this article from this british 'journalist' is so evidently biased i shouldn't have to point it out... but here i am. what's the bias? this article only looks at the question of the well being of the owner of this strawberry hothouse. what about the well-being of the pickers? the tone is set in harford's analysis of the, frankly, sociopathic attempts of the hothouse owner to engineer perverse economic incentives for his workers, who he obviously sees only as input factors, not as human beings: witness the original concept of punishing the pickers by paying them reduced marginal piece rates for increased marginal productivty. beyond that, the pickers should receive a commensurate proportion of the value added by their increased marginal labor productivity under the scheme devised by these economists-cum-consultants-cum mad scientists. but the article makes no mention of this, and i am thus forced to assume that, although the pickers' productivity increased 50%, they received no wage rate increase. that's capitalist economic justice for you: there's great news if you're eating strawberries and cream at next year's wimbledon, but you're fucked if you have the misfortune to have to live by the sweat of your brow.

PapaM,

Yes, I picked up on this, too. After reading the article, the big question hung in my mind, "Did the workers benefit commensurately from all this increased productivity?" The fact that the owner was 'concerned' about just meeting the minimum wage standard leads me also to believe the answer is "No!"

that's what's great about government minimum wage laws.

That's exactly what I was thinking at the end.

While I'm absolutely not a socialist, this piece seemed downright draconian.

This is exactly why the working class should be socialist--at least in some degree. Free market capitalism, for all it's strengths, can be quite evil left unchecked. And there simply is no balance of power between worker and employer without either government regulations or strong unions (much as I dislike unions). This is increasingly becoming true for white collar jobs in the global economy, as well. Particularly for tech jobs. It's time we started punishing companies for outsourcing our jobs and high time we demanded fair trade. American workers are at a disadvantage when companies can move jobs to countries with a third-world standard of living and neither labor nor environmental laws.

It's time we started punishing companies for outsourcing our jobs...

Great. Now figure out a way to do this that doesn't also punish the *creation* of jobs.

The average worker changes jobs, what?, every 7 years? This implies that protecting existing jobs is counter productive, they'll go away pretty quick anyway.

If the least productive picker is getting min-wage, and the *much* more productive worker is getting considerable bonuses, then I'd say at least some of them did better.

A pity we don't know what the bonuses were, etc.

While I don't necessarily agree with the previous poster's sentiment, in response to your response you have to recognize that there is a lot of disenguinity going on in the corporate world with respect to outsourcing.

Corporations seem to have it in their skull that the best business model is one where they sell products without having to make or pay for them. Currently that model is the "project manager as a company" approach, but I'm sure there have been other before that.

I have no desire to leave my job because some executive read a magazine article and wishes to apply it universally to the company - all so that he/she can get a "good job" sticker on his/her end of year review.

Of course the article focused on productivity; that was the whole pint of the experiments.

The workers discussed in the article are migrant workers looking for summer jobs where they can make some quick cash, and the settled structure allowed harder-working temporary employees to pull in more cash over the course of the summer.

We're not talking about career jobs here; we're talking about jobs which are, inherently and unavoidably, strictly temporary.

I think you might be delusional. There is a stark difference between changing jobs and those jobs evaporating. What part of that don't you get?

And here's a simple idea: tax companies for labor that they've moved overseas.

Did you not get that the entire point was to pay everyone as close to minimum wage as possible while maximizing production? That is simply perverse.

'Did you not get that the entire point was to pay everyone as close to minimum wage as possible while maximizing production? That is simply perverse.'

spoken by someone who hasn't managed so much as a diary queen.

irvingchang:

spoken by someone who hasn't managed so much as a diary queen.

I'm sorry, I wasn't aware that managing a Dairy Queen was a prerequisite to commentary on the nature of the relationship between employee and employer. They should pass a law banning proletariat speech so I won't get confused next time!

Torment: Did you not get that the entire point was to pay everyone as close to minimum wage as possible while maximizing production?

Go back and re-read the article.

The grower found maximizing productivity (and thus profits) did NOT happen when he paid *everyone* as close to min wage as possible.

That's what he had been doing before the tests began.

There is a stark difference between changing jobs and those jobs evaporating. What part of that don't you get?

Even if you're a ditch digger, at some point the ditch is dug. Systems change, processes are created, altered, then discontinued.

I've had my job change dozens of times because what I had been doing wasn't useful anymore. Normally this didn't mean I'd be fired; knowing I'm useful and productive they'd find something else for me to do.

But if my boss had been on the hook *permanently* for my existence, I seriously doubt I'd have gotten any of them.

And here's a simple idea: tax companies for labor that they've moved overseas.

So when a company *creates* a job here... they've put their head into a noose for the future, even if market conditions change. Better to just create that job somewhere else instead where he doesn't have that risk.

It's a bad thing when you make the creation of jobs a risky thing and threaten future punishment. That's discouraging things you want to encourage.

It's counter intuitive, but if you want to encourage job creation, make it easy to fire people.