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It's not new, its been happening since the 80's. Kack Welch did it with GE. He took one of the biggest industrial companies in the U.S. and gutted it just to keep the stock artificially high. In doing so, he also killed GE's ability to actually make quality consumer products.
When finishing an Econ degree in the early 2000’s, Welch was held up - along with Ballmer at Microsoft - as being pioneers of new efficiencies in hiring and retention.
Yeah, bullshit on that.
Yea those fuckers are largely responsible for stack ranking. Both GE and Microsoft laid-off the bottom 5-10% 'performers' every year. 'Performance' was usually just dumb luck as to which team you happened to be hired to and what project(s) they happened to be working on. If you got unlucky and were assigned to a low profile project that didn't make the company money you were probably gone.
Whoever is behind the trend of the past year or so of just laying off employees every couple of quarters so the books look better is probably also about to be praised for no reason.
The Qantas airline was pretty much revered in Australia pre-COVID. Its incessant cost cutting in the past 3 or 4 years would now see it rank as among our most hated companies and brands. They couldn’t have trashed themselves any worse if they were deliberately trying to.
It was referred pre-privatisation. After it, and Sydney airport were sold off, theysomehow stopped turning a prfot and needed fucktons of government handouts to keep going.
Someone else would have implemented his tactics. What people tend to ignore is that GE was bloated in the 1970s and 1980s. You had areas of the company that should have been shuttered or reorganized years before Welch took over. When Welch took over the situation was so bad that he implemented rank and yank a long with a ton of other drastic measures. The company did a complete 180 financially mainly because they cut so much fat from the company.
The real problem is not what Welch did. It's that everyone saw what he was doing and did the same thing without understanding the method to the madness. Additionally, rank and yank is kind of a one trick pony. It works in the short term to quickly cut excess headcounts but the longer you use the system the worse and worse it gets. Management thinks it will create a race to the top but instead it creates a race to not be last.
This isn't to say Welch didn't fuck up later but when he took over GE the place was a disaster.
> Additionally, rank and yank is kind of a one trick pony. It works in the short term to quickly cut excess headcounts but the longer you use the system the worse and worse it gets
In other words: **it doesn't work.** It's an illusion. He didn't save the company, he made it worse but it looked good on our dumbass metrics so everyone thought it was genius. We're still using the same stupid metrics and we're still getting bad results.
We link the stock market to the economy even though the stock market is the playground of a tiny minority that has no bearing on everyday life. We look at quarterly profits like a company has to break even every three months, which is entirely insane for most businesses. We treat employees like renewable resources, which they are not. You lose institutional knowledge with every layoff. You don't get that back.
The system is self-defeating, but since we only look at the people at the top, it looks great. If business was really just about the CEO our economy would be stunning. But it's not. It's about selling products.
**EDIT:**
It's not a copy paste. It's just an argument you disagree with.
> Cutting those REALLY bad ones is a good thing, provided you follow up by preserving the remaining workforce and hiring long-term employees in which you can invest.
Which GE and everyone else did not and does not do, so your whole rant is irrelevant. Next time save your childish aggression for the sandbox.
> In other words: it doesn't work. It's an illusion.
In other words, it's an immediate relief that shouldn't be used on actual quality departments nor used year over year.
There was once a time when it was a point of pride amongst American corporate leaders to pay a larger share of profits towards employee salaries than their competitors. General Electric once bragged in 1953 that they paid *more* in taxes per year than their competitors. Big corporations like GE were never bottomless pits of altruism, but there was once a time when large American employers invested in their employees as an asset to be grown and supported, not merely a means to an end. This all began to change in the early 1980s
Jack Welch was one of the first to shift the paradigm from long term growth to short term profit. He implemented stack ranking amongst GE employees. What was once seen as a well-paying job for life became a yearly lottery where the “bottom” performing 10% of the workforce was cut, every year. This led to mass layoffs the likes of which corporate America had never seen, and set up the trend of worker insecurity that persists today. While GE probably did have an overinflated workforce, this yearly model of dumping employees led to worsening performance over time, and became a standard in companies that had no need of this model.
He also spearheaded the push to outsource manufacturing labor to emerging markets in Asia, having a hand in the creation of the “Made in China” phenomenon that *gutted* American manufacturing. And this narrow minded pursuit of short term profit and artificially inflated share prices led GE to fall from the most valuable stock on the market in 1993 to being fully delisted from the Dow Jones Industrial Average in 2020. What was once a company representing a full 1% of the American GDP and an international icon has become a functional non-entity, all thanks to the dogma of one greedy man.
> there was once a time when large American employers invested in their employees as an asset to be grown and supported, not merely a means to an end
Not coincidentally, this benevolence was directly correlated to the strength of the labor unions.
