This is an excerpt from a document I am reading from 1999, from a leading business organisation in the city of Halifax.
"An important consideration, in any case, is the meaning of 'a job'. To a considerable extent political discourse over the past 50 years has classifed jobs as a commodity. Jobs are 'saved' or 'lost', with the underlying belief that the retention of each existing job is a significant social benefit.
It could not be farther from the truth. Jobs are not an output. With land and capital they are one of the three basic inputs to every production process. It is the objective of every manager interested in effective production - whether they are in the public or the private sector - to reduce all of these inputs. To do otherwise is to waste resources.
The use of too many people to produce a product or service displaces resources that could be applied to beneficial purposes. It usually also increases the use of the other inputs such as land and resources. This has environmental consequences."
I do love it when the chamber of commerce worries about the environment.
2 comments:
Lol, sounds very JD!
Isn't that last pair of sentences simply wrong, anyway? Okay, an inefficient company may be inefficient in all ways at once, but in many processes there's a trade-off between amount of resources used and the number of people employed - mechanisation the obvious example.
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