Marginal Devolution
27th February 2010
I knew it was getting bad out there, with the nominal unemployment rate at 10% and the actual hitting 17% and 6 applicants for every job. But my friends are mostly university-educated professionals in high-skilled tech jobs — last fired, first hired, and bright enough that if they had to change careers or found their own business they could probably hack it. Except…except for these two, who I’ll call A and B. What’s happening to them is bad. Very bad. And it illustrates a problem that’s going to get worse barring some drastic changes in the system.
We’ve spent the last seventy years increasing the hidden overhead and downside risks associated with hiring a worker — which meant the minimum revenue-per-employee threshold below which hiring doesn’t make sense has crept up and up and up, gradually. This effect was partly masked by credit and asset bubbles, but those have now popped. Increasingly it’s not just the classic hard-core unemployables (alcoholics, criminal deviants, crazies) that can’t pull enough weight to justify a paycheck; it’s the marginal ones, the mediocre, and the mildly dysfunctional.