The article is absolutely correct. But it also fails to take into account that the new jobs are lower paying while inflation decreases the value of the new wages.
As they say in the investment business: "Past performance cannot guarantee future results". Notice also that the claim was "rarely destroys jobs". Rarely is not the same as never.
Lower wage assertions aside, let's look also at the things that we lost on the way to all these gains: No more telephone operators. "All of our representatives are currently busy helping other customers. Please stay on the Line. Your Call is very important to us." Phone menu hell.
Secretaries? Receptionists? There are security guards at the front desk, not receptionists. There's no typing pool anymore. So most typing is being done directly by people who used to hand it off. Aided and abetted by spell-checkers capable of picking exactly the wrong homonym. Keypunch operators? Those were people who began to replace the secretaries, but now we expect the end use to be the data entry clerk. Often multiple times, as anyone who has had to repeatedly give out the same information while running phone menu Hell.
Independent booksellers may be on the upswing, but they still don't number as many as they did before B&N and Amazon moved in. In the mean time, many retailers jettisoned their expensive, experienced, knowledgeable sales people for cheaper transient ones. Like Circuit City, for example.
Gourmet chefs have spent most of history at the low end of the payscale. The recent fad in super-star chefs is likely mostly fad. But automated food prep was pretty well perfected before all that started anyway. And there's absolutely nothing like the taste of an efficient meal.
Most of the last 50-100 years have seen businesses ramping up efficiencies. Adding more and more automation, requiring fewer and fewer people and generally offering lower and lower prices (along with less and less personalized service). But open-ended curves are rare in nature, and straight lines to infinity are purely a mathematical abstraction. We appear to be near an asymptotic node as concerns efficiency, price, service, and keeping enough people employed to afford it all.
So enjoy it while you can.
Or, as one dinosaur said to the other, "Just ignore that flash in the sky. The Earth's temperature has been just perfect for over 200 million years!"
You can't really extrapolate from a handful of CEOs what a good management strategy is. Very, very few managers are CEOs, or ever will be.
And is what's being described here even micromanagement? It's one thing to "micromanage" by insisting that your products meet your standards, it's another to insist on specific details like underlying technologies or what color the office chairs should be.
On the flip side, there's certain aspects of the old "HP Way" that could be described as micromanagement. But I guess it would be toxic to even mention HP when you're talking about best practices in running a company these days.
I wouldn't call this "micromanagement". I'd call it "focussed management". The people in question determined what absolutely positively needed to be done right, studied their subject and homed in on it. They didn't second-guess paper-clip purchases, make idiot suggestions or otherwise do what makes micro-managing bad: interfering with people's work for trivial purposes.
Better turn off your wifi and your cellular radio too. Both of those combined is accurate enough to know where you are within a few meters. Plenty of accuracy to stake out your building in person, or order a drone strike.
Approximate accuracy of the various aspects of your cell phone:
GPS: 3 meters Good enough for a direct drone hit Bluetooth: 1-100 meters, depending on the intended use WiFi: 20-92 meters. Enough to pick up from the store next door at a shopping center. Cell Radio: 10-100 meters, depending on location and type of relay equipment.
Technically, location of a cell phone by its radio is known as trilateration. This is different from triangulation in that the location is computed "inside out" from the towers to the phone instead of from the phone to the towers.
Not included in the above are infrared (not as common on modern phones and limited to line-of-sight) and the possibility that the Feds might be able to override the phone's normal operation and force it to emit an audio (possibly infra- or supersonic) beacon - the reverse of the tin-foil fears that the microphone could be remotely activated.
While it's possibly no longer true, some phones had GPS that was not accessible to users and developers, It was kept permanently switched off to conserve power. However, if you dialed 911, the phone would switch it on for emergency location services.
i just wish he hadnt put his name on those "co-authored" series, never cared for most of those.
But, really, can you blame him?
When someone comes along and says "hey, we'll give you big piles of money if we can crank out pulp associated with your name and based in and around your fiction", it's hard to turn them down when they add enough zeroes.
I suspect he was happy enough to get the money.
