Over at Barry Ritholz’s there’s a discussion of the cost of a business being cheap. Barry recounts how he used to work for a cheap employer and as a result he sent possible employees who could have earned his employer millions to other companies. He then asks if others are vindictive bastards like him.
Let me answer. Hell yes.
Some years ago I worked for a medium sized multinational. I was an hourly employee, meaning I was supposed to get overtime. I was in sales contact, I was one of the admin people who marshalled new contracts through the system, contracts which were worth, in a year, no exaggeration, in the 10s of millions of dollars. Some years in the low 100s.
At the time I was handling almost twice the normal case-load. So I was working a lot of overtime. I was hauled into my manager’s office and told I had to stop claiming so much overtime. I pointed out my case load. My manager noted two other people with about the same case load: “they aren’t claiming all this overtime.”
Me: “they are in before me and they leave after me. They may not be claiming it, but they are working it.”
Boss: “it doesn’t matter, I’m getting complaints from upper management.”
So, for a few weeks, I worked to rule. I worked 37.5 hours a week, then went home. The problem with that approach was that when things went wrong, the person the customers screamed at and complained about was me. So eventually, I gave in. I worked the hours, and I didn’t charge for them.
But I never, ever, forgot. And in perfectly legal ways, I cost the company millions of dollars of business over the rest of my career there. After all, I was in daily, hell, hourly, contact with the people who decided whether to send my company business. And I never, ever, pushed for business to come to my employer unless it was clear cut in the best interest of my contacts and their customers. If there were any legitimate negatives to sending business there, I gave them.
And because my contacts trusted me, because I always played fair by them, they listened.
Millions of dollars of business, because my employers were too cheap to pay me what would have probably amounted to two or three thousand dollars of overtime.
Because, yes, I am a vindictive son-of-a-bitch when I am treated unfairly. If I work the hours, you will pay me for them. If you choose not to, you WILL pay a price for it, one way or the other. (On the other hand, if you treat me well, I will work my guts out for you. One place had to replace me with 2 1/2 people when I left.)
I discussed with this with a friend who had been a senior executive once, his response was instructive. “Look Ian, even if they knew, they wouldn’t have really cared. ”
Me: “What, I’m costing them millions!”
Executive: “So? They figure that as much as they are screwing their employees and causing unhappy employees to cost them money, so is everyone else in the business, so it all evens out.”
Me: “But that means someone who treated their employees well would have a competitive advantage.”
Him: “They don’t think that way. Screwing employees is how they made their way up the ranks to where they are.”
Me: “that doesn’t make sense.”
Him: “Nope, but it’s true.”
Then, I went to work for our American subsidiary for a few weeks. And they were far, far worse.
But that’s another story…
I’m flabbergasted. How they hell did this man slip through the system?
Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart said he is only ordering evictions to resume because county prosecutors told him that he was legally bound to carry out foreclosure eviction orders signed by a judge.
“For the people who have been involved with this and think now that because the (Cook County) State’s Attorney’s office has ordered me to go ahead with the evictions that everything’s fine . . . No, we are going to be looking at you for criminal violations,” Dart said. “You may have got through one storm now, the other one is coming.”
Dart singled out Bank of America, JP Morgan Chase and GMAC/Ally Financial last month for problems with eviction notices. He said Friday that investigators continue to find problems with bank employees signing off on foreclosure documents they haven’t read, although he did not single out individual companies.
“When we asked a month ago . . . send me an affidavit to say that everything was done legally, not one organization, law firm handling these cases, not one of them sent in one document,” Dart said. “Not one, and they had over a month to do it.”…
I suppose I should point out that this is what EVERY Sherrif’s office in the US should be doing. We know fraud is widespread, they should not just serve.
And I’ll note that this may well boomerang back on corrupt and/or lazy judges. Investigations are bound to turn up that they didn’t do their jobs.
This is exactly what you MUST never do as a union:
Even at manufacturing companies that are profitable, union workers are reluctantly agreeing to tiered contracts that create two levels of pay.
In years past, two-tiered systems were used to drive down costs in hard times, but mainly at companies already in trouble. And those arrangements, at the insistence of the unions, were designed, in most cases, to expire in a few years.
Now, the managers of some marquee companies are aiming to make this concession permanent. If they are successful, their contracts could become blueprints for other companies in other cities, extending a wage system that would be a startling retreat for labor.
Doing this splits the union. Solidarity is the first rule of unions, if you sell anyone down the river, you weaken yourself fatally.
On a larger scale, the destruction of unions remains job #1 of the oligarchy, especially that part of the oligarchy which prefers Republicans to Democrats. Why?
- Because union members vote Democratic, even if they are part of a demographic which normally vote Republican.
- Because the oligarchy’s overall goal is to crush wages and benefits, both to pay for their bailouts and as a permanent, long-running goal. They do not really believe that domestic consumer demand is necessary to their own prosperity, and prefer workers who are in permanent debt-slavery. For a generation and a half now they have made most of their money through leveraged financial games, asset bubbles and by offshoring and outsourcing jobs. American workers are nothing to them, less than nothing.
Update: My friend Matt Stoller has up his first blog post in about 2 years, on debt-peonage. A good read and some interesting information on where the phrase “the man” originally came from. I’m sad Grayson lost, but it’s nice that Matt can write again.
