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I think this reflects a general erosion of trust between employers and employees, which I blame Corporate America for. It used to be a tacit agreement in the wo

I think this reflects a general erosion of trust between employers and employees, which I blame Corporate America for. It used to be a tacit agreement in the workforce that if you worked hard, the boss and the company would take care of you. This illusion has been shattered first by the employers (outsourcing, at-will employment, gig economy), and now the employees (ghosting, switching firms without notice). The lack of trust on both sides engenders the feeling that any promotion is unlikely and every position uncertain, so folks always have one foot out the door. Once the trust is gone, it takes a long time to rebuild, so even if corporations changed tack now, it's likely that employees will continue to distrust them for the foreseeable future. Edit: Clarity.

lotsofpulp 7y ago
The employees also chose to patronize businesses that outsourced and offered lower prices. Other than forcing Americans to buy products made with American labor, what options are there?
- bluntfang 7y ago
  Choice is a really funny word when it comes to employees. Most employees don't have a "choice" if you look a little further beyond the surface.
  - lotsofpulp 7y ago
    By employees, I’m referring to American customers, who opted for the low prices at Walmart versus their local store. My point is employers didn’t have a choice either, if they wanted to stay in business. This is the end result of arbitrage opportunities due to differences in nations’ wealth.
    - bluntfang 7y ago
      Poor people don't choose to not support their communities. They've been put in a position to be forced to "choose" between supporting their local store vs having a warm, safe(ish) place to sleep for their families.
      - lotsofpulp 7y ago
        It is a situation that snowballs, but even originally when foreign goods started coming in, people didn't consciously choose to not support their community. They were just doing what consumers do, which is choose to purchase at the best (lowest) price they could find. But due to information asymmetry and limited ability to analyze and understand the consequences of each and every purchase, there was only one inevitable outcome, assuming goods and services are allowed to be transported between borders.
    - lllr_finger 7y ago
      Walmart isn't really an example of choice. I've traveled the Midwest and great plains extensively every year since 2009, and have watched it slowly destroy small town life. The locals fought back as much as they could, but saving an extra $50 a week ended up being too alluring, and local businesses died. I've talked to quite a few people that lament how it turned out but are completely resigned to how it happened and that it won't change.
      - lotsofpulp 7y ago
        Walmart was a choice at some point in history. And even if it's not Walmart, everyone in the chain of buying and selling is going to have to justify their decisions to a boss or a budget. You can zoom out of the Walmart vs local store picture, and imagine you're in charge of decision making at a large manufacturing company, and your competitor has moved their production to a country with cheaper labor. Is your company going to be able to sell your products at a higher price if you choose to use more expensive labor? Are you going to be able to convince customers that their decisions now will cause income instability for their children and children's children, and that they should spend $x more on your product because of it?
    - helpPeople 7y ago
      This is a terrible conclusion you've drawn here. Think about the benefits of saving money, it creates opportunity for growth. Side note, mom and pop shops made more profit than Walmart. That money is not shared with employees, it makes the family wealthy.
- mc32 7y ago
  Maybe something akin to the “buy local” initiative, but on a national level. That said buy local has its issues like not all locales being able to “buy local” and sometimes subsidizing local producers is counterproductive (effort to overcome specialization is too costly), etc. That said a framework which ensured some minimum requirements (like labor laws and environmental controls, work safety, etc.), could be a place to start.
  - lotsofpulp 7y ago
    That very framework is what makes offshoring to countries without that framework so much cheaper and so much more lucrative. Labor laws and environmental controls would have to be implemented globally, but then we're talking about going to war and taking over other countries.
    - mc32 7y ago
      It can be encouraged via tariffs and other taxes that vary depending on adherence level.
- mmierz 7y ago
  Historically, labor unions.
ncr100 7y ago
> ...I blame Corporate America for. > Once the trust is gone, it takes a long time to rebuild... Go deeper. What can we do as technologists to protect the economy from untrusty "corporate Americans"? Why would corporate Americans be so untrusty? >> I speculate it's inculcated in colleges, anti-ethical scientific approaches to management, insufficiently modeling reality, providing a sense of "distance" for those who would join higher levels of management resulting in a lack of feeling for the suffering they might inflict through their quest for optimizing the business. >> As a technologist we can take away the scientific management aspect from the humans, effectively replacing senior management with robots, restricing the humans to being human, and promoting into senior management individuals with good people skills, with the hopeful side-effect of normalizing wages to reflect the cost-savings of a true scientific management of the business. Why is there even a need for trust of corporate Americans? >> I speculate there is no need and that obstruction of progress by senior management and colleges where these subjects are ingrained into young minds is more the culprit. Centralization of power may be seen as efficient. It's also "one size fits all" and actually inefficient; no-one at the top can synthesize all the feedback from all reports in a reliably timely fashion. >> As technologists we can help corporations model and encode their businesses, feeding that data into a system that aids in machine- or human-based decision making.
golemotron 7y ago
> The lack of trust on both sides engenders the feeling that any promotion is unlikely and every position uncertain, so folks always have one foot out the door It's not just lack of trust, it's also due to the flattening of organizations necessitated by more collaborative work styles than we had decades ago.
- glitchc 7y ago
  Organizations aren't truly flat, ever. This has been consistently debunked as a myth. If the hierarchy is not explicit, it forms implicitly through cliques and personal relationships. I think you've hit an important point though, because in flat organizations, there are no rules preventing the strong and ruthless from seizing power and catering everything to their whim, including giving themselves bonuses or arbitrary privileges. Many modern tech companies are structured in this manner. The need to have a "collaborative style of work" may be the fantasy the executives feed workers to blind them from the power grab behind their backs.
