Glass House (part 2)

April 5, 2017

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Yesterday I gave an overview of Brian Alexander’s Glass House, his story of the economic decline of Lancaster, Ohio. Today I will fill in some of the details about the decline of its principal employer, the Anchor Hocking glass company.

First, a word of caution. The financial wheeling and dealing that helped bring down Anchor Hocking is very complicated and sometimes shrouded in secrecy. Alexander is not an economist or CPA, so he has to rely primarily on the stories told by his informants to make sense of it all. What he does have going for him is that he is a good journalist, he digs deep into the information available to him, and he knows the town of Lancaster well, having grown up there himself. Ultimately, we cannot know what would have happened to businesses like Anchor Hocking if they hadn’t been targeted by other companies as sources of quick profits. However, I think Alexander makes a pretty good case that the leveraged buyouts and revolving door of owners did more harm than good.

Newell

The first company to acquire Anchor Hocking in a leveraged buyout (in 1987) was Newell Corporation, a maker of household goods like window shades and hardware. The good news is that Newell’s management “introduced a few needed modern efficiencies and systems that Anchor Hocking had neglected–like data and accounting techniques, order tracking, customer service methods.” They succeeded for a time in making Anchor Hocking more profitable. On the downside, they sold off some parts of the company and eliminated an important segment of Lancaster’s leadership by bringing in outside executives who didn’t reside in the town. They persuaded local authorities to take money away from public schools in order to finance tax breaks. They were also harder on workers, eliminating training opportunities and quickly firing those who didn’t hit performance targets.

The larger problem was that Newell was becoming financially overextended because of its continuing acquisitions. Its merger with Rubbermaid in 1999 “nearly killed the company,” because Rubbermaid was in such bad shape and the deal left Newell with such a debt burden. Newell no longer wanted to put any money into Anchor Hocking for maintenance or improvements. It sold off the company in 2004, one year after getting the tax breaks from the town.

Cerberus

Anchor Hocking’s next owner was the private equity firm Cerberus. Its business was buying and selling companies, not manufacturing as such.  Here things get a little complicated. Cerberus formed a new company, Global Home Products Investors, LLC, to buy Anchor Hocking and two other businesses from Newell. Global Home Products borrowed most of the money it needed to make the buys, meaning that it and not Cerberus bore the cost of the acquisitions. To make things more confusing, it borrowed a lot of the money from a Cerberus affiliate, so that Cerberus made money by lending to GHP, its own creation. That also meant that “Anchor’s cash flow wound up supporting the structure of Global Home Products [and ultimately Cerberus], and because of that it starved.”

Anchor was still profitable, but GHP’s need to get money out without putting much in soon began to hurt the company. Maintenance was neglected; quality suffered; cash flow deteriorated; and the retirement plan was underfunded. After a while Anchor Hocking wasn’t even paying some of its suppliers. In 2007, after only two years in business, Global Home Products filed for bankruptcy. The bankruptcy proceedings were contentious, but in the end GHP’s lenders got paid, while the pension plan lost millions and retirees lost medical benefits.

“Meanwhile, Cerberus continued to thrive. As of mid-2016, Cerberus was one of the largest private equity firms in the world, with more than $30 billion under management, and [founder and manager] Stephen Feinberg was named as one of Donald Trump’s key economic advisers.” Trump, of course, also knows something about continuing to thrive while taking his acquisitions into bankruptcy.

Monomoy

As a result of GHP’s bankruptcy, Anchor Hocking was sold at auction to the sole bidder, Monomoy Capital Partners. That was an investment fund controlled by the private equity firm Monomoy. As with the Cerberus deal, the purchase was made with mostly borrowed money. The deal was structured so that the debt was incurred by Anchor Hocking rather than by Monomoy.

Monomoy’s intention was to manage Anchor Hocking for a couple of years and then sell it at a profit. Most of what Monomoy did “followed the standard private equity playbook: jawbone the unions, cut costs even at the price of damaging longer-term success, do a sale-leaseback of real property assets, take whatever public money you can get from communities eager to save their industries…and collect fees.” The sale-leaseback occurred when Monomoy sold Anchor Hocking’s distribution center for a quick $23 million, a “shortcut to make the company look profitable, though at the price of a twenty-year lease.”