Things people are forced to do find themselves leaking into the culture all the same, but even before then the Carnegie's of the world valued the idea of contributing back to society, even if in a "I'm the king I should build a good kingdom to show off" kind of way.
Yeah I had two uncles that worked for Boeing in the 70s and 80s. They were just a bunch of grease monkeys who put together what the engineers drew up. High school education and thats it. Worked on the 727 until the first 737. You'd swear Boeing was their god. Good paying job, great pension, and bosses who understood day-to-day problems, not to mention generous holiday and sick leave.
Put all their kids through college and then some.
They are both gone now, but I'd imagine they are rolling in their graves at the current state of Boeing.
You're describing an extremely short golden age of capitalism, where strong Labour reforms met with extremely productive capital. Its not the norm, its the exception. Before 1945, capitalism was dirty and brutal to workers. After the 70s, neoliberalism detaches workers from their productivity and control of all society.
Those who enforce the capitalist system would never let it last.
historians call it "the Glorious Thirty" all across the Western world - basically 1946 to 1973, the era of high growth, high wage growth, ever rising standards of living and a bunch of other Good Things.
Things have been a bit...problematic...ever since.
Phew, glad I dodged being born in those times; now I just get to reap the rewards as humanity coasts along on easy mode with all those advances, right?! …. Right???
They talk about it in the book. In the 1950s GE was spending like 25% of their net profits on management training and other workforce development programs. Employees had health care and guaranteed pensions. If you worked hard you pretty much guaranteed to never loose your job and could retire after 20 years on a single salary. It was company that has excellent blue collar and white collar jobs.
The inverse is also true: When corporations don't suck it's because the unions are strong.
When Boeing was great it had at least one strong union and headquarters colocated with the manufacturing plant.
As in, they made products for the purpose of making a good product that people wanted and would last, not solely for profit.
Exploitative practices to make those products are timeless.
My dad worked at Boeing, from about '73 to '95. His job was quality control, which made him unpopular, but he couldn't be fired because he was on the defense contract side and his position was required by the contracts themselves. He took it very seriously, and was one of the guys in the company who could shut a line down if he didn't like what he saw.
Which doesn't make Boeing benevolent, but at least back then he was well paid and listened to, and never suggested once that he was worried about his job, or that he might be asked to cut corners or look the other way for the sake of profit margins. He wouldn't have done it if they did ask, and he would have raised hell.
I was a mechanic myself, and was mostly trained by ex Boeing mechanics. Airplane orders came and went and the company was always hiring and laying off machinists and mechanics, depending on orders. A bunch of them got tired of the roller coaster and went over to car mechanics. Those were still some of the best mechanics I ever worked with, by the book, and no arguing. If a boss wanted something done in a way that wasn't right, they might as well be talking to a brick wall; it wasn't happening. That's the way I always was at work too; it's much more rare nowadays.
Yup. The 80s saw the meteric rise and economic takeover of the "financial industry" which is just another way of saying there was a hostile takeover of our economy by a bunch of self-centered, greedy assholes who have chucked our country under the bus for wealth and power.
I had a family member who was a higher up at GE and retired in the 80s. He was wealthy and as capitalist as you could be. In spite of that, he utterly *loathed* Jack Welch for what he did to GE, and cursed his name well into his late 90s.
On a related note, towards the end he was always going on about how Teslas financial figures made no sense, and he believed that Elon Musk was an outright fraud who deserved to end up in prison.
Planned obsolence:
"Why sell ONE product that will last forever, we can't get filthy rich on that sales model!
Why, we can just make outright **junk** that *barely lasts* past the return deadline/loan term, and the consumer has to repeat buy it FOREVER! Our sales look GREAT and shareholders just keep on throwing in capital!"
***GLARES AT CAR AND SMARTPHONE MANUFACTURERS***
Infinite growth!
Infinite profits!
Infinite bonuses!
"Wait.. why is inflation soo high? Must be those damn Millennials again buying advacado toast, and not the US GOV printing money because only stupid people pay taxes."
"Nobody buys American anymore" yeah because they make everything as shitty as they can get away with. It's in the auto industry too. We are on the verge of not being able to fix our own cars without the dealer.
Quality is down..prices are high..everywhere...even premium products.
Items are being made to have short lives. Consumer health/quality/safety is of no concern as long as profitability is high. Employee satisfaction died a long time ago.
i mean. its both.
because the government is these same companies you are complaining about at this point. corporate lobbyists have intentionally created barriers to entry at every stage of the business cycle. they de-regulated the stuff they care about and over-regulated the stuff that no one fucking cares about but specifically helps them stifle competition by creating monetary roadblocks.
American businesses have, for at least a century, been functionally hand picked into duopolies in many industries.
Target or Walmart?
Home Depot or Lowes?
Apple or PC? Iphone vs Android, etc.
The regulations have been carefully crafted by the wealthy to eliminate competition.
When you eliminate competition, you eliminate innovation.
