04-07-2020, 07:46 AM
(04-07-2020, 06:05 AM)Arkarch Wrote:(04-06-2020, 04:31 PM)pbrower2a Wrote:(04-06-2020, 02:17 PM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote:(04-06-2020, 11:04 AM)pbrower2a Wrote: Businesses with deep pockets will be able to have employees ready to go when those businesses restart operations.
This reminds me a bit of how things used to be when America was Great. Working for the Bell System back in the day, my father used to be expected to give a bit extra in a storm, but the company would give loyalty to their employees back. He tells the story of spending the night during a hurricane keeping the generators driving the phone system alive, leaving his late stage pregnant wife at home. She used to tell the story from a different angle. There seems to be much less of that in the modern telecommunications industry, with the companies trying to hire contractors if possible, thus having to pay them nothing in off peak times.
America was great when business treated employees well because such was not only right -- but also even good business. Then came the MBA school ethos that said that everything is money, and that the only people who matter are shareholders and executives. Such is exactly what one would expect of the greedy, materialistic young adults intent on getting ahead quick and didn't care about making themselves better as the liberal-arts program had as an objective. There was a time when the MBA degree did not exist, and people actually got their start into management (except in such businesses as retailing and restaurants from the shop floor and thus recognized that there was a human being at every work station instead of some machine in human shape. This is before robots, of course.
Quote:This used to be The Way. Companies were loyal to their employees and vice versa. A few deep pocked private companies might have an echo of it. I don’t think you would generally assume all such owners are similar.
Of course not... but the perception of what constitutes rationality changes from one era of the cycle to the next. At some point workers will need a stake in the system if it is not to end up with sullen, resentful workers who put in just enough effort to avoid being cast onto the street. Workers treated badly become goldbricks, especially in non-growth industries. Figure that as a 1T rolls around, employee retention could be a problem in places that treat employees like dirt.
Quote:This might be touched by generation theory. A willingness to sacrifice to a larger entity for the sake of all can exist with other entities than the federal government. Maybe some of it might survive the Conservative time. If so, I have not seen much of it yet.
There is little wrong with our system that powerful unions and elected officials beholden to them can't solve. Cheap labor treated badly loses its motivation and its productivity.
A company that is doing its best to protect its employees from the burden of the moment I believe is a big positive. While I did bring up the Sheldon Adelson Las Vegas Sands case which is service oriented; the other case I noted is a B2B technology business also primarily owned by a deep pocket Billionaire. To add thoughts as to why continuing operations provides an advantage - Building and retaining an experienced and talented employee base is critical for the future. In addition, a technology company that stays productive can advance their products during this time. Relationships with customers are also kept intact, ready to support during the gap and especially when the customers need to come back up. These are all common sense benefits that may be lost in the current MBA corporate-think. Thank-you for the thoughts - this may indeed have impact on the composition of our next 1T.
Ordinarily I have despised Sheldon Adelson for his politics and his business (gambling)... but when he does something good one must praise him. Figure that management-labor relations have gone into the toilet since Reagan became President, and that Big Business has gotten away with callous treatment of workers that would have been possible only on the economic fringe from the late 1940's to the late 1970's. Figure that the optimum for an employer for keeping wages down and labor discipline severe is to ensure that people already employed know that someone on the outside wants to take his job. Such was the norm in industrial sweatshops in which the work was easy to learn and in places of extreme poverty (think of the slums full of Italian and Jewish immigrants about 120 years ago). It also applied to retailing and fast food, which revived that old norm.
Employees became expendable in the 1980's equivalents of sweat-shops... and other industries sought to imitate that model. It has its costs. One is that one's firm might attract talented people able, when things change, to shake things up to meet changing realities of the marketplace. That a fast-food place or a boutique store in a mall could occasionally hire someone with a college degree to work for a near-minimum wage has not resulted in such hires sticking around. I remember working in a department store for a little over two years and hearing people who worked there say things such as "I just don't want to be a secretary". Within a few weeks that person was in secretarial school. Or I heard "I don't want to work in a factory". A factory started hiring, and that person left for the factory.
If you want to know what happened to Sears (which will probably reopen its remaining stores for liquidation sales)... Sears used to have formal management training for promising people. It stopped that. It might get talented persons as workers for a time and it would fail to recognize what was there. Maybe Sears could have done better had it developed information technology as did Wal*Mart, as there was little divide between customers of Sears and Wal*Mart. Sears started bringing in shoddier merchandise to turn quicker profits... which is a huge mistake. Upgrading one's wares is good business; downgrading one's wares debases the firm. Employees there recognized that they had no future except more of the same poverty and work that teaches nothing stuck around only if they were incompetent to do something else.
Every business and every non-profit bureaucracy makes decisions, even if the decision is the weakest of all (drift). Sears drifted into ruin. A company like Sears could fare adequately (as can any retailer) if it has well-heeled customers able to buy the stuff that it sells. As real wages fell, the well-heeled customers also disappeared. There go the sales revenues while costs keep rising. From such comes bankruptcy.
America will get out of the economic downturn related in part to COVID-19 and in part to the collapse of the Obama-Trump bull market. There is pent-up demand. People will want to go places and do things that they miss doing. Companies that have closed their doors will still need skeleton staffs just to re-start should the current lock-down end within six months. COVID-19 will run its course or medical science will find ways to stop it -- maybe through immunization with antibodies from the fluids of survivors.
It will be a good idea to develop new and improved products and services. People out of work might as well develop some new work skills if they saw themselves either consigned to the same old poverty in a workplace in which they can learn nothing or are overworked and underpaid. Something else is happening, and this may be the reality ready to strike advanced industrial societies: we are at the end of the era in which productive scarcity allows people to get rich by meeting it. We can no longer simply make stuff and sell it so that people can be happier. We can produce in much less than 40 hours what we used to produce in 40. So what are we doing in the surplus hours? The 40-hour workweek may become obsolete.
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.