In Europe, Fake Jobs Can Have Real Benefits | Hacker News Reader

In Europe, Fake Jobs Can Have Real Benefits

nytimes.com

58 pointspetethomas102 comments

How they had it wrong. Instead of robotics liberating mankind from bullshit jobs, we create imaginary bullshit jobs for those who aren't suffering from one. Amazing. Pretty soon people will pay for these oppportunities.

They will also have to borrow money to pay for these, and these loans will add up.

We'll call it "University!"

You wrote what I was going to say, but better. If there is a good thing about all this, it's that the nakedness of the emperor is fully exposed here.

People have already been known to pay for internships.

Your perception is that a job is somewhere you go to be productive, work, and get things done. For a lot of people, a job is - in Starbucks' marketing phrasing, a "second space" - a different physical space to occupy, and different people to interact with. A way to occupy their day.

I've said it before: a large part of the reason I'm in IT, and not automotive mechanics or environmental conservationism, is because I can spend my days in temperature-controlled office buildings, instead of on the cold and muddy ground or cold and damp forests.

Some people grudgingly leave their warm beds to stay in an office building in exchange for currency they can use for food and shelter. I feel as though this is a type of modern autarky, and it gets shamed by those of us whose dreams and ambitions involve building useful or cool things with available technology.

My perception is that a good job is one that doesn't feel like a job. I remember a French vineyard owner say : "I want to teach my children how to run this place, because then they never have to work again".

Yes, what denotes a good job lay in the eye of the beholder!

I'd take another angle to why I generally look down on "useless jobs," as just another worrying trend.

As is oft cited here, we're rapidly reaching a point where the basic needs of all people could be served by a vast minority of the populous, and there is a wide array of options that can be taken to still ensure everyone can support themselves. One of these options is "useless jobs", build out the job market so that everyone can still work for their pay.

As you say, your goal is to be comfortable in your other space, but in the above trend, the fact that you MUST chose the other space from within a potentially limited set, and then conform to whatever constraints it demands on you, should demonstrate why I think "useless jobs" are a worrying outcome compared to alternatives such as a global minimum wage, such that you can truly chose your other space freely, as well as what you fill the time there with.

To bring this tangent back to the point, if useless jobs become the norm, and we continue a society that puts the emphasis on _jobbing_ and not enabling each person to live their life however they wish, I worry the more Utopian outcome is an impossibility.

The reminds me of the dryly satiric, darkly comic Magnus Mills novel "The Scheme for Full Employment"[1]. It concerns "UniVan" drivers delivering loads to different UniVan depots around the country. It eventually becomes apparent that the only thing they are delivering are UniVan parts and the only work being done at the depots is maintenance and repair of the UniVans themselves. The entire enterprise had been established to provide busy work.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Scheme_for_Full_Employment

Self-Driving cars will obsolete Univan Drivers

The HN self-driving car fetish has apparently metastasized out of its usual Uber and Google threads and has started infecting and spawning here in totally unrelated topics apparently.

Dude, it's on-topic. The conversation is about people losing jobs because of automation. The comment was that even the fake jobs will probably get automated away.

Worse than that, they eventually go on strike, causing the scheme to collapse.

Every time a come across the topic of unemployment I wonder what the fundamental thing is that is broken in an economy with a high unemployment rate. I mean unemployed people mean unused workforce and it seems that there should be a strong desire to make use of unused workforce. So what is it?

Are the unemployed not needed? Because we reached a level of efficiency and automation so that we no longer need all the available workforce to satisfy all the demand, i.e. is it a work distribution problem? This seems not to be the case because there are not enough teachers, the infrastructure is in bad shape, there are heavily overworked people and so on.

Do they have the wrong profession, one where no additional workforce is required? Is it a latency effect, i.e. available workforce in one sector lacks behind needed workforce while it is the opposite in another sector? Are they obsoleted by cheaper labor abroad?

Is it some kind of local extremum or vicious cycle in which the economy got stuck, e.g. unemployed would consume stuff if they were employed and earned money but because they are not and they do not there is less demand and in consequence the jobs to employ them are not created? This seems easily solved with loans breaking the cycle by creating the demand first.

Well there are multiple things going on here that lead to this. I don't think it's a single thing.

