I realize the author of the article is pushing her agenda, whatever that is. And I’m not a class warfare person, either. If a person is successful and does the right thing, good for them. I’m happy for them. But, I also get irritated with those that spew ... sucks for them that they have no skills or didn’t do this or that.
I lost my job, last year at CSX. Not because I did something wrong. Company had a record year, previous. An Activist Hedge Fund from NYC bought the controlling shares and they brought in Hunter Harrison. His MO is fire as many people as possible, until the RR is barely running, cash out his stock and walk away with about $90 million over 4 years. He’s dead. But, last year, starting in March, they fired around 3000 people. If they keep his strategy, they will fire another 4000 or so. Out of a 27,000+ workforce, they were expecting a 35% attrition rate over the next 5 or so years, just due to retirements, anyway. His strategy was also effecting other companies, that relied on the service, but he wasn’t delivering. Lots and lots of problems. His answer to a Congressional committee was that he answers to the shareholders and their accounts, not to the customers of the railroad nor the other RRs that were also suffering due to his strategy, as they are all interconnected.
My point, after all of that, they’re firing guys with 20+ years on the RR, in their late 40s and 50s. Those guys were staring to see the light at the end of the tunnel to get their “privately funded RR pension”, but Wall St isn’t having that.
Also, go ask the former IT folks at Disney that were forced to train their foreign replacements. I’m sure it’s real easy for them to get right back in the workforce, at their age, competing against some hipster techie right out of college or some H1B visa winner.
I’m not here to be an SJW. I know and fully agree with the concept of, equal opportunity - not equal outcomes.
But, it’s pretty messed up with some of the comments on how these people are nothing. All fun and games until it happens to them.
The scenario you gave is exactly what several classes I attended were teaching as ‘success’. They concentrated on making a lot of money for an individual and moving on with no care of the business or workers success. It sickened me. I was not a quiet student in those classes and still passed them even though I disagreed ‘strongly’ with the teachers idea of a successful career. This is what is being taught in college. And we wonder why businesses make such bad decisions. And our Government folks too. That was in both business and public administration.
I totally agree with your post. American workers have been treated very badly in recent decades. We have had: 1) the illegal alien workers, 2) the visa workers that drive down wages and whose visas are tied to the company and so will put up with a lot, and 3) the newest thing seems to be that these “refugees” coming into the country are at an advantage because the government gives companies a subsidy towards their earnings when they’re hired. Then there’s the outsourcing and offshoring. Where does this leave the American worker?
I disagree with the concept of bringing in more-skilled immigrants. They would just be flooding a different labor market. It seems to me that we don’t need to import workers right now with the labor participation rate still low.
The problem is not that some make so much money but that wages have been driven down through manipulation of the labor force. Politicians and business interest have worked together too many times to disenfranchise the American worker.
The stuff coming out about working conditions at Amazon in recent weeks, if accurate, shows Bezos as a hypocrite who doesn’t treat his workers reasonably.
I am very sorry about what happened to you. I was lucky, the fire department that I was working for decided that it would save them money to offer incentives to get rid of those of us with more seniority and our retirement system was designed for a career that requires fit younger people to do much of the work. We are still working on down-sizing to fit our new budget... moving to a less expensive place, getting rid of a lot of our stuff, and trying to economize.
But we were able to plan for this. When unexpected negative events occur you can end up losing everything and then look back and realize that things could have been done differently. But this is not a “learning event” in many cases, because much of the time the “knowledge” that people gained will have no value for them going forward.
Many of us are just plain lucky. I have had a lot of close calls in my life. I know that I am lucky to be alive and lucky to still be in good health. I was lucky to have a long career that I was able to advance in. I am lucky to still be in a stable financial situation. I am lucky to still be married to the same woman after all of these years.
All of these things that we think we have earned can go away for reasons we likely would never see coming. Hopefully my luck will continue to hold.
I understand, in 2008 we ended the year with 250K in debt and we had a mortgage. We could have sold all our assets to repay it but we would have been left with very little. We were 54 years old, a darned bad age to have to start over again.
My husband wasn’t ready to give it up and the bank advanced us 50K to continue on while we remortgaged. 10 years on we are about where we were on our mortgage then. It isn’t so bad because our land has doubled in appreciation since then and with some of the land deals that have gone down lately, maybe even tripled. Our house has been mortgage free for 25 years and our taxes aren’t bad.
Since ‘08 I have actively acquired liquid, physical assets that no-one knows about that could support us easily for a couple of years. Plus we will eventually get our SS and Medicare, in fact Medicare will start for us this year. I also have a nice camp trailer, just in case.
Our plan is to retire in 3 years.