7 ms·

The American workforce has been redlining on poorly staffed overworked jobs for decades. It's not surprising that we're losing workers left and right to fatigue

• aantix 5y ago
  You saw it with Covid. Trillions of dollars spent on U.S. healthcare, but hospitals are running hyper-efficient, lean staffs, with barely any ability to scale up to meet demand during a crisis.
  • ed25519FUUU 5y ago
    Millions of covid relief dollars sent to states just to be vacuumed up into poorly funded city and state pensions.
  • aantix 5y ago
    Wondering out loud - with non-profits, the IRS can enforce that status by forcing them to spend if they have too much money saved. Am I getting this correct? What about forcing hospitals to spend on staff if they are too profitable? I’m being purposefully vague to fill in the holes with discussion. Feel free to throw tomatoes at me if it’s a dumb idea. I’ve had dumber.
    • lowercased 5y ago
      > What about forcing hospitals to spend on staff if they are too profitable? Why do I suspect we'd see 'hollywood' accounting for medical if this ever were to be a 'thing'? 'Medical accounting' would become such a thing that we'd end up seeing every hospital running in the red all the time, to avoid this sort of thing. Someone would still be bringing in profits, but much much harder to spot.
  • Zigurd 5y ago
    It's an excellent analogy: The triumph of beancounters turns out to be brittle and costly when, in this case track maintenance, unprofitable but necessary activities and capex are reduced. "It worked fine this quarter!"
    • efitz 5y ago
      I regularly see executives incentivized and rewarded for short term thinking. I never see executives pay a price for the results of years of short term thinking - they only get punished for failing to meet quarterly targets. Execs often jump around before the results of their shortsightedness bear fruit. I dream of a world where the performance of leaders and decision makers is linked with the long term performance of the organizations that they used to manage as well as the one that they currently lead.
      • btrettel 5y ago
        What are the options for incentivizing long-term performance?
        • Zigurd 5y ago
          Difficult. You need strong, diverse boards. You probably need worker representation on boards. You need a cultural change that's not very American.
      • JumpCrisscross 5y ago
        > never see executives pay a price for the results of years of short term thinking - they only get punished for failing to meet quarterly targets Are we watching the same securities filings detailing multi-year stock and cash awards based on long-term stock price and operational metrics?
  • treeman79 5y ago
    Hyper efficient? MRI coats me 1500 deductible. Plus whatever they bill insurance. Cash price $750. Is really screwed up.
    • eatonphil 5y ago
      That word is being used in a different way in this case. Maybe it's an economic definition of "efficient" but I'm not sure. It means they are spending bare minimum on staff/expenses to achieve whatever goals they have. Like "lean".
    • postalrat 5y ago
      Efficient money making machines.
    • aantix 5y ago
      Meant that they're only employing the exact number of doctors/nurses to meet their current capacity. It's great for profitability, the tradeoff being when there's increased demand, it's inflexible.
    • FullyFunctional 5y ago
      Hyper efficiency isn't about you, it's for the corporation and, to no small degree, the insurance company. I'd have to imagine that the amortized cost (millions?) for the MRI machine, it's operation and storage, and the trained personnel isn't free, but obviously much less than you and your insurance pay.
    • floren 5y ago
      The sickest part is the "billed to insurance" value. You get a medical bill that looks like this: Cost: $1000 Paid by patient: $200 Billed to insurance: $800 Paid by insurance: $150 Remaining to be paid: $0 I get statements that look like this all the time, where the provider "bills" the insurance for $N, but the insurance pays a fraction of it, and apparently that's "good enough". But when they tell me "that'll be $200 today, please, we take Visa and Discover", I don't have the option to say "actually I'm gonna pay $50 and that's good enough"
• durnygbur 5y ago
• throwaway6734 5y ago
  • foxyv 5y ago
    This is what boggles my mind. My parents that worked government jobs, both worked in a union, both on pensions, both with state sponsored medical care, and on socialized health care now after they retired; they are both Republican conservatives.
    • throwaway6734 5y ago
      It's a very strange political time. As you noted, the elderly receive massive amounts of government welfare and handouts while advocating the strongest against it for anyone else. Young people don't seem to realize that they have a massive cudgel that they could whack the elderly with. I am not looking forward to the looming funding crisis with social security and Medicare
  • slfnflctd 5y ago
    It's more that a critical mass of Americans have been duped into believing such things come with evil strings attached. Money buys voters, because the more eyeballs you put in front of overly emotional arguments which appeal to the mythologies people were raised with (along with their egos) - all very easy to construct - the more likely you are to win. The ability to influence is disproportionately granted to those who already have wealth & power, regardless of their actual agendas. By nearly any measure, we are in a new Gilded Age at least as bad as the first one, only with way more people and way more sophisticated tools of manipulation. Yet almost anything we try to do to reduce the wealth gap is easily batted down by armies of idealogues who often don't even realize their opinions have been bought. There is no easy answer to this I can see, it may take a massive crisis and unthinkable loss of life (history doesn't repeat but it rhymes) before we're able to adjust course... which will also be temporary. The battle for anything resembling equality will never end for this species as we know it.
