Economic Outrage du Jour
by Meteor Blades
Wed Nov 11, 2009 at 08:46:03 AM PST
Yves Smith at naked capitalism asks "Do Businesses Hate Their Workers?":
In America, it isn’t hard to answer the question in the headline "yes." The oft recited, "Our employees are our greatest asset" is pure Orwellian prattle; most companies treat employees as liabilities, doing everything they can to minimize labor costs, getting rid of workers whenever possible. And this now extends well up into the management ranks, with most people who are still on the corporate meal ticket assigned responsibilities that would have constituted 1.5 to two jobs a decade ago.
And before readers argue that this is a necessary response to globalization, the evidence does not support that view. If companies were simply responding to tougher competition (in this case, lower cost suppliers from overseas), you’d expect to pressure on wages AND profits. Instead, we’ve seen wage stagnation (save at the very top) with (pre bust) record profits.
If you look at past post-war expansion periods, the vast majority of GDP growth went to labor, in the form of increased hiring and higher wages. The post war average (pre the last upturn) was close to 60%; the low was 55%. The jobless recovery lived up to its billing, with under 30% of GDP gains going to workers. By contrast, the portion of GDP growth that went to profits was an all-time record.
masaccio at Firedoglake chimes in:
On Friday, a group of Trade Associations ran a full-page ad in the New York Times demonstrating their loathing for the employees of their members:
Expensive new mandates on businesses will result in lost jobs, lower wages, less flexibility and higher health care costs.
Let me translate that from scary talk to plain English. Business will dump every last cent of the costs of health care on employees. No business will give up a single penny of its profits to keep its workers healthy. Anyone who wants health care has to pay for it at whatever price the insurance companies want to charge, and business will cooperate in shifting costs to workers. And there is nothing you can do about it. The profits we suck out of your labor belongs to us, and you don’t get any.
There used to be an unspoken deal between labor and capital that profits from productivity increases would be split, wages would rise as productivity increased. That deal was broken in 1980, and since then, capital has taken all the money, at least the part that didn’t go to pay bonuses on Wall Street. Wages have been stagnant.
And every day in every way, we're told this is the natural order of things, not to be tampered with if we know what's good for us.
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