Saturday, November 25, 2006

On Labor and Goodyear

from commenter JudyGee at The Blog | Cliff Schecter: Let's Make It A Bad Year For Goodyear | The Huffington Post's comment thread: "For those of us who were marketing and advertising professionals with long years of experience, we had front row seats to the free market capitalist debacle. By the mid-1980's ceo's with marketing driven companies suddenly became the disappeared, along with mid-sized companies made famous by the authors of 'In Search of Excellence'.

Just before the bottom dropped out of the business, there was a great flurry of activity from the McKensie & Co. hacks, who suddenly appeared to put the last nail in the coffin of american productivity (in place of all that worry about producing and selling more, their solution was to downsize (the bullshit word for one employee to do five jobs at half the pay of one). The unions were devestated because american workers became fearful of losing their jobs and grateful to have one.

The companies no longer cared how much goods they sold, because with cheap labor and financial manipulations, as well as no longer concerned with anti-trust legislation, the way forward was the easy road to big money deals. Let the chinese manufacture, let the mexicans, let anyone except americans - the fat, bald men who had their heads stuck in the trough, busily slurping up this big money, of course neglected an afterthought. When there is no more of the humonguous american middle class consumer market to buy what the rest of the world is manufacturing, and their own cheap labor market can't buy it either, it is likely they may drown in their own slop - another republican great depression - only this time it's global."

I hope, but I fear.

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