• jamesredd 5y ago
  Maybe the problem is that the workers are worse, including management and CEO's. The quality of the American workforce is declining. This also puts a burden on unions because qualified and motivated people do not want to unionize with lazy and unproductive people.
  • tragictrash 5y ago
    I would love to take all your money, put you back to living paycheck to paycheck and see how 'lazy' you get after the daily struggle to house and feed yourself with no way to get ahead and no light at the end of the tunnel. It's insensitive, out of touch people like you that make it hell to be a front line worker.
    • throwaway0a5e 5y ago
      >I would love to take all your money, put you back to living paycheck to paycheck and see how 'lazy' you get after the daily struggle to house and feed yourself with no way to get ahead and no light at the end of the tunnel. Been. There. Done. That. And now I have an office job. He's onto something. I can't quite put my finger on it but it seems like a pervasive societal problem at all levels, or at least all levels I've experienced. It's like society has developed some weird way of denying people their agency when it could benefit them but hold them responsible when it is bad for them. >It's insensitive, out of touch people like you that make it hell to be a front line worker. It's out of touch. People like you are why it's getting worse and not better. You tell me how to flip my burgers. You tell me doing it this way is for my own good or it's the efficient way, or it delivers the optimum burger, or whatever. But I can't meet my stupid KPIs doing it the approved way. So I have to do it "wrong". If I fail to meet my KPIs doing it "wrong" I get fired. When I do meet them I don't get anything for it. The best I can hope for is get lucky and not get unlucky long enough to use my "experience" to get some better job. In our effort to make everything consistent, risk free and all those other buzzwords that the MBAs and the clipboard warriors jack each-other off to we've done the opposite, we've made everything reliant on luck instead of skill. In your quest to quantify everything, minimize the bad and maximize the good you've denied everyone any possible upside that could come from putting in any extra effort, owning their work, taking pride in their craft, whatever you want to call it. And this Kafkaesque situation seems to have permeated every industry and every profession. (I dare one of the people who will inevitably take issue with this paragraph to rebut it.) The parallel to some freight train engineer barreling across some flat state with a train that's too big and too fast who's just hoping it all works out should be obvious.
• deleted 5y ago
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• ta8645 5y ago
  • foxyv 5y ago
    • pasque 5y ago
      • foxyv 5y ago
  • Asooka 5y ago
    • slothtrop 5y ago
      This post breaks the rules. edit: it also improperly projects that anyone who'd have downvoted said post would only do so to oppose inclusivity.
      • piaste 5y ago
        I believe (hope) Asooka's post was satirical, but I am no longer as confident in such judgements as I used to be.
  • comeonnoww 5y ago
• dominotw 5y ago
  > developers > socialized health care, workers rights, mandated vacation time, overtime limits, minimum wages, and UBI are all lightyears away. do you mean software developers? I don't see why developers need all those. Developers are one of the highest paid people on the whole planet, like top 10% in USA. Most people not in the know think levels.fyi must be fake. This seems like ridiculous entitlement to expect even more. Why can't they spend their own money to buy the things they are lacking.
  • josh_p 5y ago
    I'm sure a lot of enjoy cushy, well-paid, low-stress jobs (myself included) but its not all of us. Game development is one area that could benefit from these. People in that industry suffer from a lot of stress and high rates of burnout due to overwork. edit: they're also paid significantly less than people working in web-dev.
    • dominotw 5y ago
      Developer job market is insane now. Why can't they just switch to one of the cushy jobs at an insurance company or something?
      • josh_p 5y ago
        You wouldn't ask a teacher or nurse to change careers because their employer or government is treating them poorly. You'd tell the employer to stop treating people like garbage. I know this is mostly about developers but not everyone is able to just make a job change like you're suggesting. We should be giving people the things they need to be happy and successful in their current jobs.
        • dominotw 5y ago
          > You wouldn't ask a teacher or nurse to change careers because their employer or government is treating them poorly. yes i am only talking about software developers. > not everyone is able to just make a job change like you're suggesting. why though? Those cushy jobs are dime a dozen everywhere. I don't see why someone is forced to work for a gaming company at low pay.
• siliconunit 5y ago
  Also I think the real estate disaster is one of the main culprits of most 'common people' problems. One cannot afford an early retirement from a taxing job, cos guess what mortgage is a criminal 10-15x their yearly salary..so good luck pensioning before 70...if at all. Here in the UK this has reached absurd levels and nobody in the goverment says a word about it in real (and no, 'easier access to credit' is absolutely not the right answer)... pay 5-6 pounds for a filter coffee and a plain croissant.. cos the tiny shop has to pay 100k / year in rent.... it's just a road to civil war... hopefully soon.
