Excessive Cuts Fuel an American UprisingBy Carl Gibson | August 4th, 2011 | 62 Comments
Imagine you helped prepare a great feast with 99 other people– one of them is morbidly obese, the rest are frail and anorexic. Now imagine the morbidly obese man lining up first, piling almost all the food onto his own plate, and leaving nothing but scraps for you and the rest of the dinner party.
More: http://blog.cagle.com/2011/08/excessive-cuts-fuel-an-american-uprising/
Here's something I wrote more than 20 years ago... just as the Evil Empire was crumbling and a decade before the War on Terror:
Can Nation Of Couch Potatoes Compete In Marketplace?
May 02, 1990|BY JAMES O. CASTAGNERA
The term "couch potato" has entered the language. It needs no further definition. But in a speech last summer in Philadelphia, PBS's Robert McNeil used a more venerable term: hedonist. Was he on the mark?
In November, the Institute for Aerobic Research released a report contending that "fewer than 10 percent of Americans over 18 . . . exercise vigorously and regularly." Spud City!
The Japanese have the same view of us. In a controversial manuscript, Sony Chairman Akio Morita and former Transport Minister Shintaro Ishihara agree ''the U.S. is doomed as a superpower because of economic self-indulgence, indiscipline and executive greed . . . The time will never again come when America will regain its strength in industry."
It ain't a pretty picture - but neither is the solution in vogue. Witness the words of President John Brodie of United Paperworkers Local 448 in Chester: "What the company wants is for us to work like the Japanese. Everybody . . . do jumpingjacks in the morning and kiss each other when they go home . . . (W)ork as a team, rat on each other, and lose control of your destiny. That (won't) work in this country."
I go along with Brodie up to a point. Notwithstanding that Japanese now own the lion's share of Rockefeller Center and are operating auto plants in this country, we Yanks can't change our national character overnight.
This is not to say we couldn't profit (quite literally) from a renewed spirit of industriousness and cooperation. But the American workforce won't swallow the Japanese approach.
If we are a little lazy, rather wasteful, a bit laidback (or even resentful) about the ground we've lost in the world market - isn't it mostly due to what we're used to?
This goes a long way toward explaining why our union leaders aren't recommending jumpingjacks and bunny hugs to their members too.
Union strength has waned from a peak of perhaps 35 percent of the workforce in the '50s to less than 20 percent. But the confrontational approach hasn't changed much, as Congress and the courts create new employee causes of action, keeping pace (if not spearheading) with our increasingly litigious legal system.
Is our nation in trouble? Hell, yes! Follow the course of Spain, Austria- Hungary, England and now the U.S. The 'American Century' may be as big an
illusion as the Thousand-Year Reich.
What to do? Some have started down the long road: Companies have regained their competive edge. I suppose Chrysler's comeback was and will remain the classic example.
What is significant to me - more than the government's role - is company- union cooperation. It was never jumpingjacks and kisses, and both sides may gripe about it now. But that's the whole point: the adversaries cut a deal while remaining adversaries.
Eventually, the American character will change, not due to government policy (although some alteration of the basic historic orientation of our labor laws wouldn't hurt), but to correspond to changing conditions.
In this world, you change or you follow the dinosaurs. And one more aspect of our national character, besides contentiousness and love of creature comforts, is adaptability.
Meanwhile, we must work with what we've got. That means designing, adopting and implementing personnel policies that recognize low levels of motivation, commitment and often even honesty in the workforce. They must also recognize that, when they implement the kinds of policies that profitable workforce management demands (e.g., drug testing, progressive discipline, control of inventory shrinkage, etc.), they risk litigation.
For unions it means making the tough judgment of when a strike means "game over" for the company and the local. It may mean doing a few jumpingjacks, if that's what it takes.
The world is going in a strange direction. We may be seeing the end of communism, maybe of history as we know it. Competition may not even mean what we think it means. If so, a workforce's current characteristics may be far less important than its adaptability. And there we have the Japanese and everybody else beat.
***********************************************************************************************
Twenty years ago, The Japanese were the ones to beat. Professor Paul Kennedy got a best seller out of this premise:
***********************************************************************************************
Where are the Japanese now? Second-raters, for sure. But in those two decades, the Chinese and Indies have come on like gang-busters. And has the US improved its position? Or have we lost even more ground?
Echoing the writer linked above, back in June one of my readers commented: "I think we need a revolution something like the Arab Spring to take the political power of the very rich, the huge corporations, and their lobbyists away. It's time to follow Jefferson's admonition: 'I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations which dare already to challenge our government to a trial by strength, and bid defiance to the laws of our country.' It's time to put our bodies in front of the tank that is big moneyed corporations who use their profit to hold power but not to create new jobs and re-train the people who need them."
Perhaps worthy sentiments, both. But will a nation of couch potatoes get up from the big-screen TVs and video games and Internet porn and reality shows and get in front of the tank? I was skeptical in 1990 and I'm even more skeptical today.
************************************************************************************************
No comments:
Post a Comment