By Oswald Krell in RIFuture.org
Full disclosure: I
grew up in a time and an environment that accepted an adversarial relationship
between labor and management.
I still agree with
that belief. Everything I have experienced in the last 30 years has convinced
me, over and over again that this is the fundamental relationship between the
workers and the bosses.
More, the side most
actively pursuing this agenda is management.
Take away pensions.
Cut benefits. Cut wages. Collude with other companies to set wages at “market
norms”. Outsource departments. Offshore jobs. Pay management ever and ever
larger salaries. Take away holidays. These have all been all-to common
management practices of the past 30 years. Anyone denying this is either
grossly ignorant or lying.
Now Hostess has gone
down. Now Hostess is blaming it on the greedy unions. Here’s a contrary view.
Hostess went through
bankruptcy twice in the last 8 years, the latest time in January of this year.
As of January of 2012, management had not implemented even some of the most
basic strategies for streamlining operations and cutting costs. The would
include, but not be limited to, closing inefficient plants, merging warehouse
operations, and closing unprofitable retail operations.
For this this gross
negligence of management responsibilities, the CEO of Hostess saw his pay
tripled; other high-level executives had their pay doubled. They got these
raises while demanding additional union give-backs and lower wages.
One favorite bete noir
of the anti-union hooligans is the US car companies. There, the unions have
strangled and nearly ruined these titans of manufacturing. This is just plain
wrong. 1977 was a banner year for GM. Its plants were cranking out mountains of
302 cubic inch V8 engines; this, after we ‘learned our lesson’ from the oil
shocks that happened in the early 1970s, when Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford were
in the White House. How did GM cope with the threat of higher oil prices?
By creating the Vega. Remember them? Millions of these cars were sold between
1970 and 1977. And yet, by 1980, there were virtually none left on the road.
WOW, it was a terrible
design, and a terrible car. Who designed this car? Who approved this car?
Labor? No.
Ford came up with the
Pinto and the Maverick. Remember the Maverick? With the gas tank situation so
that it got hit in rear-end collisions, with a sickening tendency to explode? Who
designed this car? Who approved this car? Labor?
Of course not. Only
management can make these decisions. What was the result? The American car
brands were damaged irreparably; the Big 3 are still fighting to overcome
the negative perceptions created by these cars. And these are glaring
examples of terrible management decisions. Oh, and the follow-up were the K-
and X-cars. Another engineering masterpiece.
These horrible
management decisions led to generations that assume that Japanese cars are
superior to American cars. And now that Toyota has grabbed the mantle of the
largest car manufacturer in the world? Quality has plummeted. We’re on the
third or fourth massive recall of the last five year. Why? Because
management decided to sacrifice quality for price, and over-expanded beyond
what they could effectively control.
As for labor costs,
the German manufacturers have some of the highest labor costs in the world.
Hasn’t really dented their ability to export. In fact, they see America as a
low-wage country. You know, on par with Mexico.
So you’ve seen decades
of bad management decisions in any number of industries. How many airline
companies have come and gone? I had a couple Sunbeam appliances that were very
well made. When they finally died, I had to replace them with other brands,
none of them of the level of quality.
America is engaged is
a vicious bout of class warfare. As soon as management saw its opening, it took
the opportunity to exploit its advantages to the hilt. The result has been a
period of stagnant to falling wages for labor, a shrinking percentage of
corporate profits going to management, and a level of income inequality not
seen since the days of the Robber Barons. Oh, and we have an MSM that screams
that labor is waging class warfare for merely pointing out these facts; largely
because the MSM is a wholly-owned subsidiary of some corporation.
The employees of
Wal-Mart have started fighting back. This is huge. This is the piece missing
from our economic recovery. It’s called “demand”. Supply shocks causing
recessions is ridiculous, on par with claiming the world is flat. How many
well-supplied stores have you seen fail because of lack of demand? Answer: all
of ‘em.
Because, somehow,
today’s Titans of Industries (read: bureaucrats who clawed their way to the top
by political infighting) have forgotten what Henry Ford figured out 90 years
ago: that ‘workers = consumers.’ And if you pay your workers more, they buy
more, which is the whole point of the exercise, isn’t it?
So when management
finds ever-more-creative, ever-more-blatant ways of squeezing labor harder, the
irony is that, ultimately, they’re cutting their own throats because they’re
simultaneously destroying the ability of their customers to purchase their
goods and services.
Yet one more really,
really stupid, short-sighted, greedy decision made by management. One more
reason to fire the bums, before they given themselves another raise–at the
expense of labor–and ruin even more companies.