Before Monomoy could sell Anchor Hocking, the financial crisis intervened, discouraging lending and putting a chill on leveraged buyouts.  Still stuck with a company it didn’t want to keep, Monomoy took cash out in 2009 by resorting to a “dividend recapitalization.” “Monomoy had Anchor Hocking borrow $45 million. Anchor then paid Monomoy Capital Partners, LP, $30.5 million as a dividend.”

In 2012, Monomoy merged Anchor Hocking with Oneida, another troubled company that it owned, naming the combined company EveryWare Global. In 2013, Monomoy sold a minority share of EveryWare Global to a special purpose acquisition company controlled by the Clinton hedge fund. Most of the money for this purchase was also borrowed, and that too became part of EveryWare’s debt. At this point, “EveryWare Global was drowning in over $400 million in liabilities. It possessed just over $100 million in total assets.”

As the excessive debt strained EveryWare’s cash flow, Monomoy threatened to shut down Anchor Hocking unless the union agreed to a deal: Monomoy would give the company a cash infusion of $20 million, but the workers would accept lower wages, an end to company contributions to retirement plans, and higher insurance premiums. The unions accepted the ultimatum in the summer of 2014. Despite those concessions, EveryWare declared bankruptcy in 2015. This time, the lenders took over the company. They appointed a “turnaround board” of bankers and other glass industry outsiders to fix up the company for sale, like a rundown house.

The losses were hardly distributed evenly. Alexander concludes:

From the standpoint of a private equity firm, it was a success. Like a lucky old lady hitting a slot in Reno, Monomoy put a little money in and pulled a wagonload of money out.
….
Monomoy sent what was left of Lancaster’s once-grand, 110-year-old employer into bankruptcy court while it made off with millions and the employees walked their wages and benefits backwards in time. Lancaster’s social contract had been smashed into mean little shards by the slow-motion terrorism of pirate capitalism.

Continued

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Glass House

April 4, 2017

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Brian Alexander. Glass House: The 1% Economy and the Shattering of the All-American Town. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2017.

Ask any American why so many manufacturing plants have been closing across the United States, and the answer you will probably get is that they moved to Mexico, or their products couldn’t compete with Chinese imports. Brian Alexander doesn’t deny the role of globalization and foreign competition in the decline of a Midwestern manufacturing town, but he has a different story to tell. It’s a story that is more about the workings of the domestic economy in an era of extreme inequality. Playing a prominent role in this story are private equity firms that buy and sell companies for short-term gain, finding ways to profit even at the expense of the acquired companies themselves and the communities where they are located.

An “all-American town”

The setting for Alexander’s story is Lancaster, Ohio, a manufacturing town that flourished in the decades after World War II. In 1947 it was celebrated by Forbes magazine as the “epitome and apogee of the American free enterprise system” (in Alexander’s words). Its largest employer was the Anchor Hocking glass company, formed by the 1937 merger of Hocking Glass and Anchor Cap and Closure. It was one of the biggest American companies to be located in a small town. “By the late 1960s, it was the world’s leading manufacturer of glass tableware, the second-largest maker of glass containers–beer bottles, baby food jars, coffee jars, liquor bottles–and employed more than five thousand people in Lancaster, a town of about twenty-nine thousand back then.” This was the era when a young man could graduate from high school, join the union, and make good enough money to support a family at a middle-class standard of living. Production and consumption worked together in a virtuous cycle: The workers, who in the 1940s included many returning GIs, “were marrying, setting up house, and having babies. And they needed glass: glass dishes glass tumblers, glass cookware, glass jars.”

Managers and laborers didn’t always see eye to eye, but they lived in the same town, grew up attending the same public schools, made friends across class lines, and shared some civic pride. Wives, who were less likely to be employed, devoted themselves to civic causes for the betterment of the community.  While emphasizing Lancaster’s general harmony and community spirit, Alexander does not overlook the flaws. The small minority of African Americans in town “were treated as barely tolerated guests” and confined to the lowest jobs.

Perils of private equity

By the 1980s, Anchor Hocking was facing some new economic challenges. Aluminum cans and plastic bottles were replacing a lot of glassware. Large discount retailers like Walmart were pushing suppliers to lower prices. Global commerce was increasing, and America’s strong dollar was making imports relatively cheap and exports relatively expensive. Nevertheless, few analysts were ready to give up on the company. Because glassware is breakable and often heavy, it isn’t the easiest product to import. Anchor Hocking also had the advantage of experience and versatility. “No other company made glass using as many different processes, or had as many different products sold to retailers, the food service industry, candlemakers, florists, winemakers, and distillers.”

