MyDD :: Breaking The Backs America Is Built Upon

Breaking The Backs America Is Built Upon

by aimlessmind, Wed Sep 01, 2004 at 12:33:03 AM EST

I'm sick and tired of being told that businesses simply can't afford to pay workers decent wages and still make a profit. I'm sick and tired of workers being sacrificed to increase "shareholder value" or pad the pockets of CEOs. I'm so goddamn sick and tired of corporations shitting on workers in the pursuit of a couple of extra dollars profit.

About two weeks ago, it was announced that Fred Meyer would be outsourcing their cleaning crew work. Basically, every store has an overnight cleaning crew consisting of a few people who clean the store and prepare it for the next day. In many cases, these people have worked for the company for years. They're good workers and they do a fine job.

As of September 12, it appears most of them will be fired. It sucks. I work with these guys and I find this disgusting. What's worse is the way they found out about this. No boss bothered to come around, sit them down and explain the situation. No, they found out through a goddamn newspaper article. The cleaning crew workers read about their future termination in the newspaper. No one from the company bothered to tell them beforehand.

I'm so fucking sick of all this. It's happening across the country. Good workers are being fired because their jobs can be done by other people, for less money, because they need the work to survive. Paying ten dollars an hour and benefits to people to clean the stores at night is just way too much money when the job could be outsourced. There's no concern for the people that they are firing just before the Christmas season begins. Obviously, there's no concern for these people at all, since not a single person from the company could even be bothered to tell them about their termination before it hit the newspapers.

Fuck Fred Meyer. That's all I can say about it. I was leaving the store after my shift the other night and walked past the supplies room that the cleaning crew uses. They have a whiteboard up to specify cleaning routes for the night. In the corner was written, "Soon to be homeless. Donation cup." with an arrow pointing down to a plastic container.

It was written in good humor, yes, but it's depressing the same. Here are coworkers who have spent years working hard for this company and they are being unceremoniously thrown out on their asses. A couple months before Christmas, no less, and without even the common courtesy of being informed about it personally before reading about it in the newspaper. And why are they being tossed? Because they can be outsourced and a few extra bucks of profit can be made. There's no consideration for these people and their survival. There's no consideration for their well-being, their loyalty, their family or the job they've done for the company for years. Expenses can be lowered, so fuck you.

It's not necessary. Don't tell me it's necessary. Fred Meyer has existed for decades and they've managed to afford night cleaning crews. This isn't about a necessity to stay in business, it's about screwing over 300 good employees so that they can maximize their profits. And it's happening across the country, with jobs being outsourced and eliminated, workloads being increased, benefits being reduced and workers, in general, being screwed hard and fast. It's all done with little to no concern for what these workers will do. It doesn't matter that lives are being fucked with and maybe even ruined.

Yet we're told over and over that this is necessary for businesses to stay competitive. Well, bullshit. Workers can be paid a decent wage, given good benefits, and still work for a profitable company. If that's an impossibility, then I have no idea how America has built such a strong economy throughout its history. This goddamn country was built on the back of plain old workers, not CEOs and shareholders. This country is as great as it is because of millions upon millions of workers--blue collar, white collar, illegal. They put in hard days and nights of working, make money for other people, and go home to enjoy their lives, their friends, their family. They ask that they be paid fairly and be allowed the necessities to live. But apparently even this is too much to ask. Apparently the future is to work shit jobs for shit wages and shit benefits--and to be fired at any point for any reason, most likely so that a couple dollars more profit can be made.

Fuck it. It's disgusting. We need to step back and admit to ourselves that as great as Capitalism is, it has one major flaw: it has no ingrained morality. Capitalism is an amoral system in which the sole pursuit is profit and all other pursuits are considered secondary. Take twenty CEOs and ask them if the well-being of their workers and customers is as an important and pressing concern for them as the company's bottom line. If they're being honest, at least nineteen will laugh their asses off at you. Business today is making a profit; it has nothing to do with improving people's lives.

But it should. The well-being of workers and customers should be as high of a priority for every single business as profits are. Capitalism may be an amoral system, but that does not mean it has to be run as such. Ultimately, it is us humans who decide how the system functions and it is up to us, at every turn, to introduce morality into the workings of Capitalism. It is up to us to concern ourselves with our fellow workers, our customers, our friends and family and neighbors. That notion, though, has been mostly lost in business today and if it is not corrected it will haunt us. It will destroy us. The common workers are who keep America running and our economy will collapse in upon itself if businesses and corporations don't start showing them some goddamn respect.

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This isn't the half of it (5.00 / 1)

The GOP has been waging a 20-plus year war on labor in the US. The Bush administration is simply the most recent, and undeniably the most ruthless about it. See Robert Borosage's story in the American Prospect, for an overview.

The war on labor is one front in the effort to shift power, resources, and benefits from earners to owners.

