Employment derivatives: Difference between revisions

Employees rate derivatives promised to change that by taking rebenching lateral movements — which were necessarily highly entropic - they cost a lot in transaction friction, institutional leakage and so on, which could be avoided by just paying the employees more.

The banks could sell these derivatives directly to employees, saving the bother of having to hedge themselves.

It led to anomalies. HR departments would segment staff according to an internal 5 point scoring metric (a “credibility rating”), and would force rank staff to a curve, lest the banks exposure to employee “alpha” became too concentrated.

Meantime while periodic RIFs were greatly reduced they were not avoided entirely, and now could be handled quantitatively without reference to performance or value as it was baked into the credibility rating. This led to the curious counterintuitive phenomenon that the staff with the ''highest'' credibility ratings — ergo the most, well, “poubs for pound” expensive — were the first to go. This assisted also in the force ranking process.

They would be like [[interest rate swap|interest rate swaps]]. A bunch of large employers would submit, daily, how much they would be prepared to pay to hire established categories of worker, to derive some kind of London Inter-Employer Bid-Offer Rate (can we call this LIEBOR?). Then the British Human Capital Managers Association would compile and publish a list of rates. Employer could swap out their fixed costs for a floating rate, thereby hedging employment costs. Employees could do the same, hedging against their intrinsic loyalty discount, and restricting employee moves to genuine changes in role, or idiosyncratic hatred of boss, rather than just the need to rebenchmark periodically.