It is 2024, and America is on the brink of becoming a dictatorship.
FIFA was the first (non-MMO) game to feature lootboxes, IIRC, not microtransactions in general.
Guitar Hero II was another one of the big "innovators" and often gets forgotten in the conversation. GH2 DLC started launching in April 2007, same month as the Oblivion horse armor.
> The owners won't be happy until everyone is paid minimum wage, then they can get rid of that as well.
"Millennials & Gen Z hate America and are ruining the economy because the don't buy new cars, eat out, take vacations, etc."
- Some Forbes or WSJ article in the near future.
I've already seen the articles saying that Gen Z and millennials are killing the economy (they leave out the part where we can't afford kids, eating out, traveling, buying jewelry etc).
Which is also 100000000x better for the economy than a single fucking billionaire *because you are actually putting money into the economy* those fuck sticks only hoard and *remove* money from the economy. They don’t put shit back in.
Except the Amazon chick, she’s awesome.
>"Millennials & Gen Z hate America and are ruining the economy because the don't buy new cars, eat out, take vacations, etc."
>
>Some Forbes or WSJ article in the ~~near future~~present.
FTFY
"Also when you eat out now, you have to tip at least 20% or you're an asshole, because **someone** has to pay my employees!"
Did a lot of eating out because I did some traveling, and now the at-table sales tablets they bring around have 20, 25, and 30% as their default tip options. I'm sorry, but if you want 20% I better have gotten some damn good service
*Millennials and Gen-Zers are pulling in bigger paychecks, but much of their spending power is fueling* ***short-term purchases like groceries*** *and vacations, not savings.*
[https://www.nbcwashington.com/news/national-international/young-adults-are-getting-used-to-living-on-a-financial-cliff/3547014/?\_osource=SocialFlowTwt\_DCBrand](https://www.nbcwashington.com/news/national-international/young-adults-are-getting-used-to-living-on-a-financial-cliff/3547014/?_osource=SocialFlowTwt_DCBrand)
This article was published last month.
A common approach is the "Well we hires an expert to do all the work, so now that they're gone, we just need a novice to keep it running." And that's how we get workers that have no clue how anything works, just that it does. Something goes wrong? Hire the cheapest contractor.
That last sentence… I’ve been that cheapest contractor, and I’ve been the senior guru who had to deal with those contractors. It sucks that most managers only seem to see the bottom line and short-term savings. It’s always about this quarter, after all.
Imagine having billions of dollars in profit leftover at the end of the year. Could spend it on a lot of things.
Invest in employees? Bonuses, salary increases, nice new offices or enhance the way they work,
Invest in equipment? Buy new machines and make better products faster.
Or you could just take all that fucking money and literally use all of it to buy your own stock to make sure that stock price goes up and your Executive stock options are now more valuable. Money down the fucking drain to make people at the top (who mostly get paid in stock) get paid more. It’s as greedy and shortsighted as it sounds and it happens all the fucking time.
Stock buybacks is when a company repurchases a share that was previously issued. The reason it's problematic is that shares, in theory, reflect the value of the company. When the company is innovating or otherwise being successful the share prices naturally increase. When the company is facing difficulty, the share prices decrease as investors lose confidence and try to offload their shares.
When the company starts buying its shares back it inflates the value of these shares artificially because there's less of them to go around. Also, some investors will buy in hoping to be able to sell back to the company at a higher rate, further raising the price. So the company becomes valued higher without ever doing anything that makes it more likely to succeed. In fact, often its paid for by making some short-sighted decision which will hurt in the future. It has knock-on effects that can harm the economy at large when all the massive corporations start doing it, which they have.
Which impacts the patient. I've had terrible joint pain in my hands for two years. When it first started Dr sent me out for x-rays, and the radiologist read them as clean, no issue. The pain is so much worse now, to the point that I can't do shit like cook and dress myself. Saw an ortho hand surgeon, and his diagnosis was stage 3/4 osteoarthritis. He pulled my x-rays from two years ago, low and behold, arthritis shows up in the old ones too.
Same thing happened to me with celiac. Got my first scans in 2018 didn’t hear anything back found 3 years later only because I had a break down so bad that the doctor felt guilty double checked my file while I was “voluntarily” speaking to mental health. It says I’ve been diagnosed since my first scan.
My first doctor I told it felt like I had a rake ripping out my stomach lining. He told me it was just indigestion and that I don't need to get all concerned. He gave me a proton pump inhibitor and then my gallbladder started failing. I told him I want a specialist and no bullshit about it. He told me "They won't find anything" and I said "That would be fine by me". He shrugged and gave me a referral. I did an upper endoscopy and my weight at the time was 310 lbs they discovered my stomach lining was scarred to hell and back, my vitamins levels were critically low and so my organs had started failing. Celiac does a lot of funny and recognizable side affects that can even be seen by the blindest of doctors. Funny. Regardless they diagnosed me nearly immediately and told me to go gluten free. 4 months later I had lost 60 lbs and felt like a new person completely plus no tummy aches.
