> I half expect some major corporations will move to make all
the worker bees per-diem workers; sure, they have to be paid
daily in cash, but there's no unemployment insurance and no
investment in their loyalty.
This is already happening. Community colleges and universities are already hiring
faculty this way. One-quarter or one-semester contract labor.
"Great Minds discuss ideas. Average minds discuss events. Small minds discuss
people." - Admiral Hyman Rickover
Gordon Wolfe, Ph.D. (425)865-5940
VM Enterprise Servers, The Boeing Company
> ----------
> From: John R . Campbell
> Reply To: Linux on 390 Port
> Sent: Saturday, July 26, 2003 2:40 PM
> To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> Subject: Re: IBM and 600 jobs
>
> It strikes me that the outcome of all this outsourcing will
> be an economic meltdown... since there's only so far we can
> go back. We may have the kind of meltdown that _cannot_ be
> recovered from.
>
> The bean-counters and the executives seem to be working hard
> to undo Henry Ford's only real innovation: paying people for
> their work.
>
> The final upshot is that *nobody* can afford to buy your
> products regardless of the cost of manufacturing, so, over
> time, the ability of people to buy these high-profit items
> will decay.
>
> What will IBM do when nobody can afford a ThinkPad?
>
> What will Nike do when $100+ "athletic shoes" are out of the
> reach of all but the CEOs?
>
> A major problem is that employees are not cheap: beyond
> salaries and semi-direct benefits, there are the mandated
> Sociable Security costs *and* unemployment insurance.
>
> I half expect some major corporations will move to make all
> the worker bees per-diem workers; sure, they have to be paid
> daily in cash, but there's no unemployment insurance and no
> investment in their loyalty.
>
> The problem causing this is that corporations are concentrating
> on their rear-ends not their front-ends, on "shareholder sat"
> instead of "customer sat". IBM's legendary attention to their
> employees is gone; education budgets are either a joke or
> don't exist, tech refreshes are way behind and there's a
> belief that IBM will eat away at it's ability to do business
> just to make the books look good. AT&T is apparently ahead
> of IBM in this vivisection, BTW.
>
> And IBM is in _good_ shape, when you come right down to it;
> they've not been forced by the major stockholders (pension
> and mutual funds) to ditch their labs... yet.
>
> The "institutional investors" (one reason why "shareholder
> satisfaction" efforts are idiotic since it presupposes some
> kind of loyalty on the part of shareholders) are the ones
> able to apply the pressure... which is why we're looking at
> a meltdown w/i 10 years (if not less).
>
> --
> John R. Campbell Speaker to Machines [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> "Grace is sufficient so Joy was let go." - Heather L. Campbell
> "Faith manages ... even though she can't get a promotion" - me
>
>
