Jobs, employers, and medieval trajectory
Once again Robert Reich's articles make lots of sense to me. And the overall subject continues to point toward what looks like deliberate steering of America toward a medieval type carving up of the nation. Reich's article is "Why Jobs Must Be Our Goal Now, Not Deficit Reduction" http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-reich/december-jobs-numbers_b_2409427.html and once again brought up the question to me, why would anyone want to cut back on American employment, since greater employment provides greater productivity and greater flow of money inside the nation, thus more taxes to cover the cost of the programs that provide the national infrastructure that enables the country to function as a whole instead of a bunch of bickering feudal business entities that ignore the transportation system, water quality and the other very important shared resources. And more to the subject, more employment thus provides the taxes that pays off the national debt.
Is this some kind of natural phenomenon produced by the interaction of human mentality on the world, or is it some few individuals' perverse craving for enormous power over others? To cut back on the employment that pays off the national debt, and yet demand paying off the national debt, seems only an armlock to force something else to happen. Hmm, what could that be.
Yes, am aware that those folks who crave power over others is caused by their own fear of themselves being controlled. Yet, how to keep them from excessively being "bulls in the china closet" of the society in which the rest of us also live?
Now, it is not like I am not part of all this problem; my mother was into family tree stuff and would point out to me that I "have the blood of seventeen kings" in me; so my ancestry surely had a generous helping of the urge to control other people. Maybe that is what gets me to comment about the whole phenomenon such as in this blog.
The craving by some folks to control lots of other people, gets warped into being among the system of creating goods and services that is our business system. Employers need to have skill at employing, controlling, employees, so that control-others skill is not the problem, is a necessity in places. The problem comes in perhaps when the employer loses all empathic contact with the employees, considers them like the rocks in the field, to be bulldozed around to landscape the place. More is better, better is stronger, the more employees way down there on the org chart means bigger goodies for those high in the org chart. And when the disconnection at the top gets to the point of only shuffling around investment money, based on the advise of underlings who only look at profit trends, the "idle-rich" class is formed, and increasing disconnection from the principle of producing the best products for the money gets forgotten, replaced by a system of virtual control of business territory.
I wonder if the lifestyle of the idle-rich is much different from that of the idle-retired, such as is the class I could be said to be in. Definitely the idle-rich would have more sumptuous surroundings and would not have to live without a good woman as mate, like is my unfortunate existence. But the basic quality of life might not otherwise be much different.
One of the processes that tends to be involved at all levels of the economy, is the principle of "charging what the market will bear." In other words, the principle that if one has a product that sells well, it is not enough to set the price such that one and one's employees have a nice income, and the investors have a comparable reward; it means to overcharge to the maximum amount that people will pay for the product. And that overcharging is what leads to the vast fortunes of the few ultra-wealthy folks. This overcharging squirrels away money that is not created in direct proportion to value-added processes, producing an economic factor that involves money that is not directly tied into value-added economic functions. And that money is thus lost to the people needing to have jobs to input value-added for the nation's GDP. An increasing number of people out of work, along with extreme separation of the financial state between the average American vs the ultra-wealthy: the situation we have been seeing increasing for the past dozen years.
Workers who have been without income get increasingly desperate to take jobs at lower pay. Such as when the big drop in the disk drive industry in Silicon valley happened in 1984, I was one of the many who were in resulting RIFs; and I, as a non-degreed second level design-development electronic engineer at that point, had my resumes easily tossed out by the personnel folks at companies looking for engineers to hire. As a result I was out of work for over a year, with only a few weeks of temp jobs at minimum wage. I was told by potential employers that since I had worked my way up from engineering technician level to design engineer level, I would not be happy with a technician job, and that they had plenty of degreed engineers to pick from. (I sensed a bit of hostility from degreed folks even in the personnel offices, toward anyone who dared intrude in the degreed people's world without having gotten a degree, something they had struggled hard to get themselves while being led by the carrot of promise to be considered better-than those who did not have a college degree.) So when I finally got interviewed by a small car alarm manufacturing company who hired electronic technicians based on their actual testing of applicant's skills - I was told I got the highest score of any applicant, so show up for work Monday - without asking for a resume, I was very happy to take a job that paid less than a third of my former job; and my new employer got all my extra skills without paying for them. I was so happy to have a steady job that I stayed with them for the 9.5 years before they closed their doors, laying everybody off - an experience I was familiar with by then. This is an example of how the business system gets employees to work for much less pay; and the resulting lower business expenses of the lower salaries paid, goes into the profit pile of money.
So is this part of the plan of a significant number of the mega-corporations, to reduce the overall cost of doing business by paying employees less money, and thus raking up more profit for the luxury of those on top? The over 1,200,000 Americans currently still needing good jobs here in America, might seem to fit this pattern. If they were all being productive working good jobs and paying income taxes the national debt could be getting paid off quite rapidly - and that is supposedly what is claimed to be the goal of "reducing the national deficit" so the blockage of having the government stimulate the new jobs, appears to not be consistent. Seems more reasonable that some folks want to be the sole sources of jobs for Americans.