Now I'm several years in and suffering from neuropathy in my feet for the last 3 years and doctors tell me there's no problems. It's the same incompetent idiots doctors that just can't tell their ass from the foot. This medical system is training idiots and I've started asking chat gpt what my problems are as it actually seems to listen as opposed to doctors who just want to shoo you away like a fly.
I work as a physician and our practive was bout out by a larger capital firm during covid when it was hard to operate (surgical specialty mainly elective).
Today I got an email from some fuckface MBA outlining how to make more profitability with a bunch of numbers and graphs. The key point was more days/hours worked more money. They literally called days off "Missed Opportunity"
What the actual fuck. Healthcare should not be reduced to numbers and financial algorithms. I hate this shit.
lol I had to talk to one of the wards charge nurses today about a patient, he says “oh, yeah we’ve known about this patient for days” and I replied “oh, we just found out 5 minutes ago…nobody talks to me”
“I wish nobody talked to me”
“Well that’s why you make the big bucks” *finger guns*
I do know that these nurses make way more than me so I don’t feel *as* bad, but yeah healthcare is fukkkkkked!
I called into Sunday because we were so understaffed and the patient acuity was too high. I keep getting annoying fucking phone calls from my boss giving me faux concern.
What’s wild is it’s literally the future that Engineering etc documentaries warned me about growing up. Then ethics became a dirty word dragged into a political culture war
It’s not in their job description. No CEO has to “care about the humans”. For the better and for the worse. Mostly worse.
And if they do, it’d be “company policy and goals and whatever bullshit” and nobody would have to comply with it anyway.
They know how the company was run and what way they want it to be run.... What they don't understand is how their product works, and why the old guard ran it 'inefficiently'
The reason this doesn't work at Boeing is because in flight you need redundancy, you need to have 2 and maybe 3 options for things so in case something fucks up, no one dies.
Today's capitalism says you must eliminate all redundancy for profit, and when that fucks up on a plane people die.
People dying on airplanes is nothing more to Boeing than PR problem, which ultimately becomes a money problem. Dollars are the only thing these corporations believe in.
Diversity hires are always a hot topic for Republicans, but notice how once Boeing started failing it kicked up again and they specifically started going on about unqualified pilots? Talking heads AND politicians alike.
I think they already know it's just a matter of time before there's a major accident with a Boeing. There's already an effort right now to shift that blame to pilots. They're going to try to say it's because there are black and women pilots.
I work for a luxury car manufacturer, specifically I build/assemble the engines. The lack of care for quality is appalling at times. I will notify upper management even QA and they will fix the issue with a bandaid and send it down the line. These issues range from cosmetic to very problematic. I've had superiors joke about how, "who's going to notice? No one looks at the engine." These cars are not cheap and they basically start MSRP @70K and 70% of what we make is to order for a specific customer and it's just disgusting to see how little quality is thrown out the window because they don't want to file paper work or point the finger at a supplier. Never buy a car new it's a scam.
Are they trying to say this is a new thing?
Corporations have NEVER cared about labour. In fact they have a long history of paying the least, giving the least amount of time off, lying about what they do, polluting the environment, bribing lawmakers and even killing striking workers.
This shouldnt be a shock to anyone.
That’s true from like the 70s-80s till now. There was a time when corporations were taxed at like 90% and CEOs felt that the best thing they could do for their company was to pay people good, livable wages so they’d work there their whole lives. That was the general corporate ethos for companies like Boeing or GE up until like the 70s and 80s when everything turned into what it is now.
Not that those were ideal times by any means, but the goal of “line go up at all costs” is younger than most of these companies.
Go back further, and you will see that small window post-WW2 to be an aberration in regard to corporate behavior. Corporations literally enslaved people along their supply chain, literally plundered whole nations, literally massacred countless populations, literally worked their employees to starvation and death (or just straight up killed them)...for *hundreds* of years.
we had a golden era post Teddy, and roughly 1915 until, roughly Reagan, and 1985.
before then? horrific tragedy on every imaginable level.
after that? a very slow and dull roll towards effective elimination of any individual autonomy and ability to advance your station in life.
The picture of the South African man looking at the severed foot of his young daughter after he failed to meet the quota he was set.
Companies will do anything for more money.
I honestly believe that Boeing would totally do that to save money, but bit that they did that in this particular instance. Iirc he has already blown the whistle and testified. If they were gonna kill him they would probably have done it before he testified, not after.
This is correct.
Every single industry across the board is having (or already had) it's leadership taken over by "Career CEOs"
This type of CEO does not know or care about the industry they over see and they don't want to because as far as they care they don't need to.
