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A Tip for Joe the Machinist: Watch Your Back
A Labor Day reflection: Corporate America no longer even pays lip service to the importance of encouraging hard work and skill.
You work hard. You do good work. You loyally stick with your employer through good times and bad. Do you have a right to a paycheck that rises over time?
On any Labor Day over the last 50 years, the answer — from labor and management alike — would be obvious: Of course!
But that answer doesn't seem to hold any more. Earlier this year, a trio of top business consultants openly challenged the notion that good employees doing valuable work deserve to see their paychecks steadily increase. This past July, the Harvard Business School circulated their challenge throughout corporate America's upper echelons.
This remarkably brazen assault on core American workplace values originated at Booz & Co., one of the nation's most prestigious corporate consulting firms. America's corporations, Booz analysts advised earlier this year, need to start attacking the "exorbitant" paychecks now going to their most prized, "steady and reliable" veteran workers.
The Booz analysts offer an example of the "significantly overpaid" worker they have in mind. They call him Joe the machinist, "a stellar employee who knows the ins and outs of the organization, the result of his many years on the job."
Joe's "wealth of institutional knowledge" has become a valued corporate asset. But Joe, after over two decades on the job, is making a lot more than he used to make, especially "compared with co-workers who have been doing the same job for just two years."
Corporate America, the Booz & Co. advice continues, now needs to "address these kinds of wage disparities." Companies need to start "retooling labor costs" to narrow "the gap between high wages and market value."
This retooling, the Booz analysts gush, could net U.S. corporations "labor savings of 15 to 20 percent." Of course, the analysts acknowledge, Joe the machinist "might have to take pay cuts" along the way.
But what a payoff these pay cuts would produce! Firms that seriously retool, the Booz consultants promise, "will end up with larger and more sustainable improvements in their [profit] margins."
Some business leaders are already cheering the Booz analysis.
"We infantilize workers like Joe," a former Bank of America executive charges at a Harvard Business School online discussion site, "by insulating them from the harsh economic realities by paying above market wages."
Corporate America, in fact, has been doing precious little "insulating" over recent years. Corporations have been depressing wages to fatten profit margins for decades now, and the pace of that depressing has only accelerated since the Great Recession hit, as new research from Northeastern University's Center for Labor Market Studies details.
Corporate profits from mid-2009 through 2011's first quarter, this research notes, increased 39.6 percent. Over that same span, typical full-time U.S. workers have watched their paychecks drop 1 percent.
The Booz analysts want America's Joe the machinists to swallow ever lower paychecks to help their U.S. corporate employers "keep up with intense competition" from elsewhere in the world. Yet they demand no similar sacrifice from U.S. corporate executives.
That makes no sense, particularly for analysts who are arguing we must "narrow the gap" between exorbitant pay and actual "market value." U.S. CEOs currently take home far more than the global "market" rate for executive talent.
CEOs at companies with over $10 billion in annual revenue, The Wall Street Journal reported back in 2008, make twice as much in the United States as they do in Europe — and nine times more in the United States than they do in Japan.
Corporate America, in other words, needs some serious "labor cost retooling" at the top — before gutting pay for its most experienced and skilled workers at the bottom.
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Show AllGyahh, just noticed this, great post and I completely agree with it, this is really my global outlook also. I was more focusing on the real production related economic changes (which is why I didn't even mention the financialisation of local and global economies) because I think I know a little more about this than the other stuff.