spyckie2 7y ago
Not on the side of Corporate America but curious how you would respond. As markets get more mature, it becomes difficult for companies to maintain employees if their salary level to contribution rate drops. Is the assumption that employees will absolutely be valuable to a company's strategic goals? How can a company practically care for an employee for life?
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- pm90 7y ago
  The answer is that companies can’t. Private businesses shouldn’t have to create expensive welfare programs for their employees, but pay their taxes and let Government take care of healthcare and other essentials through national healthcare programs.
  - corebit 7y ago
    "Private businesses shouldn’t have to create expensive welfare programs for their employees, but pay their taxes and let [individuals] take care of [their own] healthcare and other essentials". FTFY
    - SketchySeaBeast 7y ago
      Is the theory that healthcare prices would drop like rocks and surgeries wouldn't cost hundreds of thousand of dollars, or do the poor just die?
    - SketchySeaBeast 7y ago
      Is the theory that healthcare prices would drop like rocks and surgeries wouldn't cost hundreds of thousand of dollars, or do the poor and middle class just die?
- glitchc 7y ago
  Before we worry about taking care of employees for life, how about we first fix stagnating wages? Companies are still making excellent profits, some are at record profits even after inflation adjustment. Skyrocketing CEO pay is one of the causes. Please see graph in Figure 3: https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/6/26/18744304/ceo-pay-ratio-disclosure-2018 https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/6/26/18744304/c... I couldn't find any European curves, but things are slightly better over there.
Ensorceled 7y ago
> This illusion has been shattered first by the employers (outsourcing, at-will employment, gig economy), and now the employees (ghosting, switching firms without notice). This wasn't an illusion, companies actually did take care of employees and had pensions and full-time jobs and retraining and stuff. Also, ghosting and employees bouncing is a symptom of the employers not providing any loyalty to their employees. Boomers and GenX stayed for 30 years when they had pensions, Millenials would too.
- lotsofpulp 7y ago
  Is it possible that the existence of companies themselves is subject to more volatility? How can they provide stability when they themselves have unstable sources of income? I've only been around for a little more than 3 decades, but I've seen many markets and businesses be transformed. Vastly fewer numbers of travel agents, many retail establishments, tv channels, secretaries, hotel front desk, self check out are needed. Not to mention the effects of a drastic drop in birthrates. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/04/business/shrinking-stock-market.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/04/business/shrinking-stock-...
  - dhhdhdsbdb 7y ago
    Otoh, we have far more marketers, professional writers, video editors, programmers, and people who make their own profits via YouTube etc. And a drastic drop in birth rate should mean fewer people so favor labor.
    - seisvelas 7y ago
      Declining birth rate would also reduce demand for labor, not just supply, no? Assuming that the relationship between population and demand for labor is linear (probably isn't, I don't know economics).
      - curryst 7y ago
        I think it's a delayed effect. As the populace ages, people who are retired (from when birthrates were higher) will make up a larger percentage of the total population. There's some existing info on this out there, but most of what I have seen focuses on how this will impact Social Security in the US.
tabtab 7y ago
To compete with the rest of the world, the US companies cannot create commodity products or services. Our labor costs are too high for commodities. Thus, they must chase the Next Big Thing. The result is that they have to keep "flushing" their workforce to chase a different butterly every few years as the prior NextBigThing turns into a commodity and drifts overseas or is automated. To do this, companies want just-in-time specialists that they don't have to train. Loyalty and hard-work alone won't give them that.
- maxerickson 7y ago
  The US is a pretty huge player in industries like mining and farming, industries that produce commodities in huge quantities.
  - blaser-waffle 7y ago
    Also the largest producer of oil: The United States, 15,647,000 BPD Most is used for domestic consumption, but we're on track to be net-exporters. It's been a while since I did any serious work on food policy, but the US was the largest exporter of grain for a while, too. Not the largest producer, not the largest consumer -- that'd be China -- but largest exporter.
- r00fus 7y ago
  We can compete with the rest of the world, we simply need to do what other countries are and produce local demand for the local supply. e.g. farm to school is a great way to provide local farms consistent local demand baseline so they're not just selling to the arbitrageurs and megacorps via often-gamed futures markets. I'm a big fan of de-commoditizing what really shouldn't be commodities in the first place.
Ancalagon 7y ago
I wholly agree. Its funny to hear some of the older generations recommend staying at an employer for a long amount of time still (I am constantly told that job-hopping will badlly affect my career in the long run). I think the good advice is the exact opposite (in moderation). Change jobs, take what you want, that's the only way you're ever going to get it anymore in any reasonable amount of time.
033803throwaway 7y ago
Social trust has been declining for half a century: https://archive.is/u9Jex https://archive.is/u9Jex It's one of the most pressing issues in sociology and is rarely discussed at all, and typically discussed dishonestly when it is.
siruncledrew 7y ago
Semantically, I think the erosion of trust is a symptom of having larger and more consolidated companies in Corporate America. Trust comes from getting to know people and working with them. It's a lot easier to know 10 people than 250+. I think with smaller scale businesses with fewer employees there is a stronger sense of community and trust to watch out for each other. For a huge company spread out all over, there's not a sense of really 'belonging' to a community (some may say it's more 'using' a community), so the trust is murkier. Imagine a family of 10 people vs. a family of 250 people. How much trust would one have in a sister or cousin vs. an aunt's cousin's daughter's niece? Now imagine how much trust an employee would have in job decisions made by a manager's manager's VP's SVP at corporate HQ. They may hardly know each other aside from name only, so why would they care about each other, let alone trust each other? They are just blips on each other's radars.
- cylinder 7y ago
  The concept you're referring to is localism and I really believe in it over globalism.
sjg007 7y ago
Umm.. there never was an agreement that if you worked hard the boss and company would take care of you. Never existed. That's just an imaginary explanation pitched by nostalgia and the media. You know what actually improved life for workers? Unions.

