huffingtonpost: Circuit City Slaughter

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/barbara-ehrenreich/circuit-city-slaughter_b_45338.html

Circuit City Slaughter

Columnist Bill White of the Allentown Morning Call pictures Circuit City CEO Philip J. Schoonover getting a warm welcome to hell - very warm. Satan tells him, "This place is full of overpaid, outsourcing, golden-parachuting, employee-abusing worms like you." Schoonover's sin? Laying off 3400 employees because they had been around for too long and needed to be replaced by minimum wage workers.
His punishment? Having a choice of Dick Cheney or Nancy Grace as a roommate and spending eternity listening to Sanjaya's Greatest Hits.

The New York Times took the Circuit City slaughter with much greater equanimity. In his economics column last week, Times columnist David Leonhardt showed some pious sympathy for the laid-off, who will, after a 10 week cooling off period, be able to re-apply for their old jobs at much reduced pay. But he goes on to explain that Circuit City's employee abuse is just part of the larger corporate demand for "efficiency." Wal-Mart, after all, has capped employee pay and taken the stools away from its elderly employees. Sadly, Leonhardt notes:

It's probably not possible to halt these changes. It may not even be desirable. The flexibility of the American labor force seems to be one reason that recessions have become less frequent and unemployment is less of a problem here than in Europe, notes Jason Furman, a leading Democratic economist

Furman, by the way, is a pretty flexible guy himself. An advisor to John Kerry in 04, then an NYU professor, and now a project director at the Brookings Institute, he's made his mark as a "liberal" defender of Wal-Mart's anti-worker policies. It's fellows like Furman who put the "ick" in the word "Democratic."

But from Allentown to Times Square, no one is commenting on where the new flexibility may be taking us. Time was, not so long ago, when seniority was rewarded with higher pay and other perks. But that higher pay now carries a lethal risk. As a friend who writes software for a major multinational explained to me: "If you ask for a raise, the boss is going to say, 'Why would you want that? It would be like having a bulls-eye painted on your back.'" The more you make, the more tempting it is to fire you.

FULL story at link.

:kick:

I notice that CEOs have no problem whatsoever in asking for more money.

in France, Germany, Norway, or Sweden then have an "efficient" market here and a Walmart job. The welfare benefits in those countries would probably give you a better standard of living than WORKING in many low wage US jobs.

Why are our healthcare and pensions systems so deeply troubled?

They keep throwing out the idea that the US economy is so great as so some universally known truth when it isn't really true.

because they have printed so much of it. The bumbling Baboons of the beltway have doubled the anount of currency in circulation in 6 years.
If you bought a stock 3 years ago and it has gone up in value 7% a year
your in the hole by 9% as the value of dollar to Euro has gone down 30% in three years

which opened a couple years ago here. The help is young and inexperienced, and they are scarce.
It is not a highly regarded store and there are not a lot of customers there.
In conversation, people express frustration with the place and the competing privately owned businesses are doing well.

When CNN did a story about consumers fighting back - they featured Home Depot and the missing and ill-informed staff.

Just closed my IRA that was with a large corporate bank. When they guy tried to sell me some other "instruments" for my IRA I explained that I am sick of large corporations and I wanted to put it into a small local bank. He agreed.

This corporate behavior may not bring a big response from people but I sense there is a "corporate fatigue" building and predict a backlash.