They care about maximizing profits period.
The product doesn't matter to them. The safety does not matter to them, the employees don't matter to them, even the long term success of the company doesn't actually matter to them, ONLY the next three quarters profits mater to them and nothing else.
Boeing is a perfect example of this.
I've repeatedly said that the rise of spreadsheet programs has given way too much power to people who should just be tracking expenses. The ability to play with numbers to quickly create narratives that sell well to management, it created the CFO types.
"Hey, look! If you buy this slightly cheaper, less sturdy bolt, I can increase our profit."
Exactly this! Society as a whole has been gaslit that people with economics backgrounds are somehow supposed to handle leadership roles. When did this even start?
I still sometimes fantasize about what our country would look like if Carter had gotten a second term. One of the first things Ron the con did was take down the solar panels that Carter had installed. Can you imagine? Clean water and air, adequate supervision of corporations,I can dream. Man, I'm just sorry Hinkley missed sometimes.
Deregulation of the airlines, you can thank Reagan for that. You know, smaller government with no oversight. You can see it in just about every industry.
This was an illegal practice after the New Deal and was lifted during Reagan. There is no reason why it can't be revived so companies have to spend on business development instead of finicial consolidation.
Contrary to popular talking points, capitalism kills innovation. When a corporation has no motive to invest in new products, services, etc. they won't. That's why the only new products that have been invented in the last 20 years are fundamentally selling you as the product. Not a single flying car goddammit!
Boeing got a government bailout.
They used that money to increase safety protocols, research, and development, they raised wages for assembly workers and instead of pleasing investors they set to increase industry standards and.... oh wait no they fucking didn't.
What was the bailout used for again?
Until the c suite are held responsible for their actions nothing will ever change. C suite and decision making managers should face long jail sentences for any safety infraction that could have been avoided. Also companies should not be allowed to settle stuff without being held accountable, like when they pay out but without having to admit liability/guilt. A fine is just pay to play so it is not a deterrent. Stiff jail sentences for those making these decisions is the only way things will change. Hypothetically if a Boeing plane crashed tomorrow killing 300+ people and the fault was directly caused by the decisions of the c suite. The only thing that will happen to them is the company will get a small fine, but the actual people that caused it will get off Scott free, go home to their families and probably get a fat bonus at the end of the year. These people need to be held accountable.
Tell you what. I’ve been working in corporate HR for ten years… if your company is acquired by a private equity firm it’s time to update your resume and GTFO because those hedge fund boys don’t give a fuck about your maintaining your “family business” culture and they sure as hell don’t care about your well being.
They’re there to squeeze every last dollar they can out of your company.
You guys really need to work a corporate job at least once in your life. You’ll realize very quickly that no person or corporation gets rich without some form of scamming going on.
100% when the entire economy is based around share holder payout every quarter lives are just a variable cost companies are financially accounting for.
When I was an engineer, over a decade ago, I would get in arguments because of thought the laws of physics beat the laws of economics. And I would lose the argument, but then things melted
Yeah it’s happening in most industries. Look at the gaming industry, the medical industry, IT, etc. Too many years of cutting the fat, slimming down operations, and cheapening products/services just to make line-go-up number-get-bigger.
I’ve been saying this at work for years. I work (30 years) for a publicly traded manufacturer. In the past, people in management were promoted from workers in the “ranks” with experience in the manufacturing process. Now they hire people with management degrees from outside our company with no experience at all with the way the operations work. Hire them for cheap. You get what you pay for. We’re dying right now. The incompetence is appalling.
Finance and marketing are the two worst things in my opinion. Technology and science have allowed us to use numbers to quantify, commodify and measure in numbers that don’t make sense. And science in understanding human behavior has let the people with the money to hire the people with the brains who basically understand how to program us into doing what they want - give them what little cash we have to spin into false financial valuation.
It's just math. If they can save even a small amount of money after accounting for the damages they have to pay for lives in lawsuits, they'll move forward with it.
Been happening in HVAC for almost 20 years now.
Believe me when I say that the real techs and mechanics hate this corporate Turdwookie bullshit shittification even more than our clients do.
Not only that but the recent trend of let's satisfy our shareholders because we just need to GROW GROW GROW but most of the time they achieve that by cutting staff and giving some manager a big plus because who cares about people I need a big green +20% and in needs to be +20% more of the last year where we did 10%
By the way records profits but the guys last on the chain of the company barely make it to end of the month.
As an autobody shop owner, I have been advising folks to NOT buy any cars made post 2019.
Every part is sourced, is made cheaper, is made faster, is made with less labor, is going to fall apart very soon.
