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The negatives of the split shift will drive up the per hour wages. To illustrate: say I'll work all day for $64 but I have some bare minimum I need to live on, maybe $60. If I cannot make $60 in the 2x 3hour shifts, then I have to look elsewhere. As people look elsewhere, the price to fill the job will rise. Furthermore, there are side benefits of split shifts, like being able to do a workout midday, running errands or seeing your kids, having a walk in the park etc. etc. These side benefits are the kinds of benefits that come to all workers when we utilize skills more effectively. When all the dishwashers were laid off due to dish washing machines, we rejoiced because people dont have to do menial work anymore and can pursue the higher callings of human life. Its scary, but beneficial to all.

>"And to whom does the difference accrue"

A portion of the difference will go to those who made the software, A portion to the capitalists who invest in the software, A portion to the business owner who implements the software etc. etc. A portion will be passed onto consumers as price competition.Like the economist article says, it can take time for the market effects to settle out though, maybe not now, maybe not in 5 years, but eventually everyone will be doing it, saving us all 10 cents on a combo (or whatever contrived number)..

> then I have to look elsewhere

Where, exactly, in a world of reduced job opportunities?

> ... side benefits ...... workout midday..., , ...walk in the park ...

For the people in question these pastimes are probably as realistic as having a Rhino shooting in Namibia.

> ... A portion...

You make it seem like a beautiful win-win situation, like a well deserved 0.1 + 0.1 + 0.1 ... + 0.1 split. The current discussion revolves, among other things, around the question if it's more like 0.99 + 0.01 and if that is like it should be.

With a reasoning like yours, I always wonder if there is indeed some underlying substance to it, or if it's sheer hope and faith in some Austrian god?

As a consumer I've definitely experienced the benefits of declining labor costs. I can buy a computer today for less than 1/4 what my mother paid for 1/100th the power (when I was a child). Cars have gotten more fuel efficient, powerful, comfortable, safe etc, but I barely pay more than my parents did for a comparable 5yr old car in the 80s (FTR: 1984 Prelude in 1989 for $10k , 2008 Mazda3 GT in 2013 for $13k), so on and so forth for most of the goods that come to mind.

Practically, everyone with a pension benefits from profits in the stockmarket; that's how someone is able to pay a nonworking person (a retired senior) $1000s a month in benefits.

A walk in the park is free, reading a book from a library is similarly inexpensive, ok so they wont get to do some expensive pass times, but enjoyable things nonetheless.

I never said it was an even split, but that each of the parties get some. Theres plenty of substance and I'm unaware of any Austrian gods.

> Cars have gotten more fuel efficient, powerful, comfortable, safe etc, but I barely pay more than my parents did for a comparable 5yr old car in the 80s

You think the is the result of declining labour costs? I'm pretty sure mechanical engineers' wages have not decreased since the 1980s.

But what about those in Detroit (or wherever else) who actually build the cars? I wouldn't be surprised if they were feeling the downward spiral of wages vs cost of living/inflation.

Not that their loss is fueling cheap cars in my opinion, it seems the op doesn't believe that advances in technology can make things cheaper outside of labor costs I guess? I'd think that computers got on the whole much cheaper (and smaller/faster) due to the changes in the technology rather than the cost of actually assembling the hardware. But I guess I could be wrong and it could all be due to cheaper labor?

Edit: I also love the idea that a walk in the park/reading a book in the middle of the day/etc is somehow comparable to needing to find two different daycare slots for a child, not being able to plan or effectively work for a second source of income, or spend time with family/kids (since you're working morning and night). Seems like a fair trade off of time to me!

Improvement in CS/Electronics/MCU technology is a big contributing factor.

In India, We have a motor cycle called Bajaj Discover which gives amazing mileage. The innovation in mechanical engineering is very small, bulk of the innovation is timing of the spark plug firing controlled by a micro controller combined a engine design which functions per that intelligent design.

These sort of things were impossible even 20 years back, given the size, price and many other factors.

Imagine a situation in which someone in 1980 is paid a premium price to build a premium product. Say a automobile with heated seats, electronic door locks and AC... Then in 2014 it has migrated from high end (and premium paid) labor to being common place and performed by low end (and marginally paid) labor..

To me that situation is a decline in labor prices, despite the low end worker in 2014 making more in absolute terms than the 1980 worker.

A 2nd analogy, If I make 10 widgets an hour and earn $10 an hour in 1980 and then 30 years later make 100 widgets an hour for $25 an hour ($10 plus about $15 inflation, we're not talking inflation here). I would consider that a declining labor cost-- The labor cost per widget went from $1 per widget, to $0.25 ...

So, when I pay less or the same for a greater good, I consider that declining labor costs.

Aside: this illustrates a major flaw in the CPI, you cannot compare a 2013 TV to a 1960s tv to try and say "the price of a TV has deflated by X" ...

