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How the Workers World Changed

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hawk	Posted: Sun Jun 19, 2011 3:19 pm
Joined: 07 Mar 2010 Posts: 271	The drive to lower worker expectations in North America is a result of several different changes in political direction, new technologies and a re-birth of entrepreneurship in the United States. There has been a major change in the modern business model that most people have not grasped. I hope to explain what I believed happened on this thread. The main changes were: Deregulation of transpiration. Deregulation of communications. Right to work states. Free trade. Internet, e-mail and cheap computer systems. Bar coding and GPS systems. Employee relations & the sense of loyalty. De-skilling of work. The breakdown of community values. New business models. Exploitation of union weakness. The collapse of communism. Spreading the belief that government cannot solve social problems. Not much of what I will write is original, or even new, but I will try to fit all the pieces together. Last edited by hawk on Tue Jun 21, 2011 3:27 am; edited 2 times in total
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SharynS	Posted: Sun Jun 19, 2011 4:22 pm
Joined: 28 Jan 2006 Posts: 2939 Location: the 'puter	Not only "major" but targeted "change" IYAM and quite well executed as well. Great topic hawk. _________________ Free speech is the whole thing, the whole ball game. Free speech is life itself. - Salman Rushdie
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hawk	Posted: Sun Jun 19, 2011 5:59 pm
Joined: 07 Mar 2010 Posts: 271	Transportation Deregulation Trucking Trucking deregulation was sold as a cost saving for all Americans due to more competition. More jobs would be created and a better selection of services would be provided benefiting all consumers. The trucking industry responded that it would mean lower wages, benefits and a deterioration in safety but no one important was listening. Trucking rates dropped so much that many large trucking companies went out of business. The independent truckers were hit so hard that they had a couple of massive truck strikes in the 1970s. Of course the Teamsters, who were sucking up to the Republicans, would not side with them. A lot more trucks went on the roads fighting for whatever business they could get. The power of the Teamsters quickly declined. They can no longer put any serious pressure on the industry. Effect on meat packing A couple of meat packing executives in Chicago saw what this could mean to their industry. Cheap trucking meant that slaughter houses no longer needed to rely on the railroads. They opened up extremely efficient non-union slaughter houses in small towns in the mid-west. Using low-wage immigrants and running the lines at inhuman speeds, they got their operating costs down to rock-bottom prices. Lost-cost trucking supplied American cities with low-cost meat. The union packing houses in Chicago went belly up and a well-paying unionized industry collapsed. That was not all. These new plants started cutting the meat into pre-packaged cuts in standard-size portions. The grocery stores no longer needed high-cost butchers. There are still a few bugs that need to be worked out. These plants are running the lines so fast that the fresh cow dung that is flying around everywhere in the air is getting mixed into the hamburger meat. So we have people getting sick. A few die. The industry wants to irradiate the meat so the customers will not get sick by eating cow dung in their meat paddies. (Well, you don't expect them to slow the lines down do you?) They like to call irradiation "cold pasteurization" as it sounds safer than having your meat nuked. However, food safety is only one reason they want to nuke your meat. If they get authorization to allow this, well they can speed up the lines even faster because it will be safe to add even more cow dung into their products. Quote: More cow dung. I'm loving it! Illegal workers is another issue. The low-paying work is so dangerous and back breaking that the slaughter houses have trouble keeping workers. They need a steady stream of illegals who will accept these poor work conditions. However, the laws have changed making it more difficult for companies to hire illegals. Railroads With trucking becoming a low-cost competitor, the railroads stated to feel the squeeze. There is documented evidence that suggests that since deregulation, rail safety has been seriously compromised. Airlines The airline industry was also deregulated. Air fares have remained extremely low but a number of established airlines have crashed and burned. (Anyone seen a Pan Am, People's Express, Eastern or a Canadian Pacific plane at an airport recently?) The surviving airlines have become unprofitable and all the employees from pilots to baggage handlers have seen lower salaries, wages and benefits. (Not management however.) Pilots for the small regional airlines make as little as $20,000 a year. (to be continued) Last edited by hawk on Mon Jun 20, 2011 11:10 am; edited 3 times in total
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Scott Schroeder	Posted: Mon Jun 20, 2011 3:47 am
Joined: 20 Dec 2007 Posts: 403 Location: Some where on the mountain	hawk wrote: Bar coding and GPS systems. When I started in the grocery biz in 1979 we had on average 12 to 13 people (a night) on the night crew. Mostly full time (40 hours a week) workers. On top of ordering all groceries, stocking shelves, unloading trucks etc... We had to price(by hand) every item on the shelf. On price change day we had to remove (by hand) every old price and stamp the new price. For checkers every item was checked out(by hand). Then came the bar coding and scan check stands! Within weeks of the bar coding and scan check stands labor hours for workers begin to drop. Today 32 years later the job that use to take 12 to 13 workers a night is now being covered with 2 to 3 (if we're lucky) a night. Is the job getting done right? Hell no! Just as long as corporate makes that "bottom line" that's all that matters. Customors are no longer the priority. _________________ I will believe corporations are people when Texas executes one!
