[btilly]

Your math ignores retraining costs. A corporation of 100 employees that hires 20 more will in fact temporarily have just created extra work for the existing 100 for some time before they see a benefit from the hires.

And given normal turnover, retraining would become a higher portion of that corporation's costs permanently, resulting in permanently decreased productivity.

[petercooper]

It forgets wasted time, too. In most situations that are not manual labor, you can't just trim 10 hours from one person's schedule, give them to someone else, and expect equivalent or better performance. In most clerical positions, time is spent accumulating knowledge, socialising, and waiting for process related bottlenecks.

[j5eb6ach]

No doubt about the fact that ( more employees == more inefficiency ) for the corporation. But the benefit to the 20 members of the community that have gone from zero income to working is enormous.