Suresh Konda

Demographic models for manpower planning and policy

The purpose of this article is to demonstrate the utility, for planning and policy analysis, of mathematical models of individual mobility within organizational labor markets. Recognizing that, in an idealized sense, internal mobility can be characterized as a function of two very different things - individual attributes or job vacancies - two models of mobility are described. Using real data where possible, we demonstrate the ability of both models to forecast total labor costs and trace the change in costs to changes in the age-seniority distributions, changes in the size of the labor force, and changes in salary schedules. This disaggregation is of significance since any effective attempt to control or change total costs must accommodate for the, sometimes conflicting, contribution of each source. Using the vacancy-based model of mobility, the ramifications of alternative recruiting and Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO) strategies are explored. Relatively large increases in both direct (dollar) and indirect (turnover) costs are shown to result from free entry at all grade levels. As for EEO strategies, we show, inter alia, the ineffectiveness of pure EEO strategies in reaching representative parity within a reasonable time, the relatively weak impact of organizational growth on reaching parity levels, and the surprisingly small costs imposed on the majority population by an effective Affirmative Action (AA) program. These illustrations amply serve to demonstrate the counter-intuitive results of alternative policies applied to inter-related labor systems, and underscore the need for mathematical descriptions of complex phenomena in addressing “What if ...?” questions for policy planning and analysis.