Quotulatiousness

March 3, 2010

Exact terminology aids understanding

Filed under: China, Economics, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 08:40

Apple Computer has been accused of exploiting child labour, indirectly, in factories that make iPods and iPhones. This is a serious charge, and the moral outrage it provokes is understandable. It evokes images of Victorian factories (those “satanic mills”), with children as young as seven or eight being starved and abused in horrific conditions.

However, the term “child labour” isn’t particularly exact, as Whit points out:

What I found most interesting was the “child” part — when I was 15 I would have slugged anyone who called me a child. During the summer of my 15th year, I was working in our metal stamping plant where the highest temperature reached 103 F (40 C). I had my first factory job when I was 14 turning wheels on a lathe. My Father never read child-labor laws, and thank God for that. It was an invaluable experience that I am sad to say I won’t be able to give to my son.

I can remember in 1998 visiting a factory for a major automotive supplier in Taiwan. There were 14 year old boys working on the lines making seat belt assemblies. I asked about it and found that they were students at the local technical school. They worked half a shift on the line and spent the rest of the day in class studying engineering. Today, 12 years later, they would be around 26 with degrees in mechanical engineering and over a decade of hands-on experience. I imagine some of them are running plants in China now.

So, there are the imagined children in a Dickensian hell, and there are teenagers (“young adults” in some situations) doing co-op terms in factories. Remember that our ideas about appropriate ages to leave school and work in factories or on farms have changed dramatically over the last two generations. Our grandparents wouldn’t have batted an eye at 14-year-olds working in factories. For most of their contemporaries, the concept of “teenage years” just didn’t have any particular cultural meaning. You were a child, you went to school, then you left school and got a job.

Even 60 years ago, however, they would have objected to under-12’s working away from home (but not on the family farm . . . farming families still looked at kids as extra working hands).

I understand that Apple is worried about its image, and I acknowledge that those eleven 15 year olds may not have wanted to be there. But there is a big difference between a 15 year old farm kid fibbing about his age to get a good factory job to help support his family and using 6 year old slave labor in an illegal fireworks factory in Sichuan. It would be nice if the amazingly flexible English language had a concise way of stating the difference. I think “under-aged labor” is more reflective of the reality of the situation.

It’s also not to excuse bad employers or condone involuntary labour (permitted in some developing countries).

March 2, 2010

QotD: The true nature of school

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Education, Humour, Quotations — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 13:04

If you objected to high school students getting spied on in their homes by school district-issued webcams, maybe junior high students under nonstop cam surveillance on school grounds by a tubby administrator with a chinbeard (but no chin) will be the charm [. . .] I’m creeped out by the obvious glee with which Beardy McBeardsworth describes his prey at a Bronx junior high school in almost exactly the same tones you hear from Air Force flacks narrating thermal footage of hits on insurgents. But I must acknowledge that the concept of school as a place where the rights of students are severely curtailed dates back at least to my own schooling during King Philip’s War, was recently upheld by the Supreme Court in the Bong Hits 4 Jesus case, and seems to enjoy broad popular support. For the majority of Americans alive today, the function of school has always been to break you for a workplace where you will meet obstruction and indignity every day, be subject to every type of invasive surveillance, and generally, as even that greatest of working stiffs Jerry Langford put it, “have idiots plaguing your life.”

Tim Cavanaugh, “Junior High Lives of Others”, Hit and Run, 2010-03-01

February 23, 2010

Statistics can tell a lot . . . but not always truthfully

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Europe — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:46

Brian Lilley looks at a recent report which critiques the federal government’s claim that women earn only 84% of the wages that men earn. The report uses a different set of statistics to show that women only earn 70 cents for every dollar a man earns in Canada:

Were this true it would be a shocking and appalling state of affairs, the type of thing that government regulations must be called upon to rectify. I truly do not know anyone who would advocate that a man earn 42% more than a woman for working the same job, for the same number of hours. Of course this is not the case.