The saddest thing is that basically everything you can see points in this direction. Centralisation and formalisation of all types of social connection? Check. Turning education into a system for producing flexible labour units instead of people? Check. Appearance of PMCs specialised in (exactly as you said) repressing social dissent? Check. Increasing militarisation? Straight-out lies by "leaders" to their electors acting completely in opposition to their mandate? The deceptive framing of controversies over education, poverty, race, economics in individual-oriented terms disregarding all higher level social trends, no matter how obvious they are; blowing up bullshit "threats" as the next Pearl Harbor (and seriously, PH being the closest to an outside military threat to the US, Americans just seem to have no clue about how incredibly safe and unthreatened they are and how incredibly peacefully they could live, compared to basically any other country in the world); the disregard for safety of essential long term production, the emergence and gaining of strength of the "overpopulation" rhetoric (and other technocratic "narratives") and so on - every single thing points in the same direction and nothing in the opposite. This is just a random list of stuff, hope it makes sense though :-)
Part 2:
- Capitalism always dressed this up as a problem of increasing "efficiency". Except, of course, it never ever cared about real measures of efficiency, only a single one: efficiency of labour use, ie. productivity; and even more so, it cared more about concentration of power over the production process even more than productivity. Computers helped in this also, not just by enabling owners to steal (privatise, "enclose") and legally protect production related knowledge (which would trivially belong to the commons), and deskilling workers (ie. not sharing this stolen and concentrated and privatised knowledge with them but instead designing integrated production processes based on it and "integrating" people into it as if they were just another type of machine, basically decreasing worker control over production to meaningless levels - at least that's the goal) but also by providing deep surveillance and monitoring and production control systems that enable owners to pay as little as possible to workers and extract as much labour as possible in the meantime.
- "Efficiency" in capitalism is not just a myth, it is an obvious and disgusting lie. Capitalism in its current form only works because of externalities. The more honest (probably because they don't have the mental capacity to understand the implications of their principles) capitalist ideologues (thinking of market fundamentalists here) realise this, and then invariably fall off the other side of the horse by demanding that everything be owned and monetised, since capitalism and the invisible hand of the market only works if it's in total control, without anything else disturbing it (not a very robust system from an engineering standpoint). Not a single form of capitalist production is "efficient", because not a single form of capitalist production is "sustainable" in any reasonable timeframe, and nothing that is built on waste can be called efficient. There are other myths clustering around this myth of efficiency, the most idiotic of them being the myth that technological development as it is will solve everything. The truth is that while capitalist production systems DO optimise for a very limited set of parameters, mainly human labour, especially the more rare and costly type that would increase worker control over production, they all depend on cheap, abundant, wasteable resources and all they do is waste these, nothing else.
- This brings us to everyone's favourite set of solutions (including me hehe): localism, distributed small-scale control and production, sharing of knowledge and local interdependence etc (don't know how to call this with a single word). In my opinion, what's needed is a completely independent full production and consumption cycle that people can opt in to. (Consumption in the sense that you have to consume stuff to stay alive, so "socially necessary" consumption.) There has to exist a fully (as much as possible) market- and unsustainable technology-independent, self-contained, self-sustaining economy (or rather, a large set of such mostly independent economies) beside the global market based one that people can choose to opt in to and that can increase in size and absorb people from this current crap. No idea what this is, but I'm kind of sure it may already be there.
Anyway, sorry for the rant. It's because I like Joe the Machinist, a lot. But there aren't many people left like him, and he will be, along with a lot of this low-level knowledge, exterminated. It's like the knowledge behind grandma's cookies: ads tell you, rightly, that they won't be able to compete with shitty mass produced sweets, engineered for maximum addictivity for children. All of this type of knowledge, from peasant knowledge of agriculture to machinist knowledge to grandma's pickles is being eliminated, destroyed, and after this, resold to you, in a disgusting commercialised commoditised form, in a lot lower quality – for nostalgia value. God I have to stop or I’ll vomit. Fucking capitalism, what a piece of shit.
Atomsk, Thank you for that brilliant condensation of many ideas. To expand a little on your "local" solution, in this age of internet technologies, independent localities can connect with others around the globe for knowledge. Just as capitalists want to steal Joe the Mechanic's knowledge and condense it into a computer program, local independent communities can share Joe's knowledge (and other knowledge the humans have developed over the centuries) with each other for mutual human benefit.
Also, I want to thank CD for bringing in more articles from less well known sites. I have been adding them to places to visit, such as toomuchonline.org, where this article came from.
