Employment in Aperiomics: February 2013

Thursday, February 28, 2013

As Common As Dirt

As Common As Dirt

The case alleges that while Gomez and Villalobos picked onions across the Coachella and Central valleys in California, the contractors routinely altered payment documents to undercount hours worked; failed to pay the state’s minimum wage of $8 an hour or overtime; failed to provide safe or sanitary working conditions; and housed the workers in unsafe and unsanitary living quarters. Significantly, Calandri/SonRise Farms was also named as a defendant in the suit, meaning it was not absolved of responsibility because it had outsourced its harvesting work.

Clandri acts as V using Iv agents to distance itself from deceptions. Often B workers are used who are also secretive and deceptive, here they can be undocumented workers. Sometimes they can come together as a Bi team to balance the Iv tactics like a union trying to form. If not then this Iv-B interaction continues to evade the I-O police.

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Compared with other recent tales of American farmworkers, Villalobos and Gomez might consider themselves lucky. In Florida, tomato pickers have been locked in box trucks under the watch of armed guards; in North Carolina, pregnant workers have been exposed to pesticides during harvest and birthed babies with missing limbs; in Michigan, children as young as six have been found laboring in blueberry groves.

If they become common enough then like a contagion they attract the attention of the I-O market and police, the Bi community sees this and demands action.

Those are marquee cases that garner national media, shining the spotlight on the most egregious abuses. In relative terms, suits like Villalobos are mundane, but they are also ubiquitous, filed with a frequency that suggests the most pervasive and insidious abuse faced by farmworkers is the kind Villalobos encountered: the blatant disregard of labor laws governing wages, safety, and health. This type of abuse is most typically seen in fields managed not by farmers but by farm-labor contractors, many of whom started out as farmworkers themselves.

The laws can be ignored because Iv-B has both sides being secretive and deceptive, also highly competitive where people can be fired giving others an opportunity.

Known in some circles as “custom harvesters,” farm-labor contractors offer produce growers a ready workforce, but they also give these growers the ability to distance themselves from the people who pick their crops. These contractors control the flow of money between farmer and worker as well as all the paperwork. They track hours worked, crops harvested, and wages paid and take responsibility for everything related to labor, from verifying immigration status to providing workers’ compensation. Contractors can be found in the fields of nearly every handpicked crop in the United States, organic or conventional: green beans in Florida, grapefruit in Texas, peppers in Georgia, greens in Colorado, and garlic in California.

Farm-labor contractors give American produce growers what companies like China’s Foxconn offer to Apple: a way to outsource a costly and complicated part of the business, often saving money in the process and creating a firewall between the brand and the working conditions under which its products are made.

The firewall is often secrecy and deception from transparent V-Bi.

Chart Of The Day: The "New Normal" Trade Off - Debt vs Jobs | ZeroHedge

In the last few weeks much has been said about how the US economy, after nearly collapsing in the Lehman aftermath has staged a gradual, if painful and very slow improvement in the last 3 years. Sure enough, After jobs peaked at an all time high of 138 million in January 2008, they then tumbled to a depression low of 129.2 million in February 2010 and beginning in September 2010 have posted 24 consecutive months of growth, rising to 133.5 million last month: a 4.25 million trough to, so far, peak. Not bad.

What, however, has received very little discussion by either presidential candidate, primarily because it is largely a byproduct of both Republican and Democratic policy and action, is what can be seen on the chart below courtesy of Diapason Securities, or the cost of said recovery - namely the New Normal angle of debt increase, which from merely steep, has mutated into beyond acute.

What is worse, is that instead of a mere one-time bump in the rate of public debt accumulation, as has happened in days past, the New post-Lehman Normal has shifted the entire curve steeper by a factor of two!

This can be a zombie economy, Iv-B businesses were like the roots and branches of trees that grew very finely in the Great Moderation. Now to regrow them from the stumps of their ruins gives businesses which much less leverage. Because of this it costs much more to make jobs, the problem is the velocity of money is low and so more money is needed. Also there are areas between formerly networked businesses that are now stagnant, businesses are no longer country wide or global as much and so cannot be a specialized.

What one can also see is that the public cost of "normalization", aka the Trade Off of the new normal is an additional $4.25 trilion in debt over and above where the previous historic trendline would put total US debt, just under $12 trillion. Instead total debt is now $16.2 trillion. Oddly enough, this translates to precisely $1,000,000 per job gained or saved from the first (and certainly not last) post-crisis trough: yet another fact that will not be mentioned in either the mainstream press or any presidential debate, as sadly trading off record amounts of public debt for new jobs is the only game left in town for either party.

Average:

Sober Look: 55 straight months of job cuts in Spain's service sector

Sober Look: 55 straight months of job cuts in Spain's service sector

With Spain's recession deepening, the nation's service sector continues to struggle. Service industries such as hotels and restaurants are caught between rising input costs and falling output prices, as margins become compressed.