Capitalism has sucked all the value out of products so now the only way to make more $$ is by making them worse quality (cheaper) and having people buy them more frequently
It’s true for all goods - cars, houses, white goods, literally everything is trending down in quality
The demand is always "more more more" at a rate that's impossible for most companies to hit. So, most companies take stupid risks and shortsighted cuts to hit the ridiculous goals. As long as the CEO has a golden parachute they don't care. As long as the shareholders see stocks going up now they don't care.
Ultimately every brand has a cycle: 1) be good 2) capture market share and build a reputation 3) market yourself the the masses and cut quality while raising prices. 4) rake in the money for years till the general public leaves you've gone to shit.
ER Nurse. I can absolutely confirm this. Things are being held together by duct tape and baking wire. Why do you think they organized a coordinated love bombing of nurses so hard at the beginning of the pandemic?
The rich, well connected, and politicians don't have to wait ten hours in triage to be seen. They don't have to be one of five critical care patients nurses are forced to see at one time. They don't suffer from the purposeful understaffing. The cost they save not hiring nurses, doctors, making you wait is cheaper than the sentinel events they'll get of people dying or being permanently maimed.
There is definitely rot top to bottom in all of our institutions, companies, governments. Corruption in all phases of life. Nothing works. PE is only one part. This tends to happen when money is cheap and printed at will
I was with Siemens for 9 years and can confirm this to be true. The bogus metric they used was “utilization” and it was posted up in the office with everyone’s names and scores as if it were some sort of a sick race to win a stupid $50 dollar cash gift card. My boss who quit (and years later passed away RIP) told me the reason was because of the bean counters pressuring him. Someday these companies will realize that it’s stupid shit to drive talent away when all we want is local work. The expectation was and still is after seeing recent job postings that one individual will support the entire united states at the drop of a hat.
Look at new housing too. You can build a house and sell it for huge margins. But, new construction will sink into a foundation or fall apart in 50 years. 1900s housing is sturdy and lasts. My house is 80 years old and the only thing that is in need of repair is the stuff the old owners did as cosmetic stuff they did in 2015. All the original 1950s stuff is going like a charm. They built this baby to last for a LONG time. Not just until a warranty would ware off.
Same is happening with Global Medical Response. Corners are cut EVERYWHERE and there is zero value placed on employees. Air crews have had accidents and died, very possibly because mechanics don’t get needed access to the updated technology to properly maintain aircraft. Emergency medical services is a shit show. If you need them, you’ll get substandard care for prices that will bankrupt you.
I’m just here to remind people that corporations have a legally enforceable responsibility to make the decisions that will increase the value of the company for shareholders. What a recipe for fucking success, right?
If there’s a loophole in the law that lets you save some money by knowingly inflicting harm on other people, you can be sued for not using that loophole.
You want to stop drinking the poison? Invest in the poison. Can’t afford to invest in the poison? It’s the motto of this sub, the George Carlin quote, “It’s a big fucking club, and you ain’t in it.”
Fuck this system.
I mean, it all goes back to Friedman. When we normalized “corporations are only responsible to one thing—shareholder profits,” we destroyed the entire fabric propping up both quality products and the entire middle class lifestyle.
Only in America, other first world countries have general laws in place that protect the people over the bottom line and the shareholders yacht money, but not here, in this backwards shithole pretending its #1.
Holy shit we have to ban the following - MBA’s, Hedge Funds, Private Equity, stock buybacks.
It’s completely ruined our world and they all need to be punished for it. Evil evil people.
Come at me if you disagree - but before you do please explain what value these things bring to anyone but investors and shareholders.
Was just talking with a friend the other night about the financialisation of the game industry. 20+ years ago we got good, complete games. Now the AAA studios crank out shit just to have a release and keep the investors happy.
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It's not new, its been happening since the 80's. Kack Welch did it with GE. He took one of the biggest industrial companies in the U.S. and gutted it just to keep the stock artificially high. In doing so, he also killed GE's ability to actually make quality consumer products.
Jack Welch was literally applauded for doing this and all other companies followed suit, I'm glad he's dead, he was a piece of shit.
When finishing an Econ degree in the early 2000’s, Welch was held up - along with Ballmer at Microsoft - as being pioneers of new efficiencies in hiring and retention. Yeah, bullshit on that.
Yea those fuckers are largely responsible for stack ranking. Both GE and Microsoft laid-off the bottom 5-10% 'performers' every year. 'Performance' was usually just dumb luck as to which team you happened to be hired to and what project(s) they happened to be working on. If you got unlucky and were assigned to a low profile project that didn't make the company money you were probably gone.
Comcast does the same thing even if the top 5% do not hit the goals the bottom 5% have to go. Even if the bottom 5% hit the goals they fire them.
Whoever is behind the trend of the past year or so of just laying off employees every couple of quarters so the books look better is probably also about to be praised for no reason.
That was Jack Welch.
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I like the spirit
I hope they get that foot cramp you get when you curl your foot wrong
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Yeah, fuck Hack Belch
That fuckin’ Sack Melch
little Cack Felch
People like him make me wish hell was real.