I agree, we forget that the post-war prosperity was built on giving working Americans a fair shake.

by plunkitt on Wed Sep 01, 2004 at 12:14:23 PM EST

Re: This isn't the half of it (none / 0)

Thanks for the link to the article, plunkitt. That's a great read, disturbing as it is. I knew about some of that, but not all of it.

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by aimlessmind on Wed Sep 01, 2004 at 03:04:36 PM EST
[ Parent ]

profit (5.00 / 1)

You're right about the lack of ingrained morality. Excellent rant, btw. However, I usually ascribe it not to the system of capitalism, but more to the workings of corporations. The difference is important since you can (at least in theory) have each one without the other.

It should be noted, btw, that I'm not a mindless corporation basher who spraypaints the windows of Starbucks. I'm speaking purely philosophically. If anyone here is not comfortable speaking or understanding the philosophy of morality, don't bother reading this. I've happily worked for some big corporations, and hell, I run a small one myself for financial reasons. I firmly believe that by itself a corporation has a null morality: neither good nor bad.

The problem comes from the fact that a typical corporation is an entity made up of a large, ever-changing group of people.

The large number of people means that individuals are distanced from the results of their actions. In general the person who decided to cut the jobs isn't the one having to do the firing himself. If he were, he would have an extra moral incentive to keep the jobs, since for most people it is a difficult task morally to have to tell someone to his face that he's fired or has to take a pay cut when it's your choice. That's why the smallest businesses tend to be compassionate, because they have not grown beyond this person-to-person morality. It's also a small part of why they are most vulnerable to getting squeezed by the bigger companies, because the lack of a person-to-person morality results in a competitive edge.

Are all corporations like that? No. Some people are intelligent enough and moral enough to really consider the effects of their distant actions. Some CEOs and VPs let people go only when they have to. Sometimes a moral atmosphere is created where the workers' lives are more important than the bottom line.

But then we run into our second pitfall: the roster of a corporation changes over time. People retire, quit, get hired, get promoted, and so on. Rather than having a moral compass which generally stays put, as individuals do, the corporation's equivalent compass is implemented by different people over time. And I'd argue that this shifting compass ultimately leads to a slow, and over the long term inevitable, slide downhill for the corporation's morality.

Simply put, this is because of the old philosophical saw that acting morally is, on balance, difficult. Acting immorally is easier. Ignoring the results of distant actions is easier than considering them. Good actions require constant tending, whereas bad actions happen one at a time and are frequently irreversible. Any given individual may have a strong tendency toward morality or immorality, but as you change personnel you eventually wind up with a rough average - an uncommonly moral and insightful person's actions may be canceled out by two slightly immoral or short-sighted persons' actions, et cetera. The net result is a slide away from morality. It may be ever so slight, and ever so slow, but all you need is a small tendency toward one over the other and over the long term the cumulative effect avalanches.

"Bad actions", of course, is a deliberately vague term. That's a term to which you have to apply your own moral judgments. But regardless of your definition, I believe that over time a corporation must tend toward a certain immorality, doing things that any given individual would never do on their own. It's not at all a deliberate thing -- instead it's the cumulative effect of a large number of small decisions. Given enough time, it's inevitable. (A similar argument is made in modern Christianity: individuals are pure when they are children, but always and inevitably become sinners in the end.)

So I don't know if I completely agree with you that we can simply choose to run things morally with an effort of will. It's not quite that easy. Just as in a casino, the odds are stacked against us.

[n.b.: Although I think corporations as we've currently defined them must inevitably tend toward immorality over the long run, that doesn't mean that I think that capitalism is bad, or even that the basic idea of a corporation is bad. One point of a corporation is to pool resources and act as a group to do things that we'd be unable to do otherwise. I can't praise that enough - our standard of living is due in no small part to the fact that we have learned to organize ourselves for mutual benefit.

But I do think there are pitfalls in any system, and that we should be working to figure out what they are before we fall victim to them. We should be able to tweak the system in some small way to make it work for all of us and not against us.]

by drewthaler on Wed Sep 01, 2004 at 02:38:38 PM EST

Re: profit (5.00 / 1)

Great reply, drew, and some good thoughts. I agree that corporations aren't inherently bad, it just seems that so many of them today are run in a cruel manner when it comes to how they treat their workers.

You're right that corporations will never act moral just because people decide to. I mean, it could happen if everyone did that and that was one of their foremost concerns--the fair treatment of people irregardless of making maximum profit--but it is indeed unrealistic that that will ever happen. I suppose what I want is for there to be a more widespread recognition throughout the country that morality belongs within our economy. For too many people, it seems that the belief of what our economy--and the desire of businesses--boils down to is making the greatest profit.

The economy, though, is actually about fulfilling needs. That's the entire point of an economy and the entire point of money--to fulfill the needs of the people who live on this planet. It's not fulfill the needs of the CEOs, the owners, or the shareholders--it's to fulfill the needs of everyone and that reality has been largely lost, at least on the people who are making the decisions.

