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American Firms Want to Keep Older Workers a Bit Longer

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Re: American Firms Want to Keep Older Workers a Bit Longer

#61

Post by vacri »

ryandrake wrote: post #2

> With 10,000 baby boomers turning 65 each day, businesses are scrambling to find ways to slow an exodus of the most experienced employees and ensure that they pass along their knowledge before they leave. Knowledge transfer should be baked into the day-to-day culture of work, not something desperately scrambled for during someone's last week. Those few companies with meaningful training and mentoring programs know t…

> Here we go again with the "shortage of workers". In one article it's tech workers. Here it's GenX workers. A "shortage" of a good is pretty meaningless if you don't mention the price you're offering to pay for that good. Unless they're saying they literally can't find qualified GenX workers at any price--That would be a real shortage. Otherwise, maybe you need to just offer a little more money to find skilled mid-career workers nowadays.

By that rationale, there's no food shortage in Venezuela. "There is food, people just need to offer more money for it."

Re: American Firms Want to Keep Older Workers a Bit Longer

#62

Post by dasil003 »

petre wrote: post #60
linkregister wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel it's a cycle of mistrust. Companies don't want to spend as much time training junior workers or apprentices because they often leave shortly after achieving proficiency. But this lack of perceived loyalty comes from a rational viewpoint. After the shift in business culture in the 80s, where workers were laid off in bulk even if the company was in good financial health, workers woke up to the new reality. (To b…

Cycle of mistrust or not, this would likely work better than gradually increasing the retirement age as it happens in Europe. The free market always provides better solutions than state or superstate bureaucrats. In the EU they just throw regulation at any problem.

Disagree here, consider health care. Free market solutions here have led to healthcare being tied to your job, and only big employers able to gain any negotiation leverage, so individuals and small companies get screwed, big company employees are scared to leave, sometimes for this issue alone, and in effect, the desired "insurance" effect is undermined as people get sliced into smaller and smaller buckets.

Despite what conservative propaganda would have you believe, nationalized health care does not preclude private health care on top, and in fact it makes the market for that care much more competitive and reasonable for individuals who seek it.

Re: American Firms Want to Keep Older Workers a Bit Longer

#63

Post by citruspi »

petre wrote: post #56
citruspi wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Apparently, there would be approximately 5 people to stamp your visa. I'd say that this is still the case. Last time I visited India, when I was exiting the parking garage at the airport, there was an automated machine to let you out. Give them the ticket, put money in, the barrier opens, and you drive out. But there were also five people by this machine. One to take the ticket, another to take the money, and then…

What did you expect? India has a huge population. They all need jobs to support their families. So the local gov't has it covered. Would you prefer three of those five people being engaged in a riot and the other two, on gov't payroll, beating the shit out of them? I guess this pretty much ilustrates the difference between East and West. Mr. Rushdie has a book with short stories on that.

> India has a huge population. They all need jobs to support their families. So the local gov't has it covered.

Yup, completely agree.

> Would you prefer three of those five people being engaged in a riot and the other two, on gov't payroll, beating the shit out of them?

To clarify, in this scenario, are you saying that there are three unemployed people rioting and two other people on a government payroll (presumably po-po?) who are beating the shit out of the rioters?

Honestly, _ideally_, I'd want to see universal basic income so that people who don't have jobs don't feel the need to riot. I'd want to see everyone's basic needs supported.

Having said that, that's my idealism showing and I don't know how this would realistically work. My background in economics is weak to put it simply and I don't know if this could scale to a population the size of India's.

> Mr. Rushdie has a book with short stories on that.

Taking a look at his bibliography[0], he's written quite a few novels, any specific one(s) that you'd recommend?

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salman_Rushdie#Bibliography

Re: American Firms Want to Keep Older Workers a Bit Longer

#64

Post by cmdrfred »

ArkyBeagle wrote: post #36
Retric wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's easy to keep people after training, just pay them more and avoid toxic environments. Companies don't do this because they make bank underpaying people and burning them out.

Companies don't make bank burning people out. Burning people out is a sign of organizational... corruption. There are more incompetent managers than competent ones, so you get things like this due to that. In some, end-of-life organizations, burning people out can be a ... semi-rational decision, but .. it's an end-of-life company...

Some industries appear to operate on the "burn out model", take game dev or managed IT services firms for example.

Re: American Firms Want to Keep Older Workers a Bit Longer

#65

Post by Godel_unicode »

bsder wrote: post #59
IndianAstronaut wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems like unions benefit just the insiders and seniors. One reason why I am skeptical when people say unions built the middle class. Employer competition probably does more for that than unions.

If a company has a bimodal age distribution, the question to be asking is "Why didn't they think about hiring someone occasionally over the last 15-20 years?" Of course, the answer is that no corporate manager wanted to miss his number by hiring another person. So, the managers kicked the problem down the road and hoped that someone else would take the hit. > Seems like unions benefit just the insiders and seniors. E…

> Unions implemented this policy because companies were wiping out older workers because they were more expensive in terms of wage and healthcare.

This is essentially what GP is saying. Unions kept the expensive older worker at the expense of firing the younger workers. If the workers they keep are more expensive, then they have to fire proportionally more younger workers to make it up.

Re: American Firms Want to Keep Older Workers a Bit Longer

#66

Post by NegativeLatency »

analog31 wrote: post #22
vtange wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is also some outright "pickyness" coming from the younger generations against work that's seen as manual and unsophisticated, at least I perceived this in the architecture school I went to for a number of years. I remember very clearly many professors lamenting the fact that with each passing year the student body grew more reliant on technology and computer-assisted crafting and grew less interested in manual…

Oddly enough, in my industry, we've been making technology easy to use, that once required understanding the nuts and bolts. As a result, we can't hire people who understand the nuts and bolts any more.

What industry is that?

Re: American Firms Want to Keep Older Workers a Bit Longer

#67

Post by Inconel »

oxide wrote: post #50

Recently I've heard two different stories about this exact problem. Two specialized trades, two experts of their crafts about to retire, and two companies unsure how they'll replace them. I wish I remembered more details about the experts themselves, I believe one was a specialized glass worker.

One of the people you might be thinking of is the glass blower who is retiring from Caltech.

http://www.latimes.com/local/education/la-me-caltech-glassbl...

Re: American Firms Want to Keep Older Workers a Bit Longer

#68

Post by randomdata »

cmdrfred wrote: post #42
maverick_iceman wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if that price is below minimum wage?

Or below the cost of living? Why bust your ass to live in your patents basement anyway?

Price is the measure of where a buyer and seller agree. If sellers are rejecting bids because "Why bust your ass to live in your patents basement anyway?" then the price could never be that low.

Re: American Firms Want to Keep Older Workers a Bit Longer

#70

Post by Terr_ »

IndianAstronaut wrote: post #43
WalterBright wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I read in the newspaper that Boeing has a skills gap with their machinists. The skilled older ones are retiring, and the younger ones aren't experienced enough. There are few in the middle. What happened? When they had layoffs, the machinist union rules specified the ones with the least number of years of service got laid off first. This left Boeing with a very unbalanced workforce.

Seems like unions benefit just the insiders and seniors. One reason why I am skeptical when people say unions built the middle class. Employer competition probably does more for that than unions.

Well, suppose for a moment the position or job really was "dying", though. (Which is hard to predict accurately, but everybody gets pessimistic in times of huge layoffs.)

Arguably the older workers are the more-vulnerable section, since they have fewer opportunities (and lifetime) to re-train.

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