People aren't being paid for every moment they remain on task. They're getting paid for works completed! They're getting paid for doing their job. They don't have to be at their desk/station/site every single moment to remain productive!
This idea that people need to be paid less if they do less work is absolute Insanity. People need to be paid a fair wage for completing jobs, whatever that may be.
Like I'm sure money wasn't wasted because Jim was going to be on Facebook anyway and Karen was going to check her emails one more time anyway. Most real work happens in a small window
People aren't being paid for every moment they remain on task. They're getting paid for works completed!
There are lots of jobs that need to be on task on an hourly basis, this ignores a huge class of people and assumes everyone is where you are in life.
Security guards and cashiers are two immediate examples. Cashiers need to be ready to perform the entire time they are working and can't just work random flex hours as customers are relying on them. If customers show up during the stores hours they should expect a cashier to be working. Even if there are no customers in your line or store, there could be some in a minute or two. The "works completed" are transactions completed, but also the act of being available.
Security guards are paid explicitly to be present at specific times, the "works completed" is literally sitting there the entire time.
Lifeguards need to be present even if no one is swimming at the moment.
Right. Sure. I agree with you. But you're totally missing the point of what I was saying.
If the cashier/life guard/security personal left for a few minutes or maybe longer the company that person works for didn't "loose" money because they weren't at their station.
Being productive 100% isn't possible and anything less than 100% isn't a loss.
Companies aren't paying people for works performed but for works completed. The life guard being there at all constitutes them being at work. Just because they left and watched the eclipse for 10 minutes or went to the bathroom or took a personal call isn't a loss!
Which is why the only thing that matters is what work was completed not how much work they did in the time it took to complete.
We need to change the way business interpret what constitutes paid labor.
If the cashier/life guard/security personal left for a few minutes or maybe longer the company that person works for didn't "loose" money because they weren't at their station.
If a cashier abandons their post, a nonzero amount of people will leave without purchase instead of waiting an unknown time for them to return.
If a commercial pilot takes a detour to see the eclipse better they can cause huge ripple effects on other flights causing significant costs.
If a security guard skips out on their post for a bit the business can be robbed or otherwise liable for issues during the lapse.
If a lifeguard leaves their post unrelieved or isn't fully paying attention and someone gets injured or dies that's a serious financial liability (at least in the USA)
Right again, I agree that's a liability. If the employee was negligent in their duties, that is definitely an issue.
Are you implying that every employee must be 100% productive with no deviation?
More importantly, you're making a lot of "if" statements. Which doesn't contradict the point that I'm making. So I'm not entirely sure exactly what it is you are arguing against?
But I will again reiterate exactly what I'm trying to say. The article is implying that there was a loss of productivity when employees went out to look at the eclipse constituting some sort of financial loss.
I am stating that there was absolutely no financial loss whatsoever because employees don't need to be 100% productive at all times as long as the work or project is completed adequately.
I'll use your airline pilot example. If the pilot deviates from his flight plan and a disaster incurs that pilot was negligent. Which is somewhat of a false equivalency. A better example would be if the pilot left to go, use the bathroom or talk to a passenger on the plane leaving his co-pilot in charge of flying the plane. There was no loss in productivity the work of flying the plane will still be completed. Therefore, the pilot should still be paid his regular amount of compensation. The airline didn't lose any money because he wasn't in the pilot seat.
A better example would be if the pilot left to go, use the bathroom or talk to a passenger on the plane leaving his co-pilot in charge of flying the plane.
So this assumes there is someone available to cover and not watch the eclipse? How can the copilot abandon their post to watch the eclipse as well?
Every single person is looking at the eclipse? I traveled during the eclipse and the majority of people around us didn't care to go outside during the peak.
Its easy to think that everyone cares about what we do.
The commenter ive replied to was stressing that not even a single dollar was lost, and believing not a single person in the entire eclipse area was trying to make a transaction during this time is silly.
Ok so you're simultaneously assuming 0% of customers are looking at the eclipse and 100% of the cashiers want to go out and look at it?