Anchor Hocking remained profitable, but its declining revenues made it a target for takeover bids. Other companies, especially private equity firms, saw an opportunity to buy Anchor Hocking at a reasonable price, make some changes to boost profitability, and then sell it for a quick gain. In theory, such a takeover could be a win-win for everybody–the firm that makes the acquisition, the investors or lenders who finance it, and the employees of the company acquired. The trouble is that the acquiring firm can arrange things so that it can get more out than it puts in, even if the acquired company continues to do poorly. In fact, the acquiring firm’s quest for short-term profits can actually impede long-term growth and help it do poorly.

Private equity firms have a number of techniques for maximizing gains for themselves while imposing risks and costs on others. They acquire businesses by borrowing other people’s money, but structure the deal so that the debt is carried by the company acquired. Much of that company’s revenue then has to go to debt payments rather than to investments in future performance. New owners looking for quick profits may relentlessly cut costs by cutting wages, skimping on maintenance and training, or underfunding retirement plans. Product quality, worker morale and customer loyalty may suffer.  They may sell off assets and then have the company lease them back, producing a short-term gain at the expense of a longer-term cost. Private equity firms can also charge acquired companies high fees for advising them on what to do. Even if the acquired company has to declare bankruptcy–and Anchor Hocking did it twice–the private equity firm will have taken out more than it put in, leaving any losses to be borne by workers, retirees or other investors.

No wonder that the critics of private equity firms have viewed them as “chain-saw cowboys who slashed employment, cut investment, and shut down marketing and research–all in order to goose the bottom line just long enough to foist a shiny, but hollowed-out and highly indebted, company onto new buyers and then count their money on the helicopter flight from Manhattan to their summer houses in the Hamptons.”

Signs of social decay

By the time a series of new owners had bought and sold Anchor Hocking, the company was a shadow of its former self, with many of its operations shut down or sold off and most of its workers gone. Along with the decline of other manufacturing firms in Lancaster, the impact on the town was devastating. The poverty rate of families with children under five rose to 38 percent, while the percentage of mothers who married the fathers of their babies declined. Department stores that had served the middle class disappeared, and “retailers to the impoverished” like tattoo parlors, dollar stores, pawn shops and payday loan offices proliferated. Loans  for people with shaky finances became more available, but at subprime, exorbitant interest rates that kept people deeply indebted.

More subtle but equally important was the impact on local culture. What Alexander calls “a subculture of immediate, if temporary pleasure” spread at the expense of the traditional culture of work, responsibility and aspirations for the future. Robbed of so many opportunities to produce something of value, more people focused on consuming things, especially pain-killing drugs. The fact that dealing drugs was more lucrative than most of the jobs available to people of limited education fed the supply along with the demand.

As the tax base eroded, and as confidence in government and the future declined, the town spent less on things like schools and good roads. And yet it scraped up money to provide tax breaks for the companies that promised to come in and save local businesses. The top executives of those companies didn’t live in Lancaster and had little stake in the town and its residents. What was left of the local leadership was “incompetent, or just overmatched,” which reinforced the lack of confidence in government. Those residents who did have good jobs were often people who commuted to Columbus and had little time for participation in local affairs.

As for the town’s future, Alexander has this to say:

Lancaster, as a place, would survive; it was too big to dry up like a Texas crossroads bypassed by the interstate. Maybe it would sell scones and coffee to visitors and one day complete a transformation, already well under way, into a Columbus bedroom community with organic delis and rehabilitated loft apartments in the old Essex Wire building. Or maybe it would slide into deeper dysfunction. For sure it could never go back….

Continued

 

 

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A Measure of Fairness (part 2)

February 26, 2015

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In A Measure of Fairness, Pollin, Brenner, Wicks-Lim and Luce report their research on two kinds of wage laws: state minimum wage laws, and municipal laws that set a living wage higher than the federal and state minimums.

In 2007, Congress mandated that the federal minimum wage rise to $7.25 an hour by 2009. Twenty-nine states and the District of Columbia have raised their minimum wages higher than that; seven states and D.C. have a minimum of at least $9.00 (see map and data)

Municipal laws that set a wage higher than both the federal and state minimums are usually narrow in scope, applying only to businesses with municipal contracts. San Francisco and Santa Fe are two cities with broader living-wage laws.

