dullard
Elite Member
Why is it useless? Lets look at a couple of cases.
(1) Salaried employees. Suppose you and your coworkers get paid a fixed salary but usually work 50 hours per week. Now all of the sudden, your company goes through a slump and you have less work. Thus you now work 48 hours per week. Sure the company doesn't pay more and you don't get more. But the amount of goods you produced dropped. The company gets less work done for the same labor amount paid. This is a bad sign for the company and thus the economy.
(2) Salaried employees. Suppose you and your coworkers get paid a fixed salary but usually work 50 hours per week. All of the sudden you become more productive and only need to work 48 hours to do the same thing. This has no effect on the company, but makes you happier.
Note how you cannot tell #1 apart from #2 without data on productivity. Thus alone you cannot get much info from this statistic. But it is far from useless.
(3) Hourly employee. Suppose you worked 50 hours per week as a hourly employee. Either the company has less buisness or you become more productive and you need to work less. You make less money and are worse off. You pay less taxes, and thus the government is worse off. The company may or may not be better off.
The statistic has lots of meaning.