If you thinks that's what's responsible for cheap computers ... You know very little about computers ... I'm surprised you're even on HN.

Explain to me the source then. And maybe try to keep the contempt/insults to a minimum.

Technology has historically benefited workers, consumers, and investors in the long run. You may argue that those long term benefits are not worth the short term costs borne by those who lack the skills and/or opportunities to take advantage of the technology. In making any argument(s) against technology, it should always be remembered that if you do not take advantage of it, someone else will; and technology compounds, so the short term costs should be compared to compounding long term benefits.

"Technology has historically benefited workers, consumers, and investors in the long run."

For ~200 years, before which there were far less technology shifts and less market capitalism in general.

And just because something has been true for ~200 years doesn't mean it will continue being true.

A more likely outcome is the price will not rise a penny until those at the bottom who cannot survive legally at that income disappear from the market, either via medical reasons induced by poverty, or because they've entered the prison industrial complex via crime.

A race to the bottom is never as much fun as it sounds.

Was the industrial revolution the beginning of a race to the bottom, or the first step from agrarian poverty to modern prosperity?

For a great many people a 'race to the bottom' scenario can easily be posited. Especially for those who are exploited to make the super cheap products (particularly electronics) everyone prosperous is supposed to enjoy. Someone is always going to be getting screwed in the name of ever increasing growth/profits and ever declining costs.

That is until we reach a sweet Sci-Fi robots doing all the work scenario! :)

There is a peculiar history revisionist outlook that farmers were fired and then lacking any opportunity to farm, they moved to a factory. Sometimes this happened. Usually not.

Reality, as anyone who is related to a farmer knows, farming is very hard work and a factory job is generally better.

They were upgrading, not getting downsized.

Also modern prosperity only came after labor riots where lots of people suffered intensely and died in strike violence. Obviously a lot more violence is on the way, which I think sucks. Unfortunately that seems to be the only way things actually get fixed.

History shows some really awful stuff has been done in the name of "gotta do whatcha gotta do to feed the family". So... go ahead, push a couple tens of millions of desperate people into a corner, what could possibly go wrong? I mean, its not like the US populace is extremely heavily armed, or has a cultural predisposition to consider violence as entertainment, or has what boils down to a martyr as a religious symbol...

I seem to remember a famous rapper named Upton Sinclair who talked about this sort of thing and its effect on lower class workers.

"It's like a Jungle sometimes. It makes me wonder how I keep from going under."

They also could disappear from that market because they will find something else to do. If (in my mind, when) Robots and software drive the price of labor to the equivalent electrical cost (kind of like bit coin mining), I think people will do that which only people can: Arts, entertainment, atheletics, science and the like. We will let the automated work force do the dangerous work, the menial work, the boring work and will only do that which we want to do.

"will only do that which we want to do."

That would be awesome if food, water, housing, entertainment, clothing, and health care were free. Those are only available now to people still in the rapidly shrinking money based economic system.

A more likely outcome than doing what they want to do, is death or revolution (or both, historically they usually work as a team)

an additional possible outcome is a paradigm shift w/o revolution. As more people become unemployed, destitute etc, they will command a greater amount of democratic power (votes). Additional forces bringing the products towards free are: 1) If all the consumers are poor, the capitalist/business owner will need to reduce the price of goods in order to maximize the total value of sales (better to sell 100 widgets at $1 each than 1 at $50 each), because the automated labor force has (presumably) a low operating cost they can bring the price down to the cost of materials + electricity. 2) Because the business owner doesnt mix his own labor with the goods, he/she has little claim on the product (Locke's labor theory of property) .

Have you ever had to work a split shift? Not just been assigned one, but been in a situation where you had to take a menial job, and were forced to work this sort of shift, because if you didn't you'd be fired and likely unable to eat/have a place to sleep?

I know it sounds pretty drastic but the split shift is primarily used against (yes I say against) the lowest paid workers who need the wages the most. Its not going to drive wages per hour up... Hell in most cases over the last decade the prospect of raising the minimum wage is fought kicking and screaming.

At the lowest levels of the wage scale there isn't really the competition you would need to drive the wages up because no one is going to say "I deserve more for doing this shitty job" at the risk of being unable to feed themselves or their kids. Get real.

Edit: Not making a comment on technology here at all. Just the idea that split shifts will somehow raise the wages for said shifts.

One could also argue that split shifts increase the value of irregular (possibly part) time workers to their employers, thus increasing their working hours, thus increasing their earnings potential. I have no evidence to support this, but increasing the availability of any service usually increases utilization of it.

That might be true if they were two separate shifts... But they are not. Its one shift at two different times.

