Fungible workers

I just woke from a very dark, almost dickensian dream.  I was working in a large factory which consisted of many work teams using metal worktables, doing various metalworking sorts of things.  Some of them had machine tools, and many of them were working on greasy things.  The lunchroom was in a separate room, to keep it clean, but it had the same sort of metal tables.

One day the factory was shut down for reorganization.  As most of the workers stressed over not being able to do their jobs, other workers were reconfiguring their work tables.  After several days of this, we found out why.  All the worktables had been converted to lunch counters!

Being a dream, this was an exaggeration, but only a little.   To a lot of management thinking, workers are fungible, and the ones who work in the lunch counter are the most fungible of all: everybody understands what they do, and many other workers could do their job, so they are probably the lowest paid workers on site. Moreover, the workers who are responsible for bringing in all the companies income, the sales force, does most of their work at lunch.  So management had made what is to them, the obvious optimization.  Emphasize the parts that bring in the money, and make them cost as little as possible.

Most workers who have more than a few months of training are not very fungible.  This includes nearly the entire manufacturing and engineering staff.   However, the sales staff, large parts of management, some clerical workers, janitors, and yes, the lunch counter workers, are quite fungible.  They can quickly switch from doing what they do for one type of company, to doing the same thing for a different type of company.  There's some specialization for sure, but selling a car and selling a computer are more similar than different.  But building a car and building a computer are quite different.

The people that want to believe that workers are fungible have outsourced the majority of manufacturing in this country.  Some of it went to outside contractors who are working in America, but a lot has gone to countries where labor is much cheaper.  But the parts that can't be outsourced: the lunch counter, health care, sales, etc., are still here and taking an ever larger share of the national income.  But the workers, the non-fungible majority, are being forced to split the shrinking remainder.  Each individual company has done this to maximize its own profits.  But like a tragedy of the commons, if everybody does it, we destroy the core of the economy.

Most workers are not fungible, but money is.  This leads to a very interesting and slightly counter-intuitive consequence: when there is demand, workers find employment.   The average American taxpayer's income is over $80K  The median family income is about $50K, and the median individual income is under $40K.  What's going on?  A few people have extremely high incomes--many, many times the average. Many families have multiple earners.  Imagine we did a little redistribution--not enough to make everybody equal, but enough to give work to a lot of the workers who are now making under $20K.  Many of these people had skills which are going to waste. Employ them doing useful things.  These people will need things: groceries, cars, places to live.  Some of the underemployed will create new businesses, and if they have customers, the new business might survive.