The authors identify two different ways of defining a reasonable living wage, one focusing more on benefits and the other on costs:

First, what is a wage rate that is minimally adequate in various communities, in the sense that it enables workers earning that minimum wage and the family members depending on the income produced by this worker to lead lives that are at least minimally secure in a material sense? What wage rate, correspondingly, can allow for a minimally decent level of dignity for such workers and their families?
The second, equally legitimate, question…asks, How high can a minimum wage threshold be set before it creates excessive cost burdens for businesses, such that the “law of unintended consequences” becomes operative?

High on the list of unintended consequences would be job losses if businesses chose to lay off workers or leave a city or state rather than accept higher wage costs.

The authors also identify two ways of studying these issues: prospective research that tries to anticipate the consequences of proposed laws, and retrospective research assessing the actual consequences of existing laws. Except for the last section, the findings described below are from prospective studies.

Benefits to workers and families

Who benefits from wage laws? The answer might seem to be obvious, but some critics have questioned the need for such laws on the grounds that the lowest-wage workers are rarely major breadwinners, but are often younger workers whose wages will probably go up before long anyway. The authors find that the laws primarily benefit the people they are intended to benefit: low-income workers who are “well into their long-term employment trajectories,” with a high proportion of primary breadwinners and other major contributors to family income. In addition, the laws have important ripple effects, tending to raise the wages of workers who are already a little above the legal minimum. For example, the authors estimated that 20% of the people of Arizona would receive some income benefit from a proposed minimum-wage increase, including workers and members of their families.

Several of the research reports are from studies of a proposed city-wide minimum of $10.75 for Santa Monica. It was passed by the city council in 2001 but repealed by the voters in 2002. In order to evaluate its probable effect on incomes, the authors gave careful consideration to poverty thresholds and basic economic needs. First, they drew on research by the National Research Council on more realistic poverty thresholds than those established by the federal government. “The commission’s report…presented eight separate studies using different methodologies for coming up with alternative poverty measures. If we simply calculate the average of these eight alternative poverty lines, this average is 42 percent above the official poverty line.” Considering that the cost of living in the Los Angeles area is about 25% above the national average, they decided to use 160% of the federal poverty line as the poverty threshold for their research.

By that standard, a family consisting of one adult and two children would need an income over $21,475 to escape poverty, which corresponds to a full-time hourly wage of $10.32. A family with two adults and two children would need an income of $27,030, corresponding to a full-time hourly wage of $13.00 with only one adult employed. (All figures were in 1999 dollars, so would have to be somewhat higher today.)

The authors also drew on research by the California Budget Project, which constructed a “basic needs” budget for Los Angeles and other California regions. The CBP described this as “more than a ‘bare bones’ existence, yet covers only basic expenses, allowing little room for ‘extras’ such as college savings or vacations.” By that standard, a family with one adult and two children would need an income of $37,589, or a wage of $18.07 an hour. A family with two adults and two children would need a little less, $31,298, or a wage of $15.05, if one adult stayed home and provided child care. With both adults employed full-time, however, they would need $45,683 because of child care and other costs, but each job would only have to pay $10.98 an hour to generate that income.

To assess the impact of the proposed $10.75 hourly wage, the authors construct two very specific “prototypical family types.” The first is a three-person family whose primary breadwinner earns $8.00 an hour and contributes 70% of the family income. A raise to $10.75 increases the family income from $19,430 to $24,105, an increase of 24.1%. This takes the family from 10% below the adjusted Los Angeles poverty line to 12% above it. It also takes the family from 48% below the CBP “basic needs” budget to only 36% below it.

The second prototypical family is a four-person family with a low-wage worker earning $8.30 an hour and contributing 50% of the family income. A raise to $10.75 increases the family income from $29,880 to $34,290, an increase of 14.8%. (The other adult earner is not assumed to have an hourly rate low enough to be covered by the minimum-wage increase.) This takes the family from 12% above the adjusted Los Angeles poverty line to 29% above it. It also takes the family from 35% below the CBP “basic needs” budget to only 25% below it.

However, some of the increased income from higher wages would be offset by higher taxes and lost tax credits. (It wouldn’t be offset by loss of food stamps or medical benefits, since neither prototypical family was poor enough to qualify for those in the first place.) The authors calculate that the offsets amount to 40% of the income gains for the first family and 27% of the income gains for the second family.

