What corporate welfare has gotten us...("job creators", my ass)

[Triana]

[nichomachus]

1. Let me tell you my personal experience

I have a free-lance job in which I edit interviews and round-table discussions with corporate executives -- mostly in the IT industry. I've been doing this for 10 years.

In that 10 years, no one has ever bragged about creating jobs. In fact, quite the opposite. They pat themselves and each other on the back for "reducing headcount," "driving out cost" (firing people), "running lean," and whatever other euphemism you can think of.

They brag about laying off thousands of people. Their Holy Grail is a "lights-out operation," in which something like a data center is run without any humans present, and a handful of people can run multiple sites remotely.

The newest trend, of which they are all very fond, is running with "contingent workers" (we used to call them temps) or what they also call "statement of work" workers (SOWs).

Many companies are now running with 30 percent SOWs -- and some are at 50 percent. You're hired for a project or a task within a project. When the task or project is over, you're back on the street looking for another gig.

Job creators my ass.

[uponit7771]

2. +1, they OPENLY .. OPENLY reward themselves and others for cutting jobs

[SoapBox]

3. wow...

And a couple things that stick in my mind as of recent...

TPP

and

Nabisco is moving Oreos production to Mexico

[forest444]

11. 5 million jobs lost to the Third World since 2000.

Trump's right: they're laughing at us, and our stupid leadership.

(not that he would do anything about it if he took office - on the contrary, judging from his own record of offhoring, outsourcing, and illegal hiring).

[LittleGirl]

4. That's because IT is a capital expense

for companies and doesn't provide any income; just spends it on security and network administration by third party companies. Been in IT for over 30 yrs and what you describe is exactly what they were striving for when I left the industry about 9 yrs ago. I saw the writing on the wall and instead of getting certified in Microsoft products, I got a business management degree while I worked full time and was on call 24/7/365. Burned me out and I had had enough of that shit. My husband is still employed but left the IT field for the same reasons a couple of years ago. And in the states, there are no unions to protect employees so the employers hire H1-B or contract folks that will work for just above minimum wage and replace the life long IT folks that deserved their pay and benefits even though they got laid off eventually. Saw it many many times.

[nichomachus]

6. And they're making it an operating expense

Employees are just like automobiles now. They're "leased" for a certain amount of time and then turned in when no longer needed.

The sad thing is that they say the young workers really like this model. And I guess it would be attractive to a 20-something where they're doing something different all the time.

But I can imagine it's gets pretty old pretty quick. Who wants to be scrambling for a new job all the time?

Also, I don't think it's just in IT, although that's what I deal with. I have friends in other fields who are finding the same thing. They're professionals in their 50s and are constantly scrounging for a short-term gig to pay the bills.

One of the problems they face is that the older you get, the less value you have in the market. What 35-year-old hiring manager is going to hire a 55-year-old?

It's also happening in the medical field. A local hospital gets its in-house physicians from a company that provides them. Just recently, they decided to change physician supply companies, and all the doctors at the hospital were gone -- replaced with new people.

[davidpdx]

16. Disposable employees is really what corporations are looking for

I think long-term employment is going to become harder to find if the trend continues.

[Martin Eden]

5. Profit driven businesses always try to keep costs down

Some have different business cultures regarding how they treat employees. For example, there is risk in running a "lean" workforce that is overstressed; productivity and quality can go down, and valuable people will be lost.

But regardless of the business philosophy, labor is a cost that is always managed to increase profits.

My point is that, all other factors remaining constant, DEMAND for the product or service is by far the largest variable that will create new jobs within the company.

And demand goes up when the average consumer has more disposable income.

[Triana]

9. Ah yes. The new "gig" economy.

Royally screwed workers and richer than ever CxOs.

[Ed Suspicious]

10. This has been my experience as an guy who gets to work with a large management staff. We are

owned by an investment firm. There seems to be a love of "lean" at my work. It is the order of the day. Less headcount == more profit. Let somebody work twice as hard to pick up the work of the guy they laid off. When that fails, fire the guy and pick up two temps to do the job half as well, but with no commitment and low salary.

Job Creators my ass. The day I stop being a human resource, a cost on the balance sheet is the day I consider them job creators.

[B Calm]

7. I tell right wingers every chance I get that jobs are created by consumers, not businesses! With

demand for a product you will always find someone willing to capitalize on the demand.

[Marr]

12. Every single (employed) right-winger I know has a government job.

Most have been getting their money from the government literally since birth (father was a cop, in the military, local bureaucracy, etc.).

I literally don't know a single right-winger who made their way in the 'free market' they lionize so much. They're either employed by the government, or unemployed and blaming minorities for their lack of a job.

[DirkGently]

8. Wealth flows up;

not down. Supply-side, trickle down, voodoo -- by any name, the idea that we somehow get to a better situation for the many by catering exclusively to the few is a lie invented, oddly enough, by the "few" in question.

[Dark n Stormy Knight]

13. Such an obvious point that somehow the Dem party can't seem to use to get elected.

Of course, partly because too many of them buy into that BS.

[Triana]

14. There's a lot of ammo the Dem party refuses to use to its advantage

Either because too many of them are part of the problem or/and they're too chickenshit to do it. The party today is only a whispy ghost of what it used to be. Dems don't even recognize their own principles anymore when a candidate talks about them. It's pretty damn sad. And it's really really bad.

[daredtowork]

15. We dialed back labor law to enable "innovation". What did we get back? nt