Thoughts on the "Obama won? You're fired" Crowd

[cthulu2016]

One of many perverse things about the Republican coalition is that it is full of un-serious business people, and has no faith in a free market economy.

Actual business people know certain things.

Actual business people know that if a business owner's personal tax bill increases it has no possible effect on how many employees he has unless he has surplus employees as a charitable enterprise. No business employee is paid out of the business owner's after-tax income.

A change in personal income tax rates cannot reduce hiring unless hiring was being done as a charity—hiring people who were not adding to profits.

Actual business people know that saying Obama will add 14 cents to your costs for a pizza is of no interest to any consumer. Customer's do not buy pizza to support the business owner. They buy pizza to eat. You can pass along the 14 cents in higher price to the consumer, or not, and the consumer will continue to buy the pizza or not based on the totality of factors. A pizza seller who was already a good employer will not see a rise in costs and will not be raising prices and will out-compete you. Sucks to be you.

Business. Welcome to it.

If any aspect of Obama's election mandated cutting the workforce than that would apply to all similar businesses. It would not depend on the political leanings of the owner.

And making business actions for political reasons is un-serious business. It is not business at all.

For instance, firing people today for what employing them would cost in 2014, hypothetically, is not a business decision at all.

In a real business those employees could not be fired if they are making money for you, and cannot be retained if they are not. In the real business world, doing anything for non-business resons costs you money.

I was involved in one of these things. First job I ever had. Fast food. The minimum wage went up and the manager cut everyone's weekly hours slightly to stay within the same wage-budget and gave us a speech about how the minimum wage hurts working people.

(I didn't laugh in his face, but even as a kid I could see that working 38 hours for the same pay as 40 hours was not the worst thing that had ever happened to me. It was two less hours of work without a reduction in weekly pay.)

The shift cuts lasted about two weeks because the hours worked were not, and had never been, a charitable gesture. The hours worked were necessary to the profitable enterprise of cooking and selling hamburgers.

These people are not the least bit interested in the free market. The believe that the government should subsidize wage slavery. The government should educate children so they can be useful employees, and have subsidized buses so employees can get to work, and then provide these drones to business as a subsidized resource made available to the business class. Like prison labor, but with lower overhead than prison.

They are not business people.

[myrna minx]

1. I agree. When reading these silly arguments made by these supposed 'captains of industry'

leaves one baffled at their business acumen. This isn't business, this is purely political.

[Xyzse]

2. I can agree, though I believe more than half of the reports are hoaxes

Many of the reports I hear are lacking sufficient details.
They would not give out their name of business, name of employer, location and so forth.

I am sure some overly dramatic, paranoia induced morons do it, however I think they are mostly shooting themselves on the foot.

Docking pay, particularly personal one makes more sense.

[Generic Other]

9. This one is documented

http://sacramento.cbslocal.com/2012/11/09/davis-business-owner-facing-backlash-for-urging-employees-to-vote-for-mitt-romney/

[demOcrat11]

3. +1

[Whisp]

4. isn't there such a thing as wrongful dismissal

that can land the boss in court?

or is that only on tv and the movies, can't say these days.

[unblock]

7. only if the dismissal violates an employment contract or handbook

or if the dismissal is based on legally protected classes -- sex, race, religion, national origin.
in some states/localities, sexual orientation, maybe some other classes.

generally, though, employers can fire people for all sorts of stupid reasons or for no reason at all.
employees have no legal protection against employers being stupid.


if there's an employee handbook that promises you'll never be fired for political reasons, then there's a case.
but employers generally don't make such promises so that argument doesn't work.

[Whisp]

10. thanks, that clears it up for me. n/t

[unblock]

5. mostly, they ARE laying off for business reasons, and just taking advantage to grandstand

they hate obama and would like to make a speech about how much they hate obama but they can't do that apropos of nothing.

separately and unrelated to politics, they need to lay people off. perhaps because their product or their pricing sucks, perhaps because they're terrible managers who pay too much attention to politics and not enough to business, or perhaps because of competition or the economy or whatever. as you point out, the situation is extraordinarily rare when the math of extra expenses from legislation actually justifies layoffs. that's not what the layoffs are happening.

laying people off is an unfortunate reality of business, but rather than being honest with the people whose lives they're dicking over, they take advantage of the opportunity to grandstand about their own political views and get in a dig at obama.

it's not that they're not business people, they are.
it's that they're complete, narcissistic assholes.