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hawk	Posted: Mon Jun 20, 2011 11:31 am
Joined: 07 Mar 2010 Posts: 271	Communications Telephone systems The deregulation of the telephone industry and the breaking up of the Bell system, drove the price of long distance phones into a free fall. I can now phone my friends in China for 1¢ a minute and have a 100 hundred channels on my TV. The amazing technological advances created by the introduction of digital telephone exchanges allowed both voice and data to be sent through the same system. Cell phone networks did not need expensive land lines. the building of the Internet connected through the new digital telephone exchanges and cable TV systems and new fibre optics allowed high speed communications to cover the world using fibre optic cables and bouncing TV and data signals off satellites. Great for consumers. Sure but business got the most out of it. Corporate headquarters can communicate instantaneously to all of its operations, suppliers and customers all over the world. Orders from suppliers in Asia are tied directly into the sales recorder by the cashier bar codes in individual stores. Quote: What I fear is a Ghengis Khan with a telephone Leon Trotsky about Stalin Retail stores Each store, and store manager,is constantly monitored by the computer systems. prices on each bar coded product can be changed by head office. Each cashier's efficiency is measured by the number of bar code swipes she makes each hour. The manager does not say how many cashiers he needs and what hours he needs them for, the bar coding tells him of that. A slow cashier finds his or her hours are cut back. The next step to eliminate cashiers. The customers will bar code their own purchases and swipe their debit or credit cards, especially when the stores are slow. The stores will have only one cashier, a security guard and a bank of video cameras looking after the customers. Factories Every factory in the world building similar products are compared for efficiencies, quality, costs of scarp, machine downtime and total costs of production. Factory orders can be switched from a plant on Ohio to a plant in Hong Kong in a matter of a few minutes. The suppliers get notice on increases or decreases of orders at the same time the factory orders changes. Part time workers are told to go home or work longer hours with little or no notice. Engineering & skilled work The good paying office jobs are no longer safe. Software code, mechanical and electrical engineering can now be done anyway in the world and the results of this work transferred anywhere it is needed. Tax accounting and even the payroll can be completed in other countries and the proper amounts sent to the proper bank account. Telemarketing and customer support jobs are long gone to cheap wage countries such as Ireland and India. All of this is binding the workers of the world into one big labour market competing for limited jobs. Last edited by hawk on Mon Jun 20, 2011 3:31 pm; edited 2 times in total
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Scott Schroeder	Posted: Mon Jun 20, 2011 2:55 pm
Joined: 20 Dec 2007 Posts: 403 Location: Some where on the mountain	hawk wrote: Railroads With trucking becoming a low-cost competitor, the railroads stated to feel the squeeze. There is documented evidence that suggests that since deregulation, rail safety has been seriously compromised. You nailed it with this one Hawk. I have family who have worked for the railroad for way over 30 years and the stories we have heard about the trains running the rails would make you shutter! _________________ I will believe corporations are people when Texas executes one!