I don't think I ever read Clancy. He was the last of the Cold War novelists, and that kind of stuff isn't up my alley. But the '90's were full of "co-authored" books. Apparently the publishers no longer had the courage to introduce new authors so they attached up-and-comers to well-established big names.
As it happens, most of the authors I read on a regular basis who are new since about Y2K didn't originally show up as co-authors, for whatever that ploy was worth.
If you're tired of their bullshit YOU SHOULDN'T BE VOTING FOR THEM!
Give us an option of"I AM VOTING AGAINST ALL THE SCUMBAGS" on your ballot ticket, then.
Or else, who the fuck are we supposed to vote for ?? Most of us already know that those appearing on our ballot tickets are scumbags.
Write in someone. Write in Mickey Mouse, if you really want to get the point across. Just don't stay home and get ignored, and for FSM's sake DON'T VOTE FOR ANYONE BASED ON A SINGLE/NARROW ISSUE! We need a government that can function full-spectrum, not bicker back and forth on things that may be important to individuals but are distractions from what's important for the country.
Change does not come from within. Real change must be made from the outside.
Correct, and here's how to do it: WOLF-PAC. Launched in October 2011 for the purpose of passing a 28th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution that will end corporate personhood and publicly finance all elections. Since Congress won't pass such an Amendment on its own, the plan is to instead have the State Legislators propose it via an Article Five Convention. At least 34 States need to cooperate for this to work, but already many have reacted with enthusiasm, most notably Texas. If successful, the real problem should be fixed within one or two election cycles.
I am quite willing to sign up for this. But not everything wrong with US government can be laid at the feet of corporations. Some corporations do benefit from the current state of affairs, it is true. And some are greatly inconvenienced. By even if you wrote corporations out of the equation entirely, the real mover here is power and the people with the power are merely getting some of their funding from corporate sources. Getting their campaigns financed by other means wouldn't change the people behind it.
I've said before that money is not speech, it's just a bigger megaphone. The last election demonstrated quite handily that even the largest war chest is no guarantee that those grimy worthless little voters won't pick someone else. So, while pulling the money plug is a worthwhile effort, don't expect it to solve all problems.
Australia has something called "double dissolution" where, to fit the US system, both the Senate and Congress would be dismissed in entirety and an election for all seats would take place.
You should look into that.
America used to use a quaint old system. It involved tar, feathers, and being run out of town on a rail.
I find your two paragraphs in disagreement with each other.
Instead of funding everything at once, the Republicans in the House passed a bill funding some things but not others, so that what is more generally agreed upon can continue to work while the rest would need its own separate spending authorization. From your first paragraph, this would seem to be a step in the right direction.
And yet, your second paragraph turns around criticizes the Republicans for NOT bundling all things. You suggest they should bundle everything then coming back later with a separate bill to remove some of them.
That's just whitewash. The bill being held hostage is to pay for things already funded. "Killing" a law by de-funding it is what you do when you cannot get the law repealed by more honest means.
What's hysterically funny about all this is that the same people who are claiming that "This is the Will of the People" are the first ones to scream "It's not a Democracy, it's a Republic!"
What's hysterically funny is that there's no conflict there. Government must do the will of The People or it will fall, sooner or later.
But the difference between Republic and Democracy (in their crudest forms) is precisely how you compute the will of the People. The normal pro-Republic stance is that Direct Democracy is mob rule and that mobs cannot be depended on to rule wisely.
Except, apparently, when the mob agrees with them.
If the Republican Party had any integrity, they'd stop attaching Obamacare to the budgetary process, get the darn thing passed, then do an honest frontal assault on Obamacare.
Incorrect. If the Politicians had any integrity, they roll out stuff like Obamacare in a small test area, and IT WOULD BE ALLOWED based on the experimental nature of science, not rejected out of hand because it flies in the face of some bullshit untested ideological hypotheses about health care spending. Then it would be evaluated against control groups. Modifications would be made if needed as it was rolled out to more and more people -- Or stopped.
I thought the "small test area" was called "Massachusetts". Rolling out a huge nation wide change without any evidence it will work is fucking moronic. Opposing said changes without any evidence of their harm after the fact is equally moronic. Fire Congress, no Scientist would agree to be ruled thus.