Costs to business

Most legally mandated wage increases are not dramatic, and their impact is limited by the number of workers whose wages are already at or near the new minimum. Typical of the research reported here is the authors’ finding that a Santa Fe living-wage ordinance would increase average costs relative to business revenue by about 1%. The impact is often two or three times greater for businesses with more low-wage workers, especially in the food service and hotel industries.

Affected businesses can handle the added labor cost in many different ways. Perhaps the most obvious is to raise prices. Although that poses some risk of lost business, the damage is limited if the price increases are small, competitors are also raising their prices, consumers are interested in quality more than price, and possibly that consumers prefer to patronize businesses that treat their employees well, as some research indicates. In addition, some businesses, especially retail businesses operating in poor neighborhoods, may gain business because better-paid workers have more money to spend.

Another way that businesses absorb higher labor costs is through increased productivity. Higher wages tend to reduce turnover, which reduces the costs incurred in recruiting, selecting, hiring and training new workers. Based on their research in Santa Fe, the authors suggest that 40% of the cost of higher wages can be recovered in higher productivity.

Businesses can also absorb higher labor costs by redistributing income within the firm. This can be done in a rather subtle fashion, simply by letting low-wage workers have a larger share of productivity gains, while holding higher incomes steadier. Perhaps that is only fair, considering that the country has been doing the opposite for some time: “The fact that the minimum wage has been falling in inflation-adjusted collars while productivity has been rising means that profit opportunities have soared while low-wage workers have gotten nothing from the country’s productivity bounty.” If paying a higher wage forces a business to accept slightly lower profits, the damage to its competitive position is limited by the fact that its competitors may be facing the same problem.

Two more drastic responses to increased costs are to lay off workers or relocate to another city or state. The businesses most likely to relocate are those with a customer base that is not tied to a specific location, and with a substantial increase in labor costs. But many of the businesses that rely on low-income labor also have strong ties to a particular place, such as many restaurants and hotels.

The authors’ summary of their New Orleans research is typical of their conclusions:

Our results suggest that the New Orleans firms should be able to absorb most, if not all, of the increased costs of the proposed minimum wage ordinance through some combination of price and productivity increases or redistribution within the firm. This result flows most basically from the main finding of our survey research–that minimum wage cost increases will amount to about 0.9 percent of operating budgets for average firms in New Orleans and no more than 2.2 percent of operating budgets for the city’s restaurant industry, which is the industry with the highest cost increase.  This also suggests that the incentive for covered firms to lay off low-wage employees or relocate outside the New Orleans city limits should be correspondingly weak.

 Retrospective studies

In a few cases, the researchers were able to evaluate the effects of wage increases that had already been in effect for some time. Mark Brenner and Stephanie Luce studied the effects of wage ordinances in Boston, Hartford and New Haven covering businesses with city contracts. Critics had predicted that fewer companies would bid on city contracts, and the reduction in competition would result in higher costs for the city. In fact, there wasn’t much difference: The number of bidders went down in New Haven, but went up in Hartford and stayed the same in Boston. Businesses did not lay off workers, but adjusted to the higher wages mainly by accepting lower profit margins.

Brenner, Wicks-Lim and Pollin did a study comparing states with and without minimum-wage laws higher than the federal minimum. They found no adverse effects of higher minimum wages on employment.

Wicks-Lim and Pollin studied the effects of Santa Fe’s citywide minimum wage on job opportunities for low-wage workers. Aaron Yelowitz had reported that unemployment rose once other factors were statistically controlled. Wicks-Lim and Pollin found that employment actually held steady, but that the rate of unemployment was higher than expected only because more people came into the labor market looking for work. They came “precisely because there were more jobs and better jobs in Santa Fe than elsewhere.” Pollin also reminds us that the United States used to have a higher minimum wage (in inflation-adjusted dollars) in the 1960s than it has today, with no apparent damage to employment or productivity.

In general, this book supports the conclusion that raising wages for low-income workers brings at least modest benefits to workers, while imposing modest costs on employers and consumers. For workers, the benefits are partly offset by higher taxes and reduced benefits for the poor. For employers, the costs are partly offset by price increases, higher productivity, and redistribution of compensation among different levels of workers. Living-wage initiatives are one effective way of addressing extreme income inequality and poverty. They are not a cure-all, however, and other measures like progressive taxation and direct public assistance remain important as well.