It feels like you're just making up scenarios here. Seems more likely similar proportions of both cashiers and customers would be out looking at it.
Now take for example a grocery store. Did the eclipse mean that people are going to eat less? Like because there were fewer cashiers, they suddenly decided they aren't going to buy food this week? I'm pretty sure demand for food (or any other good) disappeared because the eclipse. So what's the actual economic cost? Some businesses would have been less busy for about 20 minutes but then more busy later on.
Thinking that a 20 minute pause in production is going to significantly impact demand is what seems silly to me. But then all of this supply side economics style of thinking is silly to me.
I'm not assuming anything, I've been responding to your whole argument of:
People aren't being paid for every moment they remain on task. They're getting paid for works completed! They're getting paid for doing their job. They don't have to be at their desk/station/site every single moment to remain productive!
There clearly are a whole section of jobs where being on call, available, or present at specific continous times is vital to their "productivity" or value.
You just want to pretend everyone works a 9-5 office desk job and can work at their own pace.
Predictably idiotic headline. A few hours ago, before coming across this post, I visualized just such a stupid headline and chuckled to myself for thinking of such low-hanging fruit. And here it is.
A meaningless figure, mindlessly arrived at with the same abstract mathematical tools that could and should be also mentioning how much money is lost by keeping so many people poor and with hurdles, by NOT investing in education, on public health, on the environment...
But we never read these assholes talking about this in this manner, now do we?
There is no fruit so low-hanging that the U.S. media will not pick it. I predicted, quite accurately, that Fox would claim that the eclipse would allow immigrants to cross over the border in the dark.
Well, no, because them suffering is worth it and if they had more everyone else might want more and the rich might have more but it would be a smaller slice, a smaller %, so obviously that's bad.
Wow its like you have no conscience. Think of the children, their emaciated little bodies, and how exploitable they are! Don't you see!?
No only for the select few, the rest of us are serfs. At this point I wouldn't be surprised if one of the billionaires started calling themselves Ramesses XXVI or something.
It's the "avocado toast" people all over again. "Why are you enjoying anything in your life right now when you could be waiting to enjoy things in the last 10-20 years of your life (if you live that long)?"
We only missed starting with no slavery by a single vote. I'm not even joking. Georgia and Carolina caused the biggest and most drawn out argument of The Continental Congress, and only managed to win by a single vote. The other 11 colonies were in favor of outlawing slavery from the start, though their stance on the natives was still crap.
Sure but you see this in those same buildings modern day?
They need x people from their party to vote against y policy to stop it, and all of them want y to fail, so they make sure the bad thing banning y that all of them want to wring their hands over passes by exactly x votes, with a sacrificial asshole who can take the PR hit or is too old to care (let's call him Joe man).
So nobody has to deal with y, everybody other than joe-man gets to say how much they wanted y, and everybody gets to deflect criticism of themselves at joe-man.
Not a new phenomena in the parliamentary politics every onebof these blatantly conspiratorial aristocratic scumfucks would have been familiar with.
Ahh, I see. Unfortunately the people that made the institutions made the mistake of believing that dishonest actors would be ferreted out by the system they were creating. That has proven to not hold up. The last time that I can think of that a SCOTUS judge resigned due to ethical questions was in the '60s or early '70s.
and so, spent money to travel and presumably stay someplace and eat food which actually might be a net gain to the economy given (we assume) the days off work were PTO time that would have been taken anyway?
I 100% agree with the post and the comments. But we stayed at my MIL's house and ate mostly BBQ from her deep freezer meat supply. I took PTO, my husband did not. The only real gain was Quality of Life, which I have absolutely no guilt about.
I manage a team of 5 people. I told them all not to come in so they could go see the eclipse. I told them not to take vacation and just bill it as normal hours. Three listened to me. One took a half day. One just went and worked...
I work with a guy like that. He hates his wife so much that WFH was causing him genuine issues. He would call us just to be in a meeting. I used to think it was a joke until hearing her constantly nagging him.”you are home! You need to help with the laundry! I want the computer! Let me use it!”