The idea of tacking completely unrelated issues together on an up-or-down vote basis is one of the ugliest facets of the US legislative process. You take a bill, name it "The Homeless Puppies and Kittens Act", put in a token support for animal shelters, then festoon it with pork-barrel riders such as Interstate Highways to nowhere, covert espionage on citizens, etc., etc., etc. like lampreys on a whale. Now no one can vote against wasteful spending or violations of basic rights because if they do, they "hate puppies and kittens". And the puppies and kittens are hostages.
If the Republican Party had any integrity, they'd stop attaching Obamacare to the budgetary process, get the darn thing passed, then do an honest frontal assault on Obamacare. But then, they can't win that, so intelligent people would regroup, plan for a more opportune time, and spend their resources on something that actually did the country some good, building some political capital that they could use for the next attack. But then again, intelligent and Congress never did go too well together.
No, the house of representatives represents the will of the gerrymanderers. Theres a reason why the senate and president are Democrat controlled, while the House is republican controlled. Heres a hint: The republicans redrew district lines to increase republican votes!
What's hysterically funny about all this is that the same people who are claiming that "This is the Will of the People" are the first ones to scream "It's not a Democracy, it's a Republic!"
I take anytime a government spying in their own people over a government spying and controlling other countries people, sometimes even is a reaction for their own protection, to avoid the dangers implied of other government controlling your own people. Also, using Russia, China and a few more as all the 200+ governments is a good generalization to support that it must be good because others do it, there are thousands of people that steal, so everyone steals, so is ok that you do it, no?
The difference is that if China has Total Information Awareness about you and you live in the US, their direct control over you is necessarily limited. The FBI, DHS, et. al. are all ultimately branches of the US Federal Government, which in turn has a lot of control in both carrot and stick forms over state and local government agencies. China cannot sic the FBI on you. The NSA on the other hand...
The jobs have left. There is a whole world of smart people who are now competing. The IT revolution has made knowledge and work transfer easier and easier. If it weren't for H1b's to complain about it would be the sound of jobs being sucked out of the developed world. Unions won't stop it. They might shift the playing field a smidgen.
Maybe more than a smidgen. Garment workers in Bangladesh have started agitating for more union representation. Seems they got tired of having the overcrowded Dark Satanic Mills collapse on them while pulling their 15-hour shifts.
The result is a competent creative who is suddenly being pitted against people whose standard of living requires a third or less of the salary by a company whose primary interest isn't in being a good corporate citizen, investing in the community, or even playing by the rules that conservative and libertarian proponents pay lip service to, but increasing "shareholder value" by any means necessary no matter who suffers, and no matter how bad it is for the community, the region, and the country.
A company's sole purpose is to increase shareholder value; as defined by the shareholders. Some companies include things beyond a financial return, or believe being socially responsible results in greater returns; but in any case they driver is still shareholder value and shareholders ultimately vote with their wallets.
You make it sound like Democracy. It isn't. Most corporations have the majority of their voting shares in the hands of a very small number of people and/or investment organizations that have little interest in their investments other than strictly financial.
Corporations operate under Charter. Charters are granted by States, which ostensibly operate to the good of their citizens. Meaning that the State determined that the Corporation in question would benefit the State and thus (theoretically) the citizens thereof.
We seem to have forgotten that and forgotten that not all of the benefits - or liabilities - of a Corporation are the ones on the balance sheet. And the bar for determining benefits is presently extremely low.
This isn't just pedantry. We have seen indications that we may be moving into a post-employment economy, where the number of workers needed to provide not just essentials, but luxuries as well is vastly outstripped by the population. It's going to take more than the Church of the Marketplace to deal with that.
In short, while it's all well and good to argue about whether INTERNATIONAL Business Machines should tap INTERNATIONAL sources of labor over domestic ones, it's really just one note in a symphony. Times are changing and it's going to take more than simple re-arrangements to deal with them. The roles of people in relationship to employment, employees in relation to employers, employers in relation to the governments who give them their mandates and regulations, all these and more need thorough study in reference to where we seem to be heading.
This is more than just the 18th Century Robber Baron version of Capitalism giving way to the early 20th Century Management-vs-Labor to the late 20th Century Plunder-and-Parachute model of business. It's a potential revolution, and if not handled well will be so in the most bloody and literal sense of the word.
