For too long, We the People have listened to the experts telling us what’s good for the economy and how to improve productivity. Only one journalist and I agree with him, Neil Irwin, stated in his column in the Times, ” poor productivity would increase when wages improved”. Is anyone listening? Low productivity is correlated with low wages.
Did you ever own your own business? If you had, you would have realized that if you worked with your employees, made them feel part of your team, they produced for you. I know. I was an employer, first in large multinational corporations, then in my own contracting business. I paid good salaries for quality work. We were customer-service oriented. When a job was scheduled, it was installed and finished. It didn’t matter if we installed single apartments or an apartment house. The materials were always cut and ready for installation. No matter the size of the job, I employed a supervising foreman, and we did it right the first time!
Today’s labor is given boring repetitive jobs to perform for little pay. Most employees have to work 2-3 jobs to pay their bills. We already know very few in the middle class have 6 months’ savings on hand. Yet, what do I hear? Business needs “certainty” to invest. That is a “crock of s***t”. For nine years we’ve coddled Big Business and what have we gotten? The answer is zero investment in America and Americans, stagnant wages, non compete clauses, and competition from imported foreign workers. As businesses merge, the American worker has no place to go to for upward mobility. Monopolies and crony capitalism have stifled the American worker.
You don’t have to look far to see the toll of selfish greed on the faces of Americans. We don’t even have affordable quality healthcare though we manufacture the best imaging devices in the world? Why is productivity low? Asked and answered! Why has this occurred? We have given Big Business tax breaks; we have encouraged Big Business to increase their cash hoard by investing overseas. No one has told business to stop investing in the American worker. No one has told Big Business to stop rewarding executives and to stop buybacks. Except for Gretchen Morgenson, there has been very little chastisement of industry practices, which are anti-American. If Big Business had confidence in themselves, they would invest in their manpower and their product. While the rest of the world is emerging from recession, we are digging ourselves right back into hard times.
No need to wonder why people are in despair. They are overworked, overlooked and underemployed. They are also saddled with student loan debt. The list of ” We the People’s ” burdens is long. When and who will give Americans the relief from misery and poverty that is long overdue?
See you at 11am Monday and we’ll chat. ,
” the heart and pulse of the Middle Class”