Thanks :-) As for the internet and sharing knowledge: this is in fact something I wanted to add in but didn't, despite being one of the most important issues :-) Also, it's not "my" solution, thankfully, it looks like that a lot of people here like this idea and think of it as the obvious solution (well, it's not really a solution, it's more like an idea that a lot of people think should be a strong part of any worthwhile solution). But I really, really like that this type of approach is kind of obvious for so many people here.
Much of what you are describing in Part 2 reminds me of a modernized form of the ideas of Kropotkin. It's a sort of anarcho-syndicalist economics with small scale, more distributed industrial and agricultural entities, only you don't specify human communes or communitarian (religion centered) micro-capitalist communities within it.
You presented some good ideas leading up to your conclusions and yours is one of the very few long posts I've copied to study in a while.
Well, yeah. Fuck capitalism. In the ear.I appreciate your overall point of view, but the intelligence and application required to be a good machinist is way beyond what's required for grandma to make fine cookies. No that I'm putting down grandma, but you're talking apples and oranges.I would submit that when it comes to applied intelligence, an accomplished machinist has lots more than your typical CEO.Look at it this way: most good machinists could doubtless be trained to be CEO's, wheareas many CEO's couldn't possibly be trained to be even competent machinists.Imagine George Bush attempting to learn a sophisticated operation on a Bridgeport, heh heh.But you're right about one thing: eventually the Chinese will get it together. The Brits used to think of our manufacturing as crude and unsophisticated, and the French thought of them as mass producers of shoddy goods-and they were right!
I've taken machinist classes. I KNOW whereof you speak. While taking those classes, I came across Christopher Dunn's book; "The Giza Powerplant". It's a fascinating read for someone with a machinist background.
"Well, yeah. Fuck capitalism. In the ear.I appreciate your overall point of view, but the intelligence and application required to be a good machinist is way beyond what's required for grandma to make fine cookies. No that I'm putting down grandma, but you're talking apples and oranges."
Well I'm talking about grandma's cookies as just a tiny little piece of the overall self-sustaining peasant knowledge, and that in its complexity is easily, imo, comparable to machinist knowledge. My grandparents were very much self sustaining (including wheat production and bread baking) even through the 60's and I know that most of the type of knowledge they had is gone from society now and replaced by mechanised knowledge. But yeah, I'm noticing more and more than my picture of "grandparents" is completely out of sync with reality, those people have simply died off and only the much more urban and much less self reliant types remain.
My basic point was that the knowledge of a machinist is mostly the same *type* of low-level, non-formalised personal knowledge as that of peasant knowledge (of which an "urban" grandmother's cookie baking skills are just a tiny little remnant) and the attack on this type of knowledge is universal. Also, when I see ads (repeated during children's programming) where a grandmother's home baked cookies are shunned by children in favour of mass produced stuff, I think the social (pedagogical) effects of these changes may be pretty large.
(OT: I often think that what may be missing - among loads of other things hehe - in modern education is a chance for a less centralised and formalised and more personal teacher-pupil (or possibly even "master-disciple") relation, where teachers take a lot more responsibility for their own students and in exchange have a lot more influence over them, which would enable teaching not just technique but higher level behaviours (work morale, control over production processes, work philosophy etc.))
"I would submit that when it comes to applied intelligence, an accomplished machinist has lots more than your typical CEO. Look at it this way: most good machinists could doubtless be trained to be CEO's, wheareas many CEO's couldn't possibly be trained to be even competent machinists."
Doh. IMO this is just way too obvious and true for a very large majority of CEOs, and almost all CEOs of companies above a certain size. My favourite anecdote regarding this is from Andrew Grove's "Only the Paranoid Survive" (iirc), in which (iirc, may not remember right) he describes a meeting announcing Intel's change of strategies to employees (going from producing memory chips to CPUs)...after which some engineer (iirc) stood up and told him "boss, that's what we've been doing already, good job for recognising it".