Business is more than just supply-and-demand. At its heart, it's people. People make the decisions that govern business, both purchasing and regulating. And the roles of the people are changing, whether they want them to or not.
That the USA has a history of rotten unions is obvious. It also has a history of much better ones (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_Workers_of_the_World). In the 90's we had some trouble over here with a union that didn't do anything for its members either. A new one was founded and quickly outmatched the old one whose members left in droves for the new union.
Having no union is still worse than even a corrupt union, though, as the corrupt union has to do at least *something* for their members in order to get them to join. And if you're in a closed shop, you can apply and organize inside the union. Not easy but sitting back and complaining never helped anyone.
Soooo, You're saying that there's a Market for Unions? And that people will choose the one that works for them? How Capital!
Well, so far, we've had two category ones and 7 tropical storms. In early August, NOAA predicted 13-19 named storms, including 6-9 hurricanes, 3-5 of them major.[1]
so, expect a big pileup in October and November. Maybe even a storm to ring in the new year
Or not.
The traditional formulas for statistical prediction of hurricanes have been patently knocked for a loop. So we can say that the statistics indicate that we've some catching up to do, but then again, where I live, we're double-plus overdue over multiple years.
So I won't "expect" a pileup or even a big storm. Though I will be prepared. Because frankly we don't have a clue anymore.
Slashdot Mirror
And how is this a bad thing?
We are moving from an industrial society to an intellectual society.
We're doomed then. Consider the current state of the US Government. Aren't they supposed to be intellectual workers?
The article is absolutely correct. But it also fails to take into account that the new jobs are lower paying while inflation decreases the value of the new wages.
As they say in the investment business: "Past performance cannot guarantee future results". Notice also that the claim was "rarely destroys jobs". Rarely is not the same as never.
Lower wage assertions aside, let's look also at the things that we lost on the way to all these gains: No more telephone operators. "All of our representatives are currently busy helping other customers. Please stay on the Line. Your Call is very important to us." Phone menu hell.
Secretaries? Receptionists? There are security guards at the front desk, not receptionists. There's no typing pool anymore. So most typing is being done directly by people who used to hand it off. Aided and abetted by spell-checkers capable of picking exactly the wrong homonym. Keypunch operators? Those were people who began to replace the secretaries, but now we expect the end use to be the data entry clerk. Often multiple times, as anyone who has had to repeatedly give out the same information while running phone menu Hell.
Independent booksellers may be on the upswing, but they still don't number as many as they did before B&N and Amazon moved in. In the mean time, many retailers jettisoned their expensive, experienced, knowledgeable sales people for cheaper transient ones. Like Circuit City, for example.
Gourmet chefs have spent most of history at the low end of the payscale. The recent fad in super-star chefs is likely mostly fad. But automated food prep was pretty well perfected before all that started anyway. And there's absolutely nothing like the taste of an efficient meal.
Most of the last 50-100 years have seen businesses ramping up efficiencies. Adding more and more automation, requiring fewer and fewer people and generally offering lower and lower prices (along with less and less personalized service). But open-ended curves are rare in nature, and straight lines to infinity are purely a mathematical abstraction. We appear to be near an asymptotic node as concerns efficiency, price, service, and keeping enough people employed to afford it all.
So enjoy it while you can.
Or, as one dinosaur said to the other, "Just ignore that flash in the sky. The Earth's temperature has been just perfect for over 200 million years!"
You can't really extrapolate from a handful of CEOs what a good management strategy is. Very, very few managers are CEOs, or ever will be.
And is what's being described here even micromanagement? It's one thing to "micromanage" by insisting that your products meet your standards, it's another to insist on specific details like underlying technologies or what color the office chairs should be.
On the flip side, there's certain aspects of the old "HP Way" that could be described as micromanagement. But I guess it would be toxic to even mention HP when you're talking about best practices in running a company these days.
I wouldn't call this "micromanagement". I'd call it "focussed management". The people in question determined what absolutely positively needed to be done right, studied their subject and homed in on it. They didn't second-guess paper-clip purchases, make idiot suggestions or otherwise do what makes micro-managing bad: interfering with people's work for trivial purposes.