Markit: - The Spanish service sector ended the third quarter of 2012 deep in contraction territory. Moreover, September data signalled faster reductions in both activity and new orders as the economic crisis in Spain continued.Higher fuel costs contributed to an acceleration in input price inflation to its fastest since July 2011. On the other hand, companies continued to lower their output prices, despite a rise in the rate of VAT limiting the extent to which they were able to do this.

This can be an Iv-B economy based on credit, people in a bubble invested in Spanish real estate and unless the bubble reinflates this part of the market cannot regrow. A collapse without a potential for regrowth can be like a damaged building partially collapsing, then there are further collapses as parts of it give way later. It can also be like a plant that collapses partially in a storm so it is no longer viable, it then slowly dies as reserves are used up causing more collapses. In this case the V-Bi savings of people and the government might be used up waiting for a revival where there is no market. it is like a zombie economy or a patient on life support that cannot revive, resources are waste din keeping parts of the body alive though it does not have enough connections to move and sustain itself. In Aperiomics the economy needs to be analyzed not just with V-Bi statistics that only measure the stagnant or stable parts of an economy not the growing areas. the roots and branches of the economy need to be analyzed, a representative sample of these workers would be selected and then what business they connect to. Then the business those people connect to until long chains of business are mapped out to see if there are any breakages. If these weak links can be fixed then the Iv-B parts might revive, otherwise resources will just be wasted in keeping disconnected areas on welfare. Eventually this can lead to complete collapse into Roy as debts mount until they cannot be paid.

Source: Markit

Driven by sharp declines in demand, employment is Spain's services sector has been hit especially hard. This is the 55th straight month of service jobs losses.

Markit: - With workloads falling, service providers lowered their employment accordingly, extending the current sequence of job cuts to 55 months. The sharpest reduction in staffing levels was at Renting & Business Activities companies, while Hotels & Restaurants was the only sector to take on extra staff.

digitalcommons.ilr.cornell.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1858&context=key_workplace

digitalcommons.ilr.cornell.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1858&context=key_workplace

Introduction
A period of unemployment greatly increases the odds that a worker and members of the worker's
family will be counted among the nation's poor. For example, among persons between the ages of
16 and 64 who were unemployed in early 2010, nearly one in four (24.1%) were poor based on
their families' incomes in 2009; among those who were employed, 6.7% were poor.

B workers can have a collapse in resources when unemployed, for example they might have to sell assets at a fraction of their worth or become ill from it.

1
A variety of social insurance benefits may be available for unemployed workers. The benefits
analyzed in this report can be generically grouped into the category of Unemployment Insurance
(UI) benefits. UI benefits provide a cash supplement to replace a portion of lost wages to
qualified unemployed individuals. Two main objectives of the joint federal-state unemployment
insurance program are to provide temporary and partial wage replacement to involuntarily
unemployed workers and to stabilize the economy during recessions.

this is Bi and adds insurance to quench chaos, for example someone unemployed can hold onto their assets or sell them more slowly getting more money from them. They also have the time to retrain and look for work, unemployment can cause people to become weak from lack of food or living homeless and become less employable.The floor here then can be R poverty or nomadic life as homeless or living in a car.

2
As a temporary, partial replacement of lost earnings due to job loss, the benefits workers receive
may help to prevent them and their family members from reaching poverty, an ancillary but
important role of the program. Unemployment benefits are an individual worker's entitlement (as
long as that worker meets the criteria for the benefit) and are not means tested.
3
In this regard, the
UI program, while not a poverty program per se, can play an important role in reducing poverty
associated with job loss.
Additionally, as a countercyclical program UI has a macroeconomic effect in reducing poverty.
By injecting dollars into the economy directed toward those who have experienced job loss, UI
helps to partially mitigate income loss among a group directly affected by economic downturn,
and it thereby temporarily augments the ability of unemployed workers to meet basic needs,
which further stimulates the economy. In this regard, the macroeconomic effect of UI helps
dampen the tendency for poverty to increase during periods of economic downturn.

It can act as a stimulus but runs the risk of people adapting as R or B to this money, learning how to get it instead of how to find work. This is like Iv-B weeds adapting to sprinklers used in a drought so they can no longer survive with normal rainfall patterns.

Spain's Robin Hood - Businessweek

Spain's Robin Hood - Businessweek

In the farming village of Jódar in southern Spain, 2,000 demonstrators march down the heat-buckled tarmac toward a police checkpoint at the edge of town where, they’ve just heard via megaphone, their hero has been detained. In front stride men in green T-shirts printed with the letters SAT, the Spanish acronym for the 40,000-strong Workers Syndicate of Andalusia, a leftist trade union building a network abroad.

When an economy turns to Roy Bi unions can become Ro gangs or demonstrators, because they are a component of the O police if O are biased to Oy criminals then they lose strength. For example a right wing Roy economy might have O policed biased to Oy corruption, allowing criminals to rob if they pay bribes. This can cause Ro demonstration, this can also happen with Oy conmen in finance in the GFC.