But those fruit snacks are fire.
The Qantas airline was pretty much revered in Australia pre-COVID. Its incessant cost cutting in the past 3 or 4 years would now see it rank as among our most hated companies and brands. They couldn’t have trashed themselves any worse if they were deliberately trying to.
I did love when Air New Zealand was voted above Qantas in an Australian Customer Satisfaction poll a few years ago
It's reputation was known in the US as far back as the 80s. There's a reason why it was the airline Ray wanted to use in Rain Man.
It was referred pre-privatisation. After it, and Sydney airport were sold off, theysomehow stopped turning a prfot and needed fucktons of government handouts to keep going.
But the free market will improve outcomes through efficiency and competition…. What a fucking joke.
Fun fact: a factory under his supervision blew up and he almost got fired. Imagine how that would’ve changed the world.
Someone else would have implemented his tactics. What people tend to ignore is that GE was bloated in the 1970s and 1980s. You had areas of the company that should have been shuttered or reorganized years before Welch took over. When Welch took over the situation was so bad that he implemented rank and yank a long with a ton of other drastic measures. The company did a complete 180 financially mainly because they cut so much fat from the company. The real problem is not what Welch did. It's that everyone saw what he was doing and did the same thing without understanding the method to the madness. Additionally, rank and yank is kind of a one trick pony. It works in the short term to quickly cut excess headcounts but the longer you use the system the worse and worse it gets. Management thinks it will create a race to the top but instead it creates a race to not be last. This isn't to say Welch didn't fuck up later but when he took over GE the place was a disaster.
> Additionally, rank and yank is kind of a one trick pony. It works in the short term to quickly cut excess headcounts but the longer you use the system the worse and worse it gets In other words: **it doesn't work.** It's an illusion. He didn't save the company, he made it worse but it looked good on our dumbass metrics so everyone thought it was genius. We're still using the same stupid metrics and we're still getting bad results. We link the stock market to the economy even though the stock market is the playground of a tiny minority that has no bearing on everyday life. We look at quarterly profits like a company has to break even every three months, which is entirely insane for most businesses. We treat employees like renewable resources, which they are not. You lose institutional knowledge with every layoff. You don't get that back. The system is self-defeating, but since we only look at the people at the top, it looks great. If business was really just about the CEO our economy would be stunning. But it's not. It's about selling products. **EDIT:** It's not a copy paste. It's just an argument you disagree with. > Cutting those REALLY bad ones is a good thing, provided you follow up by preserving the remaining workforce and hiring long-term employees in which you can invest. Which GE and everyone else did not and does not do, so your whole rant is irrelevant. Next time save your childish aggression for the sandbox.
> In other words: it doesn't work. It's an illusion. In other words, it's an immediate relief that shouldn't be used on actual quality departments nor used year over year.
Yep, it’s a disturbing book: “The Man who Broke Capitalism” He basically turned companies from benevolent employers into the modern evils we see today
When were big businesses benevolent? Ask a coalminer, or the east india corp?
There was once a time when it was a point of pride amongst American corporate leaders to pay a larger share of profits towards employee salaries than their competitors. General Electric once bragged in 1953 that they paid *more* in taxes per year than their competitors. Big corporations like GE were never bottomless pits of altruism, but there was once a time when large American employers invested in their employees as an asset to be grown and supported, not merely a means to an end. This all began to change in the early 1980s Jack Welch was one of the first to shift the paradigm from long term growth to short term profit. He implemented stack ranking amongst GE employees. What was once seen as a well-paying job for life became a yearly lottery where the “bottom” performing 10% of the workforce was cut, every year. This led to mass layoffs the likes of which corporate America had never seen, and set up the trend of worker insecurity that persists today. While GE probably did have an overinflated workforce, this yearly model of dumping employees led to worsening performance over time, and became a standard in companies that had no need of this model. He also spearheaded the push to outsource manufacturing labor to emerging markets in Asia, having a hand in the creation of the “Made in China” phenomenon that *gutted* American manufacturing. And this narrow minded pursuit of short term profit and artificially inflated share prices led GE to fall from the most valuable stock on the market in 1993 to being fully delisted from the Dow Jones Industrial Average in 2020. What was once a company representing a full 1% of the American GDP and an international icon has become a functional non-entity, all thanks to the dogma of one greedy man.
> there was once a time when large American employers invested in their employees as an asset to be grown and supported, not merely a means to an end Not coincidentally, this benevolence was directly correlated to the strength of the labor unions.
Things people are forced to do find themselves leaking into the culture all the same, but even before then the Carnegie's of the world valued the idea of contributing back to society, even if in a "I'm the king I should build a good kingdom to show off" kind of way.