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The Zero Marginal Cost Society

September 8, 2014

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Jeremy Rifkin. 2014. The Zero Marginal Cost Society: The Internet of Things, the Collaborative Commons, and the Eclipse of Capitalism. New York: St. Martin’s Press.

Jeremy Rifkin is the president of the Foundation on Economic Trends and a leading thinker on the transition to a more sustainable global economy based on new energy sources and infrastructure. In this latest of his many books, he predicts that capitalism will gradually decline and be largely supplanted by what he calls the “collaborative commons,” a system based on common access to cooperatively managed and shared resources. This sounds pretty utopian, but he bases his argument on some very real changes that are already occurring in how we produce and share information, obtain energy, and make things.

Rifkin’s version of the decline of capitalism is not based on its supposed failure, but on its success. The relentless quest for profit leads producers to raise productivity in order to lower unit costs and attract more buyers. Their competitors are forced to do the same. If the process is carried to its logical conclusion, productivity moves toward “the optimum point in which each additional unit introduced for sale approaches ‘near zero’ marginal cost…making the product nearly free.”

The information economy has already taken much of the profit out of some industries by making it so easy to obtain certain commodities; music and news are prime examples. Rifkin believes this is only the beginning:

The near zero marginal cost phenomenon has already wreaked havoc on the publishing, communications, and entertainment industries as more and more information is being made available nearly free to billions of people. Today, more than one-third of the human race is producing its own information on relatively cheap cellphones and computers and sharing it via video, audio, and text at near zero marginal cost in a collaborative networked world. And now the zero marginal cost revolution is beginning to affect other commercial sectors, including renewable energy, 3D printing in manufacturing, and online higher education. There are already millions of “prosumers”— consumers who have become their own producers.

In Part I, Rifkin reviews the history of capitalism, emphasizing the connections among energy sources, communication and transportation at each phase. The First Industrial Revolution depended on steam, printing and railroads; the Second Industrial Revolution relied on oil, the internal combustion engine and the telephone. In both cases, the trend was toward concentrations of economic power. “Vertically integrated corporate enterprises were the most efficient means of organizing the production and distribution of mass produced goods and services.” For a time, the only alternative to capitalism seemed to be another form of centralized power–state socialism.

Rifkin expects the Third Industrial Revolution, with its reliance on renewable energy and global electronic communications, to reverse the centralizing trend and distribute power more widely:

A new communication/energy matrix is emerging, and with it a new “smart” public infrastructure. The Internet of Things (IoT) will connect everyone and everything in a new economic paradigm that is far more complex than the First and Second Industrial Revolutions, but one whose architecture is distributed rather than centralized. Even more important, the new economy will optimize the general welfare by way of laterally integrated networks on the Collaborative Commons, rather than vertically integrated businesses in the capitalist market.

To put it simply, people will rely less on big corporations to meet their needs and more on one another.

A new infrastructure

When economists have thought about improvements in productivity, they have usually thought in terms of better machinery or better trained workers. However, economist Robert Solow found that changes in energy sources and infrastructure accounted for the greatest leaps in productivity. The Second Industrial Revolution was possible because of the electric grid, telecommunications network, interstate highway system, oil and gas pipelines, and water systems (all of which required government initiatives, by the way). Rifkin believes that the world is on the verge of a similar revolution that will take human productivity to a dramatically higher level.

First, he sees the creation of “a renewable-energy regime, loaded by buildings, partially stored in the form of hydrogen, distributed via a green electricity Internet, and connected to plug-in, zero-emission transport.” The cost of solar energy is now dropping exponentially, just as the cost of computing already has. All of the energy annually used in the global economy could be supplied by much less than one-tenth of one percent of the energy that reaches Earth from the sun. Rifkin expects 80 percent of our energy to be from renewable sources by 2040.

Another key development is the “Internet of Things,” which will connect “every machine, business, residence, and vehicle in an intelligent network,” enabling all of them to work smarter. Rifkin doesn’t provide detailed examples, but he cites studies that estimate the potential productivity gains:

Cisco systems forecasts that by 2022, the Internet of Everything will generate $ 14.4 trillion in cost savings and revenue.  A General Electric study published in November 2012 concludes that the efficiency gains and productivity advances made possible by a smart industrial Internet could resound across virtually every economic sector by 2025, impacting “approximately one half of the global economy.” It’s when we look at each industry, however, that we begin to understand the productive potential of establishing the first intelligent infrastructure in history. For example, in just the aviation industry alone, a mere 1 percent improvement in fuel efficiency, brought about by using Big Data analytics to more successfully route traffic, monitor equipment, and make repairs, would generate savings of $ 30 billion over 15 years.