This could be put into the rather snide description of the robber-barrons conniving to force the lazy grunts to work for less pay, and gloat over being better-than the poor slobs out there who are starving as a result, begging for even a dirty-work job to be offered to them by the robber-barrons.
Although I doubt it is the whole problem, this too often looks like a significant part of the problem.
Is this some kind of natural phenomenon produced by the interaction of human mentality on the world, or is it some few individuals' perverse craving for enormous power over others? To cut back on the employment that pays off the national debt, and yet demand paying off the national debt, seems only an armlock to force something else to happen. Hmm, what could that be.
Yes, am aware that those folks who crave power over others is caused by their own fear of themselves being controlled. Yet, how to keep them from excessively being "bulls in the china closet" of the society in which the rest of us also live?
Now, it is not like I am not part of all this problem; my mother was into family tree stuff and would point out to me that I "have the blood of seventeen kings" in me; so my ancestry surely had a generous helping of the urge to control other people. Maybe that is what gets me to comment about the whole phenomenon such as in this blog.
The craving by some folks to control lots of other people, gets warped into being among the system of creating goods and services that is our business system. Employers need to have skill at employing, controlling, employees, so that control-others skill is not the problem, is a necessity in places. The problem comes in perhaps when the employer loses all empathic contact with the employees, considers them like the rocks in the field, to be bulldozed around to landscape the place. More is better, better is stronger, the more employees way down there on the org chart means bigger goodies for those high in the org chart. And when the disconnection at the top gets to the point of only shuffling around investment money, based on the advise of underlings who only look at profit trends, the "idle-rich" class is formed, and increasing disconnection from the principle of producing the best products for the money gets forgotten, replaced by a system of virtual control of business territory.
I wonder if the lifestyle of the idle-rich is much different from that of the idle-retired, such as is the class I could be said to be in. Definitely the idle-rich would have more sumptuous surroundings and would not have to live without a good woman as mate, like is my unfortunate existence. But the basic quality of life might not otherwise be much different.
One of the processes that tends to be involved at all levels of the economy, is the principle of "charging what the market will bear." In other words, the principle that if one has a product that sells well, it is not enough to set the price such that one and one's employees have a nice income, and the investors have a comparable reward; it means to overcharge to the maximum amount that people will pay for the product. And that overcharging is what leads to the vast fortunes of the few ultra-wealthy folks. This overcharging squirrels away money that is not created in direct proportion to value-added processes, producing an economic factor that involves money that is not directly tied into value-added economic functions. And that money is thus lost to the people needing to have jobs to input value-added for the nation's GDP. An increasing number of people out of work, along with extreme separation of the financial state between the average American vs the ultra-wealthy: the situation we have been seeing increasing for the past dozen years.
Workers who have been without income get increasingly desperate to take jobs at lower pay. Such as when the big drop in the disk drive industry in Silicon valley happened in 1984, I was one of the many who were in resulting RIFs; and I, as a non-degreed second level design-development electronic engineer at that point, had my resumes easily tossed out by the personnel folks at companies looking for engineers to hire. As a result I was out of work for over a year, with only a few weeks of temp jobs at minimum wage. I was told by potential employers that since I had worked my way up from engineering technician level to design engineer level, I would not be happy with a technician job, and that they had plenty of degreed engineers to pick from. (I sensed a bit of hostility from degreed folks even in the personnel offices, toward anyone who dared intrude in the degreed people's world without having gotten a degree, something they had struggled hard to get themselves while being led by the carrot of promise to be considered better-than those who did not have a college degree.) So when I finally got interviewed by a small car alarm manufacturing company who hired electronic technicians based on their actual testing of applicant's skills - I was told I got the highest score of any applicant, so show up for work Monday - without asking for a resume, I was very happy to take a job that paid less than a third of my former job; and my new employer got all my extra skills without paying for them. I was so happy to have a steady job that I stayed with them for the 9.5 years before they closed their doors, laying everybody off - an experience I was familiar with by then. This is an example of how the business system gets employees to work for much less pay; and the resulting lower business expenses of the lower salaries paid, goes into the profit pile of money.
So is this part of the plan of a significant number of the mega-corporations, to reduce the overall cost of doing business by paying employees less money, and thus raking up more profit for the luxury of those on top? The over 1,200,000 Americans currently still needing good jobs here in America, might seem to fit this pattern. If they were all being productive working good jobs and paying income taxes the national debt could be getting paid off quite rapidly - and that is supposedly what is claimed to be the goal of "reducing the national deficit" so the blockage of having the government stimulate the new jobs, appears to not be consistent. Seems more reasonable that some folks want to be the sole sources of jobs for Americans.
This could be put into the rather snide description of the robber-barrons conniving to force the lazy grunts to work for less pay, and gloat over being better-than the poor slobs out there who are starving as a result, begging for even a dirty-work job to be offered to them by the robber-barrons.
Although I doubt it is the whole problem, this too often looks like a significant part of the problem.
posted by Unknown at
09:23
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
Subscribe to Post Comments [Atom]
<< Home