume that a piece of machinery can produce a measurable and predictable output of product withing a given span of time. Ten identical machines should yield ten times the output. People are not so easy to measure.




The well-recognized truth about the way humans behave in organizations is expressed by the so-called "Pareto Principle" or more commonly, the 80/20 rule. The economist Pareto's observation was that 80% of the wealth is owned by 20% of the people. This perception of reality has extended itself to other observations - how long it takes to complete tasks, the participation of students in a classroom, etc. Basically 80% of any result can be ascribed to 20% of activity. In the business context, 80% of the work is done by 20% of the staff.




Back in the 80's, at my company, one of my bosses had an interesting variation on this phenomenon. He called it "Ziff's Law"*. He reasoned that - instead of perfection (100%), which takes 100% of the time - we should aim at something less than perfection (eg, 80% of the requirement). The beauty of this approach was that we could do 5 times as many jobs. since each job would only take 1/5 of the time.




This was business application software development. Order Processing, Invoicing, Receivables, Reporting. Pretty important functions in any company. However, the part of the new system design that always got cut was the "ease of use" interface pieces of the design, which was always the most time-consuming element for computer programmers.




Of course, the users hated the products we designed and delivered to them. The unfriendly interfaces caused them to make errors and stressed them out. The manual fixes from yesterday's errors took all morning to resubmit, Instead of fixing the system, our technical management would go to the users management and convince them that the complainers were incompetent - and that doing the 100% job would be too costly. Somehow functional business managers were convinced (or cowed) into submission.




So, none of the jobs ever got done according to the original users specifications (which took about 20% of the alloted project time to write). Nothing worked the way it was supposed to work, and everything we did was what they called FUBAR.


This is the difference between theory and practice. We were very productive from the measure of lines of code produced, but we did not make the business run better and often we made it worse. The part of the aforementioned article that I agree with, says that many of the retail/service jobs are gone forever because the customers have disappeared. For example: Hardly anybody goes to the store in the mall to purchase DVD's anymore. Mortgage agents have gone away with the dearth of qualified home buyers. And then there is the self-service sector which effectively puts clerks, toll-takers, film developers, video store employees, gas station attendants and bank tellers out of a job - just to name a few.
History indicates that there will be plenty of jobs when things pick-up again. New things are always percolating up the marketing food chain. Until a few years ago, you never heard of Kindle or Blu-Ray or IPhone, Goji berries, Teavana.


The economy continually cycles between full employment and prosperity and recession. Some jobs are lost in the dust. But there will always be always new jobs that did not previously exist.


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* Probably a reference to Harvard linguist G.K. Zipf who authored "Human Behavior and the Principle of Least Effort."