Anyone else reminded of the Ludites?
Only you.
Read E.P. Thompson's "Making of the English Working Class" if you want to know anything about them and not just a misspelled version of their name.
Wow- I am in awe. Very informative, and many thanks.
Workers who are paid a decent wage are being "infantalized?" What the hell?
Has anyone else noticed that the class war has come out of the shadows in recent years. What used to be dressed up in fancy language is now stated more openly, more often than I can ever remember.
Of course, only right-wingers are allowed to talk about "class warfare," because the rich are so very poor. (It's the oxymoronic sentiment at all defenses of the rich.)
Yes, I have noticed it.
It is almost like the wealthy have recently obtained some kind of secret knowlege of a coming apocalypse, so they are grabbing for all the wealth and power they can - the seats on the escape spaceship, or living quarters in the multi-generation survival cave will be in very limited supply - and you know what that will do to the price!
But then again, naaah... it is just a normal aspect of capitalism. They see a once in centuries alignment of social/political/environmental** conditions (Siouxrose would say planets and stars) that favors a power grab, and they are going for it!.
** Don't believe for a moment that the Capitalists and their political friends don't understand the seriousness of AGW. That "global warming is unproven/a hoax" stuff is strictly stuff they broadcast for proletarian consumption!
They've been developing and indoctrinating the lesser affluent with an economic siege warfare mentality for a quarter century now. I think they are preparing to cruelly escalate that siege to its logical and brutal conclusion and I think they think they've got the political, military and police power to do it.
I think they've been surrounded by yes-men and snorting their own propaganda originally aimed at the lesser affluent for so long (like Dick Cheney) that they actually BELIEVE IT themselves now as a self-fulfilling prophecy that justifies their class delusion of material god-hood. Mass psychosis similar to this enveloped the upper-class in Weimar and Nazi Germany.
Mother Nature's reformation is aimed directly at THEM. Their survival caves will be collapsed by earthquakes. Their escape capsules wil be burned by solar flares( Mother Nature is not earth-bound. The entire solar system is connected as one organism, on many frequencies, and She has powerful allies). There is no escape for the wicked. Best for them to just "manup" and face the consequences of their deeds. THAT will earn them some karmic merit.
Hell yeah- and if their survival caves are not collapsed by earthquakes. their air passages will be poisoned, the escape passages will be sealed, and humanity WILL be freed from these so called illuminati - descendants of Jesus Christ? NO- they are HELLSPAWN.
Except that it ignores accelerating "free trade" job offshoring.
It may sound outlandish, but I trust some imagining around the abolishment of money will produce some ideas. Certainly, the capitalist model has failed miserably, at least the unbridled one. Other business models like co-operatives and collectives are surely the way of the future. A documentary, "The Take" follows a group of workers in Argentina whose company decided to close the plant leaving them out of work. Knowing the company had received money from the government, the workers took their case through the courts all the way to the national legislature and won the right to take over the physical plant and all the machinery and the company had to relinquish it. The workers now operate the plant with everyone having a say in how the plant operates. This co-operative is among a growing number in South American countries where the means of production has been taken back by real people.
http://www.veoh.com/watch/v6283477p23HFZaP?h1=The+Take+%28Naomi+Klein%29+2004
Here's the link to the one with English subtitles.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LEzXln5kbuw
That was one great documentary..
What pissed me off was that the workers were left high and dry with the owners still oweing them wages/pension...Then the workers re-started the plant, made deals for raw material and found markets for the machines produced..I believe that the other factory in the film made ceramic tile...
Once the workers , who split the profits evenly, were out of the red, the plant owner returned and tryed to repossess..
I loved the way that the workers fought off the police goons working for the owner who abandoned the plant, fought them off with sling shots...I wonder what kind of bad assed mojo the goons in this country would use against such workers armed with sling shots protecting what they had resurrected from abandonment???
