I for one and I am sure there are many - would welcome some SERVICE! for a change!
Everywhere I go surly, lazy incompetent US born employees (many so-called professional ones) resent their jobs and as a result the customer/client is given short shrift.
Bring on the Mexicans or anyone else who is willing ot do the work without some tight assed unionists hovering in the background telling employees tbey have a right to dish out poor service.
Are you sure it's not because employers are assiduously undercutting their wages and making sure they can't earn a living and have no job security? Hmmmmm?
I took a trip to Italy in 1982 and was surprised to see that tables were being waited on by full-grown Italian men, many of them no doubt with families to feed, who were efficient and professional. I didn't say there was no attitude -- there's attitude everywhere, from the mega-engineering manager Lee Iacocca once fired because he had "trouble getting along with people" (Iacocca, firing him: "Well, that's too bad, because people is all we have around here!") to the night-shift fry-cook at Denny's.
The point is, in Italy, employers haven't crushed wages every chance they got, just because they could and because the religion of the Harvard School of Business is that you always break wages every chance you get -- you underpay people, you screw people, you break unions and document people's files unfairly and fire them. You do whatever it takes to break your payroll, quoth the b-school don who's high and dry and out of the rain, just because that's the right thing to do, and we said so, and five is bigger than four.
My point is that it isn't worth wrecking worker morale for an extra point or two in your ROR; that you probably give up top-line gains to flog your horses. But this opportunity cost never goes into the ROR calculations, even if higher worker health costs do (to which the Harvard solution is to eliminate benefits and put everyone on contract).
In 1996 or 1997, I forget the exact year, Agip, the Italian oil company, brought a new American manager into its Houston office. The manager did the cool manager thing and called in Kinsey and Associates, the Jack-the-Ripper HR and management consulting firm. Kinsey said, fire a zillion people and pocket the payroll! The American manager ran with it and proposed a big layoff (Agip up to that point having laid off sparingly if at all, while all around them were wading in the gore of their former employees)........and then he made a mistake. He included a couple of Italian nationals in his cuts. Result: the big layoff went forward, the two or three Italians were recalled to Milan rather than laid off, and the American manager went out the door right behind everyone else.