首页
外语
计算机
考研
公务员
职业资格
财经
工程
司法
医学
专升本
自考
实用职业技能
登录
外语
A Workaholic Economy For the first century or so of the industrial revolution, increased productivity led to decreases in wo
A Workaholic Economy For the first century or so of the industrial revolution, increased productivity led to decreases in wo
admin
2012-12-13
51
问题
A Workaholic Economy
For the first century or so of the industrial revolution, increased productivity led to decreases in working hours. Employees who had been putting in 12-hour days, six days a week, found their time on the job shrinking to 10 hours daily, then, finally to eight hours, five days a week. only a generation ago social planners worried about what people would do with all this new-found free time. In the US, at least, it seems they need not have bothered. Although the output per hour of work has more than doubled since 1945, leisure seems reserved largely for the unemployed and underemployed. Those who work full-time spend as much time on the job as they did at the end of World War Ⅱ. In fact, working hours have increased noticeably since 1970--perhaps because real wages have stagnated that year. Bookstores now abound with manuals describing how to manage time and cope with stress.
There are several reasons for lost leisure. Since 1970, companies have responded to improvements in the business climate by having employees work overtime rather than by hiring extra personnel, says. economist Juliet B. , Scholar of Harvard University. Indeed, the current economic recovery has gained a certain amount of notoriety for its "jobless" nature: increased production has been almost entirely decoupled from employment. Some firms are even down sizing as their profits climb. "All things being equal, we’d be better off spreading around the work," observes labor economist Ronald G. Ehrenberg of Cornell University.
Yet a host of factors pushes employers to hire fewer workers for more hours and, at the same time, compels workers to spend more time on the job. Most of those incentives involve what Ehrenberg calls the structure of compensation: quirks in the way salaries and benefits are organized that make it more profitable to ask 40 employees to labor an extra hour each than to hire one more worker to do the same 40-hour job.
Professional and managerial employees supply the most obvious lesson along these lines. once people are on salary, their cost to a firm is the same whether they spend 35 hours a week in the office or 70. Diminishing returns may eventually set in as overworked employees lose efficiency or leave for more arable pastures. But in the short run, the employer’s incentive is Clear.
Even hourly employees receive benefits--such as pension and contributions and medical insurance--that are not tied to the number of hours they work. Therefore, it is more profitable for employers to work their existing employees harder.
For all that employees complain about long hours, they, too, have reasons not to trade money for leisure. "People who work reduced hours pay a huge penalty in career terms," Scholar maintains. “It’s taken as a negative signal about their commitment to the firm.” Bailyn of Massachusetts Institute of Technology adds that many corporate managers find it difficult to measure the contribution of their underlings to a firm’s well-being, so they use the number of hours worked as a proxy for output. "Employees know this,’ she says, and they adjust their behavior accordingly.
"Although the image of the good worker is the one whose life belongs to the company," Bailyn says, "it doesn’t fit the facts.’ She cites both quantitative and qualitative studies that show increased productivity for part-time workers: they make better use of the time they have, and they are less likely to succumb to fatigue in stressful jobs. Companies that employ more workers for less time also gain from the resulting redundancy, she asserts. "The extra people can cover the contingencies that you know are going to happen, such as when crises take people away from the workplace. "Positive experiences with reduced hours have begun to change the more-is-better culture at some companies, Scholar reports.
Larger firms, in particular, appear to be more willing to experiment with flexible working arrangement.
It may take even more than changes in the financial and cultural structures of employment for workers successfully to trade increased productivity and money for leisure time, Scholar contends. She says the U.S. market for goods has become skewed by the assumption of full-time, two-career households. Automobile makers no longer manufacture cheap models, and developers do not build the tiny. bungalows that served the first post-war generation of home buyers. Not even the humblest household object is made without a microprocessor. U. S. goods are appropriate only for high incomes and long hours.
Most of those incentives involve what Ehrenberg calls______, quirks in the way salaries and benefits are organized that make it more profitable to ask 40 employees to labor an extra hour each than to hire one more worker to do the same 40-hour job.
选项
答案
the structure of compensation
解析
根据题干中的信息词those incentives和Ehrenberg定位到原文第三段第二句“Most of those incentives involve what Ehrenberg calls the structure of compensation;quirks in the way salaries and benefits are organized that make it more profitable to ask 40 employees to labor an extra hour each than to hire one more worker to do the Same40-hour job(这样做的主要动机是Ehrenberg所称的补偿架构;即工资与利润以一种特殊的方式组合在一起,因而让40名员工延长一小时工作与再雇用一名工人工作40小时相比,前者的利润更大) ”,由此得到答案。
转载请注明原文地址:https://kaotiyun.com/show/1ew7777K
0
大学英语四级
相关试题推荐
Thecoursenormallyattracts20studentsperyear,______(其中一半会来自海外)
A、Theyshouldmeetatthecoffeeshopnow.B、Theyhavetodealwithsomethingurgent.C、Theyarenotabletomeettomorrow.D、Th
Comparisonsweredrawnbetweenthedevelopmentoftelevisioninthe20thcenturyandthediffusionofprintinginthe15thand1
Comparisonsweredrawnbetweenthedevelopmentoftelevisioninthe20thcenturyandthediffusionofprintinginthe15thand1
Languageislearnedprimarilythroughcommunicationwithotherpeople.Researchshowsthatthemorecommunicationchildren【S1】__
WhenIfirstentereduniversity,myaunt,whoisanEnglishprofessor,gavemeanewEnglishdictionary.Iwas【C1】______toseet
AmongthecriticismsoftheObamaadministration’sbankrescueproposalisthatthegovernmentwillprovideupto$1trillionin
AmongthecriticismsoftheObamaadministration’sbankrescueproposalisthatthegovernmentwillprovideupto$1trillionin
It’s10pm.Youmaynotknowwhereyourchildis,butthechipdoes.Thechipwillalsoknowifyourchildhasfallenandne
It’s10pm.Youmaynotknowwhereyourchildis,butthechipdoes.Thechipwillalsoknowifyourchildhasfallenandne
随机试题
糖尿病的基本病理生理变化是
上证综合指数的计算公式是()。
政府与民营企业合作完成某个项目的模式(简称PPP)能够使政府获得资金,也可以让社会资本进入电力、铁路等公用事业领域。这种模式中存在的问题是政府违约或投资人违约而给对方造成经济损失。在以往的PPP项目中,政府违约不是小概率事件。尽管地方政府违约的现象屡见不鲜
下列关于肾自截的叙述不妥的是
房地产市场不存在全国性市场,更不存在全球性市场,而是一个地区性市场。()
社会工作者最基本的角色是( )。
下面四个所给选项中,左边的图形经折合后会像右边图形中的()。
非暴力不合作纲领不包括()。
IEEE 802.11定义了无线局域网的两种工作模式,其中的(24)模式是一种点对点连接,不需要无线接入点和有线网络的支持,用无线网卡连接的设备之间就可以直接通信。IEEE 802.11的物理层规定了三种传输技术,即红外技术、直接序列扩频(DSSS)和频率
A.additionalB.ideallyC.alteredD.personalE.likelyF.excessiveG.virtually
最新回复
(
0
)