Huh? Joe still got a pay cut, and his replacement is working for far less. The next time he tries it, he will get one again get 10% less. If Joe is not an Ayn Randite psychopath who care only about himself, he should be quite disturbed that those that follow him are on their way down, increment by increment, to serfdom.
Ever heard of the saying: "An injury to one is an injury to all!" And it is, in a very real way.
And at any rate, as other commented, in real capitalist workplaces, only an inner circle of elites are allowed to have "ideas", the rest do as they are told or they get fired.
But I bet your Joe isn't a machinist, isn't he? He wears at least a sport coat and tie to work, doesn't he? His options are available to very few actual machinists or other workers.
And what is the point of your anecdote? I can tell a story about someone winning the lottery, but is that a solution?
You are a dissembling, half-assed, morally compass-less corporate suit. Quit wasting your and our time on this site and go hang out on the GE corporate site with Geoffrey Imelt.
Most probably not, although "it" clearly has nothing against ignorant ideologues like you making comments on their behalf on other sites.
Spike you when I read you. Do your own homework.
"A running man with a good knife can cut a thousand throats in one night."
- Klingon proverb
You've got "chameleon's" number, alright. What a piece of work. Clown suits like him are why this country is going straight to hell at mach 5.
You're basically saying, as any well educated/propagandised person should be, that the best way to handle high-level social problems is to handle it as individuals. As I have explained before, and as history of industrial development invariably shows, this kind of power will be slowly (or quickly) taken away from Joe, even the top level best ever Joe, which he will not understand, and his response will be to blame cheap and crap Chinese (right now, but of course it used to be Korean and Japanese before that) labour for his own bad luck. You are a clueless ideologist without any understanding of history and the real world and a religious belief in competition; what you do not understand is that individual knowledge and expertise do NOT hold their value and will NOT stay individual for long and thus you are promoting a self-destructive (from the pov of Joe's interests) social mechanism for a temporary material advantage.
Edit: wrote "to blame cheap and crap Chinese (right now, but of course it used to be Korean and Japanese before that) labour for his own stupidity" but that of course makes no sense at all. Sorry about this, Joe :-)
Garsh, how chameleon can spew corporatist psycho-babble. Dacron-polyester McHumanoids like him are so stoned on their own propaganda they expect everyone to participate in their long obsolete social darwinism with them and while they pretend to discuss grown-up issues using infantile insular pluto-corporate innuendo and inarticulate adjectives.
Explain, beelzebub lizard, how your "Joe" (who you were pressed to admit wasn't even a machinist as you originally presented him but some other kind of Joe) "stood up for himself" by taking a job with inferior wages. Explain how the corporate trend that led to this pressure on your Joe benefits the Joes regardless of whether they take the "re-tooling" pay cut at the first job or take a pay cut at another job. Explain the moral justification for a CEO class to do this to Joe in the first place when that class is making record profits, with record over-concentration of wealth. Explain what "excuse" you are misattributing to me.
Joe's experience and competency is WHY the first company SHOULDN'T be doing that to him and also why the second company should offer him his actual worth and not hire him on the cheap--discounting his years of experience. If industrial CEOs including the Wall Street elite were paid a morally justified income in this country and were adequately taxed the U.S. wouldn't be in the economic mess it's in. Nothing any competent or incompetent Joe has done has put this country into the tailspin decline its in. "Free trade" and wartime tax cuts for millionaires and billionaires carried the overwhelming bulk of that load of woe to its ongoing fruition.
I only issue personal attacks to the most intransigently stupid or morally repugnant posters who show up on this site and, even then, not always. You are an especially tedious and disgusting troll who expects the working-class to eagerly participate in the corporatist cutting of its throat and who has the additional temerity to become indignant when they are not as enthusiastically suicidal as suits your completely warped and inverted morality--so I will make a special exception for you and excoriate you factually and personally whenever I encounter your posts.
