I was thinking the other day, that if someone in a company thinks they need to layoff a group of people then the person making the decision to do the layoff has to meet the person and the family of the person, they’re laying off face to face. This might be pretty difficult in some situations, I realize, but I bet you would have a lot fewer layoffs if the individual knew they would have to tell you and your family to your faces. If they had to face the family members of the lives they’re about to ruin, I would imagine things would be a bit different than they are right now.
It used to be, back in the old days, that companies became successful by being beholden to their customers, and their workers. Now it seems that they are beholden to their stockholders, and to hell with everyone else. The problem I have with that mindset is that when you forget the customer, and you forget the worker, then you’ve pretty much eliminated the reason to be in business in the first place. How in the world does a company expect to make money if they don’t make anything, or don’t provide a service?
I’m not saying our recent economic problems are anything new. We’ve had problems like this throughout history. However, what I think is recent, is the dot com attitude that if you create vaporware, then you can get rich without actually doing anything. There are some of you that won’t understand that comment, but what I’m getting at is that there were hundreds of companies in the 1990s that were making millions in investment dollars, and never made, or sold a product. I’m really wondering if some of the executives who came out of that era in the 90s aren’t still trying to run their businesses that way.
What appears to be the M.O. of most companies is to see how much they can skim off the top without having to actually do any more work. These companies don’t try to look for better ways of doing things. There’s no massive strategy. There’s no real plan. They just look at a set of numbers and say “If we can reduce our payroll by 30%, well then we have increased our profits by 30%.” But that’s never the case…and I mean never. If you look at a set of numbers on a spreadsheet, and you decide to make a decision in whole on those numbers, then you deserve to get what you don’t pay for. It never works out that when you let someone go that you instantly reap an economic benefit. Someone still has to do the work, or the work doesn’t get done. If the work doesn’t get done, then you can’t sell your product. If you can’t sell your product, then you don’t make money. It’s that simple.
Many companies have decided that to make money, they need to ship jobs offshore. This is even after other companies have tried this over the last decade, only to ship jobs back to the U.S. The most noticeable are customer service jobs. There was a time when you called customer support, and you didn’t understand a word the person said. Now they are moving these jobs back because they found that 1). It really didn’t save them what they thought. Sure the labor cost is lower, but the cost of doing business in two countries erased any benefit, and 2). They lost customers.
The other jobs that were being shipped overseas were manufacturing. It’s just recently that these jobs are starting to come back. Let’s face it…you can’t sell toys with led paint. Companies found that products didn’t meet any quality standards, and they had to spend three or four times as much money as they did before, for the same product. It turned out that the cheap Chinese and Indian labor didn’t really pan out all that well. They removed any profit because they had to ship things back and forth to get them fixed, or they had to hire someone here to fix them anyway.
It is true…you get what you pay for. I like to work on houses, so my favorite example is this. You can buy a of paint brush for $4.99, but if you pay $25.00 for a brush, you will spend less on the paint. Sure…you your brush for 20% less than I did, but you still didn’t get the job done with that brush. And, you wasted hours, and a lot of paint to figure out that the crappy brush you bought, just ruined the wall you were trying to paint. So now you have to go spend another $50.00 on a gallon of paint, and still buy the good brush to cover up what you did when you tried to save $15.00. So…how much did you save?
I think shipping jobs overseas is un-American. If there is anything that we can all agree upon, I think it just might be that. With all the rhetoric of people pointing fingers at others and calling them un-American, from politicians, to pundits, I think one thing we should all agree upon, is that if you run a business in this country, and you think that putting Americans out of work to add another nickel to your pocket is a good decision, then you are no better than the people who flew planes into the twin towers. It might not kill as quickly, but like cancer, it’s just as deadly, and I would guess, that it ruins more lives than any terrorist we will ever encounter.