Up until now, industrial manufacturing has required a lot of capital and large, vertically integrated organizations to produce goods economically. The development of 3D printing is changing that, making possible a transition “from mass production to production by the masses”:

Software— often open source— directs molten plastic, molten metal, or other feedstocks inside a printer, to build up a physical product layer by layer, creating a fully formed object , even with moveable parts, which then pops out of the printer. Like the replicator in the Star Trek television series, the printer can be programmed to produce an infinite variety of products. Printers are already producing products from jewelry and airplane parts to human prostheses. And cheap printers are being purchased by hobbyists interested in printing out their own parts and products. The consumer is beginning to give way to the prosumer as increasing numbers of people become both the producer and consumer of their own products.

The main thing one needs to be such a “prosumer” is access to the information that the printer needs to create an object, and that information is likely to be widely available in the information age. Rifkin also anticipates the expansion of low-cost education, as more learning occurs through “MOOCs”–massive open online courses.

The future of work

Rifkin acknowledges the potential of higher productivity to destroy millions of jobs by reducing the need for human labor. Jobs are disappearing because of a major structural change in the economy, not just because of a temporary recession or relocation of factories from one country to another. Although in the past, technological changes have created as many jobs as they destroyed–for example, creating factory jobs to replace farm jobs or white-collar jobs to replace blue-collar jobs–Rifkin does not see that substitution process continuing. The new information technologies are threatening white-collar and service jobs as much as manufacturing jobs.

The last book I discussed, Jaron Lanier’s Who Owns the Future?, argued that humans have to defend themselves against the smart machines by fully monetizing their own information contributions, that is, by charging for every idea, data, photo, etc., they share. Otherwise, a few owners and users of Big Data will get rich while the rest of us get poor. Rifkin’s solution is almost the opposite. He doubts that the capitalist, profit-centered model will work very well for anyone, and that all of us will end up exchanging information and things at little or no cost. Eventually, more of our time will be devoted to pursuing non-material ends, since obtaining the material necessities of life will have become so easy in a zero marginal cost world. While Lanier advocates a more thorough commodification of information, Rifkin expects less commodification and more sharing.

This will not happen overnight, and Rifkin makes an explicit distinction between time frames. “In the short and mid terms…the massive build-out of the IoT [Internet of Things] infrastructure in every locality and region of the world is going to give rise to one last surge of mass wage and salaried labor that will run 40 years.” A big part of this will be the transition to renewable energy sources and the conversion of existing buildings to use them. But in the latter half of this century, he expects most human labor to shift to nonprofit activities of one kind or another.

Continued

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The Good Jobs Strategy

February 3, 2014

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Zeynep Ton. The Good Jobs Strategy: How the Smartest Companies Invest in Employees to Lower Costs and Boost Profits. Seattle: Lake Union Publishing, 2014.

Why is it so hard to find a good job? Part of the problem is matching the good jobs with workers who are qualified to do them. We hear about hi-tech companies that can’t find enough applicants with the right technical skills. But even more often these days, we hear about the disappearance of jobs with decent pay and benefits, and the proliferation of jobs with low pay, no benefits, and erratic work hours.

Globalization and technological change are often cited as factors contributing to high unemployment and low wages. Many American workers are in a poor bargaining position, vulnerable to being replaced by an industrial robot or a lower-paid foreign worker. Workers with low pay can’t afford to spend very much, giving a competitive edge to businesses that can cut costs and hold down prices. So the conventional wisdom is often that businesses cannot invest very much in their labor forces and still make a profit. Maybe this is the real “class warfare,” the attitude that regards workers as an unfortunate expense to be minimized as much as possible.

