Laid off/Unemployed

[Wes Tausend]

Originally Posted by 767Jockey

I was talking about all this with a friend the other day. What we're missing is integrity and accountability in upper management. I work in the airline industry. You will find no other industry with a higher percentage of self absorbed shameless executives than here. There was a time in my fathers age when the priority was on the product and the employees. The feeling back then was if you take care of the employees, they will make a better product. If you make a better product, the people will buy it, and as a result the shareholders will be happy. If the shareholders are happy, the shareholders will reward the executives. That worked for decades, and this basic philosophy took America from being a strong nation to being the greatest nation in the world, the engine that drives the world economy.

Somewhere along the line, and looking back I would say sometime in the early to mid '80's, this all took a huge shift. We developed a system where it is all about the executives, their outlandish compensation packages, and the shareholders. The employees vie for last place on the list of priorities along with the product itself.

In the case of airlines, which is the industry I am most familiar with, this change is vividly illustrated. After 9/11, as the industry tried to recover, some executives saw in the tragedy an opportunity, and seized it with the vigor of a hungry dog attacking a raw piece of meat. Using the bankruptcy laws in a perverse interpretation that served them well, companies threatened and sometimes even actually even entered bankruptcy with billions in cash still in the bank (see Northwest airlines for an example).

I work for Continental, we had tons of money in the bank, yet we were threatened with complete decimation of all of our labor contracts by the company, suggesting that if concessions weren't immediately agreed to that they too would enter bankruptcy. AGAIN, they too had billions in the bank. Moving along here, once these companies realized that they could use actual or threatened bankruptcy as a ruse to abrogate all their labor contracts, they did so. Now if this isn't insulting enough, here is the greatest insult of all. After doing this, with people losing jobs, losing retirements, losing homes and marriages due to pay cuts and layoffs, these real men of genius rewarded themselves for their "performance" with multi-million dollar bonuses, year after year. Many of my co workers had their pensions discontinued, with the burden of those pensions transferred to the federal government. The people affected will get 30 cents on the dollar, and those dollars will be paid by YOU, through the federal government. The companies claimed they could not possible afford to pay these pensions anymore. Oh, by the way, they went on to take more multi-million dollar bonuses after this, and they also found the money to completely fund, and sometimes overfund, the executive pension plan at the same time they were terminating the plans of the employees. Remember, YOU are paying for these terminated pension plans while these guys retire on full pensions worth millions and live out their days in mansions scattered across the best neighborhoods in America. Nice, huh? Remember that next time you hear about pensions being terminated. Remember that the head guy who has terminated these pensions likely has a very well funded pension of his own.

There is no integrity in upper and middle management anymore, there is no moral compass, there is no sense of shame, there is no sense of responsibility toward the employees. It's all about them. That's the difference between just 25 years ago and today. No one reigned them in, they were given unfettered permission to do what they wanted, they took full advantage of their freedom to do as they wish, and now everyone is surprised that the house of cards has come crashing down on us all. My only surprise is that it took so long.

As a side note in closing, you see this pilot "Sully" who is being universally lauded as a hero in the media? He and his crew did an outstanding job. He and his crew are also now working for about 40% less than they once did, and in his late 50's in age, he has had his retirement plan canceled. How in the world is he supposed to make that up at his age? It's a good thing that he'll make a few bucks speaking and selling his story, etc. Unfortunately there are thousands of Sully's out there, pilots and millions of others in all walks of life in the same position, people who have had their retirements taken from them on the very eve of retirement, while the guy that took it rakes in huge bonuses and has for himself a nice fat over funded pension.

In management now there is no sense of integrity, no sense of loyalty, no sense of shame. Only overinflated egos, and a huge sense of entitlement. Again, the only surprise is that the collapse took this long. The middle class is under attack from both ends. God help us all.

Good post 767,

rant on
I've said it before and I'll say it again. If folks thought that labor unions once had too much power, that they were evil, now the shoe is completely on the other foot. Corporations are merely unions, nearly identical to a group of workers, a group of owners banded together first to achieve what no lone owner could build, but, if left unchecked, to mostly muscle whatever outcome delivers the most earnings to the exclusive members.