Better turn off your wifi and your cellular radio too. Both of those combined is accurate enough to know where you are within a few meters. Plenty of accuracy to stake out your building in person, or order a drone strike.
Approximate accuracy of the various aspects of your cell phone:
GPS: 3 meters Good enough for a direct drone hit
Bluetooth: 1-100 meters, depending on the intended use
WiFi: 20-92 meters. Enough to pick up from the store next door at a shopping center.
Cell Radio: 10-100 meters, depending on location and type of relay equipment.
Technically, location of a cell phone by its radio is known as trilateration. This is different from triangulation in that the location is computed "inside out" from the towers to the phone instead of from the phone to the towers.
Not included in the above are infrared (not as common on modern phones and limited to line-of-sight) and the possibility that the Feds might be able to override the phone's normal operation and force it to emit an audio (possibly infra- or supersonic) beacon - the reverse of the tin-foil fears that the microphone could be remotely activated.
While it's possibly no longer true, some phones had GPS that was not accessible to users and developers, It was kept permanently switched off to conserve power. However, if you dialed 911, the phone would switch it on for emergency location services.
But, really, can you blame him?
When someone comes along and says "hey, we'll give you big piles of money if we can crank out pulp associated with your name and based in and around your fiction", it's hard to turn them down when they add enough zeroes.
I suspect he was happy enough to get the money.
I don't think I ever read Clancy. He was the last of the Cold War novelists, and that kind of stuff isn't up my alley. But the '90's were full of "co-authored" books. Apparently the publishers no longer had the courage to introduce new authors so they attached up-and-comers to well-established big names.
As it happens, most of the authors I read on a regular basis who are new since about Y2K didn't originally show up as co-authors, for whatever that ploy was worth.
"The number of male developers is currently close to the low, at 86%, which might indicate more females are taking up programming."
Might indicate more females? Do we have a large number of non-gender or 3rd gender in the workforce taking up programming?
Might just indicate that women are staying in the profession. Places I worked, women dropped out, got married, had kids.
If you're tired of their bullshit YOU SHOULDN'T BE VOTING FOR THEM!
Give us an option of" I AM VOTING AGAINST ALL THE SCUMBAGS " on your ballot ticket, then.
Or else, who the fuck are we supposed to vote for ?? Most of us already know that those appearing on our ballot tickets are scumbags.
Write in someone. Write in Mickey Mouse, if you really want to get the point across. Just don't stay home and get ignored, and for FSM's sake DON'T VOTE FOR ANYONE BASED ON A SINGLE/NARROW ISSUE! We need a government that can function full-spectrum, not bicker back and forth on things that may be important to individuals but are distractions from what's important for the country.
Change does not come from within. Real change must be made from the outside.
Correct, and here's how to do it: WOLF-PAC. Launched in October 2011 for the purpose of passing a 28th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution that will end corporate personhood and publicly finance all elections. Since Congress won't pass such an Amendment on its own, the plan is to instead have the State Legislators propose it via an Article Five Convention. At least 34 States need to cooperate for this to work, but already many have reacted with enthusiasm, most notably Texas. If successful, the real problem should be fixed within one or two election cycles.
I am quite willing to sign up for this. But not everything wrong with US government can be laid at the feet of corporations. Some corporations do benefit from the current state of affairs, it is true. And some are greatly inconvenienced. By even if you wrote corporations out of the equation entirely, the real mover here is power and the people with the power are merely getting some of their funding from corporate sources. Getting their campaigns financed by other means wouldn't change the people behind it.
I've said before that money is not speech, it's just a bigger megaphone. The last election demonstrated quite handily that even the largest war chest is no guarantee that those grimy worthless little voters won't pick someone else. So, while pulling the money plug is a worthwhile effort, don't expect it to solve all problems.
Australia has something called "double dissolution" where, to fit the US system, both the Senate and Congress would be dismissed in entirety and an election for all seats would take place.
You should look into that.
America used to use a quaint old system. It involved tar, feathers, and being run out of town on a rail.
Maybe we should revive it.
I find your two paragraphs in disagreement with each other.