The supreme mediocrity of upper-class banality, limitless avarice, narcissistic infatuation with controlling everything and everyone they regard as "beneath" them in their delusions of corporatist godhood is what has accelerated economic and environmental chaos around the globe for 17 years since NAFTA.
The question the truest fools like you should ask yourselves but never will (because of your grand delusion) is: Does humanity exist to serve corporations or do corporations exist to serve humanity?
Sells it to successive employers for less money at each step. That's the point, chameleon. It's a win-win for management and ownership and a lose-lose over time for the Joes. The global race to the bottom in wages, benefits, GDP, and consumer spending ability commensurate with a global race to the top in over-concentration of wealth, political power, military and police power never ends with you people, does it?
Sound's psychopathological to me.
You are such a sick puppy.
The process you support is anti- all the Joes. I used to be one of those Joes. I've seen the downside of your system. I used to up-sell processes that earned the company $4,000 a pop, sometimes three a day, while as a skilled technician I earned no commission and was paid $9 an hour plus per diem and hotel costs.
YOU are the one that hates not just the Joes and their progeny but all their hopes for the future. They ARE one of the last subsets of the population driving what's left of the pre-NAFTA real economy. But they are driving that economy in the DIRECTION DICTATED by the neo-liberal upper-class and implemented by its upper-middle-class legal and corporate professionals (who most benefit from it) that includes historically unprecedented, fiscally insane wartime tax cuts for the super-rich, and "free trade" stock dividends generated by foreign labor in offshored manufacturing operations. That DIRECTION has resulted in over-concentrated wealth and over-concentrated political power resulting, in turn, in over-concentrated military and police power.
Soaring income disparities and police state concentrations like that produce class top-heavy, highly unstable and brutal dictatorships. The CIA uses the economists' GINI coefficient to measure income disparities within nations to determine how politically unstable they are. They use that information to gauge how ripe certain countries are for artificially induced insurrection, assassination of top leadership or armed overthrow. The U.S. is currently ranked by the CIA as 64th among nations in terms of income equality--far behind every other developed Western nation and on the same level of income disparity and political instability as Uganda.
You only see my comments as "bitching" because you don't like what I have to say.
Laissez-faire "free market" fairy-tale tellers like you need to quit narcissistically worshipping yourselves without cause. Your ideas are the ones destroying what was once a much healthier real economy, not mine.
"while as a skilled technician I earned no commission and was paid $9 an hour plus per diem and hotel costs."
Sorry abt that, if you were really that good, you should have negotiated a better deal when yo got hired.
It's telling that you respond to the personal story and not to the economic and social facts that are presented.
Seems you have a very limited vision. It does not extend beyond your own narrowly defined interests. That's your perogative, but why bother spouting your narrow views an a cite concerned with COMMON Dreams?
Again, pretending that a high level social issue is about bad individual decisions and responsibility. But of course this doesn't work. No one who ever looks at real economies could in their right mind believe in meritocracy. Unless they also believe that Bill Gates has a clue about programming, that Zuckerberg invented social networking or that Greenspan knows his shit about economics.
You are so out of touch with reality from the worker's point of view and in terms of your very limited grasp of history that you really should call it quits on this sight. Go find your ilk elsewhere so you can all sit around an Ayn Randian circle jerk and tell each other more "free market" fairy-tales about your heroes like Neutron Jack Welch and General Motors.
You're just putting a moralising face on a standard divide-and-conquer strategy. As long as an individual worker's skill level and experience is important for increasing profits (which is less and less true anyway), you just have to divide the "good" and "best" Joe's from the "average", which leads to a decrease of total income (for all machinists) and polarisation of wages and thus a lack of unified representation of interests, which will in turn make it much easier, when the immediate need for this expertise ceases (this will happen very reliably because of technology development), for the capitalist system to discipline the entire profession. That's all. This thinking that individual knowledge and experience by its inherent value will overcome such a social mechanism is just downright stupid.
