vegas1 1 Solving Unemployment: The Night Society

Solving Unemployment: The Night Society

In 2014 in Britain, think tanks started releasing a plan they think will help unemployment: capping the amount of hours a person can work a 21 hours per week. A noble idea, but one with obvious deficiencies. Yes, it’s an idea that would assuredly reduce unemployment — but the central question is “at what cost?”Though the idea is definitely worth discussing, scratching the surface of it reveals some of its most immediate flaws — some fixable, some not. This proposed plan would result in hourly wage earners and low wage salary workers earning roughly half their pay, in essence sharing their salary with a work partner. The think tank addresses this particular issue, stating that eventually prices would drop to accommodate the lower wages.

So, taken alone, this might be a worthwhile cost for a dramatic increase in workforce participation. However, hourly wage earners who were once earning a living wage may simply opt to get a second job — thus returning the system to the status quo, but with some arbitrary rules to overcome.

Secondly, productivity of the workforce would decrease, as sharing a job would require more time investment in internal communications and recruiting to facilitate this kind of baton passing — probably at the cost of some more immediately productive jobs.

Thirdly, some jobs can’t be divided cleanly, or bracketed nicely into hourly work requirements. For instance, to cover both points, a salesman working an individual account on a salary — is the account to be shared? Are the total number of accounts to be shared? What if the account requires an inconsistent time investment, such as 10 hours one week and 30 hours the next?

Thus, this initial idea faces its logistical limitations under close scrutiny. It’s possible laws could be passed to prevent people from having second jobs after their 21 hours — but already in this country we face a political demand from people who want to increase the minimum wage to the living wage at the cost to the amount of jobs and at costs to unemployment; and this plan is the opposite of that, trading higher wages for lower unemployment.

But this idea, which I’ve thought about before, has me thinking of a related idea I’ve often thought about. There’s another way, besides cutting hours for workers during society’s agreed upon working hours, that we could accomplish the same effect of doubling the amount of jobs — expand society’s agreed upon working hours.

Why is it, in this day an age, where some establishments are open 24 hours, that we don’t have a much greater push to establish a functioning nighttime society? If people are going to Taco Bell at 3 AM, why not a medium-end pizza chain? Why not a bank? Why not a retail outlet?

nightjob 1 Solving Unemployment: The Night Society
Let me go through some of the virtues of this idea. Crime would be reduced for two reasons. First, because most crime stems from opportunism — unmanned establishments are at risk; with bustling employment at all hours, everything becomes ‘crime in broad daylight’.

Secondly, much of crime is attributed to lack opportunity and employment — if the criminals, working at night, are now just working at the local pottery barn at night, they have less time and incentive to commit crimes.  The amount of available jobs may not immediately double, but even, say, shifting many establishments to be expected to be open for a late afternoon to evening shift ending between 10 PM and midnight would dramatically increase the number of jobs, as well as workforce productivity.

Now, rather than cutting someone’s hours to open up a second half-job, we’ve opened up a second half-job while cutting nothing, and potentially created some new work for recruiters and coordinators.In previous times in history, such an idea would have been unthinkable, because under the guise of darkness any business operating at night would be open to all forms of nastiness. But three things in our society of have changed this, all related to technology.

First the ubiquity of lighting, second the growing trend of telecommuting, and third the interconnected time zones created by globalization.  Nighttime businesses would obviously need to be much more well-lit than they are now, but this can be done without dramatically affecting residential areas, as flood lighting can be brought in to centers, malls and business districts without spilling over as much to residential areas.

Telecommuting, while often not ideal for either the worker or the business, could be used to help facilitate a transition to a new normal. Finally, many corporations and skilled professionals already operate at all hours, either because their skills could be called upon at any time, such as in the case of hospitals, or because their corporation acts internationally and a person in America may have to communicate regularly with a team in China or India, where the time zone differences almost entirely reverse day and night.

In fact, since many businesses already operate on this structure, they may become the very first and most regular customers of any businesses that expand their hours of operation. As workers expand their hours, restaurants spring up to support them, then retailers, and then other structures — all of which provide jobs and employment.

Obviously there are some issues, but they may be easily mitigated. One is societal stigma — after all, a ‘night society’ already sounds like something that maybe has to do with a porno, or an after-hours club for people pretending to be vampires. The solution here is halfway to just embrace that (who cares?) and halfway that it will take care of itself.

People have those images about what happens at night because of the reality of what happens at night — as what happens at night becomes more similar to what happens during the day, that mythology will dissipate. Secondly, and more importantly, rather than opening up new jobs as intended, some hard-working ‘job hogs’ will simply expand their own hours to ridiculous levels, further pushing the have-nots down and propping the haves up.

While the limits of humanity and its requirements for sleep may dampen this problem, there may need to be some kind of cap on the hours worked, much like suggested in Britain’s original idea — just without impacting the way society currently operates.

Taking much of the good from Britain’s plan to cut working hours for the employed to open up more hours at the expense of wages and productivity, the idea here is to create new hours at the expense of no one while increasing productivity.

After all, they say Vegas never sleeps — why should any other city? And hey, if we want to get really spicy, why not combine both ideas? Instead of a 21 hour cap, make it a semi-reasonable 40 hour cap, and instead of all night employment, let’s have places that normally close at 6 PM close at 10, and places that close at 10 close at 2.

Author

  • Ryan Night

    Ryan Night is an ex-game industry producer with over a decade of experience writing guides for RPGs. Previously an early contributor at gamefaqs.com, Ryan has been serving the RPG community with video game guides since 2001. As the owner of Bright Rock Media, Ryan has written over 600 guides for RPGs of all kinds, from Final Fantasy Tactics to Tales of Arise.

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