The guy ended up quitting and taking a job that took him back in the office.
I read an article headline yesterday claiming that it would generate $6 billion in economic output due to tourism. That would far outweigh the lost productivity.
I think that number has been seriously inflated too. I was in the path of totality here in Terre Haute, IN. Traffic was normal the whole time before and after the eclipse. I didn't go right downtown, but we went to a park with an advertised event going on and where people from other parts of the country were coming, but it wasn't really any more full than if they had done it during the summer.
Nearby Bloomington, IN was expecting 500,000 people. They had a special event with Mae Jemson, William Shatner and Janelle Monae. They have IU Memorial Stadium there, which is designed to handle major Big 10 football games. In the photo I saw, it was maybe a quarter full and that's being generous.
The eclipse was on a Monday and most kids didn't have the day off from school unless they were at least close to the path of totality. The tourism boom did not appear.
That's sad to read. The total eclipse of my lifetime was in 1999 and my place was bang in the middle of the corridor of the umbral shadow. It was truly a spectacular event. Schools and most work places were closed for that day and my godfather just told his boss "I'm not coming in, fire me, I don't care" lol (he didn't get fired)
Not to defend bosses here, because I would absolutely let people off for the eclipse, but I can see why a boss in, say, Iowa would not be cool with all of their employees taking a day trip to the other side of Illinois to see the path of totality. A lot of them just wouldn't get it. And if you can't take your kid out of school anyway, it doesn't really matter.
Yeah and the town I went to literally had cars parked along every single street. I can only speak for myself, but I didn't spend a single dime there. We brought a lunch and snacks and I was thinking of getting dinner while out but seeing how busy it was, I decided instead to gtfo of town before everyone else decided it was time to get on the road, basically a minute or two after totality ended. It was a "see something cool in nature" thing rather than a "go spend money" thing for me. I wouldn't be surprised if it costed the region more money in police overtime than it brought in in tourist dollars. Though regions on the way there might have seen higher speeding ticket revenue, at least until the line of cars saturated to the point where no one was speeding (and turning left if you were going the other way would be difficult).
Lmao what is $700 million to the world's largest GDP. Mfing Norfolk Southern just paid out $600 million to East Palestine residents for gasing their town.
I was just noting the fact that you chose Juneteenth as the first holiday to come to mind. Not Easter, Good Friday, Christmas, or any other holiday. Just the first holiday to acknowledge our country's brutal past in any way. Sorry, tongue and cheek friend. 😚
IMO NBC News is right, and the commenter is being histrionic.
Like it or not, but we live in a society that uses money (this is not a strictly capitalist thing). If you recall your microeconomics class you might remember that currency is a unit of measurement (like Celsius or inches). The original story is making a point about how disruptive the eclipse was to our "normal" lives. What other universal way is there to measure changes like that? Utils?
NBC (headline) didn't say it cost $700M and it was bad. Nor did it say it cost $700M and it was good.
The tone of the article probably went where we think it went.
You could talk about man hours worth of enjoyment or recreation.
Or if you want to stay in the money realm, the amount of tourism it generated. Or travel, hotel accommodations/revenue, or related merchandise.
The framing of "it cost us" inherently implies a negative. Cost implies liability.
The core premise is that average worker productivity on eclipse day will dip by 1/24th (assuming 20 mins of "eclipse break" on a 8 hour workday).
And that's BS on several fronts.
For one, many people have taken days off (PTL or similar) or move their break to the eclipse, which is already accounted for in the averaged productivity statistic.
Second, people in positions they can't just leave (factory workers on an assembly line, cashiers etc.) will often have to skip on the eclipse.
And people who can leave (I'm thinking of white collar desk jobs here), are often spending a similar amount of worktime off-desk on other days, too, for a myriad of only indirectly productive reasons (networking, thinking on a thorny problem over a smoke...).
The formula assumes
that all of the American workforce spends every minute of their 8 hour day actively working on their desk/station/etc.
that every minute they don't, is "lost", work-wise.
that all of that workforce is on the job during eclipse time, but will take a paid break during the actual eclipse
