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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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120 Comments so far
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Writing as a former corporate lower managament lackey that had to endure a first class Booz & Co. douche bag disguised as a consultant hired by upper management. Booz & Co., plus their willing clients in the executive suite for whom a hard day's work is a distant and unpleasent memory (if ever), are precisely the sort of morons who's hubris one reads about in accounts of businesses going into the toilet as a result of their trashing the staff who make the enterprise go, particularly at publicly traded companies. Of course, if the company goes belly up, these executive douches still get their 'golden parachutes' or get bailed out at taxpayer expense.
Yup, not to mention that Booz Allen is a major crony capitalist wealthfare recipient seriously chowing down at Uncle Sam's expense.
Details, please.
Those corporate jerks act as if they are the only people with power to influence the
the bottom line. Big mistake. Good employees have much more influence and the power to use it. The trick is making them think they don't.
This is sick, and indicates that our economy is a dying beast, fatally infected by bloating gas and parasites of all sorts.
Honest, skilled work and productive business has no place anymore in this super-corrupt cash transfer and financial shell game. It makes you long for old fashioned unjust capitalism that actually did stuff. We will fade away and other countries will come to the fore. Our century is over.
"Trapped in the belly of the beast
And the beast is dying"
-Visions of a Black Emperor
This is a good article that will resonate with many valuable and responsible workers in the private and "non-profit" sectors. It always comes as a shock to see instances where quality work is not what is valued in a workplace. I have seen good people laid off because the boss does not understand their contribution, what they do, or because they are Black, or the boss is jealous, or cannot spell their foreign name. I think this has always been true to some extent. Now it has reached a new level - it is now official policy to devalue excellence as yet another method to take away salary from the productive sector and enrich those at the top with bonuses for cutting expenses.
Individual excellence of a productive worker (that company performance can depend on individual excellence of productive workers) is in fact a bad thing for a (modern) capitalist environment. It means that a productive worker can exert power over the production process and is less easily replaceable and has thus a chance to get a bigger slice of the pie over sustenance wages and decreases other forms of centralised management control (eg. it makes relocating production more difficult etc). The industry trends towards mechanisation, automatisation, "process engineering", deskilling, in addition to destruction of all productive worker organisation is intended to decrease this kind of dependence on individual knowledge and work quality. Basically, in general it's better for a capitalist company if it can produce a somewhat lower quality product with a low level of dependence on the skills and individual characteristics of workers. The larger the company, the truer this is. Basically all the deplorations of quality decreases etc are just missing the point and are based on an incorrect, ideological, romantic, "meritocratic" misinterpretation of capitalism.
RESPECT THE WORKER!!!
“Don’t hate the media: Become the media!”
- Jello Biafra
Alright folks, READ ALL ABOUT IT! -- Low Power FM (LPFM) radio station license applications for non-profit organizations in medium and large-sized cities to commence summer of 2012. This is the first time that’s been done by the FCC in thirty (30) years. Get’em while they’re hot!
This the idea I've been pushing on CD for five years now. This opportunity won't come again. Non-profit progressive groups (including labor interest groups) need to get those licenses while they're hot.
Enough of these stations blanketing a medium-sized or large city with contiguous broadcast ranges could potentially mimic the audience market penetration of large commercial FM stations—ONLY WITHOUT CORPORATE CENSORSHIP.
These stations could become part of a nationwide, populist progressive information cooperative network that airs local programming most of the time but cooperates to concentrate on regional and national issues of importance, averting or responding to crises, and covering independent progressive candidates during election cycles.
The other good idea to get around the Establishment right now is Americanselect.org. Check it out. Via this online idea, anyone can become a citizen delegate and nominate whomever they want and, so the site operators say, get on the ballot in all 50 States. This would circumvent the Dem/GOP/Federal Election Commission lock on the nomination process.
If we had both these ideas, low power FM and citizen delegate nominations in all 50 States—independent of corporate media and the Dem/GOP/FEC nomination Machine, respectively, then we could use the LPFM stations to educate the masses about OUR CANDIDATES and get OUR IDEAS out without having to go through corporate "mainstream" media filters.
CARPE DIEM! Start talking these ideas up in your family, church, community resilience circle, or other progressive group and research what it takes to get these stations up and running. This is a once in a generation-and-a-half opportunity and if we don’t seize it, sooner or later the right-wing will.
So, get off your fat carbo-potato monkey butt and sweat your old agitator mind and body for a change! You progressive retirees who still have your health: There’s no excuse not to. Let me tell you, I’ve worked in radio before and it’s a hell of a lot of fun. It will be even more fun to use radio to help build local community resilience and resistance and stick it to all those creeps who’ve been screwing us locally and nationally since Reagan. And we can use our own media voices that can’t be silenced by corporate media to help locally and nationally organize our own politics to go around theirs!!
"V" for peace and victory over our true oppressors!
That former Bank of America executive is Marc Effron, which you would have already found out if you had read a slightly different version of this article elsewhere, such as http://toomuchonline.org/joe-the-machinist/.
Why did commondreams.org edit this out? Was it not with the release as delivered to CD? There is no reason to conceal his identity. Workers have the right to know exactly who it was that uttered that horrible and offensive remark.
Hmm. Mysteriouser & mysteriouser.