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Tough day for economy, for American workers
The numbers added up quickly, 8,000, 8,000, and then 7,000.
They were job cuts, coming with major corporate news that crossed the
wires throughout Monday morning. Pfizer announced an effort to buy a
competitor for more than $60 billion but also would cut 8,000 jobs.
Sprint Nextel also announced cuts of 8,000 workers. Follow that with
7,000 from Home Depot, and now we're talking real numbers.
Locally, General Motors announced another 2,000 cuts, small compared
to the others but more dire because the company has struggled with
numerous prior cuts and recently received government bailout money.
Over at cnn.com, they put everything together, and in including
Caterpillar's falling profits and plans to eliminate 20,000 workers,
they came up with 68,000 jobs lost in one day.
I know that it's easy to hate Mondays, but this was one where I
should have stayed in bed.
They were job cuts, coming with major corporate news that crossed the
wires throughout Monday morning. Pfizer announced an effort to buy a
competitor for more than $60 billion but also would cut 8,000 jobs.
Sprint Nextel also announced cuts of 8,000 workers. Follow that with
7,000 from Home Depot, and now we're talking real numbers.
Locally, General Motors announced another 2,000 cuts, small compared
to the others but more dire because the company has struggled with
numerous prior cuts and recently received government bailout money.
Over at cnn.com, they put everything together, and in including
Caterpillar's falling profits and plans to eliminate 20,000 workers,
they came up with 68,000 jobs lost in one day.
I know that it's easy to hate Mondays, but this was one where I
should have stayed in bed.
posted by Stephen Frye at
2:16 PM
1 Comments:
While I have never been a union person (I am an auto mechanic, paid on commission), I understand that our local standard of living is almost surely a direct result of the gains that were fought for and won by the UAW and others through the years. What all the anti-unionists seem to not understand is that, if you send all the good-paying jobs away and replace them with subsistence-wage jobs, who will be left to buy the volumes of product that must be sold in order to ensure prosperity for all of us? They think that it works for them now, but events are proving that theirs is a flawed model. Even the middle and upper-management-types are beginning to feel the pain. Cheapness is not always goodness.
We are all to blame, in many ways, for the situation in which we find ourselves. Some will lament that it is impossible to find many consumer goods (TVs, microwaves, etc.) that are not made overseas. That is because when we still had a choice of a domestically-made product versus a lesser-expensive import, most of us chose the import, (because it was cheaper). Even the Big
3 (or 2, depending upon your perspective) source all of the parts required to build their cars from the absolute rock-bottom, lowest bidders. This has resulted in their products (American cars and trucks) having a very high import part content, at the same time as they use "patriotism" to market these products. If that isn't talking out of both sides of your mouth, I don't know what is.
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