Corporations Find New Ways to Fuck Over Workers AND Kill the Economy

The Boss Is Your Enemy. Always has been, always will be. Never forget: The Boss Is Your Enemy.

Susie Madrak:

This was so frustrating, talking to the Tea Partiers at their rally the other day: When I brought up this report, they defended the employers. They said employers were too afraid to spend money because of Obama's unpredictable anti-business policies. Oy. Here's Bob Herbert:

“I’ve never seen anything like this,” said Andrew Sum, an economics professor and director of the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University in Boston. “Not only did they throw all these people off the payrolls, they also cut back on the hours of the people who stayed on the job.”

As Professor Sum studied the data coming in from the recession, he realized that the carnage that occurred in the workplace was out of proportion to the economic hit that corporations were taking. While no one questions the severity of the downturn — the worst of the entire post-World War II period — the economic data show that workers to a great extent were shamefully exploited.

The recession officially started in December 2007. From the fourth quarter of 2007 to the fourth quarter of 2009, real aggregate output in the U.S., as measured by the gross domestic product, fell by about 2.5 percent. But employers cut their payrolls by 6 percent.

In many cases, bosses told panicked workers who were still on the job that they had to take pay cuts or cuts in hours, or both. And raises were out of the question. The staggering job losses and stagnant wages are central reasons why any real recovery has been so difficult.

“They threw out far more workers and hours than they lost output,” said Professor Sum. “Here’s what happened: At the end of the fourth quarter in 2008, you see corporate profits begin to really take off, and they grow by the time you get to the first quarter of 2010 by $572 billion. And over that same time period, wage and salary payments go down by $122 billion.”

That kind of disconnect, said Mr. Sum, had never been seen before in all the decades since World War II.

In short, the corporations are making out like bandits. Now they’re sitting on mountains of cash and they still are not interested in hiring to any significant degree, or strengthening workers’ paychecks.

Productivity tells the story. Increases in the productivity of American workers are supposed to go hand in hand with improvements in their standard of living. That’s how capitalism is supposed to work. That’s how the economic pie expands, and we’re all supposed to have a fair share of that expansion.

Corporations have now said the hell with that. Economists believe the nation may have emerged, technically, from the recession early in the summer of 2009. As Professor Sum writes in a new study for the labor market center, this period of economic recovery “has seen the most lopsided gains in corporate profits relative to real wages and salaries in our history.”

Worker productivity has increased dramatically, but the workers themselves have seen no gains from their increased production. It has all gone to corporate profits. This is unprecedented in the postwar years, and it is wrong.

Personally, I think there should be a national campaign to shame these people into hiring. I remember a time not so long ago when companies took pride in employing people. Why not some White House leadership on this issue?

The wealthy are always demanding tax cuts is "because we create jobs." Uh, sorry, pal. When you're the only people left with cash, there's no one else left to tax.

Read the whole thing.

The essential fact of every economy, from slave-based through feudalism to capitalism and communism is this:

Management is the enemy of Labor.

Always has been, always will be.

As long as we had a manufacturing economy, that was easy to remember. Management, by exploiting workers and fighting unions who defended workers, made it impossible to forget.

But a service economy - especially a white-collar professional service economy - makes it easy to forget that the number one goal of management is to exploit workers and destroy unions.

We professionals - even those of us who support unions - don't think of ourselves as "labor." We have college degrees. Graduate degrees. Post-graduate professional degrees. We work in offices. We hold meetings. With PowerPoint presentations. Our professional opinions are eagerly sought and respectfully received. We're not labor.

And that self-destructive mindset is precisely why we earn less than we did 35 years ago, have none of the benefits we had 25 years ago, and have lost the job security we had 15 years ago.

While management - Wall Street - earns 100, 1,000 times what they earned 35 years ago, has gold-plated benefits no one imagined 25 years ago, and not only can't be fired but is rewarded for failure by trillions in tax dollars paid by the very white-collar professionals Wall Street ass-fucks daily.

The only solution is to tax the fuckers into submission.

Cross-posted at They Gave Us A Republic ....