The report, dubbed a reality check by its authors, looks at the government’s claim that women earn 84 cents for every dollar a man makes and they dismiss it. Their reason for doing so? The government does not use the correct data. In the government report, the 84 cents on the dollar claim is arrived at by looking at wages on a dollar per hour basis using Statistics Canada’s July 2008 Labour Force Survey. In July of 2008 women earned an average of $19.14 per hour while men earned an average of $22.80 per hour, thus the 84 cents on the dollar figure.

In any argument over statistics, the chosen measurement is always the one that best supports your argument. This is fair play, when the statistics are comparable. It isn’t when your choice of stat measures something quite different:

The collective report by the labour and activist groups does not use dollar per hour compensation to show that women earn less than men, they use total year compensation. It is easy to understand why the group uses this formula, it will always show that women are being discriminated against while the other formula is showing improvements. A quick look at Stats Canada’s monthly Labour Force Survey shows one reason why men make more money than women; they work more hours. While this may not justify a difference in hourly wages, it would justify a difference in year end compensation. In the report cited by the government, men worked an average of 38.7 hours per week, a full five hours more than women who clocked in for 33.7 hours. For full-time workers, rather than all workers combined, there was still a difference, men working 40.7 hours per week to 38 hours for women. In reviewing several months of these reports over the past two years a consistent pattern emerges, men in full-time jobs work two to three hours more per week than women.

There may still be parts of the economy where male bosses or business owners irrationally discriminate against women (equally, there may be other forms of prejudice in play). Where laws exist to prohibit this, they should be enforced. However, trying to paint the numbers to show discrimination where it does not exist does not help anyone, and it makes it harder to achieve truly equal rights.

Update, 21 October: Ilkka at The Fourth Checkraise mentioned a related story from Finland:

Speaking of the male-female wage gap, I don’t know how I could forget the recent study by the Finnish emeritus researcher (who is thus free to speak his mind) Pauli Sumanen about this very issue. It concluded that Finnish men earn more on average (again, not the median) than Finnish women simply because they work more: if you control for actual hours worked, women get paid more than men so that a woman’s euro is not 80 cents but closer to 104. And if you look at the net salaries after the heavily progressive taxation, and include the fact that women live and receive pensions seven years longer on average (Finnish women pay 45% of total health care costs yet use 59% of health care), these numbers become vastly more dramatic for women.

February 4, 2010

Unemployment insurance systems can deter hiring

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Government, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 07:31

Jay Goltz discusses how some state-level unemployment insurance systems actually deter firms from hiring new employees:

The unemployment insurance tax may be the most confusing and misunderstood tax there is. It is run by the states, and the rules can vary as much as the weather from one state to another.

Here’s how it works in Illinois. The important point for business owners to know is that when the state pays out claims to a company’s former employees, that company’s unemployment tax rate goes up. For each business, the state calculates how many dollars have been paid in compensation over the previous three years and adds on about 48 percent through various calculations. The result is that in Illinois, you end up paying for incremental compensation claims at a rate of $1.48 for every dollar that a former employee collects.

If you lay off or fire someone without “cause,” that person is eligible for unemployment compensation. “Cause” means that the employee violated a company policy, like coming in late or threatening a co-worker. “Cause” does not include doing a bad job, being very slow, or having a bad attitude.

I’d always assumed that the Canadian system (which is run by the federal government) was more generous than the various state-level systems in the US, but there appears to be more variation state-to-state so that may not be true. Certainly the Illinois system’s top payment of $531 per week is well above the Canadian EI top payment ($457 before taxes, according to the servicecanada.gc.ca website). If the Illinois amount is after tax, that’s significantly more than a Canadian claimant would get.

November 9, 2009

US unemployment rate, graphically

Filed under: Economics, USA — Tags: — Nicholas @ 13:36

The New York Times has a useful interactive graphic for determining the unemployment rate for various groups. They show the 12-month rate, due to the unreliable nature of monthly estimates.