It's hard to retrain people for new jobs. Productivity has been going up so demand for labor to fulfill the same output goes down. Teachers and infrastructure are government funded things. To increase teachers and infrastructure you need the political side to vote for it which isn't happening right now.

There are a lot of other factors.

Healthy economies will always displace workers through creative destruction. For example, the internal combustion engine decreased demand for horse whip makers but increased demand for oil workers. While few horse whip makers could make the transition to oil workers a healthy economy can usually adjust.

Structural problems in economies can also create sub-optimal use of labor. For example, in a debt based economy debt and savings are just call options on future labor (production). In a healthy economy the concept of debt and savings is used as a way for people to buy and sell call options on their labor. For example a student may choose to sell a call option on his labor by taking on debt for an education with the expectation that his labor will be more valuable in the future. Somebody in middle age may chose to buy a call option on the students labor with the expectation that the value of his labor will decline in his old age.

However in a pathological economy structural problems can create sub-optimal use of labor. For example, if deflation becomes entrenched then all rational actors may chose to defer consumption into the future where labor will be cheaper. This can create structural unemployment like it did in the 1930's. Other examples where the available call option on future labor is smaller than the demand. For example the demand from Baby Boomers looking at retirement, demand from the 1% to maintain their relative wealth, corporate coffers that can't be repatriated due to tax minimization strategies and sovereign wealth funds may exceed the productive capacity of the future labor pool.

In that case the economic system may be 'signaling' to the rising generation to defer their labor but in a way that exceeds their actual capacity to defer the labor creating sub-optimal use of labor.

Would it be legal for these people to start a real business in that office? Even if it's something like knitting a jersey and then spending the next week trying to sell it for 10 bucks, at least they'd be 10 bucks richer than spending all that effort doing nothing.

It's not like they don't have time or resources to run a business - they're running a fake one.

It wouldn't be training anymore, so they'd lose their unemployment benefits.

There should be a gentler ramp-up from unemployment benefits to sustainable business, but there isn't so as of today the practical answer to your question is "no, it's not legal".

>> "There should be a gentler ramp-up from unemployment benefits to sustainable business"

There is. In the UK you can work up to 16 hours per week while on unemployment benefits. If self-employed you also don't have to pay national insurance until your profit exceeds a certain level.

In theory yes.

In practice the UK poverty trap is very real and crushing to the entrepreneurship of the economically disenfranchised.

I've been wondering if it wouldn't make sense to help businesses with a portion of the salary of people who have been out of work for a long stretch of time, to offset the cost of retraining.

I'm ashamed I'm french... How can one think "let's start a fake company" instead of asking real companies to train these people for real? and for free...

How is it OK to work for a fake company, but it's bad to work for free for a real company and gain some real experience... How come?

Because that's exploitation and unfair competition.

Imagine company A uses this program for a significant fraction of its workers. The government is paying the wages for its workers so it can afford to lower it's prices. This puts company B out of business because it can't. Now we have twice as many workers on unemployment...

Then limit the program to a non significant fraction of its workers and a limited time, and a limited number of such programs per year.

That's very easy to verify and enforce...

There might be laws preventing working for free for a real company. Or maybe unions are opposed because it may depress their wages?

There are definitely such laws. There's even a minimum wage for interns in France (800€/m, which is about 80% of the legal minimum salary).

And unions in France would definitely be opposed to it... because they're opposed to any change.

But I think they could make it work...

The minimum is a bit less thank that I think. You can see here[1] an example of the gratification for a full time (7h a day) intern ship of 4 months. The pay per month is ~500€

[1] http://vosdroits.service-public.fr/professionnels-entreprise...

> How is it OK to work for a fake company, but it's bad to work for free for a real company and gain some real experience... How come?

These people are unemployed, right?

What if you let a company hire them for free? Let's see...

  1. company has one paid secretary
  2. company hires free secretary
  3. company lays off paid secretary because the free one is cheaper
  4. previously paid secretary is now unemployed
  5. previously paid secretary gets hired for free by company 2

You KNOW this is what would happen. Don't even start about how companies autoregulate themselves and how the market will punish bad behaviour and how employees can simply choose to work for a better one or whatever. These things are wishful thinking.