[Savannahmann]

6. Absolutely agreed, but the question remains.

What can we do about the bastards who are doing everything they can to make the doom and gloom prophacy come true? By firing people, they create situations of higher unemployment, which in turn will create more unemployment when the spending power of the population deminishes.

[Odin2005]

8. The belief that people are rational economic actors is false.

These idiots are a good example of that.

[JaneyVee]

11. No one is getting fired b/c of Obamacare, they're getting fired b/c their bosses are GOP assholes.

[baldguy]

12. Firing people because Obama won is an excuse for poor management skills.

And you're spot on - they want the govt to make it possible for them to succeed (even exist) in spite of having those poor skills.

[MineralMan]

13. Absolutely. Imagine some HVAC company laying off workers because of the election.

Last edited Sat Nov 10, 2012, 02:45 PM - Edit history (1)

What's the owner going to do? Say, "Sorry, we can't install your new furnace for two weeks because I laid off a bunch of workers after Obama won?" The customer simply goes to the competitor and buys a furnace from someone who will get it installed immediately.

I've been writing content for the websites of a big city HVAC company for two years now. I've seen their crew schedule many times. Often, a crew is idle briefly. I asked the owner about that. He said, "Who cares? Five minutes from now, someone will call and tell me their furnace quit working and ask how soon I can replace it. I tell them I can have a crew there in less than an hour. I've made the sale on the spot. We're staffed so there is always a crew available on short notice. We have to be."

That's why that HVAC company is successful, and why the moron who lays off productive workers will fail.

[Hippo_Tron]

14. I try to explain the application of economic models to the real world to the fundamentalists

The models show that producers will produce at marginal revenue equals marginal cost (or something close since these calculations aren't always totally precise in the real world). What they argue is that because marginal cost goes up when wages go up, they will scale back production to a new equilibrium, thus laying off workers. This is true in theory.

In practice, it's a little more conditional. Cost in economics is always about opportunity cost. So when you're producing at marginal cost = marginal revenue, it doesn't mean that producing anymore you'd literally be taking a loss. It means that producing more you'd be making less than you could investing your money elsewhere.

Now lets put this into the real world of finite choices. Lets say I own a McDonalds. And lets say the minimum wage goes up $1 an hour this year. With 5 employees working 40 hours a week, my labor costs increase $10,400 a year. The profit margin on a Big Mac is STILL going to be positive. It will be a little smaller, but it will be positive.

So here's the question. Does there exist a better investment for my $10,400 than putting it into my McDonalds? Frankly, I don't think so. Putting it into my McDonalds still gets me a positive return on my money as long as demand for Big Macs holds steady. And I could always reduce employee hours at any time if there is a sudden drop in Big Mac demand that made it more profitable for me to put the $10,4000 elsewhere.

But more likely, there will be an INCREASE in demand for the Big Mac because the minimum wage increase has given people more disposable income. Possibly even to the extent that my profits increase to the point where my employees are producing enough to more than make up for the extra $1 an hour I pay them. Remember, I still have to pay my employees per hour whether the store sells 5 Big Macs or 200 Big Macs that hour.

It's not that the economic models are wrong. It's that right wingers take the logic and make it out to seem like any small increase in taxes or the minimum wage will have a drastic impact that it doesn't. Small changes are just that: small. They make small impacts that are often times cancelled out by other factors.

Yes if you raised the minimum wage to $100 an hour, it would have a drastic impact on employment. But nobody is proposing that.

[Honeycombe8]

15. 1. They're punishing workers they think voted for O. 2. They're trying to blame O for what THEY

were going to do, anyway, so hopefully others will blame Obama.

It's as simple as that.

Obama hasn't done anything, or had a chance to do anything, since getting elected the day before the terminations, of course.