Instead of funding everything at once, the Republicans in the House passed a bill funding some things but not others, so that what is more generally agreed upon can continue to work while the rest would need its own separate spending authorization. From your first paragraph, this would seem to be a step in the right direction.
And yet, your second paragraph turns around criticizes the Republicans for NOT bundling all things. You suggest they should bundle everything then coming back later with a separate bill to remove some of them.
That's just whitewash. The bill being held hostage is to pay for things already funded. "Killing" a law by de-funding it is what you do when you cannot get the law repealed by more honest means.
What's hysterically funny about all this is that the same people who are claiming that "This is the Will of the People" are the first ones to scream "It's not a Democracy, it's a Republic!"
What's hysterically funny is that there's no conflict there. Government must do the will of The People or it will fall, sooner or later.
But the difference between Republic and Democracy (in their crudest forms) is precisely how you compute the will of the People. The normal pro-Republic stance is that Direct Democracy is mob rule and that mobs cannot be depended on to rule wisely.
Except, apparently, when the mob agrees with them.
If the Republican Party had any integrity, they'd stop attaching Obamacare to the budgetary process, get the darn thing passed, then do an honest frontal assault on Obamacare.
Incorrect. If the Politicians had any integrity, they roll out stuff like Obamacare in a small test area, and IT WOULD BE ALLOWED based on the experimental nature of science, not rejected out of hand because it flies in the face of some bullshit untested ideological hypotheses about health care spending. Then it would be evaluated against control groups. Modifications would be made if needed as it was rolled out to more and more people -- Or stopped.
I thought the "small test area" was called "Massachusetts".
Rolling out a huge nation wide change without any evidence it will work is fucking moronic. Opposing said changes without any evidence of their harm after the fact is equally moronic. Fire Congress, no Scientist would agree to be ruled thus.
The idea of tacking completely unrelated issues together on an up-or-down vote basis is one of the ugliest facets of the US legislative process. You take a bill, name it "The Homeless Puppies and Kittens Act", put in a token support for animal shelters, then festoon it with pork-barrel riders such as Interstate Highways to nowhere, covert espionage on citizens, etc., etc., etc. like lampreys on a whale. Now no one can vote against wasteful spending or violations of basic rights because if they do, they "hate puppies and kittens". And the puppies and kittens are hostages.
If the Republican Party had any integrity, they'd stop attaching Obamacare to the budgetary process, get the darn thing passed, then do an honest frontal assault on Obamacare. But then, they can't win that, so intelligent people would regroup, plan for a more opportune time, and spend their resources on something that actually did the country some good, building some political capital that they could use for the next attack. But then again, intelligent and Congress never did go too well together.
The government sets the framework. People within it then do their best (or their worst, in this case mostly their worst).
This is heresy! The government is BAAAAd! BAAAAd! BAAAAd! Everything would be perfect if the goddam gubbmint would just get out of the way.
(This message brought to you by Duckspeakers USA.) No actual brain cells were used in the creating of this message.
Italy has a government?
No, the house of representatives represents the will of the gerrymanderers. Theres a reason why the senate and president are Democrat controlled, while the House is republican controlled. Heres a hint: The republicans redrew district lines to increase republican votes!
What's hysterically funny about all this is that the same people who are claiming that "This is the Will of the People" are the first ones to scream "It's not a Democracy, it's a Republic!"
Locking your doors won't keep out determined burglars, but do you leave your house unlocked when you're not there? Why do you even have locks?
We seem to be more in a position where the door has more locks than Maxwell Smart's front door, but the windows are wide open.
Fortunately, terrorists are just as obsessed with doors as the US Government.
Unless they start taking their cues from Kenya.
War on it's own citizens
War on mis-use of apostrophe's (sic)
I take anytime a government spying in their own people over a government spying and controlling other countries people, sometimes even is a reaction for their own protection, to avoid the dangers implied of other government controlling your own people. Also, using Russia, China and a few more as all the 200+ governments is a good generalization to support that it must be good because others do it, there are thousands of people that steal, so everyone steals, so is ok that you do it, no?
