My "basis" is that reporting on the labor market in it's current form is flawed as the Fed themselves have stated that it's a lagging indicator on numerous occasions.
So is the fed wrong, or is this another sensationalized article in an attempt to garner clicks?
If my employer wants me to work 40 hours a week (5 8 hours a day) but they have analytics that prove I"m working 2 hours a day... why don't they fire me?
If you're delivering more value than they pay you, why would they? They're literally profiting by keeping you, and losing by not. Sure they could marginally employ another person for even more profit, but save for network effects like cost of communication or layers of management there's little reason to remove a net highly productive person.
Companies - managers - very often suffer from the sunk cost fallacy.
They're very concerned they won't necessarily do any better with the next person, than the two hours of work per day they're getting. They've invested into integrating, training the existing employee. Managers almost always consider it a high burden to have to go through the process again with a new person. If they find a considerably superior new candidate first, maybe they'll get rid of the existing person or rotate them into a worse position. The difference between the two persons, in terms of output, has to more than make up for the headache.
> They're literally profiting by keeping you, and losing by not
I find it very hard to believe that at a hypothetical $200k/yr, my company benefits to the tune of $201k/yr+ at me working ~10 hours a week (5 2 hour days).
it's a probability thing, esp. if you interact with anything sensitive. Even if you don't actively work, having the keys to the kingdom and being latently trustworthy enough to not immediately defect is worth a lot compared to trying to find an equivalent (and transferring knowledge to them). also the knowledge is invaluable in the one-off scenario where you're actually needed.