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hawk	Posted: Mon Jun 20, 2011 4:02 pm
Joined: 07 Mar 2010 Posts: 271	Right to work states The economically backward American southern states introduced Right to Work laws to encourage industry to dump their Northern union workers and move south. Taxes were lower and so were the wages. The New England textile industry was among the first to move. By the 1970s, many industries, including aerospace and auto manufacturing started moving south. Companies started to realize that they could run away from their higher priced union shops. When Caterpillar decide to break the UAW in the late 1980s, the workers went on strike. In response to the strike in Brampton Ontario, Caterpillar move their complete operations to North Carolina and had the plant back into production in a few months. All the Canadians lost their jobs. Caterpillar broke the UAW by outsourcing much of Caterpillar's parts production and warehouse work to outside firms. Caterpillar also implemented a "southern strategy" opening new, small plants, termed "focus facilities", in right-to-work states. Caterpillar opened these new, smaller facilities in Clayton and Sanford North Carolina, Greenville South Carolina, Corinth Mississippi, Dyersburg Tennessee, Griffin Georgia, LaGrange and Seguin Texas and North Little Rock Arkansas. Mexico Mexico set up special trade zones among the US boarder and North American manufacturing found a huge supply of extremely cheap and disposable workers. Extremely lax environmental laws and lax enforcement of what laws existed made Mexico even more attractive. If the UAW and other industrial unions found it extremely tough to organize in the Right to Work states, it was impossible for them to organize in Mexico. Last edited by hawk on Mon Jun 20, 2011 10:49 pm; edited 1 time in total
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hawk	Posted: Mon Jun 20, 2011 10:43 pm
Joined: 07 Mar 2010 Posts: 271	New business models For almost a hundred years the big department stores set the pace for retailing in the United States. Sears became huge when they pioneered the mail order business and retail stores. Kresge (later Kmart), Woolworth, Towers and Eaton’s became the new retail giants. Then entrepreneurs developed new retail concepts that had no place for unions, high wages or decent benefits. Low prices became the key. MacDonald’s, developed the model for fast food and McJobs. Wal-Mart did the same for discount department stores. In sporting goods, electronics, home furnishings and groceries, new companies challenged existing models by emphasizing low prices and big selections. Tens of thousands of independent businesses disappeared as their customers chased “every day low prices.” Wal-Mart quietly discarded their “Buy in America” policies and went for the lowest priced suppliers they could fine. In the process hundreds more American jobs disappeared while Wal-Mart became the largest single customer for Chinese assembled goods. Buyers told their suppliers that they could build their products wherever they wanted but they had to match China prices. The down side was the customers’ gains, and the lower prices on many products were remarkable, were borne on the backs of the employees. The traditional retail competitors reacted by imposing the same poor wages and benefits on their employees. The low paying employers set the standard for the entire industry so instead of the better paying companies being the standard that the poorer paid workers hoped to climb up to, the basement became the new ceiling.
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hawk	Posted: Tue Jun 21, 2011 12:56 am
Joined: 07 Mar 2010 Posts: 271	Loyalty Employees were once considered valuable assets. Companies would spend time and money training new employees and retraining them as required. Many employees expected to stay with one employer for their entire working life. That was the basis for their pension plans, medical plans and increased vacation credits with seniority. In the late 20th century, this mode of thinking changed. Employees were now thought of as “costs” and “savings” were realized when full-time employees were laid off. Many companies stopped using the term “permanent employees” because nothing was permanent. GE banned the word “loyalty” when speaking of the company’s attitude towards its employees. Part-time employees Whenever there are peaks in production, part-time or short-term employees can be hired. This is great for companies as they keep only pay for employees when they are productive. It is also far easier to call someone in only when you need them rather than spend time and effort trying to keep full time employees productive when work is slow. Full-time employees always know that they are easily replaced if the business is full of part-timers looking for a full-time job. It helps keep them in line. Contract employees Companies hired employees on short-term contracts that may or may not be extended. The carrot was a full-time position to give the contractors hope while they slugged away trying to impress their boss. Automated-employees Automated telephone directories (to serve you better), putting information on the Internet, bank machines are all ways to eliminate employees. Customers as employees The slickest trick is to get your customers to work for you for free. At MacDonald's the customers get their orders and clean up when they are finished. People pump their own gas even in the coldest weather. Soon people will become the cashiers and baggers at the grocery stores. Outsourcing Now there is very little that cannot be outsourced. Human relations, accounting, payroll, legal work, production, warehousing, customer support, office services is all being done by outside companies that compete for a corporation’s business. Outsourcing is often done “in-house” so employees who actually work for other companies can work for years in corporate headquarters. Employee loyalty Since companies have no sense of loyalty to their employees, the workers respond in kind. Why plan to stay at a company if there is no benefit to do so? Caterpillar tells its factory floor employees to improve their education and find better paying work either inside the company or outside because no one will be able to earn good money driving a forklift working for them. What they are really saying is that whether you are with the UAW or not, we will not raise your wages and benefits any more than we have to in order to attract replacements so you might as well get out if you can.