It’s Oct. 4, a strike is on, no shops are open, and the sidewalks are lined with hulking members of Spain’s Guardia Civil and the local police force, clean-shaven and dressed in black. The demonstrators’ chants resound, rhythmic and rhyming, in Spanish, punctuated by clenched fists raised high. “¡Que no! ¡Que no! ¡No queremos pagar la deuda con la salud y educación!” (“No! No! We do not want to pay off debt with health care and education!”) and “¡El pueblo unido jamás será vencido!” (“The people united will never be defeated!”)

Ro cooperation can be against Oy individuals.

Half of Jódar’s 12,000 residents, who are mostly jornaleros, or day laborers, are out of work and receive no unemployment benefits. “The government is answering our demands for jobs with repression,” says one marcher. “And now they’re holding our leader.”

A Roy economy can do better by nationalizing property as G then employing people by the state, better than having them do nothing. This also happens in thrid world economies where scarce resources cause high unemployment because any businesses get trampled and robbed like a tree in the savannah by animals.

Immigration: Giant low-hanging fruit | The Economist

Giant low-hanging fruit

Nov 15th 2012, 20:19 by R.A. | WASHINGTON

THIS week's Free exchange column takes a look at the case for more immigration into the rich world—a lot more:

The economic case for migration is similar to that for free trade. Trade benefits countries by letting workers specialise in activities in which they are relatively more productive, raising output. And the larger market created by trade spreads the fixed costs of innovation more thinly, encouraging the development of new goods and ideas. Governments began the long march towards trade liberalisation after grasping that its upsides outweigh its costs, leaving a surplus large enough to compensate the losers.

This can work in Biv societies trading with each other because they have plentiful Gb resources, this makes trade a positive sum game where each side benefits. Some might gain less than others but they can usually profit elsewhere in a rich resource economy. However this fails in a Roy society where they have a negative sum game, the idea is to minimize losses. Adding immigrants is like adding more R animals to an area with not enough food, it becomes necessary for each to minimize costs to survive. Instead of free trade causing specialization and growth it might cause the losers to not survive at all, this can create areas of poverty and unemployment. There is no surplus but a deficit being created, the objective is to minimize the deficit from it.

Immigration is an afterthought, in both practice and theory. In traditional trade models wages converge across trading partners with similar technologies even without migration, a phenomenon winningly branded “factor-price equalisation”. Sadly, factor-price equalisation is a real-world rarity. As of 2000, for instance, a worker in Mexico earned a wage 40% that of a Mexican-born worker of similar education and experience working in America.

Most of this wage gap is down to productivity differences, stemming from disparities in the quality of infrastructure, institutions and skills. An individual worker, however talented, cannot hope to replicate the fertile environment of a rich economy all on his own. But transplanting a worker into rich soil can supercharge his productivity. A Mexican worker earns more in the United States than in Mexico because he can produce more, thanks to the quality of US technology and institutions.

If there are unused Gb resources then adding more B workers can in effect be like planting more trees, more businesses grow from them. However Mexico is more Roy and the negative sum game of minimizing costs dominates there.

The upshot is that advanced economies could take an an awful lot of new immigrants without much hurting native wages.

This situation can be viewed with future robot workers, they act like real workers in that they consume goods for fuel like food and need to be housed and looked after like housing and health care. If they can work for cheaper than humans then this only produces extra wealth in Gb abundance, they might however consume much of these resources without benefiting anyone but themselves.

But the huge gains in productivity enjoyed by the migrants themselves add up to a substantial impact. Economist John Kennan reckons that the average migrant could expect a rise in income of perhaps $13,000, well more than 100% of what they would earn in their home country. And when you begin to add up all those higher incomes you get some really enormous numbers:

In a recent report Sharun Mukand of the University of Warwick calculates the effect of movement by half of the developing world’s workforce to the rich world. Such a vast migration could never happen in practice, of course, but as a thought exercise it is instructive. If migration closes a quarter of the migrants’ productivity gap with the rich world, their average income would rise by $7,000. That would be enough to raise global output by 30%, or about $21 trillion. Other studies find even bigger effects. A 2007 paper by Paul Klein, now at Simon Fraser University, and Gustavo Ventura, now at Arizona State University, reckons that full labour mobility could raise global output by up to 122%. Such gains swamp the benefits of eliminating remaining barriers to trade, which amount to just 1.8-2.8% of GDP, reckons Mr Mukand.

It could also be argued that if many American moved to Africa that the GNP would rise there as well, however in many cases the superior training of Americans would just put others out of work.

The most striking thing about the $21 trillion estimate is that it is really quite conservative by the standards of such computations. And yet that's equal to the combined annual output of America and Japan!

The piece discusses common economic criticisms of open immigration—that native wages would be harmed, that rich-world government budgets would suffer, and that brain drain would leave those left behind without hope—and generally finds them wanting. It does not deal with issues of assimilation or the cultural complications of mass migration. My feeling is that those concerns are also very likely to be overstated by critics, but I also think the main takeaway from the column ought to be the sheer size of the potential here.

This potential can only be estimated by looking at what Gb resources are available for them.