lotsofpulp 7y ago

The employees also chose to patronize businesses that outsourced and offered lower prices. Other than forcing Americans to buy products made with American labor, what options are there?

bluntfang 7y ago
Choice is a really funny word when it comes to employees. Most employees don't have a "choice" if you look a little further beyond the surface.
- lotsofpulp 7y ago
  By employees, I’m referring to American customers, who opted for the low prices at Walmart versus their local store. My point is employers didn’t have a choice either, if they wanted to stay in business. This is the end result of arbitrage opportunities due to differences in nations’ wealth.
  - bluntfang 7y ago
    Poor people don't choose to not support their communities. They've been put in a position to be forced to "choose" between supporting their local store vs having a warm, safe(ish) place to sleep for their families.
    - lotsofpulp 7y ago
      It is a situation that snowballs, but even originally when foreign goods started coming in, people didn't consciously choose to not support their community. They were just doing what consumers do, which is choose to purchase at the best (lowest) price they could find. But due to information asymmetry and limited ability to analyze and understand the consequences of each and every purchase, there was only one inevitable outcome, assuming goods and services are allowed to be transported between borders.
  - lllr_finger 7y ago
    Walmart isn't really an example of choice. I've traveled the Midwest and great plains extensively every year since 2009, and have watched it slowly destroy small town life. The locals fought back as much as they could, but saving an extra $50 a week ended up being too alluring, and local businesses died. I've talked to quite a few people that lament how it turned out but are completely resigned to how it happened and that it won't change.
    - lotsofpulp 7y ago
      Walmart was a choice at some point in history. And even if it's not Walmart, everyone in the chain of buying and selling is going to have to justify their decisions to a boss or a budget. You can zoom out of the Walmart vs local store picture, and imagine you're in charge of decision making at a large manufacturing company, and your competitor has moved their production to a country with cheaper labor. Is your company going to be able to sell your products at a higher price if you choose to use more expensive labor? Are you going to be able to convince customers that their decisions now will cause income instability for their children and children's children, and that they should spend $x more on your product because of it?
  - helpPeople 7y ago
    This is a terrible conclusion you've drawn here. Think about the benefits of saving money, it creates opportunity for growth. Side note, mom and pop shops made more profit than Walmart. That money is not shared with employees, it makes the family wealthy.
mc32 7y ago
Maybe something akin to the “buy local” initiative, but on a national level. That said buy local has its issues like not all locales being able to “buy local” and sometimes subsidizing local producers is counterproductive (effort to overcome specialization is too costly), etc. That said a framework which ensured some minimum requirements (like labor laws and environmental controls, work safety, etc.), could be a place to start.
- lotsofpulp 7y ago
  That very framework is what makes offshoring to countries without that framework so much cheaper and so much more lucrative. Labor laws and environmental controls would have to be implemented globally, but then we're talking about going to war and taking over other countries.
  - mc32 7y ago
    It can be encouraged via tariffs and other taxes that vary depending on adherence level.
mmierz 7y ago
Historically, labor unions.