• ajsnigrutin 5y ago
  > However, with our current political system, the solutions to these problems are nearly impossible to accomplish. Unions, socialized health care, workers rights, mandated vacation time, overtime limits, minimum wages, and UBI are all lightyears away. All of those (except the UBI) exist in most developed countries. There are many problems, from taxes (the poor already pay zero, the rich avoid them, the middle class gets fucked), to foreign/illegal worker (why pay a fair pay to a local worker, if you can employ a foreigner for cheaper), to widespread corruption, anti-covid measures (mostly printing money and giving it around, bringing high inflation), to political sanctions (eg. ukraine war - it's no different than eg. the war in afghanistan or iraq or libya, syria, etc., but somehow we act as if it is, and with many political steps inbetween, the gas prices and food prices are soaring high), to people abusing all the buzzowords you've mentioned in countries that have them. Honestly, if just the police and courts did their jobs, and all the corruption was punished (from heads of government, to paying plumbers under the table and people abusing social benefits), a lot of the problems would be solved. In my country, we just had an election, and the two most pressing matters were healthcare (fscked) and housing prices (double fscked). Noone on TV ever mentioned how much an average worker pays for healthcare (it's automatically deducted in two different ways from your "gross-gross" paycheck), because people would get mad and ask where does all the money (a lot of it) actually go,... and also noone asks why we can have cornfields and cows in prime locations of our capital city, and even more prime development land in other cities, and the government (from national to local) doesn't allow building there, to bring the prices down.
  • mschuster91 5y ago
    > and also noone asks why we can have cornfields and cows in prime locations of our capital city, and even more prime development land in other cities, and the government (from national to local) doesn't allow building there, to bring the prices down. For one, healthy good soil is rare and expensive. We're already wasting too much of it. And as for "prime development land" - I know the thoughts as a Munich resident and every time I see a rare piece of land that's not been built I always think "just how much housing could be built there". The thing is, a city also needs un-obstructed green space for local micro-climate reasons [1]. You can't just build up everything and expect livable temperatures, especially not with climate change looming. We should ask politicians instead why they let the rural areas rot to hell and beyond and people are forced to coop together in extremely dense unhealthy urban monster areas. [1] https://www.local-energy.swiss/dam/jcr:0471327e-8fe2-4f9f-ac5a-72f78a0add39/Faktenblatt2-Staedtische_Gruenflaechen_im_Klimawandel.pdf https://www.local-energy.swiss/dam/jcr:0471327e-8fe2-4f9f-ac...
• btrettel 5y ago
  There are way too many jobs where management doesn't give the front-line worker an appropriate amount of time and/or resources, and when things inevitably go wrong, the front-line worker is blamed, and the problem is studied as if the only factor was the front-line worker. I saw that regularly as a patent examiner. Examiners aren't given a lot of time, and when a bad patent is issued, tons of ignorant people on the internet start insulting the examiner. They have no idea what the job is like, and I strongly doubt they'd do better than an experienced examiner, even given a lot more time than an examiner gets.
• mardifoufs 5y ago
  I think you are a bit overstating the situation. No matter what's your opinion on how the pandemic was handled, I think it's safe to say that the measures were unprecedented and caused a massive, massive shock in almost every corner of the economy and society in general. That we are still doing...fine (!!) After entire sections of the world's economy were put on hold, on and off for years while other portions were , as you said , overdriven by necessity is a testament to how resilient the US and the world are. In hindsight, it's tempting to try to frame the recent events as just the logical ans predictable results of a bad system that was slow crumbling anyways... But I just completely disagree that this was just the result of decades of neglect, in no small part because workers were actually doing much better now than they did a decade ago. The pre pandemic times were extremely prosperous all things considered, real wages were actually getting higher, infrastructure was worked on, etc. I wouldn't describe that period as a slow decline, and we were steadily revving down from the "redline" of the early 2000s. Even in my poor home country, that historically has been pretty devoid of opportunities, things were looking really good and people were optimistic. But then the pandemc hit. And there has been an insanely massive contrast between how, say, an office worker was affected by the pandemic versus how a healthcare worker experienced it. Imo, that obviously lead to unprecedented fatigue and not just physically. Both of my parents are nurses, and I remember them being almost completely burnt out while everyone else was almost enjoying the perks of WFH and not having things to do. But once the decision was taken to lockdown/shutdown what were the options? Food still had to be moved, patients had to be treated, etc. But again, imo we are still doing surprisingly well and while sinking into doomerism can be tempting, I'm acrually more optimistic now than ever before. Because beyond the culture war, the punditry, the push to divide and the moments that genuinely scared me (like when when normal people started rabidly turning in- and on- their neighbors)... we still kinda made it through?! And we all kind of made that possible, though some more than the others!
  • foxyv 5y ago
    It's easy to be optimistic when your friends aren't starving and struggling to afford transportation or find work. I'm not talking from a doom-scroll, I'm talking from lived experiences where I'm seeing people drop like flies in a system that is rigged to wring every drop of their energy and time from them for the least amount of compensation. How many people do you know who work for Wal-Mart? How are they doing right now? How many unemployed people do you know? People who are getting evicted? I know at least 5 and they are all doing terribly. The cost of living has nearly doubled for the poorest among us and wages have barely budged. They can't afford to live close to their jobs because of skyrocketing rents and can't afford cars to drive to work. They have no savings and are a hairs breadth from homelessness which is becoming a bigger target for police.