Then enforce good manners and sound business practice.

And restrict the extent of this program, both in numbers and time.

Also limit this program to companies that need it most (could not hire otherwise).

This is what happens with unpaid internships?

In a limited way, yes, that's why unpaid internships are now limited to two months as far as I know.

Even then low paid, longer, internships still do displace legitimate jobs to some extent.

As I said, good manners and sound business practice are wishful thinking at best.

Limiting this kind of program to startups could help. Limiting to certain jobs and job levels too (I guess the fake companies don't "employ" PhDs in compsci either).

It's not my job to make it work or make it right. But tossing the idea altogether is rather radical.

Of course, they could also help create real companies. For a limited time, and a limited number of "employees".

Also note that this implies a serious investment from the company too: they have to train these employees... which they may actually choose to keep onboard after the program's end.

I'm pretty sure I used to do something like this as a kid. And after the fake job, let's all meet up for a tea party in the back room. If you aren't into tea, then feel free to grab yourself a fake cold one from the fake fridge.

If you are going to fake something like this, at least you could be a fake lawyer (you can't handle the truth,) doctor (whoo, that might be scandalous!) or astronaut.

Personally, I could come up with a really long list of things to spend my time on that would be helpful to society and potentially land me a job (or make me money.) Just allowing people access to the basics of putting something together (internet connected terminals) might be more worthwhile. Too bad these places can't teach people how to think outside the system in creating roles in society.

Wow it's like a whole another world. I really like the idea - much more effective form of training than traditional types. Everyone knows about the scarring effects of long term unemployment (if not http://bit.ly/1Qf8ue3). This is a good way to combat that scarring.

Seconded, there's a discouraging element to being unemployed. Besides the training angle, this helps people to stay confident and even improve their skills.

I'm wondering how this could be translated to software development. Setting up an IT department in these virtual companies would be a very good idea. Going further, you could even sell the software and kickstart real software businesses in the B2B space, this could be a tremendous opportunity to help software developers to learn about marketing, sales, accounting, etc.

Sounds like an interesting simulation. I would suggest they throw in some politically backstabbing co-workers, 20 hours a week of useless meetings and a psychopathic self serving boss to make it more lifelike.

It seems like it would be a much more productive use of human capital to actually do the work below cost so something is actually being accomplished.

At that point, the state (who is ultimately paying for most of this) would be competing unfairly with private companies (in particular, it would not be paying minimum wage). This is probably not a good idea.

In Ireland we have a scheme where an unemployed person can get an extra 50 euro a week on their unemployment benefit, in return for which they do an internship for a private company, which must at least in principle be training-oriented. In practice, this can cause a problem where these 'internships' displace the need to create real jobs.

This system also likely works without making changes to wage laws etc, and makes clear that it is temporary and to help people get a job and not a source of cheap labor (which quickly would take over "real", normally paid jobs, which would mean more people are unemployed, ...)

The UK has a nastier version of this: you can be compelled to do unpaid work or lose your unemployment benefit. Some of this is displacing real jobs in the low-paid retail sector. Some of it results in people standing around in hi-viz jackets doing nothing for 35 hours a week. https://welfaretales.wordpress.com/2015/05/15/workfare-force...

The (rather idealised sounding, by the NYT's description) European version is about keeping people engaged with society by giving them things that feel like work so they have colleagues, a familiarity with working practices, and a feeling of usefulness.

The British version seems to regard sitting at home while unemployed as an outrageous privilege; drudgery must be imposed on those people otherwise they're better off than the 'hardworking' people who must suffer commuting and not seeing their family. A previous version was declared illegal, so the government enacted "emergency" legislation to retroactively legalise it. http://www.politics.co.uk/news/2013/03/19/ids-emergency-jobs...

It's a free lunch for all is it? Someone pays (if not the descendants yet to be conceived who will be making interest payments on current debts) so it's certainly drudgery on the folk who have to pay for those sitting at home.

I suppose that's how you keep the chain of economic coercion through threat of starvation going.

"We are giving you this free lunch, because we're uncomfortable with people starving to death in a first world country, but in order to maintain the strict ranking that citizens are only allowed happiness in proportion to their income, we're going to inflict useless activity on you. Don't have a nice day or it'll come out of your benefits."