Folks should remember the plight of the air traffic controllers and how it was made to look like they were the unfair ones. One of the most intense, highest stress jobs in the world, and they were made to look like they were overpaid in the gullible eyes of the American public. Unreal. Citizens actually began to believe that the middle class, the working class, as a whole, was being overpaid. It began in the '80's, this long downhill middleclass slide. Trickle Down/Hemorrhage Up. I'm embarassed to hand this off to my children. It wasn't damaged like this when I got the keys. And it may already be too late. America may never again be what it once was, to so many, and middleclass people vote as though they don't care or know, that their children, will be among the future destitute.

This is what the middle class is. It's made up of either union members ...or folks that directly benefit from the wage standard set by these unions ...no others. Sure folks, non-union labor, service, lower management, medium skilled professionals, will claim that their job compensation level is set independently. Right. They have no clue whatsoever as to how low their wages can go. They will claim that American jobs rightly moved overseas because of unions, not dawning on them that Chinese labor went for $.50 an hour ...because it really is independent. Just what did they think American organized labor would do ...come down to meet it ...and would any American work for that? Chinese auto-plant workers don't get anywhere near that of southern American non-union Toyota plant-workers. But southern non-union Toyota plant-workers get what they do because of American unions ...and the fore-sighted labor folk that sacrificed to make it happen.

In many other countries, there is no middleclass. There are no unions. And we don't have to have any here either. There is no edict written in stone. No divine law.

Perhaps the top 1 percenters think they will make even more money if there exists only rich and poor, but no middle. Wrong. Most of the market for products will be gone and, worse yet, there won't be any country with a middleclass left to sell to. The world will be a much sadder, more primitive, place.

White collar/blue collar, the result of greed is all the same if left unchecked.
rant off

Wes


...

[Wes Tausend]

Originally Posted by Wes Tausend

Good post 767,

rant on
I've said it before and...
...Just what did they think American organized labor would do ...come down to meet it ...and would any American work for that? ........

Wes


...

Whoops. I might have been wrong that Americans were unwilling to work really cheap for overseas wages.

IBM

Wes


...

[Wayne Maybury]

Scott
Sorry to hear about your situation. I wish you and your men the best and I hope that you can hang in there. Several of the mills we are closing for a couple of weeks are on the west coast as the Asian pulp market has tanked from what I have heard. The buyers simple are not buying, probably waiting for the prices to fall even further.

Bobcat
I travel Interstate 87 (the main north-south route between New York City and Montreal) on a very regular basis. Every day I pass dozens and dozens of truckloads of round logs heading north bound. This has been going on for years and is still going on today. Canada and the US are partners, not enemies. There is give and take in this relationship. Our 2 countries are the biggest two-way trading partners in the world. Our problem (for both Canada & the US) is the Pacific rim countries that don't give a damn about the workers health & safety, the environment, patent laws, or anything else.

The company I work for has spent billions of dollars over the past 15 or 20 years on cleaning up our emissions, just like every other forest products company in North America. In the same period, companies in China and other Asian countries continue to spew out millions of tons of every kind of crap you can imagine so that they can manufacture cheap crappy products for Wal Mart.

Wayne

[Bobcat]

Wayne ... I didn`t intend to imply/say that the US and Canada were/are enemies .... or offend you . What I should have clarified was , as I said , it was 10 to 12(?) years ago ... and at that time , there were a host of factors that figured into the equation . One of which was the difference between the value of the US dollar and the Canadian dollar ( about 25% at the time ) and the environmental issues the US producers were starting to face . The people I worked with in our Canadian region told me that at the time , the regs in Canada weren`t as tight as they were here ... but that has since changed . Also , back then, a lot of the timber was being put out of bounds by environmental groups here , a lot of the mills here hadn`t upgraded their equipment as fast as they should have .
We are actually more in agreement than disagreement on these issues , but back then it was a fact that Canadian lumber could be put on a boat in Mobile as cheap or cheaper than the local mills could ... and this is not intended as a slam on anyone .

[Wayne Maybury]

Bobcat
No offense taken. We always hear up here that our costs are much higher than down there. Everyone is jockeying for position and I believe very little that any politician has to say. It is very scary when we hear Scott say that some of his employees may lose their homes.

One thing is for sure, if we (everyone in North America) doesn't smarten up, and learn from our mistakes, there won't be much left here for our grandchildren to inherit except an awful lot of debt. I try to buy products made in Canada or the US but it is getting more and more difficult to do.

Wayne