Of course, this is where the unions come in. That's how the workers are kept strong. Unfortunately, unions have taken a real beating over the last few years. They've been particularly hit hard under the Bush admin, of course, but I'm pretty sure it started before then. There has been too great of a rise in corporations while small businesses have suffered and the unions have lost a lot of influence. It appears that way to me, anyway.

But I do agree with you that corporations are not inherently bad. The dominance of corporations is bad, as far as I'm concerned. The power that corporations wield within our society is bad. And the amoral and immoral ways the majority of them act is bad. If we could get to a point where protecting and nurturing workers was considered a top priority of CEOs--if it was as ingrained in the culture as making profits--then that would be a real start. Couple that with a decrease in the dominance of corporations, a rise in the influence of small businesses and a real strengthening of unions, then we would have a pretty damn good economy. Workers would be living much better, the economy would be much stronger and we would all be better off for it.

That's a long road that needs to be traveled, though.

Anyway, great thoughts on corporations. I'm definitely with you on what you say.

Elect Steve Novick to the U.S. Senate - Donate

by aimlessmind on Wed Sep 01, 2004 at 02:57:06 PM EST
[ Parent ]

widespread recognition (none / 0)

That's actually a very good point: that we need a widespread recognition of the importance of morality in the economy, and remembering what the economy is for. Recognizing that the bottom line, profit or loss, is not the goal but merely part of the picture. An important part, to be sure, and it needs to be maintained at a certain level -- but it's not the be-all end-all.

Unfortunately I sometimes fear that the only way we'll come to that realization is by making some colossal mistakes.

by drewthaler on Wed Sep 01, 2004 at 03:41:55 PM EST
[ Parent ]

There definetely are corporations which are good. (none / 0)

They also tend to be some of the most successful.

Lemme name three examples: Costco, Toyota, and Google.

Costco competes in the exact same market as Walmart's Sam's Club division. Yet they pay thier workers two or three times as much, with benefits, and thier workers are unionized. They are still insanely profitable. Their employees are more productive, sue the company more, and have lower turnover rates than places like Sam's Club. Happy employees are good for a company.

Toyota makes high-quality, reliable, enviromentally friendly cars, such as the Hybrid Prius. They are the ONLY car company to actually sell to consumers full-sized electric cars, instead of leasing them or selling them to fleets only (RAV4 electrics could be purchased in California for a couple years. Nobody bought them (sales were less than 100 a month), so they did finally pull the plug after a year or two. BUT NOBODY ELSE EVEN TRIED.) Two thirds of thier cars sold in the US are made in either the US or Canada, which is probably more than some "American" car makers. Their US factories aren't union, but thier US workers refuse to join the UAW, not because of company pressure, but because of fear of the UAW mucking up thier system. They make safe, reliabile cars. When was the last time you saw a news story about somebody suing Toyota because one of thier SUVs flipped over or the brakes failed or whatever? It never seems to happen-there's a reason. Oh, and they are so profitable, they could buy (in cash) 100% of the stock of either Ford or DaimlerChrysler using only two and a half year's profits (they made 10 BILLION dollars last year-Ford and DaimlerChrysler are each only worth about 25 billion).

And Google. Hell, thier corporate motto is "Don't be evil". They pay thier employees well and treat them right (my sister works for them, so I'm biased a bit). They've taken on the big guys (Microsoft, Yahoo) and won. Hell, even thier IPO was an attempt at Democracy.

Treating your employees and customers well MAKES a company successful-it doesn't prevent it.

by Geotpf on Wed Sep 01, 2004 at 03:15:39 PM EST

$2 per hour illegal immigrant cleaning crew (none / 0)

That's how Walmart saved money by outsourcing its overnight cleaning. A shell company is set up, brings in the illegals, pays them in cash (no Social Security, no check for documents), Walmart saves big, and if and when the Migra bust comes, they throw up their hands and say "Oh, we didn't know."

I suggest your laid-off friends look real closely at who takes their jobs. I don't mean this in the ethnic sense; Walmart used many Eastern Europeans.

Then drop a dime to the local INS folks, although under this Administration, they've probably been told to let the USA worker get screwed.

by Anonymous Citizen on Wed Sep 01, 2004 at 04:52:53 PM EST

Breaking The Backs America Is Built Upon (none / 0)

Workers can be paid a decent wage, given good benefits, and still work for a profitable company. If that's an impossibility, then I have no idea how America has built such a strong economy throughout its history.

Two things. First, rigid protectionism for the 19th century up through the early 1930s, when the 1930 tariff war triggered an unprecedented economic freefall. Second, the US was the beneficiary of a global war that obliterated and/or eviscerated every industrial power on the planet outside of North America.

by Anonymous Citizen on Wed Sep 01, 2004 at 06:55:57 PM EST

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