Posted on 08/03/2003 2:37:02 AM PDT by sarcasm
Edited on 04/13/2004 2:10:34 AM PDT by Jim Robinson. [history]
But those very same forces are now serving to prolong workers' misery. More college-educated executives and managers have been cut from payrolls this last recession, compared with previous ones. And it's taking them longer to find new work.
More worrisome to them, however, is that the jobs may never come back.
(Excerpt) Read more at boston.com ...
Do you have to be an employee of the company to do this? And, if it's dividend re-investment, don't you have to own the stock in the first place?
I don't have credit card debt. Isn't all that profit from banks and CC companies on paper? Where are the "real" assets for these companies? Isn't that what caused the debacle of the 1999? No real assets. When paper gets pushed around too much it becomes worthless.
I don't think it can be stopped. Are we not now encouraged by all to "spend" our way out of trouble? How can we do that when we have nothing to spend?
I'm wondering how they pay for an $80,000+ education on $12K a year...
>I can't even begin to describe what a phenomenally bad idea the outsourcing of tax return preparation to India is.
Earnst and Yound is doing this. There is one question EY has forgotten to ask. If their business decisions are so routine that they can pack it up and ship it to India, why hire E&Y at all? Why not just use a computer program?
Yes, Founding Fathers made this mistake. America suffered as a result of tariffs until Clinton and Bush have fixed it.
Amen! My primary defense against this onslaught of unemployment is to develop my own application on my own time, which I'm almost ready to begin selling.
One of the main arguments against requiring public corporations to release tax returns has been that they contain highly sensitive information that a competitor might use to its advantage.
So what are the Big Four doing to ensure the confidentiality of this highly sensitive information? Are they so sure that an Indian raised in a culture very different from our own will share our concept of what constitutes ethical behavior? I've worked with a few people from that area of the world, and I have my doubts about this.
You can from most companies once you are a share holder. Then you can purchase shares directly from the company treasurer at no commission. You can also have your dividends reinvested into new shares at no cost.
Why do banks pay 1.5% for money and we are paying 12-26% for the money we borrow? Don't tell me there isn't a mass gouging of the American people by the money industry.
If you are paying those rates (12-26%) its because you are too lazy to move to another credit card or your credit history sucks. These days you can get all sorts of low interest rate deals for accepting a new credit card. After six months, if they dont continue to give you a good rate, you transfer your balance to another bank offering a low rate on transfers. Additionally, many credit card issuers are offering permanent rates of under 8%.
To all who say American workers are not good enough workers to compete, I tell you, "It's a lie. Get out of my wonderful country!"
Take your anti-American sentiment to the countries you believe hold the keys to your happiness and prosperity. Don't come back.
Yeah... I remember that in the late 70's and early 80's, it was the slow, fat, overpaid, underworking union blokes that were the problem. Then, laid off people were encouraged to become "knowledge workers." That must explain why the IT people are overpaid and underskilled... they're all the old union people!
Right on two counts out of three. But I've seen code written by the Ten Little Indians that was so garbled and inefficient it had to be completely reworked, at considerable expense to the company.
It reminds me of a guy who used to favor going to huge buffets for lunch. We'd always complain that the food was crap. "Sure," he agreed, "but it's CHEAP."
In the 1800s, a "managerial hierarchy" developed in corporations in which professional managers (i.e., "white collar" workers) added value by being transmitters of information. This was at a time when large numbers of workers were either illiterate or uneducated, and needed to have critical information about the production processes digested, then parceled out to them depending on their task.
MANAGERS WERE CONDUITS OF INFORMATION. That was their primary job in "management."
But with the advent of computers, and with a super-highly educated workforce (i.e., virtually everyone with a high school degree and 25% of the workforce college educated), these managers no longer added value when a "line" employee could obtain critical information by going on his company's computer and getting it himself, usually hours or days before he got a response from his boss.
Most companies could not explain this phenomenon. They knew it was occuring, and they knew managers were no longer "profitable," but could not specifically say why. In the 1990s, we saw the first big wave of these managerial layoffs. There will be more, because managers (not all, but many) HAVE BECOME BOTTLENECKS TO INFORMATION TRANSMISSION WITHIN A CORPORATION.
Now, as for the Indian x-ray readers, there is likely some of that going on, but I can tell you that the trend is the other direction---hiring lower cost DOMESTIC workers (i.e., "nurse practitioners" and "lab techs") to do in-house work in doctors' offices instead of adding expensive doctors. These are good paying jobs that don't carry the risk of malpractice nor the burden of years' of medical college debt.
I don't think you realize how fast the changes are in IT professions. While American programmers are standing in unemployment lines, or cleaning carpets to try to stay afloat, it will be the Indian programmers keeping up with new innovations. Americans are too busy looking for work and why take classes when there are no jobs for Americans? Our government has chosen for us to drop out of the IT industry. Just as it has chosen for us to drop out of machine tooling and the garment industry.
We haven't scratched the surface of the tech revolution yet--indeed, some of the layoffs we're seeing are the direct result of both companies and employees not seeing the value that they once added to a product, but no longer add.
It is all about adding value. If you don't add it, you have no reason to complain about losing/not having a job. YOU are responsible for your job, even if someone "hires" you, because it is only your productivity and value to the company that gives you a job in the first place.
You need to realize that in China, that government actively promotes business ---- when a business starts up, the government provides the building, the electricity but compare that to here where the government does everything it can to hamper business. An American small businessman gets no support at all from the government ----quite the opposite. It's a little hard to compete with businesses which have their government behind them and encouraging them ---even owning them.
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