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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]OP I am a little confused by your statement.

Never once in my life have I assumed that any job was "safe". Everyone EVERYONE is replaceable.

[b]Lack of a guaranteed job keeps you on your toes, makes you work harder and do better. [/b] [/quote]

I disagree with this completely.  When people are constantly worried about their jobs (or anticipating layoffs or wondering about layoffs or dealing with frequent layoffs), they actually don't perform as well because they are distracted.  It also leads to a sense of fatalism -- as in, it doesn't matter how hard someone works or how productive they are, it all starts to seem arbitrary.  So what ends up happening when people feel insecure in their jobs (whether it is because a company frequently does layoffs or because an entire industry has an approach of firing people when they earn too much) is that people spend a lot of time and effort doing passive aggressive things to keep their jobs.  This is especially poisonous in work environments where cooperation, coordination, and team work are needed to really do the job well.

There is actually research to back up my claims -- that job insecurity leads to REDUCED productivity.  
[/quote]

Then how do yiu explain the absolute lacknof productivity of government workers. [/quote]

For one, I disagree with that claim too (and I'm guessing you don't have statistics to back it up).  There are some government agencies that are very efficient and where the workers work pretty hard for stagnant salaries.

And yes, there are also unproductive ones.  I've worked in both sectors, and I actually don't think government workers are any more or less productive than private sector workers.  That's another trope that people like to trot out, usually with an agenda -- that agenda is to destroy things like due process, etc.

As I said, I've worked in both sectors, and when I've seen a lack of productivity, it usually has to do with bad management.  It's a combination of unclear goals, lack of clearly stated expectations, lack of follow up, and stagnant growth.  What do I mean by that?  The biggest cause of apathy and a lack of productivity is a sense that effort won't be noticed or rewarded and/or there's no clear path for career growth.

Fear of job loss doesn't motivate people to perform better (or more efficiently); it motivates them to do the bare minimum they have to to keep their job and it usually causes a sense of distrust and petty territoriality with other coworkers.

As I said, there's research to back up a lot my claims here.

But you like to just repeat tropes you hear in the media.  [/quote]

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