What company is going to pay for all the hassle of having two employees to cover the same shifts they can force one person to do? The hypothetical you propose is not only imaginary, but worse value on the face for the employer, and thus will not happen because it makes no sense from a business perspective.

One could also argue that any number of things, from faith in a higher power, to higher carbohydrate intake, could increase the value of an employee to their employers but that doesn't make it in any way realistic.

>"One could also argue that any number of things"

It is not unreasonable of me to think that increased employee availability will lead to increased number of hours worked. Whenever it becomes easier for me to get something I want, I usually get more of it (e.g. Netflix); there is no reason to believe labor is different.

You continue to ignore that there is not 'increased employee availability', it is in point of fact decreased. As the op stated:

This means a employee may be required to work a short morning shift and a short evening shift, making it effectively impossible for those prepared to scrape by working a second job to even do that any more.

And I have reiterated the point. The split shift is not two different shifts. It is one shift at two different points in the day. Where does the increased employee availability come from? The employee in question actually has less availability for another employer (not to mention for themselves given possible commute times, having to work morning & night when they might see family who dont have such a schedule, etc).

Unless you're somehow meaning since they are willing to work more flexible (read: Worse) schedules?

Also your Netflix example rings pretty hollow. They arn't even loosely comparable situations. Any owner/manager who hires more people "because they are available!" is probably 'doin it wrong'. You ideally hire, and pay, only as many people as you need to get the job done.

But for the sake of argument: Imagine if you had to pay the upkeep for Netflix twice per month (hiring two employees for the different parts of the one split shift). Pay your monthly cost, then you go over a limit or want to watch on a second device or whatever, so you then have to pay a second time. Would you be watching things as freely? I'd wager that you wouldn't.

>"Where does the increased employee availability come from?"

Being able to structure the workday differently, such as a 7am-11am and 1pm-5pm split shift as opposed to a 9am-5pm shift may make the employee available for more productive hours (depending on the employer and requirements). This may make the difference between hiring and not hiring, or between giving 4-6 hours in a single shift and 8 hours in a split.

>"You ideally hire, and pay, only as many people as you need to get the job done."

This is true, but increasing the number of scheduling options may have an impact on how much work can get done (and the value proposition to the employer); and I am addressing marginal cases.

>" Imagine if you had to pay the upkeep for Netflix twice per month (hiring two employees for the different parts of the one split shift). Pay your monthly cost, then you go over a limit or want to watch on a second device or whatever, so you then have to pay a second time. Would you be watching things as freely? I'd wager that you wouldn't."

I think that if Netflix offered me more opportunities to consume content, I would be happy to pay for it.

My policy goal would be to make employees more productive, and increase the demand for labor, so that employers will have to pay higher wages to attract the workers, and the employers can afford to. This also has the impact of making people's work more meaningful, as their labor must be better utilized, instead of wasted on menial tasks.

What you described is not increased employee availability. It is forcing an employee to be available to the same employer for effectively 2 extra hours without having to pay for those two hours (remember you're only paying them for when it is best for you). They still have to commute to-from work which eats at least an hour of their time unless they live literally around the corner. Also this does not increase wages for the time or hours worked with pay.

If you're addressing marginal cases you may not want to initially present it as an absolute that should increase wages or hours worked because it obviously will not in all but extreme fringe cases.

The Netflix example would not be them offering you more, you would simply be paying twice, for the same thing you used to get (comparison being the need to pay the upkeep for two different employees rather than the one you used to use). Your response does not take that into account and it seems to ignore it purposefully.

Your policy goal is lofty. But it has been shown over and over that employers having the ability to pay more does not lead to higher wages for workers. That is actually an idea that runs counter to the idea of profit. It would be nice if that were the case but it simply is not true, and something you say you have no evidence for in a previous post, while there is ample evidence to the contrary.

The worker isn't forced into anything. They can choose the job or not. Further, they're available for other tasks in the 2 hour window. Write a book, advance their careers, invent something. If they take the 2 hours and spend 30 minutes each way going home and 1 hour on Xbox, then they're going to lose out because they didnt make use of the 2 hours.

BTW: I had split shifts before when I was a teenager, and I didnt like it. I told my employer and they greatly limited the number of them we had. We also had "Call" shifts, where you had to be ready to work, and call in an hour ahead of time and see if you were working or not... Made it so you couldnt book any hard plans for that whole shift, but 95% of the time you didnt work it anyways. Overall it was a good job, traded my teen years for subway and clothes (spent all my paychecks like any teen would :P )

Have you ever had to work a split shift? Not just been assigned one, but been in a situation where you had to take a menial job, and were forced to work this sort of shift, because if you didn't you'd be fired and likely unable to eat/have a place to sleep?

I used to write call center management software in the late 90s and they had split shift for years. The workers loved it. The people with kids could get the middle of the day and late at night shifts. That way they could take their kids to school and pick them up each day. Admittedly it was not something that was forced, but the call center always had the split shift schedules full.