Zeynep Ton is an adjust associate professor at the Sloan School of Management. Her studies of business management have convinced her that even in today’s competitive environment, businesses have a choice. They can profit from what she calls a “bad jobs strategy,” at least in the short run. But a “good jobs strategy is also a viable option:

You can certainly succeed at the expense of your employees by offering bad jobs— jobs that pay low wages, provide scant benefits and erratic work schedules, and are designed in a way that makes it hard for employees to perform well or find meaning and dignity in their work. You can even succeed at the expense of your customers; for example, by offering shoddy service. People may not enjoy buying from you, but plenty of them will do it anyway if you keep prices low enough.

In service industries, succeeding at the expense of employees and at the expense of customers often go together. If employees can’t do their work properly, they can’t provide good customer service. That’s why our experiences with restaurants, airlines, hotels, hospitals, call centers, and retail stores are often disappointing, frustrating, and needlessly time-consuming.

Many people in the business world assume that bad jobs are necessary to keep costs down and prices low. But I give this approach a name— the bad jobs strategy— to emphasize that it is not a necessity, it is a choice.

There are companies in business today that have made a different choice, which I call the good jobs strategy. These companies provide jobs with decent pay, decent benefits, and stable work schedules. But more than that, these companies design jobs so that their employees can perform well and find meaning and dignity in their work. These companies— despite spending much more on labor than their competitors do in order to have a well-paid, well-trained, well-motivated workforce— enjoy great success. Some are even spending all that extra money on labor while competing to offer the lowest prices— and they pull it off with excellent profits and growth.

Ton’s research focuses on the retail industry, notorious for its millions of bad jobs. Its median hourly wage in 2011 was $10.88; 40% of the jobs are only part-time; and unpredictable work schedules often make it hard to care for a family, go to school, or take a second job. Ton reasons that if better jobs can be created in retail, they can be created just about anywhere.

Ton highlights four companies that are succeeding with a good jobs strategy: Costco, the wholesale buying club; Mercadona, the biggest chain of supermarkets in Spain; QuikTrip, a convenience store chain; and Trader Joes, an American supermarket chain. They manage to make good profits, offer good value in prices and service to customers, and also create good jobs. Costco pays its hourly workers 40% more than Sam’s Club. In addition to better pay, these model employers provide their workers greater “opportunity for success and growth” by giving them adequate training, time and resources to do the job well. They are places where people generally like to work.

Investing in employees

Ton describes two main ingredients for success using a good jobs strategy: investment in employees and operational choices. Both are essential. The strategy requires an adequate quantity and quality of labor, but it also requires an efficient operation to make that labor productive and justify its high cost.

One could say that the company puts itself in its employees’ hands, then does its best to make sure those hands are strong, skilled, and caring. This is not a matter of happy talk, PR, and employee-of-the-month awards. This is concrete policy, manifested not only in wages and benefits but also in recruitment, training, scheduling, equipment, in-store operations, head count, and promotion.

Ton points out that not all tasks are simple enough to be reduced to standardized routines that the least skilled and trained worker can complete. Retail operations have actually become more complex over the years, but the investment in workers has declined. (The ratio of retail wages to average U.S. wages declined from 91% to 65% between 1948 and 2011.)

Ton found that in many cases retail stores can increase profitability by adding workers rather than cutting them. The relationship between employees and profits can be described by an inverted-U-shaped curve (with employees on the horizontal axis and profits on the vertical axis). Profits are highest at a theoretical sweet spot where stores are neither understaffed nor overstaffed. But businesses often have a bias toward understaffing because they think of labor as an expense to be minimized. Whenever sales are lagging, managers may be under pressure to cut staff in order to hold payroll to a fixed percentage of sales. Businesses fail to weigh the short-term gain against the long-term harm to their operation. They have few models of companies that sustain a high commitment to their workforce.

Companies without that commitment easily fall into a “vicious downward cycle”: Low expenditure on labor leads to a low quality and/or quantity of labor, which leads to poor operational execution, which leads to low sales and profits, which leads back to low expenditure on labor.

There are many effects of failing to invest enough in one’s employees, including— but by no means limited to— phantom stockouts; promotions that are executed incorrectly or not executed at all; data corruption that undermines inventory and strategic planning; and loss of products due to theft, spoilage, and faulty paperwork. [Phantom stockouts are situations where what the customer wants is actually in stock, but nobody can find it.]

Investing in employees can create a more virtuous cycle in which higher expenditures on labor justify and sustain themselves by supporting better operational execution and higher sales and profits.

The operational choices that support the good jobs strategy will be the topic of the next post.

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Posted by Ed Steffes

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