> On the whole I think that profit in a competitive > market is a heavy disincentive to regard anything except productivity > thereby resulting in the "good" situation where supervisory "like" is > secondary to performance.
Seems to me that a lot of people here agree that the private sector tends to prefer any measure of money over the welfare of their workers. I think there's two sides to this coin. I've worked in industries that sell commodities. The market for PCs was an example of this. Lots of volume, extremely little marginal profit, everyone doing all they can to keep overhead down. The problem is that management inevitably treats their employees like commodities. I imagine old-school industries like steel, transportation and automotive, textile, etc are like this. But hasn't anyone had the experience of working for a knowledge-driven company that values its employees (and their knowledge) as its main assets? If you can develop yourself into a position of influence, be a go-to guy, a big fish in a small pond, your manager is going to fight to keep you from leaving. I think this is particularly the case in small companies where everyone needs to pull a lot of weight. But it can easily be the reverse, there can be a lot of exploitation in small companies when the manager has his own money on the line (and he doesn't have all that much to begin with). -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list
