The rich get richer
A Dream Short-Circuited
By Harold Meyerson
Washington Post
Wednesday, April 11, 2007;
On March 28, Circuit City announced that it was laying off 3,400 of its salesclerks. Not because they had poor performance records, mind you: Their performance was utterly beside the point. They were shown the door, said the chain, simply because they were the highest-salaried salesclerks that Circuit City employed.
Their positions were not eliminated. Rather, the store announced that it would hire their replacements at the normal starting salary.
One can only imagine the effect of Circuit City's announcement on the morale of the workers who didn't get fired. The remaining salesclerks can only conclude: Do a good job, get promoted, and you're outta here.
It was, in short, just a normal day in contemporary American capitalism.
Over at Wal-Mart, the employer that increasingly sets the labor standards for millions of our compatriots, wage caps have been set for certain jobs, and many longtime employees are now required to work weekends and nights in the hope that they'll quit. A memo prepared by a Wal-Mart executive in 2005 for the company's board noted that, "the cost of an associate with 7 years of tenure is almost 55 percent more than the cost of an associate with 1 year of tenure, yet there is no difference in his or her productivity."
(That, of course, is because Wal-Mart does nothing to raise its employees' skills lest it have to raise their wages.) Coincidentally, in the same week that Circuit City axed its clerks, an analysis of Internal Revenue Service data from 2005 that became available showed that the bottom 90 percent of Americans made less money that year than they had in 2004. According to a study by economists Emmanuel Saez of the University of California at Berkeley and Thomas Piketty of the Paris School of Economics, total reported income in the United States increased by 9 percent in 2005 over its level in 2004. All of that increase, however, came from the wealthiest 10 percent of Americans, and the wealthiest 1 percent experienced an increase of 14 percent. Among the remaining 90 percent, income actually decreased by 0.6 percent.
(Continued here.)
By Harold Meyerson
Washington Post
Wednesday, April 11, 2007;
On March 28, Circuit City announced that it was laying off 3,400 of its salesclerks. Not because they had poor performance records, mind you: Their performance was utterly beside the point. They were shown the door, said the chain, simply because they were the highest-salaried salesclerks that Circuit City employed.
Their positions were not eliminated. Rather, the store announced that it would hire their replacements at the normal starting salary.
One can only imagine the effect of Circuit City's announcement on the morale of the workers who didn't get fired. The remaining salesclerks can only conclude: Do a good job, get promoted, and you're outta here.
It was, in short, just a normal day in contemporary American capitalism.
Over at Wal-Mart, the employer that increasingly sets the labor standards for millions of our compatriots, wage caps have been set for certain jobs, and many longtime employees are now required to work weekends and nights in the hope that they'll quit. A memo prepared by a Wal-Mart executive in 2005 for the company's board noted that, "the cost of an associate with 7 years of tenure is almost 55 percent more than the cost of an associate with 1 year of tenure, yet there is no difference in his or her productivity."
(That, of course, is because Wal-Mart does nothing to raise its employees' skills lest it have to raise their wages.) Coincidentally, in the same week that Circuit City axed its clerks, an analysis of Internal Revenue Service data from 2005 that became available showed that the bottom 90 percent of Americans made less money that year than they had in 2004. According to a study by economists Emmanuel Saez of the University of California at Berkeley and Thomas Piketty of the Paris School of Economics, total reported income in the United States increased by 9 percent in 2005 over its level in 2004. All of that increase, however, came from the wealthiest 10 percent of Americans, and the wealthiest 1 percent experienced an increase of 14 percent. Among the remaining 90 percent, income actually decreased by 0.6 percent.
(Continued here.)
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