Are you a business owner who employs a battalion of staffs or workers? More importantly, do you, as a boss, believe that young workers produce higher productivity than older workers and in a process which you didn’t even realise, have practiced age discrimination against your older workers who had fought for your empire during the tough time?
Like it or not, employers have a perception that young employees could deliver more hence would give priority to young job seekers. During the present challenging time, people who breach the age of 40s are having tough time competing with youngsters for a job interview. However, bosses may have been recruiting the wrong people, if they’re betting on young workers alone.
Not only older workers are more experienced and productive, most likely they’re more loyal than young workers simply because they had worked in an environment where technology was nothing more than a land-line phone, a fax and a computer as huge as a refrigerator. They know what productivity really means, especially in the manufacturing sector.
Based on a report dated 31 May, 2016, a Texas Manufacturing Outlook Survey conducted by Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas shows a “decline” in manufacturing activity for the month of May after 2-month of increases. Meanwhile, the wages and benefits index stayed positive and rose from 16.7 to 21.8, suggesting a slightly accelerated “rise in compensation”.
Machinery manufacturing sector surveyed have expressed concern about the new Department of Labour overtime rules to go into effect later this year. The rules and other government regulations are seriously slowing down business development, increasing overhead costs, reducing productivity and causing increased management time.
However, there’s a particular complaint during the survey which is quite amusing and damaging. One said the following – “We have a serious productivity problem with office workers and estimated that less than 50% of their time is spent on value-creating business activities.”
But why was the productivity delivered by the workers was less than 50%? The reason – “The younger workers are often off task, engaged on social media, on the internet, texting on phones and other unproductive activities.” Because of the new rules, not only the employers are forced to pay the young workers overtime for work they should do during normal work, they’ve to micromanage employees too.
The complaints continue – “All the government regulations and Department of Labour rules are doing is making our country less competitive, creating more part-time workers, reducing workers to a max of 35-39 hours, creating divisions and de-motivating the top achievers.” Employers are now competing to reduce compensation to reflect actual productivity of a mandated 40 hour or less workweek.
On paper, its good news to workers as the Department of Labour’s final rule – signed and announced by President Obama and Secretary Perez – will automatically extend overtime pay eligibility to 4.2 million workers. The rule will entitle most salaried white collar workers earning less than US$913 a week (US$47,476 a year) to overtime pay.
To be effective on 1st December, 2016, employers can either increase their employees’ salaries to at least the new salary threshold, pay workers the overtime premium for extra hours, or limit their work to 40 hours in a week. But the intangible problem is this – the workers’ productivity was less than 50%, and will continue to stay that way.
Now, if you think such low productivity is only confined to manufacturing sector, think again. As a boss, you can always observe your non-manufacturing young workers’ productivity tomorrow. Chances are – those young workers who own a smartphone would probably busy flicking their gadget 50% of the time in office, as compared to those old workers who might own or don’t own one.
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June 1st, 2016 by financetwitter
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With technology and automation, and coming soon AI robotics, people don’t need to work so much anymore. 20 hours work week is quite enough. Otherwise, there’ll be a shortage of jobs.