No, I’m not being sarcastic. I still have little hope for the US, but I am very heartened by what is happening in Europe. The French actions and now the British students rioting. It is, ironically, even more hopeful that the British government wants to try a student for attempted murder for throwing a fire extinguisher off the roof. Next, they’ll be hanging people for stealing chickens. The massive overreaction and the clear double standard, given the war criminals who ran the British government, none of whom have been prosecuted, is the sort of thing which indicates a loss of legitimacy, a loss of legitimacy which often leads to revolution: peaceful or otherwise.
At this point, my best guess is that when push comes to shove in Europe, the left will actually win in most nations. They aren’t wimps, they are willing to fight, they are willing to clash hard with the cops and they are willing to directly attack the interests of the ruling class. Unlike in the US, where the people willing to risk violence are right wingers, in Europe more are on the left wing side.
The economic collapse of the Eurozone, as multiple nations are forced to beggar themselves to bail out bankers and the rich, is similar to what is happening in the US, what is different is that the people in multiple nations are fighting back. I’m hoping the Irish wake up and tell the Eurocrats to go fuck themselves, that the deal of joining the Euro was “we give up a lot of autonomy for a lot of prosperity” but that if they aren’t getting the prosperity, they want the autonomy back. Multiple nations should sincerely threaten to go off the Euro. At this point they are getting economically crushed by being on it and forced to pay off banker’s losses, without the advantages of having their own currency. Right now they are going to take the economic hit they would take by going off the Euro, so they might as well do it.
Odds that the Euro doesn’t exist in 10 years are now, in my opinion, more than 50%. It is not serving the peripheral nations interests, they are being offered a standard of living roughly equivalent to the 50s. (My Eurocrat friends (you know who you are) will tell me this is unthinkable, and won’t happen. We’ll see.)
The pendulum, in Europe, is swinging away from the right. That’s good news.
So, HOPE!
(Oh, as an aside, who cares whether this sort of thing increases or decreases public opinion? Public opinion is irrelevant, all that matters is the costs for the elites who make decisions.)
by Lieutenant Colonel John McCrae, MD (1872-1918)
In Flanders Fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.
We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.
Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.
For years I’ve been saying the plan was to Japanify.
Japanify is another way of saying “extend and pretend”. You pretend the banks and the rich aren’t broke. In the Japan scenario, you slowly pay down or write off the bank losses at a pace which doesn’t wipe out the shareholders or bondholders or bank. Japan could do that, because Japan is a net exporter: there is money coming in to Japan. Of course, doing so led to over a decade of a lousy economy for Japan, but it was feasible.
Nations like the US can’t do it, not just because the US is a net importer, but because it’s bleeding all over the place, losing high value jobs, industry and running down infrastructure.
The 1st world as a whole is trying to Japanify, but because most nations aren’t net exporters, they’re adding a heaping side order of austerity on top of it. Everyone is trying to slash expenses on ordinary people, so they can funnel money to the top, and avoid forcing rich people and corporations to take their actual losses.
So, take as much from the public domain and turn it into monopolistic profit centers for private enterprise (for example, the health care bill, mandating purchases of a private product with no price controls or unregulated credit card interest rate and fee increases), slash spending on things which can’t be turned into profit centers, and make sure that banks and other corporations aren’t forced to take losses.
To bring it home, you have New York Governor-elect Cuomo saying that his first goal is to take out the NY unions – ie. to get wage and benefit concessions out of them. You have a huge push against teachers unions, both to reduce costs and to turn eduction into a profit center (money for corps). You have the push to slash SS and Medicare (entitlements) and so on. And on the top end, to keep low tax rates for rich people and even decrease them more.
These are two sides of the same coin – extend and pretend doesn’t work for most western nations the way it did for Japan. To put it crudely, Japan still makes stuff. The US makes less and less, Britain makes squat, Greece makes squat, Ireland makes squat.
To extend and pretend, if one wanted to do such a thing (one shouldn’t) requires a real engine of economic growth. But right now, if real economic growth happened, oil prices would strangle it just as it got out of swaddling clothes.
None of this is to say that there aren’t ways around this conundrum, but they require taking steps governments simply aren’t willing to take at this time.
First it is “Change election funding” but to do so Law needs be legislated; but the legislature is broken.
Then it is “Elect more better™ legislators” but the political process is corrupted; the political parties are broken.
Then it is control the government but that is run and dominated by the imperial executive; the presidency is broken.
Then the courts will pass judgment but the law has been laid low, cut down by judges with nefarious agendas; the courts are broken.
Then it depends upon the citizen to act but the citizen, bereft of education, possessing no remembrance of history, no knowledge of economics, no concept of civics, no acquaintance with Law, and willfully ignorant of any discipline of substance; that citizen is broken as well.
When all is taken together and summed, the bottom line is that this extent of damage cannot be undone. At the end of the day, the interrelated complex that sustained the Republic is no longer, what remains is a body politic riddled with cancer: a cancer of lies, a cancer of propaganda, a cancer of illusion, a cancer of delusion, a cancer of self-deception, a cancer of hubris.
In the end, power abhors a vacuum, something will replace what once had a vital balance. Those in power will try to remain there and will apply greater and greater force and coercion to do so; but this too will break down as all autarchical despots ultimately do, the expense of force finally undermining the autocrat.
Maybe then, enough of the Philadelphia construct can be recalled and a new edifice built in such a manner that no individual, no group, no corporation will be allowed enough power by themselves or in conspiracy to endanger the new edifice. The life expectancy of a Republic averages about two centuries before the political impulse is spent; this Republic is no exception. Those things that extend the life of Republics were not done and profound corruption prevails.
151,000 jobs were gained last month. 150K is the break-even point given population gain to maintain employment. This is neither a good nor a bad figure.
