IBM Europe Workers Strike

csimoes writes "IBM employees in Europe are on strike today. This is in response to the 10,000-13,000 job cuts that IBM is planning, most of them in Europe. Strikers will be wearing black and blue to signify their struggle. Here is their main union web site. Now I can't say I'm big union guy, but they do make some interesting points on their site. Such as: "IBM is a wealthy and successful company. Its first quarter profit for 2005 was $1.4 billion, and $9 billion for the whole of 2004. It increased the dividend to its shareholders, recently bought back $5 billion in IBM stock, and acquired 19 companies in 2004." The union also questions if other cost cutting mechanisms could achieve the same effect without cutting so may jobs."

Comments

Re:Ok, wait a minute...

[EccentricAnomaly]

The prescriptive one is the one that treats people as both completely rational and completely instrumental: as both agents and resources, and advocates for political choices based on the optimization of certain statistics.

That's just simple-mided economics. People clearly make irrational choices all of the time. How else would some car salesmen and mortgage broakers stay in business? You can do analysis with better statistics where you assign a probablity to a rational verses an irrational decision. Similarly you don't have to be completely instrumental... you can use Kalmen filters and the like to estimate quanities that you cannot directly measure. (math is cool).

There's nothing wrong with efficiency, but turning efficiency into an end rather than a means is part of the pathology of the modern.

What's wrong with efficiency as an end? We are only going to live a finite life, why not seek the maximum efficiency in doing good with the time we have here? Why shouldn't socieities set policy on maximizing economic efficiency? That would keep the most people fed verses any other policy.

Children are starving right now all over the world because of economic inefficiency. Good, hard working people in 3rd world countries can't find a job because of economic inefficiency. Economic inefficiency is one of the greatest sources for suffering and dispair in the world.