July 25, 2009

A blast from my past

Filed under: History, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 20:08

I was reading Charles Stross’s blog the other day, and noticed that he’d nicely compiled all his “How I got here in the end” blog entries into a single post. I’d not read the whole thing, so a quick bookmark and I was off to other things. Today, while going back to the bookmark, I discovered that we may have crossed paths in our respective previous lives:

I spent nearly three and a half years working on technical documentation for a UNIX vendor during the early 90s. Along the way, I learned Perl (against orders), accidentally provoked the invention of the robots.txt file, was the token Departmental Hippie, and finally jumped ship when the company ran aground on the jagged rocky reefs of the Dilbert Continent. At one time, that particular company was an extremely cool place to work. But today, it lingers on in popular memories only because of the hideous legacy of it’s initials … SCO.

SCO was not then the brain-eating zombie of the UNIX world, odd though this may seem to young ‘uns who’ve grown up with Linux. Back in the late eighties and early nineties, SCO (then known more commonly as the Santa Cruz Operation) was a real UNIX company. Started by a father-son team, Larry and Doug Michels, SCO initially did UNIX device driver work. Then, around 1985, Microsoft made a huge mistake. Back in those days, MS developed code for multiple operating systems. Some time before then, they’d acquired the rights to Xenix, a fork of AT&T UNIX Version 7. SCO did most of the heavy lifting on porting Xenix to new platforms; and so, when Microsoft decided Xenix wasn’t central to their business any more, SCO bought the rights (in return for a minority shareholding).

SCO is one of the stops on my resumé that I rarely call attention to, as it was an unhappy and eventually unpleasant stop along the way. Charles says “late 1991”, so perhaps we didn’t actually meet . . . I visited the SCO Watford office in August.

Still, I’d like to think that I met one of my favourite authors before he became famous . . .

Later on in that mega-post he says:

During this process I discovered several things about myself. I do not respond well to micro-managing. I especially do not respond well to being micro-managed on a highly technical task by a journalism graduate. Also, I’m a lousy proofreader. Did I say lousy? I meant lousy.

Dude. You want to talk micro-managed? My (Toronto-based) manager wanted twice-daily meetings where I needed to show my progress since the last meeting. I got so paranoid about “showing progress” that I stopped writing altogether, just showing a list of emails I’d been involved in since the last 4-hourly meeting occurred . . .

Do I need to say that my employment at SCO didn’t last much more than a few months after my visit to the Watford office?

Reading further in Charlie’s memoirs:

Here is an example of a Terminally Bad Sign for any organization in the computer business:

… When you discover that your line manager’s recreational reading is the 1980 edition of the IBM Staff Handbook.

Oddly enough, I had a few co-op work terms with IBM in the mid-to-late 1980’s. There were few books that could strike fear in the hearts of technology sector workers like official IBM publications. My very first official IBM staff meeting had the head of R&D in IBM Canada saying things like “There is business out there that we’re not getting. Business that GOD HIMSELF wanted us to have!” For some reason, I thought he was making a joke. I laughed out loud. My IBM career didn’t exactly go upwards from there . . .

July 23, 2009

The wrong measure

Filed under: Economics, Law — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 07:29

The economy is struggling, employers are shedding excess workers, the banks are floundering, so what can the government do to make things better? Other than getting the hell out of the way, not much . . . but they can certainly make things worse:

Come Friday, the federally mandated minimum wage will jump from $6.55 an hour to $7.25 — an 11 percent increase. At a time when employers are laying off workers, Washington is going to make it more expensive to keep them.

If you’re a minimum wage employee, your job will pay more, but only if it still exists. These days, most companies are scrutinizing every position on the payroll to make sure it’s worth the cost. Raise the toll, and some employees will find they are no longer valuable enough to make the cut.

Economists generally agree that increases in the minimum wage cause unemployment even when the economy is prospering—something it has not been doing for the last year and a half. David Neumark, a professor at the University of California, Irvine, estimates this rise will destroy some 300,000 jobs among teens and young adults.

The problem is that by trying to forcibly change the relationship between entry-level workers and employers, the government actually hurts both parties. Entry-level workers whose lack of training or aptitude makes their work less economical at a mandatory higher pay rate lose the most: their jobs and their prospects of other minimum-wage jobs. Employers lose out, too, because some work is now uneconomical to have done, it either doesn’t get done at all or is outsourced.

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