11-18-2018, 09:13 PM
(11-18-2018, 03:12 PM)beechnut79 Wrote: profit is the lifeblood of successful businesses
For sure this is so, but with that in mind a fair question to ask would be, then, how were the large employers of the postwar period able to almost guarantee lifetime security to their workers? They couldn't have known for sure if they would turn a profit for two decades or more down the road. In fact, when employers of the time interviewed they went the extra mile to weed out those they thought might be "job hoppers", the here today, gone tomorrow types. A common question often asked was where you expected to be in your life five, ten, or more years down the road? We all know that this kind of thinking has now been obsolete for quite some time. And yet at the same time there is a bigger push to set goals then there was then. Or at least so it seems.
...and until about 1980 people got the advice to stick with the same employer and not jump to get a promotion or pay raise. This may have kept people in professional tasks from getting as much money as they might have been had they been more mercenary and slowed the advancement of competent people. So if one was a retail clerk and was thinking about taking courses in accounting or engineering, he might ask his boss first, who would ask his boss. "Our company does not need engineers" or "We don't think that you would serve us well as an accountant" was a good reason to drop the idea.
People traded opportunity for economic security, and institutions such as housing lenders promoted such. It is safe to assume now that most people have little faith in their employers to keep them from job-hopping. On the other hand, longer duration in a position meant that one learned the subtle things that made one slightly more efficient and attentive even in assembly-line work. Today the employer typically keeps a Help Wanted sign just to remind workers that there is always someone who wants to take his job, perhaps by promising to work for less.
In few cases does anyone expect someone to stay in the same job or the same employment for so much as two years. Employers are finding that employee retention is a good thing, especially in service and sales activities, often menial and ill-paid, for not having to spend so much time training new employees. Starbucks promotes a liberal arts degree through distance learning, figuring that if its baristas can keep a conversation intact with a customer that that customer will buy more latte or cappuccino in slow times in the coffee shop. Accounting or engineering is not good for a discussion with a customer.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.