Peoples is Peoples
There’s a rumor going around town that the reason there is one really strict school bus driver who keeps giving out “bus tickets” that prohibit poorly behaved students from riding the bus is because he’s trying to make it so he has the fewest number of passengers so he can finish his route faster and get home while getting paid the same amount. If true, this is a slightly different flavor of quiet quitting, and it’s as insidious as it is brilliant.
Further, this guy must be in cahoots with the delivery person who keeps dropping packages vaguely near the end of our driveway rather than take the five minutes to go up to the house because that’s a job that’s paid to finish routes on time as well. As business philosopher Charlie Munger says, “Show me the incentive, and I will show you the outcome.”
While perhaps we can argue that the school district should propose a more market-based approach where bus drivers are paid based on the number of students they pick up and drop off rather than by the day, the fact is that the labor market is tight. I think many have experienced the reality that businesses and organizations today are hanging onto people despite performance just to keep the lights on.
The stress from worker shortages had previously been considered a temporary phenomenon attributed to knock-on effects from our collective response to Covid-19. Yet The Wall Street Journal argued recently that the crisis is, in fact, a long-term one and that it’s not going to get better. I didn’t know this, but the labor force participation rate peaked in 2000 and has been declining ever since.
What will we do in a world with fewer workers? I think we’re seeing it today: Pay more for lower performance.
There’s another line of thinking that says technology will solve this problem for us, with gains in efficiency more than offsetting losses in manpower. I actually think that technology stands to make the problem worse. After all, technology creates problems that people have to solve. It’s now frictionless, for example, for a customer to register a complaint with a business, and your boss can find you with a gripe at any hour on any day. And I don’t know what your experience has been, but people are far superior at solving my problems than software (No, AI Chatbot, your answer is not satisfactory).
Where does that leave us? We need people, and we need to invest to build them up.
– By Tim Hanson