(Current debt is being issued at 0.5% interest rates, a historic low)

Though you are correct that interest rates are very low, I believe it is disingenuous to quote the rate of a gilt with a maturity under 10 years. (You have mentioned the 2-year gilt.)

Yep, Workfare is definitely far worse than Jobbridge (the Irish scheme); in particular Jobbridge is not mandatory (or even particularly common) and the internship has to provide useful experience and training (though there has been abuse of this; a major supermarket chain was advertising shelf-stacking jobs as Jobbridge internships for a while before getting caught).

You could do things that are not in competition with any company (or in minimal competition). For example visiting and having a chat with lonely elderly.

I think this is a bit extreme on the fake side, but I have found somewhere between that and a real job that works quite well, while not being fake. There are agencies that will make you come in like a 9-5 job, help you write your CV, help you communicate with recruitment agencies and give you interview training, will effectively teach you about the recruitment industry and the sales industry since you will be selling yourself. You will do this with other people in an office who are either looking for work like you are, or who are between temporary or contract jobs, so it also offers an opportunity to network.

> There are agencies that will make you come in like a 9-5 job, help you write your CV, help you communicate with recruitment agencies and give you interview training, will effectively teach you about the recruitment industry and the sales industry since you will be selling yourself.

This is an extension - teaches you what to do once you actually get the job. As far as training for skills required in modern office goes, it sounds pretty good actually. We don't need superheroes to answer email.

"I have found somewhere between that and a real job that works quite well, while not being fake."

You have found that in a rigorous scientific study, a methodical comparison between approaches, personal experience, or second-hand experience?

There might be a solution to do real work and not disrupt other people jobs (or lower the salaries) and this might be to do Volunteering. I'm thinking everybody wins in this case: the worker who is actually doing work and contributing to something, the NGO/non-profit who always needs more labor and (maybe) the society in general.

"The success rate of the training centers is high. About 60 to 70 percent of those who go through France’s practice firms find jobs, often administrative positions, Mr. Troton said. But in a reflection of the shifting nature of the European workplace, most are low-paying and last for short stints, sometimes just three to six months."

Doesn't seem that high a success to me. I'm sure it helps, but we don't know how much it cost, and it doesn't seem really scalable. It would be interesting to know how it compares to other training methods.

It might not be the most effective way but it also gives people a reason to get up in the morning and some structure and social interaction in their lives. I think that's a very important benefit that's often overlooked.

This is as much about making unemployment bearable than it is about training people.

This article makes me feel like Yossarian

https://www.ted.com/talks/jeremy_howard_the_wonderful_and_te...

Jobocalypse

I wonder if rate of governments barricading SMBs is a good metric for tyranny.

As developers obsessed, sometimes unhealthily so, with optimization, this strikes us as an inadmissible waste.

However, we need to remember that a lot of what we perceive as "legitimate" jobs are also bullshit jobs. Even if they're not exactly zero-sum games, many jobs are more about diverting money from company A to company B than creating net wealth. Take marketing and advertising departments operating on inelastic markets: every dollar taken to Adidas by a Nike marketing guy is cancelled by a dollar taken to Nike by an Adidas marketing guy. And even if they can convince you to buy more shoes, every additional dollar spent on shoes is one less dollar for your video game budget.

We treat salaried work as an intrinsically good thing rather than a necessary evil: that's the fundamental fallacy that makes the mock companies in this article morally justifiable in many people's eyes. To sustain that "work ethics", we pretend that people wouldn't do anything socially useful if they didn't get a salary in exchange, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary (stay-at-home parents, most retired people in sound health and financial situations, philanthropists... People only work for salary, because they're in a vital need for a salary. And as every decent manager knows, extrinsic motivation kills intrinsic motivation)

Central planning won't solve the problem of inefficient exploitation of human workforce, as demonstrated by communist countries. But the situation is very comparable to an arms race, and there already are many multilateral agreements to limit this arms race, some legal (can't hire a hitman to dispatch your competitors' executives), some informal (no-employee-poaching agreements), and some illegal and secret (cartels). If we were to admit that wealth creation, not salaried occupation, is what we should thrive for, multilateral agreements to limit unproductive work could be set up. The net result would be orders of magnitude bigger that thwarting the couple of ridiculous initiatives, such as illustrated here, to conceal unemployment and unemployability.