> because if you didn't you'd be fired and likely unable to eat/have a place to sleep?

Unemployment pay?

Migrant workers, you say? Well, that's an entirely different problem.

Retail workers very often have little advance notice of what their shifts will be. This is bad for everyone, and results in people being idle when they would rather not be. People with kids, especially, need to have schedules that they can predict ahead of time. In addition, a lot of people would very much be willing to work two jobs, but without a guaranteed schedule, you have no way of avoiding conflicts.

I don't think shift workers are much better off, as it currently stands, as a result of cost-saving tech. We'll have to see what happens, I guess.

Maybe improved scheduling software would benefit workers and employers; employers would have access to the labor of workers who are not currently able to work because of the problems you describe, and workers would be more able to manage their schedules. This is not cost-saving, but it might be value-creating.

Maybe, and I wish you luck in your optimism! But I wouldn't hold my breath that any benefits gained from technology won't go to a smaller and smaller group of people as history shows time and time again.

My stepfather is a shiftworker and he can tell you what days he will and wont be working for the next year (4 on 4 off) ... Then again, he's also unionized..

"The negatives of the split shift will drive up the per hour wages."

Wallmart employees get around 10USD an hour.

You are thinking about this as a student or someone without too many obligations.

The reality is that you need to work those other hours when you get 10USD and hour.

As a side note, can you imagine what things would be like if the US didn't have a minimum wage?

Here in Germany we don't have one and there are people working for wages as low as 3€ per hour[1]. That is 4.07$.

[1] http://translate.google.com/translate?sl=de&tl=en&js=n&prev=...

Germany has an unemployment rate 1.5 points less than America. If we can attribute the bulk of that to the artificial spread between supply and demand of labor due to price fixing (minimum wage) then the difference would be 2.5 million people would be in the workforce.

Germany has a much better social security mesh than the US.

Something seems not quite right to me about how businesses are singled out and criticised for deploying the sort of labor optimizations you describe. What I mean is, why should a business abstain from optimizations just because they happen to employ manual labour? Why is it their resonsibility to keep their processes inefficient, rather than the responsibility of other businesses to introduce inefficencies that will create more manual roles? Why don't we make Google have all their printouts for code reviews manually typed up and spell checked by a legion of low payed workers? Or something equally arbitrary that will 'create' a job?

Note that I'm not coming down on either side of the automation vs job-preservation debate as a whole, I'm just asking what justification people have for only penalising businesses which recruit people for pre-existing menial tasks.

Of course, that would be silly and wasteful. I don't think anyone would think that would be a useful solution but we need to start seriously considering Guaranteed Basic Incomes.

All technology is amoral, and will continue to be amoral. If you don't believe so, you should just join the Amish or the Luddites, because that was their take on the world.

The things you discuss were possible to do before technology, technology just made it easier to do.

Ethics is therefore still important (and perhaps the enforcement of them via laws).

Nuclear technology makes cheap energy. It also makes gigantic bombs.

The libertarian in me says that workers who do not like their split-shift conditions should just quit them. En masse, this would force those employers to raise wages in order to attract people willing to put up with that kind of crap, equalizing things again.

Of course, this would require extending unemployment benefits to people who quit jobs. (There is no logical reason why this isn't already the case. I can simply stop showing up for work and make it so that I get unemployment benefits, but that is far more wasteful and is basically a trade of self-esteem for security.)

The thing is, if you ignore labor-saving techniques and keep labor for its own sake, that's quite a nihilistic existence if you think about it. I could take that to an extreme and demand that I get paid to manually move the bits around which generate the computing screen I'm looking at. It might take me over a year just to post this message, but hey, at least I'm getting paid and not forced to look for work that is better suited to me, right?

If you want to see a real-world example of money burned simply to keep jobs alive, look no further than this article about how the US Military spent its money last year https://medium.com/war-is-boring/ec86786aae30 . Read the story about the M1 Abrams tank. Then see how you feel.

Government regulation will arguably only paper over the problem in the short term, as it incentivizes capital to route around it, mainly by accelerating the automation of these jobs.

I'd argue that the focus should be on fostering policy and technologies that allow independent creation of wealth. Policy-wise, empowering self-organization of local communities. How can a community with high unemployment act in their own self-benefit? How can we shape policy so that they can grow their own food, build their own houses, and generally not be utterly dependent on "the system" for their survival? Technology-wise, let's look at things like 3D printing and solar.

The problem is unemployment. Employers want to minimize the number of hours they have to pay employees (this is a good thing, in theory, no sense paying people to work at times when they aren't needed.) If this creates problems for the workers, it doesn't matter for them because there is still a large number of people who are looking for jobs willing to work there.