New data from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics released on Tuesday continued to show weakness in the American jobs market.The latest Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey (JOLTS) shows that the number of new hires in February decreased to 4.8 million, which was roughly 400,000 fewer hires than wer...
I believe it’s artificial. Companies have laid off workers to drive down wages. They’re willing to make their current employees work even harder to accomplish this goal. Suffering all around. It’s one part of the AI push; to make it seem even more like the workers aren’t needed.
Yeah so the key is, hit all the stupid benchmarks they follow, and don’t spend time on anything else. Simultaneously give them the best metrics they could hope for, and the worst operational outcomes.
malicious compliance
Work to rule.
You think companies across the US economy are taking decisions which they believe will hurt them in the short term, in order to pursue a long-term benefit? Lol, dream on.
They get short-term cost reduction (less paid out in salaries) that helps stock prices.
If they were really doing layoffs because of rising costs, there wouldn’t be so many with record profits.
So then I would say, following this line of thinking, that they are laying people off to reduce costs. Whether to just make a ton of profit, or because other costs are rising, isn’t really the point, because neither explanation is about driving down wages - something that can only be done in collusion with other companies and so is rather far-fetched.
Some of the companies that are doing this (i.e., major tech companies) have colluded in the past — specifically, to drive down wages — so that part isn’t exactly a conspiratorial fantasy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_Litigation
Seems like it’d be on a completely different scale, don’t you think?
What happens if you lay off 5,000 employees but then your competitor goes, “lol sike, I’m keeping mine”? You can’t sue them!
Compare what happens if you don’t cold call Apple’s employees to poach them and they cold call yours - you can just start again, and only lost however many months of potential new hires.
What I took issue with is your argument that collusion between companies to lower wages was somehow unlikely when it’s already happened before. That doesn’t prove that it’s happening now, but it does disprove your argument that they wouldn’t collude or it’s extremely unlikely.
The same people serve on multiple boards of many of the biggest companies. Not collusion if it’s just the same people. And leaders at smaller companies love mimicking the big guys, so no collusion needed there either.
You already stated the real reason. Why do you want there to be a secret bonus reason, one that you have presented no actual evidence for?
We may be agreeing but saying it differently. I’m not saying there’s a secret bonus reason. I think it just works out well in many ways for companies when unemployment is high.
It’s artificial for sure, but I’m pretty convinced it’s part of the tech bros attempting to create their feudal states. I think they’re convinced they just need a bit longer to get AI to be able to replace most workers and overplayed their hands too early this time.
In reality, they created a large force of people who want to tear down the current model where most current jobs (which are just pushing money back and forth or supporting buying and selling in some way but not creating anything) will go away anyway. Only, they’re going to keep their autonomy and power and the tech bros will have none.
… intelligence
At my place of work in software, at least, there is very much Reduction In (human) Force because fewer people are producing more.
Maybe there are other reasons, but AI is absolutely one reason.