Here are some examples of wealth-creation-promoting reforms, which don't require central planning: punitive taxes on advertizing; mandatory long warranties on product to tackle obsolescence; limiting lottery-like legal actions by banning "no gain=no fee" lawyer hiring, and by making it standard for the loser to pay the winner's fees (that would probably kill patent trolls).

A key reason why we focus on preserving jobs rather than maximizing job efficiency is that we use salary both as a way to create wealth through work, and to distribute it through wages. It becomes a poorer and poorer way to generate wealth on average, but as long as we don't set up better complementary ways to distribute wealth, we're doomed to create more and more bullshit, pointless jobs. Capitalism reaches its limits later than communism, but when it does, it also becomes a wildly inefficient converter of human work.

Another reason is that the jobs which give power are often those which control and displace wealth flow, rather than those creating net wealth. What's the lawyer/engineer ratio in Senate and Congress? You can't expect those in power to destroy their power tools, if they can help it.

I don't understand why they don't simply do real work. Are all possible useful services in France already provided? Why not simply have these unemployed people work for the government, instead of hiring overpriced union workers?

So, replace a highly-trained essentially unfireable labour force who'll mostly stick around for life with a labour force which would more or less turn over entirely every year (as noted in the article, people who do these schemes tend to get real jobs afterwards)? This seems like a bad idea.

Because there is no real work? If there was a pet webshop like the one described in the article, these people could go there and work there. There isn't though, else they'd be working. Simple economics, really. As for working for the government, that depends on whether the government has any jobs that suit these people.

If you're suggesting they could work for their unemployment benefits... that's a legal problem, because then they'd technically not be unemployed anymore and would cost the government / tax payer more money. Although they'd be tax payers themselves again via income tax. It gets very confusing really.

TL;DR: One does not simply create jobs.

Because there is no real work?

Really? I suspect that our eyes are merely blinded to positive things that can be done but that currently nobody is willing to pay for.

In ageing societies, think about services for the elderly. The elderly benefit, and if the job is designed humanely (i.e. not with the aim of extracting as much profit as possible at any cost), it could also benefit the one who does it.

What about making the cities we live in more beautiful by creating new municipal gardens and tending to them?

These are just two examples. Once you look outside the usual economic spheres you can certainly find more. Somehow, I have the feeling that it would be more valuable to society if the people working fake jobs as described in the article actually did something useful instead. That could still provide training as a side effect.

Money is exactly the measure of "value to society". If nobody pays these people to do this, then it literally means that it's not worth a living wage to do it. You may like municipal gardens, but how many dollars per month do you like them? Run a Kickstarter or Patreon to start a charity, go out and advertise that garden project, or contact your elected representatives to pay for that garden in exchange for a modest tax increase.

The capitalist system is set up to measure value in a common unit called "money". If you value something, paying for it is exactly how you express this. So put your money where your mouth is. Cash is the unit of caring.

Eh, there are well-known situations where bare capitalism leads to under-utilization of available resources. See, the Parable of the Babysitting Co-op.

One of the sane uses of government (as opposed to, oppressing people we don't like to make us feel better about ourselves) is back-filling demand that the private sector isn't supplying.

Suppose the government is currently paying them $10 for a fake job. That's a loss of $10. Now suppose the municipal garden is worth only $5/hour. If we instead shut down the fake job and paid them $10/hour to create $5/hour of value, society would only lose $5 rather than $10.

All I'm proposing is France should get something instead of nothing.

Your argument is not really an argument, but merely the statement of the assumption that value (in general) and monetary value are the same thing.

It is hard to define value in general (and I cannot do it) simply because unlike money, there is no clear way of numerical measurement. It may be tempting for technical folks to believe otherwise, but things can matter very much even when they are not easily measured numerically.

So why is your assumption incorrect? The fact that different market institutions lead to different outcomes given the same underlying preferences of individuals is really enough to show this. If you can keep the same set of people with the same set of beliefs and preferences, but obtain different prices merely by changing the market institutions, then this means that the prices do not accurately reflect the underlying value (in the general sense).

