Question

1. Workers in the manufacturing floor are being replaced by robots and other machines. On one hand, this lets companies compete with cheap labor from other countries. On the other hand, automation eliminates many jobs. Are you concerned that automation may increase unemployment or underemployment in the United States and around the world?

2. If a company provides employer-paid child care services to workers with children, should those who don't have children or don't need child care be compensated any other way?

3. What advantages do compensation plans such as profit sharing and employee stock ownership offer an organization? What are the benefits and challenges of flextime, tele-commuting, and job sharing?

Answer 1

1. Yes in my opinion, automation increases unemployment or underemployment in the United States and around the world because it replaces the jobs of individuals with robots which creates unemployment and insecurity among the workforce. The automation process promotes efficiency and effectiveness and decreases human intervention in the process aa well which is justified from the point of view of efficiency increase but also renders unemployment as well.

2. Yes the employees who don't have children or do not abail such child care services should be compensated in some other way because it is important to create parity for all the employees in the organization and the other employees must not feel that they are not being compensated at the same level as the other employees, which would lead to higher attrition rate and hence equal compensation must be allocated to them.

3. The advantages of compensation plans such as profit sharing and employee stock ownership to an organization is that the organization does not have to compensate the employees in case it does not make profits and also in case the sticks of the organization fall below or the stocks are at lower level, then there is not much benefit to the employees. Also it reduces the variable pay cost for the organization as well and organization does not have to shell out much due to such components.

The benefits of flexitime, tele-commuting and job sharing are that they help to save a lot of time and efforts of the employees and also increase motivation level of the employees. However the disadvantages are that these policies result in loss in productivity of the employees and also decrease in efficiency of the organization since the employees sometimes find this approach very casual in nature.