ncr100 7y ago

> ...I blame Corporate America for. > Once the trust is gone, it takes a long time to rebuild... Go deeper. What can we do as technologists to protect the economy from untrusty "corporate Americans"? Why would corporate Americans be so untrusty? >> I speculate it's inculcated in colleges, anti-ethical scientific approaches to management, insufficiently modeling reality, providing a sense of "distance" for those who would join higher levels of management resulting in a lack of feeling for the suffering they might inflict through their quest for optimizing the business. >> As a technologist we can take away the scientific management aspect from the humans, effectively replacing senior management with robots, restricing the humans to being human, and promoting into senior management individuals with good people skills, with the hopeful side-effect of normalizing wages to reflect the cost-savings of a true scientific management of the business. Why is there even a need for trust of corporate Americans? >> I speculate there is no need and that obstruction of progress by senior management and colleges where these subjects are ingrained into young minds is more the culprit. Centralization of power may be seen as efficient. It's also "one size fits all" and actually inefficient; no-one at the top can synthesize all the feedback from all reports in a reliably timely fashion. >> As technologists we can help corporations model and encode their businesses, feeding that data into a system that aids in machine- or human-based decision making.

golemotron 7y ago

> The lack of trust on both sides engenders the feeling that any promotion is unlikely and every position uncertain, so folks always have one foot out the door It's not just lack of trust, it's also due to the flattening of organizations necessitated by more collaborative work styles than we had decades ago.

glitchc 7y ago
Organizations aren't truly flat, ever. This has been consistently debunked as a myth. If the hierarchy is not explicit, it forms implicitly through cliques and personal relationships. I think you've hit an important point though, because in flat organizations, there are no rules preventing the strong and ruthless from seizing power and catering everything to their whim, including giving themselves bonuses or arbitrary privileges. Many modern tech companies are structured in this manner. The need to have a "collaborative style of work" may be the fantasy the executives feed workers to blind them from the power grab behind their backs.

spyckie2 7y ago

Not on the side of Corporate America but curious how you would respond. As markets get more mature, it becomes difficult for companies to maintain employees if their salary level to contribution rate drops. Is the assumption that employees will absolutely be valuable to a company's strategic goals? How can a company practically care for an employee for life?

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
pm90 7y ago
The answer is that companies can’t. Private businesses shouldn’t have to create expensive welfare programs for their employees, but pay their taxes and let Government take care of healthcare and other essentials through national healthcare programs.
- corebit 7y ago
  "Private businesses shouldn’t have to create expensive welfare programs for their employees, but pay their taxes and let [individuals] take care of [their own] healthcare and other essentials". FTFY
  - SketchySeaBeast 7y ago
    Is the theory that healthcare prices would drop like rocks and surgeries wouldn't cost hundreds of thousand of dollars, or do the poor just die?
  - SketchySeaBeast 7y ago
    Is the theory that healthcare prices would drop like rocks and surgeries wouldn't cost hundreds of thousand of dollars, or do the poor and middle class just die?
glitchc 7y ago
Before we worry about taking care of employees for life, how about we first fix stagnating wages? Companies are still making excellent profits, some are at record profits even after inflation adjustment. Skyrocketing CEO pay is one of the causes. Please see graph in Figure 3: https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/6/26/18744304/ceo-pay-ratio-disclosure-2018 https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/6/26/18744304/c... I couldn't find any European curves, but things are slightly better over there.