Joe the Machinist has been accurately reflected in software development over the last 10 years. The bean counters at big companies had this great idea about moving software development overseas because, person-for-person, you pay a software engineer less overseas. However the bean counters are LOUSY at calculating overall costs. Projects take longer to complete, and therefore the companies are less responsive to providing new features, fixing bugs, and the overall quality of the software is haphazard. The other thing the bean counters fail to take into account is that you have to devote significantly more management time to fighting with the overseas development to try and get anything close to decent. Having been project management, I'm familiar first-hand with all these issues. What then happens is the bean counters "lock in" proof of how much money is being saved by simply changing the basis of comparison. They take a project that took 20% longer to complete overseas at only 80% the quality, and they use those specs as the basis for calculating how much it would have cost if it had been done in the US. So they calculate the cost of doing the same project in the US as being 20% higher it really would have been because they assume the time it took to complete it overseas was also the time it would have taken in the US. On top of that, they have zero ability to factor-in the "only 80% the quality" problem with overseas, and they assume the US management costs would be the same regardless of whether the project was done overseas or in the US.
Thank you for this very interesting, tragi-comic bit of insight. It sounds like the basis of a good film script for a dark comedy to me. You should write it or get with a local comedy writer and work it.
This argument is the same hopeful "they can't possibly get as good as us!" thing that always comes up with every single enhancement of global division of labour, and is invariably proven wrong in a decade or two. Simply put: human beings are mostly equal, so the skills you have are reproducible with time, which means you will be forced into global competition, and sadly this will mean a decrease in your wages. It's just unavoidable. It's not very smart to cling on to these types of hopes of being inherently better than the competition, because they're all false.
But software development is imo a very good example for the value of worker control over production and its development is imo a really good case in point for showing how low-level worker control over production decisions can be incredibly efficient. The general theoretical organisation behind software development was built on rigid, centralised, management-powered development models and processes, which didn't exactly work very well, but the pretty disorganised free software model and the newer commercial models (like Agile) with a lot more low-level distributed decision making power and responsibility has showed pretty good efficiency gains, afaik. As far as I can see, centralised, management-based organisations of decision making are especially crap for developing software but systems that put decision power in the hands of programmers (especially in an organised, iterative, collaborative structure) with close to direct contact with the customer can work very well.
Interesting debate for sure. Is it the greedy unscrupulous power hungry chicken or is all the fault with the egg. Free enterprise as the colonists new it worked, it worked for maybe a couple hundred years. It was a special formula that existed in a time unique in world history. Immigrants who came with here hardworking both skilled and unskilled evolving in a society where all men are created equal. It resulted in a country boasting of the largest "middle class" the world had ever seen with a life style also unequaled. It maybe is time to give it up and join the European Union type of system. They sure do have things going swell for themselves. Call it whatever you want ... any sociol-economic system will fail once power and greed wins the day. The question is which system provides the lesser of the evils.
I would say these business "experts" need to talk to another businesssman and award winning one, David Erdal over in Scotland. But why should he have to waste his time on these case studies in abnormal human behavior, when they just need to get some some serious therapy on the old couch. Just "let it all out" about how they can't sleep with their guilty consciences for being such slime.
"Immigrants who came with here hardworking both skilled and unskilled evolving in a society where all men are created equal."
Exactly !! Ummmm... errrrr... except maybe for the slaves, each of which was constitutionally deemed to be 3/5 of a human being. I guess their lifestyles were fairly UNEQUALED too, eh? Lots of good jobs became available also, implementing genocide amongst the native population.
Slavery was most definitely a nasty issue in the world at the time. I don't believe that the colonists where responsible for it? It was more or less an unfortunate given in the civilized world at that time just as the indentured servant system. However, it was an issue to be dealt with. It seems to me that the line in the Declaration of Independence "where all men are created equal" was a good start. It was the seed of truth that eventually won the day although it wasn't easy. Nowhere in the world could any immigrant (colored, asian, latin) go and have opportunity as was available here in the good old USA. Keep on with accentuating the negitive .maybe you will win the day with it. Inspite of your comment... the fact still stands, the USA rose to a level of fairness to all its citizens ( middle class ) not equaled in the history of the world. Genocide? You mean mass Aborttion? Maybe you should bone up on your world history...I suggest starting with the cave men and women.