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unionnow	Posted: Tue Jun 21, 2011 1:25 am
Joined: 05 Feb 2006 Posts: 695 Location: Gettin the Hell out of retail	All very true and just completely unstoppable. Skilled jobs go unfilled because workers dont want to give up their free time to go to school while they make the transition. So maybe its time to slow down your lifestyle. Produce some of what you need to eat. Join with like minded people and pool resources. Share skills, teach, build, work in small groups. Change has not stopped, it is speeding up. Find the empty nitches and fill them. Look into the future. Don't be disposessed because things change because things will always change. The company doesn't owe me shit if the check don't bounce. Quit thinking that someone or some system owes you something. Life is survival of the fittest. Be fit; survive. Quote: “Empty your mind, be formless, shapeless - like water. Now you put water into a cup, it becomes the cup, you put water into a bottle, it becomes the bottle, you put it in a teapot, it becomes the teapot. Now water can flow or it can crash. Be water, my friend.” Bruce Lee _________________ “The burden against Damascus. ‘Behold, Damascus will cease from being a city, and it will be a ruinous heap. (Isaiah 17:1-2)
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hawk	Posted: Tue Jun 21, 2011 1:43 am
Joined: 07 Mar 2010 Posts: 271	The end of communism The fall of communism was a boom for American, Japanese and western European business. At one swoop, millions of highly educated workers became available on the world-market. German companies were thrilled to move jobs to poor-paying East Germany. There were no cultural or language barriers to overcome. The workers in other eastern European countries became cheap labour for western companies. However, China became the world’s huge source of cheap labour. One Taiwanese company, Foxconn, has 900,000 Chinese employees assembling computers and smart phones for Japanese and American companies. Millions of North American manufacturing jobs moved to China. The Chinese now flood our markets with everything from barbecues, electronics, power tools, clothing, shoes, hardware, auto parts, sports equipment, electric lighting, home appliances, furniture and toys. I remember when Canada had factories making appliances, television sets, hockey sticks, bicycles and toys, telephones, computers, clothing and furniture. There is very little of this left. Now that China is getting a little more expensive, companies are attracted to Vietnam where business is welcome, the infrastructure is adequate and the wages are extremely low. (In Guangzhou, China, the minimum wage is $200 a month. In Vietnam it is $50 a month. 2011 figures) Return of fascism The governments of Vietnam and China may nominally be communist but in fact they have become more fascist in practice than socialist in that the government is promoting the needs of business over the needs of the people and the environment. Last edited by hawk on Thu Jul 28, 2011 7:46 am; edited 1 time in total
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hawk	Posted: Tue Jun 21, 2011 2:37 am
Joined: 07 Mar 2010 Posts: 271	The collapse of the labour unions When I joined the workforce in the late 1960s, I remember the arrogance of the UAW, Steelworkers and Teamster union leaders. However, unknown to to us all, their unions had already past their best-before-date. The only power the unions have is the ability to control the supply of labour. In North America, the unions never were able to attract the majority of the workforce. The fact that some companies ran union-free gave them an advantage that all companies were eager to possess. When cheaper cars were being imported into the United States, the UAW was a strong voice demanding that the Japanese auto companies be forced to build manufacturing plants in North America. The unions were sure that they would easily gain union recognition and that the Detroit Big Three would then be able to compete. However, the Japanese built their plants in areas where the unions were weak and then carefully screened out all job applicants who seemed likely to be union-friendly. To this day, the Japanese plants remain non-union. Once Ronald Reagan showed the country how easy it was to destroy a union when he outlawed PATCO, the air traffic controllers’ union, private business was not far behind. The destruction of the 12,000 member UAW local at Caterpillar in Illinois showed how weak the unions really were. In every industry companies broke strikes and the deterioration in employees wages and benefits began. Why the unions were weak In the 1930s and 1940s the labour unions were built by idealists; many who were socialists and communists. They were the ones who were fired, beaten and worked endless hours building the unions. In the 1950s, the unions started a purge of these idealists and replaced them with “business-unionists”; men who knew how important it was for labour to cooperate with management and the government. Don’t kid yourself; these were violent and bitter struggles. Once the business-unions won, they did not even notice that they had amputated their heart and their passion. Union organizing was left as a sideline done by “professionals”. In reality organizing ended up being little more than raiding other unions’ members. The unions also lost the support of churches, civil rights groups, the young and the minorities during the 1960s. The unions like to brag that they were leaders in all of these struggles but they were not. In all of these fights, most strikingly labour’s position on the Vietnam war, the unions were definitely not among the leaders bringing change to America. Labour unions were thought of as arrogant and selfish organizations who looked out only for themselves. Labour would not united to help its own. Whenever a union got into a life and death struggle with an employer, the union was left on its own. The AFL-CIO did not give any meaningful help. It was also common for national unions to help break a strike conducted by one of their militant locals. When labour finally collapsed, few non-members cared. Today, when workers need to join together to fight what the politicians and the employers are doing to the working people, they do not look at the existing labour unions for guidance. Who’s fault is that?