Yes, money is an extremely useful proxy for "value to society", but it is only a proxy.

Does this mean that suddenly, society values a beautiful city more? Did preferences change over night? I would argue that it is the other way around: Society has always valued a beautiful city more, but the existing market institutions did not translate this valuation into monetary terms. People noticed the discrepancy and effected political change to bring the money in line with underlying valuations.

The belief that "the market" is this objective institution is very widely spread today. This is unfortunate, because "the market" is not a fixed thing. Market institutions can be changed via politics, and those in power use that fact for their own benefit. I would be so happy if more people recognized that the assumption you stated is really part of an ideology and should be treated as such: potentially useful at times, but not a universal truth.

Consider this thought experiment. Suppose that tomorrow, your city council decides to put more money into work making the city more beautiful. More people will be paid to tend to municipal gardens, among other things. Does this mean that suddenly, society values a beautiful city more? Did preferences change over night? (...) People noticed the discrepancy and effected political change to bring the money in line with underlying valuations.

My city council has existed for decades, as have the gardens. Why did people chose this particular moment to effect political change? I think that clearly indicates that preferences did change.

That said, I do agree that monetary value is just one possible measure of value.

>Because there is no real work?

Apart from education, infrastructure maintenance and development, community improvement... and many many more.

There's plenty of work that needs to be done.

>There isn't though, else they'd be working. Simple economics, really.

No, according to "simple economics" these people aren't working because no one can profit off them.

That's in no way the same as there not being nothing useful for them to do.

The problem is no one wants to hire them, despite their obvious desire to work. That might be hard for some techies to understand, but it does happen.

Because there is no real work?

If that's the case, then I guess there is no need to expand the government or provide any new services?

And yes, I'm suggesting that instead of being paid to do nothing, they could be paid the exact same money to do something useful. If the law forbids this, fix the law.

Wasn't this the plot of the matrix or something?

as a french, this cracked me up.

I've been unemployed for a long time, and I'd love to try this.

Europe is broken.

Workfarce

This is horrible and scary. I could imagine it would be possible to establish such a business without telling the people that it's fake...

Why not simply give the people the money and use the space to help them creating new ideas? Or hell....get another child and raise it properly. Or...I don't know there is a whole universe of better solutions then this. This is the nightmare version of the 60s/70s dream of less work through robots.

> I could imagine it would be possible to establish such a business without telling the people that it's fake...

I think they might notice that they weren't being paid... Bear in mind, this is not actually a fake job, despite the title; it's a rather contrived training scheme (and a reasonably successful one; as noted in the article most people who do this do get a proper job after).

The frightening part really is that no actual profitable business wants their labor for free. So they must provide their labor for free to a fake business.

That's insane. That means in all probability, their labor is a negative for any employer even if it comes at no cost.

My guess is that this is a result of idiotic labor laws and tax practices.

> The frightening part really is that no actual profitable business wants their labor for free.

Accepting labour for free is illegal basically everywhere in the developed world, and for good reason.

Would you care to explain those reasons?

Define: Slavery

Slavery requires coercion. If it's by choice it's different but there are other laws under which this falls that prevent it to avoid abuse. For example in the US, you cannot employ a intern for free that does work your company might profit from (not a lawyer so I might have that slightly skewed).

Slavery seems to go rather beyond accepting unpaid labour.

That's not necessarily completely inaccurate, but terse to the point of opacity: the problem posed by unpaid labor in support of for-profit efforts is that if it is allowed, it is very easy for it to become a necessary prerequisite (e.g., as something you need to have to be considered) for paid labor in the same industry, which, if it expands to many industry, makes it potentially a matter of economic coercion to accept unpaid jobs as a means of gaining potential (but not guaranteed) access to paid jobs.

How do you account for unpaid interns?

They are frequently illegal unless the company is paying them in experience, expending at least as much time/effort/resources as if they were doing the task directly.

And people sometimes break the law.

Unpaid interns are often illegal if they are doing productive work for the benefit of a for-profit firm. For instance, in the US, according to the Department of Labor [0], for an "internship" not to be an employment relationship subject to the FLSA, including minimum wage provisions, one of the criteria that must be met is: "The employer that provides the training derives no immediate advantage from the activities of the intern; and on occasion its operations may actually be impeded"

[0] http://www.dol.gov/whd/regs/compliance/whdfs71.htm

The people who write these laws in developed countries accept free labour from interns.