From the 1620s until about 1668, there were a few major black landholders who pre-existed the rise of slavery in colonial America who were very respected in their communities. As more white Anglo-Saxon Protestants arrived they their brought their religious and racial prejudices with them--a nascent form of white Manifest Destiny--and more and more blacks started being discriminated against in every sense: Precluded from land purchases, disenfranchised, indebted, indentured and sold into slavery in some cases.
Then began the importation of slaves on a mass basis, especially in the southern colonies--an early form of "absolute advantage free trade" in labor. Slavery ended in Britain decades before it ended in America and it took the death of 650,000 Americans (more than in any other U.S. war) to achieve it, followed by a century of Jim Crow apartheid, followed by a few brief decades of voting rights extensions (now countered by high-tech Jim Crow rigged registration, fraudulent privatized voter lists, remotely programmable electronic voting machines, and vote caging systems) and Affirmative Action, which has been effectively gutted for nearly two decades now. Black prison, education and economic statistics speak for themselves compared to any other demographic in America.
You say: "...the USA rose to a level of fairness to all its citizens ( middle class ) not equaled in the history of the world."
This is an inarticulately absurd, historically dishonest statement because you include the descriptor "all" instead of "most." It precludes, by the use of the term "citizen" any discussion of the exclusion and disenfranchisement of First Nation tribes who once numbered an estimated 25 million people in this country before whites seized their land. Whites conducted GENOCIDE against the First Nations people. Now there are fewer than 3 million.
You ignore continued systemic discrimination against blacks and Hispanics who never had a "fair" chance to join the ranks of the American middle-class. Blacks that have achieved that status are like the blacks with respect to employment: Last to gain entrance and first to be kicked out.
Maybe you should bone up on American history.
I applaud your eloquence. Thank you.
The genocide would be that comitted against the tribes of native Americans. Your "aborttion" quip reveals you as a rightist, deeply immersed in the fairy tales and racism of right wing revisionist history.
"Genocide? You mean mass Aborttion? Maybe you should bone up on your world history.."
Genocide: as in the mass murder of the original peoples of the "new" world! Take your own advice, bonehead.
Unfortunately, neo-liberalism has infested and diseased the "European Union type of system." The EU is only 18 years old. It was established by the Maastricht Treaty in 1993. It is a neo-liberal "free trade" currency bloc. A grand hard-core plutocratic experiment that the U.S. Wall Street establishment helped push on them that doesn't allow deficit financing like our system does--which is screwing them big time now.
Neo-liberalism is in its purest form there and is proving that it is an inherently self-destructive "economic theory" [read: mythological "free market" fairy-tale]. It is rapidly destroying its own currency and trade bloc there with spreading "austerity," weekly bank crises, inter-bank credit that is slowly seizing up and increasingly over-concentrated wealth, political power and central bank power. Sound familiar?
Only a few of the northern EU "social democracies" still represent what I think you are talking about, but they are surrounded by bad influences and a failed economic theory created by the Ayn Rand infantilized Milton Friedman in the U.S.
And even Sweden is changing. Norway, not yet, at least not as much, as far as I can see, but its time may come.
Some business leaders are already cheering the Booz analysis.
If Ray Anderson was alive, I'll bet he wouldn't. And the wealthy folks in New England who organised themselves and lobbied for equal taxation, I wonder.
"We infantilize workers like Joe," a former Bank of America executive charges at a Harvard Business School online discussion site, "by insulating them from the harsh economic realities by paying above market wages."
We've infantilised corps, management and government by being indifferent and insulating them to their slow growth/impairment of their amygdalas.
"We've infantilised corps, management and government by being indifferent and insulating them to their slow growth/impairment of their amygdalas."
This is so true.