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hawk	Posted: Tue Jun 21, 2011 3:12 am
Joined: 07 Mar 2010 Posts: 271	The High-Tech Revolution The first attempts at automation during the 1950s and 1960s brought large productivity gains in manufacturing plants but the productivity growth did not really start to explode until the computer revolution created extremely cheap and powerful computer power available to any business no matter how small. Computer controlled machinery eliminated the need for skilled workers and greatly improved quality, speed of production and greatly lower the labour cost of a product. Testing stopped being done by technicians and were done by test machines. Computerized machines visually inspect for defects. They are faster and more accurate than humans. In the offices, hundreds of draftsmen were replaced by a handful of CAD operators. Design went from blueprints to computer screen. In the retails stores, cashiers worked bar coding scanners and electronic cash registers. At McDonald’s, cashiers push a button to record an order and to calculate the correct change. They do not have to be literate or know how to add. Most of these changes have not added any skills to the jobs, they have deskilled the jobs. A machine operator is not a skilled trade. Anyone can operate a bar code scanner. New machines slashed jobs in the lumber, paper and mining sectors to a fraction of what use to be required. At first business executives and labour leaders stated that all of their investments in computer driven machinery will allow high-paid North Americans compete against the less sophisticated Asian factories. Heavens, some “experts” claimed that our factories would be so efficient that we will be exporting cars and electronics to Asia. One slight miscalculation. The Chinese imported the same machinery from the United States and Japan and were quickly running assembly lines just as efficient as us but with workers costing only a tenth of what Americans and Canadians expect to get paid. Automation however did help drive down the cost of goods or help keep the prices low. That is a given. Last edited by hawk on Tue Jun 21, 2011 3:46 am; edited 1 time in total
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hawk	Posted: Tue Jun 21, 2011 3:45 am
Joined: 07 Mar 2010 Posts: 271	The Widening Income Gap In North America, there is a rapidly growing spread between what the top 10% of our society receives and what the bottom 10% receives. Not everyone is enjoying the benefits of our new economic age. More troubling is that the bottom 50% are starting to see a shrinking in their standard of living. They are working longer, have less job security and are making less. A lot of this realty was hidden by an increase in consumer debt. People started leasing cars and trucks instead of buying them. Leasing is more expensive but people could not afford the larger down payments needed to purchase. When the wealthy started getting richer on the stock markets, the ordinary people started to notice. To get in on the action, people bought stocks. When the markets crashed twelve years ago, people lost their savings and many took a big cut in their pensions. Quote: Investments don’t work as well for lower income people as it does for the rich. Hawk Then people figured they learnt from that mistake; we will now put our money into something solid. We will put it into real estate. The bigger the mortgage, the more we will make. Well, we all know what happened then. The business executives, investment advisers, bankers and business consultants continued to amass fortunes. The new economy has not been bad for them. If workers have to do with less, the same is not true for them. Many ordinary Americans understand that the rich need to get richer. That is why they join the Tea Party, vote Republican and believe preachers who tell them that God rewards the good with riches while the poor are receiving God’s just punishment.
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hawk	Posted: Tue Jun 21, 2011 4:07 am
Joined: 07 Mar 2010 Posts: 271	The Role of Government Agencies Republicans understand that big government bureaucracies hinder the smooth operation of business. They argue that business is drowning in government red tape. So how can government help out? The best action is to eliminate regulations governing environmental protection, worker safety and working standards, taxes, product safety, the need for extensive testing for new products and designs and making out reports to satisfy government agencies. However, the government can go only so far. Instead of eliminating federal and state regulations, the government cuts the number of agency employees and reduces the number of inspections the government agencies can conduct. They also instruct the agencies to cooperate with the businesses that they are regulating. The results are almost the same. No one finds mad cow disease in American cattle. Peanut butter kills a number of children and sickens thousands before the plant is identified and closed. Eggs from America’s biggest producer killed people for the second time in the last two decades. BP has an oil rig blow up out on the Gulf and contaminate the ocean. That is only a small list of the costs associated with the drive to make government smaller and more efficient. People like the idea of smaller government as no one wants to pay higher taxes so the government will nose around and tell you what to do.
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