The difference is that if China has Total Information Awareness about you and you live in the US, their direct control over you is necessarily limited. The FBI, DHS, et. al. are all ultimately branches of the US Federal Government, which in turn has a lot of control in both carrot and stick forms over state and local government agencies. China cannot sic the FBI on you. The NSA on the other hand...
Use yaks. Not as fast, but more capacity per "packet".
The NSA has logged your opposition to this idea, and they wish to notify you that this is going on your permanent record.
The NSA has also noted that Kevin Bacon is now a Person of Interest.
The jobs have left. There is a whole world of smart people who are now competing. The IT revolution has made knowledge and work transfer easier and easier. If it weren't for H1b's to complain about it would be the sound of jobs being sucked out of the developed world. Unions won't stop it. They might shift the playing field a smidgen.
Maybe more than a smidgen. Garment workers in Bangladesh have started agitating for more union representation. Seems they got tired of having the overcrowded Dark Satanic Mills collapse on them while pulling their 15-hour shifts.
The result is a competent creative who is suddenly being pitted against people whose standard of living requires a third or less of the salary by a company whose primary interest isn't in being a good corporate citizen, investing in the community, or even playing by the rules that conservative and libertarian proponents pay lip service to, but increasing "shareholder value" by any means necessary no matter who suffers, and no matter how bad it is for the community, the region, and the country.
A company's sole purpose is to increase shareholder value; as defined by the shareholders. Some companies include things beyond a financial return, or believe being socially responsible results in greater returns; but in any case they driver is still shareholder value and shareholders ultimately vote with their wallets.
You make it sound like Democracy. It isn't. Most corporations have the majority of their voting shares in the hands of a very small number of people and/or investment organizations that have little interest in their investments other than strictly financial.
Corporations operate under Charter. Charters are granted by States, which ostensibly operate to the good of their citizens. Meaning that the State determined that the Corporation in question would benefit the State and thus (theoretically) the citizens thereof.
We seem to have forgotten that and forgotten that not all of the benefits - or liabilities - of a Corporation are the ones on the balance sheet. And the bar for determining benefits is presently extremely low.
This isn't just pedantry. We have seen indications that we may be moving into a post-employment economy, where the number of workers needed to provide not just essentials, but luxuries as well is vastly outstripped by the population. It's going to take more than the Church of the Marketplace to deal with that.
In short, while it's all well and good to argue about whether INTERNATIONAL Business Machines should tap INTERNATIONAL sources of labor over domestic ones, it's really just one note in a symphony. Times are changing and it's going to take more than simple re-arrangements to deal with them. The roles of people in relationship to employment, employees in relation to employers, employers in relation to the governments who give them their mandates and regulations, all these and more need thorough study in reference to where we seem to be heading.
This is more than just the 18th Century Robber Baron version of Capitalism giving way to the early 20th Century Management-vs-Labor to the late 20th Century Plunder-and-Parachute model of business. It's a potential revolution, and if not handled well will be so in the most bloody and literal sense of the word.
Business is more than just supply-and-demand. At its heart, it's people. People make the decisions that govern business, both purchasing and regulating. And the roles of the people are changing, whether they want them to or not.
That the USA has a history of rotten unions is obvious. It also has a history of much better ones (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_Workers_of_the_World). In the 90's we had some trouble over here with a union that didn't do anything for its members either. A new one was founded and quickly outmatched the old one whose members left in droves for the new union.
Having no union is still worse than even a corrupt union, though, as the corrupt union has to do at least *something* for their members in order to get them to join. And if you're in a closed shop, you can apply and organize inside the union. Not easy but sitting back and complaining never helped anyone.
Soooo, You're saying that there's a Market for Unions? And that people will choose the one that works for them? How Capital!
Well, so far, we've had two category ones and 7 tropical storms. In early August, NOAA predicted 13-19 named storms, including 6-9 hurricanes, 3-5 of them major.[1]
so, expect a big pileup in October and November. Maybe even a storm to ring in the new year
Or not.
The traditional formulas for statistical prediction of hurricanes have been patently knocked for a loop. So we can say that the statistics indicate that we've some catching up to do, but then again, where I live, we're double-plus overdue over multiple years.
So I won't "expect" a pileup or even a big storm. Though I will be prepared. Because frankly we don't have a clue anymore.