Unpaid internships must provide education/training; otherwise they are typically illegal.

No, it's not. It's called volunteering.

And if you're a non-profit, you can accept volunteers. In most developed countries, if you're for-profit, and you have "volunteers", you will be in trouble over labour law, and likely tax evasion.

We have people here in Germany who do Mini-Jobs or 1-Euro-Jobs. People still get their benefits, but do some kind of low-wage sector jobs (taking away real jobs there). I could imagine there would be no problem moving those people from the street where they pick up litter for example and put them in a office where they push numbers. They would be happy about it and you could give the real low-wage sector jobs back to different people.

establish such a business without telling the people that it's fake

How do you tell the difference between this and a VC-funded startup which never acquires any paying customers, without resorting to speculation about what its value might have been were it to acquire customers?

Because the VC-funded startup pays employees. The people showing up to these Potemkin companies don't get paid.

Fake jobs might be necessary but there is a danger of making them half fake jobs that get things done slowly and end up as a cost to society and the people supporting the workers.

An example of that I've observed are construction workers maintaining railway infrastructure. There are probably a few times as many people working there as needed. When walking by you'll see them standing around talking, or maybe one of them is sitting in an excavator and four are staring at him. Meanwhile people have to take the replacement buses for two months. Most of the work only gets done in the first and last week, largely using machines, while everyone relying on the train connection is at risk of delays or has to spend extra time on the journey.

This is so incredibly ignorant and judgemental I don't know where to start.

http://www.quora.com/Why-does-it-always-look-like-constructi...

Yes and no. While there is legitimate "standing around" as your link makes clear, and safety should be paramount, most building projects from where I am - Philadelphia - take twice as long as the Empire State Building at 1/4 the size. We have labor unions that contribute to the problem, but you can't imagine how slowly work goes around here.

I'm aware that OSHA rules are different, and we have a higher standard of safety now than we did, but so too have materials and tools and building methods improved.

The Empire State Building was completed in one year and 45 days ... with 7 million man-hours of labor. Given 2000 man-hours in a work-year, that is 3100 people employed full time building the Empire State Building.

I would be surprised if the buildings you're thinking of in Philadelphia are employing even a tenth of that full time, continuously.

Planning should be done before important infrastructure is made unavailable. If there is no progress being made for a long time, then there is something wrong.

Please also realize that my example does not apply to every country. It was meant to point out a danger of a form of fake jobs that seems to exist from my observation, not criticize all construction workers for being lazy or ineffiecient.

> An example of that I've observed are construction workers maintaining railway infrastructure. There are probably a few times as many people working there as needed. When walking by you'll see them standing around talking, or maybe one of them is sitting in an excavator and four are staring at him. Meanwhile people have to take the replacement buses for two months. Most of the work only gets done in the first and last week, largely using machines, while everyone relying on the train connection is at risk of delays or has to spend extra time on the journey.

An example of that I've observed programmer maintaining enterprise software. There are probably a few times as many people working there as needed. When walking by you'll see them standing around talking, or maybe one of them is sitting in front of the computer and four are staring at him. Meanwhile people have to do the "some important work" manually for two months. Most of the work only gets done in the first and last week, largely using third-party tools and libraries, while everyone relying on the "some important work" is at risk of delays or has to spend extra time on the job.

Ok, I fixed this paragraph for you. The way you see construction workers and their work is the way business people see IT workers and their work. Come, we are just staring in the monitor without actually doing anything.

Quote from child comment that TLDR it:

> To an outsider, a lot of work looks like non-work.

Can you actually answer why his observations are wrong instead of saying the problem exists in other fields?

To an outsider, a lot of work looks like non-work.

No, better reasons might be 1. work specialties, 2. safety considerations, 3. inter-dependencies that prevent full productivity. I just hate the "...yeah our industry sucks also..." knee-jerk answer.

I think that this may be more that you don't understand what the railway maintenance workers are doing than anything else. I'll take a bit of cost over collapsing bridges and derailments, if it's all the same with you. When railways go wrong, they can go wrong _very_ badly.

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