Evil Corporations, or Slacker Workers?

As of the middle of this year, corporate America was doing quite well. According to Brian Rogers, Chairman of the investment firm T. Rowe Price, America's corporations had earnings double those of a year earlier; they were rolling in cash; and they were buying back their own stock and increasing dividends—all signs that business was very good and these companies were quite profitable.

Yet the little American is not doing well. As everyone knows, we have a high rate of unemployment. People are struggling and are losing their homes. Poverty is at an all-time high rate. Food banks haven't got enough food on their shelves to feed all of the hungry.

So one has to think about the wide discrepancy between the health of corporate America and the financial well-being of millions of everyday American families. Or ask, If these companies have been doing well, why aren't they hiring back all the workers that they laid off during the recession?

Just to use a little logic, those companies evidently are getting along okay with fewer workers, or, as they might put it, with a leaner work force.

We could look at this in two ways. First, maybe the workers who are still there are being worked harder--and I am sure this is the case in some and perhaps many instances. In the terms of what would now be only a metaphor, the plant managers are running the mill (or assembly line) very fast and the workers are scrambling to keep up to where they are pretty much exhausting themselves.

This is doubtless true in some cases. Figures for productivity are up, meaning that there is indeed more output per worker. Workers are working harder.

On the other hand, there have been studies that show that the average American worker (in an office) is actively working only about half the time. Again to use an old metaphor, he or she spends too much time gossiping around the water cooler. In more modern terms, people sit at their desks making personal calls, surfing the Internet, texting, and so forth. We all know this is true, and 99.99% of workers have been guilty of this.

So it's true that more work could be gotten out of workers. I'd say that maybe in a few instances, the bosses have become evil slave drivers, cracking a whip over the poor gangs of workers. And workers in many sorts of jobs seldom or never would have an opportunity to goof off. But in other cases there was indeed some slack that could be squeezed out, and employers are merely getting more of a full day's work from their employees, and it's hard to blame them for that. It would not be realistic to expect that they are going to hire back workers if they have found that they simply don't need them.

Copyright © 2011 by Richard Stein