Work

Possible wage hikes in Japan

Japan’s job market is the tightest it’s been in more than 40 years, giving leverage to labor unions pressing for bigger pay hikes at annual wage negotiations and raising prospects for higher consumer spending and inflation.

The jobs-to-applicants ratio rose to 1.59 in December from 1.56, the highest since January 1974, labor ministry data showed. That means there were nearly 1.6 jobs for every applicant.

Still, many firms remain very reluctant to commit to a hike in fixed costs like wages. A Reuters survey last month showed that two-thirds of Japanese companies think the government’s push to raise wages by 3 percent is a tall order.

Paying Employees in Bitcoin

GMO Internet, which operates a range of web-related businesses including finance, online advertising and internet infrastructure, will start paying up to 100,000 yen (£660/$890) monthly by Bitcoin to its employees in Japan from February this year.

“Employees can receive salaries by Bitcoin if they want to,” company spokeswoman Harumi Ishii said. “We hope to improve our own literacy of virtual currency by actually using it.”

The offer will be open to around 4,000 employees of the GMO group in Japan, she said.

Amazon workers strike

On one of the busiest online shopping days of the year, Black Friday, thousands of Amazon employees decided it was also a good day to walk off the job. Warehouse workers in several distribution centers in Germany and Italy took the day off to demand higher wages and better treatment. ​

In addition to asking for a pay raise, the German union Ver.di says Amazon needs to vastly improve the “work culture” and stop pushing employees too hard. The Italian Amazon workers that participated in the Black Friday strike said they want “dignified salaries” more in line with their jobs. They gathered outside one distribution center located in Piacenza.

American work culture for females

Once upon a time, the American dream was built on the ideal that hard work leads to success. But today, with the rise of technology, the message has become: work all the time or you will fail, Melinda Gates argued in her first column on LinkedIn. 

This workaholic culture is particularly harmful to women, Gates writes, because women are still being told by society that home care and child care is up to them as well. She explained:

"We’re sending our daughters into a workplace designed for our dads... The American workplace was set up based on the assumption that employees had partners who would stay home to do the unpaid work of caring for family and tending to the house. Of course, that wasn’t always true back then, and it definitely isn’t today."

The Gig Economy

Transport for London has announced it will not renew ride-sharing app Uber’s license because it has identified a “lack of corporate responsibility” in the company. But did the company deserve to have its licence revoked?

Uber has always maintained its drivers are not directly employed by the company; rather, they are self-employed contractors who are connected to drivers through a platform. But Labour MP Frank Field said, “They are not paying sick leave or contributing to pensions. Yet it seems likely that their employment practices will lead more people to need taxpayers to pick up these costs.”

Wider concerns about the so called ‘gig economy’ have also been cited. Almost 5 million people currently work in these short-term, temporary jobs in the UK.

Hard work is irrelevant

One of my favorite economists, Dan Ariely, tells this story about a locksmith. When the locksmith was new at his job, when he was an apprentice, he took a really long time to open a lock. And people saw him working away, struggling, really having a hard time. And often they'd end up giving him a tip. But then when the locksmith got better at his job, when he got so good at his job he could open pretty much any lock in just a minute or two, then his customers started complaining. They were like, you want $200 for that? This took you, like, 30 seconds. And you can see why, right? I mean, we tend to think the harder someone works, the more they should get.

But, it's also kind of ridiculous. I mean, this guy was better at his job. When you call a locksmith, you want to get into your car or your house as fast as possible. And that was what he was doing. He was giving customers what they really wanted. But they felt cheated. His bills suddenly felt unfair.

Yamato reduces delivery times

Yamato Transport Co. has modified its parcel delivery time slots to reduce the burden on overworked drivers handling a sharp increase in parcels.

As of Monday, the door-to-door parcel delivery firm no longer allows noon to 2 p.m. as a designated delivery time so drivers can take a lunch break.

In addition, the company replaced the latest time slot in the day of 8 p.m. to 9 p.m. with a new slot of 7 p.m. to 9 p.m. to avoid the concentration of delivery orders in the final one hour.

In line with the change, Seven & I Holdings Co., Lawson Inc. and other retailers that offer online shopping using Yamato’s delivery services have revised their delivery time slots.

Benefits of paid time off (PTO)

A growing number of companies are combining vacation and sick time into one bucket called "paid time off", or PTO.  Employees will decide whether they're going to use the days for vacation, when they or a relative are ill, or for family events.

According to a report from World at Work, an association of human resources professionals, 51 per cent of private companies, including small and mid-size businesses, offered PTO last year.

One of the biggest pluses about PTO for small business owners is eliminating the administrative chore of tracking how many sick days versus vacation days their employees have used. That can be particularly helpful in the growing number of states, counties and cities where employers are required to allow staffers to accrue sick time, usually up to 40 hours a year depending on how many hours they work. With PTO, there's no need to track hours worked or accrued.

Premium Fridays in Japan

Faced with slack consumption and soul-searching over Japan’s notoriously poor work-life balance, the government is asking companies to allow their workers to leave at 3pm on the last Friday of the month.

The hope is that they will use those extra hours of freedom to shop, make an early start to their Friday libations or go on a weekend break.

The puzzle of motivation

In April 2017, economists at LSE looked at 51 studies of pay-for-performance plans, inside of companies. Here's what they said: "We find that financial incentives can result in a negative impact on overall performance."

There is a mismatch between what science knows and what business does. And what worries me, as we stand here in the rubble of the economic collapse, is that too many organizations are making their decisions, their policies about talent and people, based on assumptions that are outdated, unexamined,and rooted more in folklore than in science. And if we really want to get out of this economic mess, if we really want high performance on those definitional tasks of the 21st century, the solution is not to do more of the wrong things, to entice people with a sweeter carrot, or threaten them with a sharper stick. We need a whole new approach.