Ensorceled 7y ago

> This illusion has been shattered first by the employers (outsourcing, at-will employment, gig economy), and now the employees (ghosting, switching firms without notice). This wasn't an illusion, companies actually did take care of employees and had pensions and full-time jobs and retraining and stuff. Also, ghosting and employees bouncing is a symptom of the employers not providing any loyalty to their employees. Boomers and GenX stayed for 30 years when they had pensions, Millenials would too.

lotsofpulp 7y ago
Is it possible that the existence of companies themselves is subject to more volatility? How can they provide stability when they themselves have unstable sources of income? I've only been around for a little more than 3 decades, but I've seen many markets and businesses be transformed. Vastly fewer numbers of travel agents, many retail establishments, tv channels, secretaries, hotel front desk, self check out are needed. Not to mention the effects of a drastic drop in birthrates. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/04/business/shrinking-stock-market.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/04/business/shrinking-stock-...
- dhhdhdsbdb 7y ago
  Otoh, we have far more marketers, professional writers, video editors, programmers, and people who make their own profits via YouTube etc. And a drastic drop in birth rate should mean fewer people so favor labor.
  - seisvelas 7y ago
    Declining birth rate would also reduce demand for labor, not just supply, no? Assuming that the relationship between population and demand for labor is linear (probably isn't, I don't know economics).
    - curryst 7y ago
      I think it's a delayed effect. As the populace ages, people who are retired (from when birthrates were higher) will make up a larger percentage of the total population. There's some existing info on this out there, but most of what I have seen focuses on how this will impact Social Security in the US.

tabtab 7y ago

To compete with the rest of the world, the US companies cannot create commodity products or services. Our labor costs are too high for commodities. Thus, they must chase the Next Big Thing. The result is that they have to keep "flushing" their workforce to chase a different butterly every few years as the prior NextBigThing turns into a commodity and drifts overseas or is automated. To do this, companies want just-in-time specialists that they don't have to train. Loyalty and hard-work alone won't give them that.

maxerickson 7y ago
The US is a pretty huge player in industries like mining and farming, industries that produce commodities in huge quantities.
- blaser-waffle 7y ago
  Also the largest producer of oil: The United States, 15,647,000 BPD Most is used for domestic consumption, but we're on track to be net-exporters. It's been a while since I did any serious work on food policy, but the US was the largest exporter of grain for a while, too. Not the largest producer, not the largest consumer -- that'd be China -- but largest exporter.
r00fus 7y ago
We can compete with the rest of the world, we simply need to do what other countries are and produce local demand for the local supply. e.g. farm to school is a great way to provide local farms consistent local demand baseline so they're not just selling to the arbitrageurs and megacorps via often-gamed futures markets. I'm a big fan of de-commoditizing what really shouldn't be commodities in the first place.

Ancalagon 7y ago

I wholly agree. Its funny to hear some of the older generations recommend staying at an employer for a long amount of time still (I am constantly told that job-hopping will badlly affect my career in the long run). I think the good advice is the exact opposite (in moderation). Change jobs, take what you want, that's the only way you're ever going to get it anymore in any reasonable amount of time.

033803throwaway 7y ago

Social trust has been declining for half a century: https://archive.is/u9Jex https://archive.is/u9Jex It's one of the most pressing issues in sociology and is rarely discussed at all, and typically discussed dishonestly when it is.

siruncledrew 7y ago

Semantically, I think the erosion of trust is a symptom of having larger and more consolidated companies in Corporate America. Trust comes from getting to know people and working with them. It's a lot easier to know 10 people than 250+. I think with smaller scale businesses with fewer employees there is a stronger sense of community and trust to watch out for each other. For a huge company spread out all over, there's not a sense of really 'belonging' to a community (some may say it's more 'using' a community), so the trust is murkier. Imagine a family of 10 people vs. a family of 250 people. How much trust would one have in a sister or cousin vs. an aunt's cousin's daughter's niece? Now imagine how much trust an employee would have in job decisions made by a manager's manager's VP's SVP at corporate HQ. They may hardly know each other aside from name only, so why would they care about each other, let alone trust each other? They are just blips on each other's radars.

cylinder 7y ago
The concept you're referring to is localism and I really believe in it over globalism.

sjg007 7y ago

Umm.. there never was an agreement that if you worked hard the boss and company would take care of you. Never existed. That's just an imaginary explanation pitched by nostalgia and the media. You know what actually improved life for workers? Unions.