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Originally Posted by X5rolls
You mean to work fewer hours per year and protest more. Doesn't sound very productive to me.
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There is absolutely no need for full employement anymore, and there will never be ever again. This is due to technology. We just don't need people to work as much as we used to. This trend is going to continue as long as man continues to make technological advances.
My company used to employ 8 workers, and now we employ 5, yet we are actually more productive. I know many other companies that have seen the same trend.
Some industries that are unionized have resisted this change by way of the union forcing regulations. If you've ever passed a road-work site, you'll see people standing around doing nothing. That is because unions have negotiated that a certain number of employees must be present each type of work site, so half of them stand around doing nothing since they are really not needed. The UAW union has similar contracts with the automobile manufacturers. Without such union contracts, we would have even a much higher unemployement rate as half of those union workers are not needed and certainly not productive.
The trend we are seeing here is that number of work hours hardly translates into productivity. If you measure productivity, then 10 guys that take 5 days to dig a ditch and then fill it in are being productive. But if you measure productivity with logic, you will see that we are one of the least productive countries in the world, which is why we have such a big trade deficit. We produce hardly anything useful, and we spend most of our "productivity" doing eachother's laundry, which is about as productive as diging that ditch and then filling it in. Having people work for no other reason than to have them work is not productive at all, unless they actually accomplish something useful.
So the choice is either to have high unemployement, or to have full employement where everyone works less. That is going to be the big decision we are going to have to make in the future. As you can see from your list, Europe has chosen the later option.