Category Archives: Econ & Money

US firms told 'take UK jobs home': Turns out that the Bush folks do have a plan to increase US employment, one whose stupidity boggles the mind: blackmail defense contractors into closing plants in allied countries and repatriating the jobs. The idiocy of this thuggish idea exceeds even that of the incredibly stupid and obviously illegal steel tariff.

Ok, the Evening Standard is not the New York Times, but it is London's major evening paper, and it's hard to believe they would get this wrong:

US-based multinationals have been told they will receive compensation from American trade authorities if they cancel contracts in Britain and take jobs home, according to CBI director-general Digby Jones.

…

Speaking at the CBI's annual conference in Birmingham, Jones said: 'Three chief executives of American companies investing in Britain have told me to my face that they have been told to close down, bring their stuff home and make it in the US.'

He said the companies were major employers in defence or manufacturing.

Jones continued: 'Whether flouting international law with their steel tariffs or telling their companies to come home, this bullying affects Britain and British jobs.

(Spotted by the sideshow.)

Well, that ought to make for fun discussions with Tony Blair, don't you think? And for a good show at the next Question Time…

It's good that a little bit of the defict-pumping tax cut is trickling down to working people. What's surprising is not that employment is up, but how little. What's even more surprising is how ineptly the numbers are being reported in the newspapers.

Comes now MaxSpeak to draw a picture and set us all straight. “OH PROMISE ME …” has a nice simple picture we can all understand, comparing the jobs the Administration promised its economic plans would create to the jobs actually produced. Worth more than a thousand words, easy.

You don't see stuff like this every day: Stephen Bainbridge's The LA Strikes and the Economic Analysis of Unions uses a prolix merger of Catholic Worker Social Teaching and Law Economics to explain why he doesn't cross picket lines.

It probably helps to have a little background in microeconomics, literary theory and political philosophy to appreciate the full playfulserious subversive brilliance of Brad DeLong’s A Non-Socratic Dialogue on Social Welfare Functions, but even if you don’t have that background you will enjoy it. If you do have such a background, don’t read it while drinking coffee or there’s a serious risk to your keyboard.

What makes this entry particularly brilliant is not just the self-deprecating manner in which it clubs you over the head with its intelligence, but the hidden subversive message aimed at great philosophers of past, present, and future ages.

Continue reading →

Slashdot is running a discussion entitled How Were You Fired? It's full of personal stories, some with happy endings, many of them horrible, some totally disgusting, others compelling.

Yet another reason to be really, truly, grateful for tenure.

Someone somewhere, must write manuals about How To Fire Employees, and those manuals must be full of stuff about turning off computer IDs, escorting people of the premises under guard as if they were felons, and not letting them have their personal possessions from their desks.

I know, from talking to victims in places I've worked after they were RIF'd, that these things happen even in work environments where they are utterly unnecessary. It can only be due to mindless automatons in Human Resources reading from a one-size-fits-all playbook.