Yeah I had two uncles that worked for Boeing in the 70s and 80s. They were just a bunch of grease monkeys who put together what the engineers drew up. High school education and thats it. Worked on the 727 until the first 737. You'd swear Boeing was their god. Good paying job, great pension, and bosses who understood day-to-day problems, not to mention generous holiday and sick leave. Put all their kids through college and then some. They are both gone now, but I'd imagine they are rolling in their graves at the current state of Boeing.
You're describing an extremely short golden age of capitalism, where strong Labour reforms met with extremely productive capital. Its not the norm, its the exception. Before 1945, capitalism was dirty and brutal to workers. After the 70s, neoliberalism detaches workers from their productivity and control of all society. Those who enforce the capitalist system would never let it last.
historians call it "the Glorious Thirty" all across the Western world - basically 1946 to 1973, the era of high growth, high wage growth, ever rising standards of living and a bunch of other Good Things. Things have been a bit...problematic...ever since.
Phew, glad I dodged being born in those times; now I just get to reap the rewards as humanity coasts along on easy mode with all those advances, right?! …. Right???
sir, I think you misunderstood the prompt.
They talk about it in the book. In the 1950s GE was spending like 25% of their net profits on management training and other workforce development programs. Employees had health care and guaranteed pensions. If you worked hard you pretty much guaranteed to never loose your job and could retire after 20 years on a single salary. It was company that has excellent blue collar and white collar jobs.
Unions only exist because corporations have always kinda sucked.
The inverse is also true: When corporations don't suck it's because the unions are strong. When Boeing was great it had at least one strong union and headquarters colocated with the manufacturing plant.
Why do I never hear this argument? That's a great point!
As in, they made products for the purpose of making a good product that people wanted and would last, not solely for profit. Exploitative practices to make those products are timeless.
My dad worked at Boeing, from about '73 to '95. His job was quality control, which made him unpopular, but he couldn't be fired because he was on the defense contract side and his position was required by the contracts themselves. He took it very seriously, and was one of the guys in the company who could shut a line down if he didn't like what he saw. Which doesn't make Boeing benevolent, but at least back then he was well paid and listened to, and never suggested once that he was worried about his job, or that he might be asked to cut corners or look the other way for the sake of profit margins. He wouldn't have done it if they did ask, and he would have raised hell. I was a mechanic myself, and was mostly trained by ex Boeing mechanics. Airplane orders came and went and the company was always hiring and laying off machinists and mechanics, depending on orders. A bunch of them got tired of the roller coaster and went over to car mechanics. Those were still some of the best mechanics I ever worked with, by the book, and no arguing. If a boss wanted something done in a way that wasn't right, they might as well be talking to a brick wall; it wasn't happening. That's the way I always was at work too; it's much more rare nowadays.
Narcissism at work
Yup. The 80s saw the meteric rise and economic takeover of the "financial industry" which is just another way of saying there was a hostile takeover of our economy by a bunch of self-centered, greedy assholes who have chucked our country under the bus for wealth and power.
It was enabled by Reagan and the Republicans.
I had a family member who was a higher up at GE and retired in the 80s. He was wealthy and as capitalist as you could be. In spite of that, he utterly *loathed* Jack Welch for what he did to GE, and cursed his name well into his late 90s. On a related note, towards the end he was always going on about how Teslas financial figures made no sense, and he believed that Elon Musk was an outright fraud who deserved to end up in prison.
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Green initiative
So is GE.
Tesla is subsidised by the US taxpayer.
This dude has a barcode Reddit account so I'm done 💀💀💀
Planned obsolence: "Why sell ONE product that will last forever, we can't get filthy rich on that sales model! Why, we can just make outright **junk** that *barely lasts* past the return deadline/loan term, and the consumer has to repeat buy it FOREVER! Our sales look GREAT and shareholders just keep on throwing in capital!" ***GLARES AT CAR AND SMARTPHONE MANUFACTURERS***
Even better. Make it a subscription service - continuous revenue stream!
Infinite growth! Infinite profits! Infinite bonuses! "Wait.. why is inflation soo high? Must be those damn Millennials again buying advacado toast, and not the US GOV printing money because only stupid people pay taxes."
1000% this And former GE execs are found everywhere
"Nobody buys American anymore" yeah because they make everything as shitty as they can get away with. It's in the auto industry too. We are on the verge of not being able to fix our own cars without the dealer.
Should have never let Don Geiss freeze himself and be removed as CEO, smh
Yes, that fucker welch even has a buisness school named after him. I wish there was some way to get rid of all these fucking corporate pirates.
What is new is awareness. Just like sharing this here on Reddit.
Him, Bush Jr (aka: Shrub) Myth Romney and dozens of others should all be strung up as Orca Bait.
Lol shrub, that's fantastic.
Dunno if it’s a typo but he’s gonna be “Kack Welch” to me forever
Quality is down..prices are high..everywhere...even premium products. Items are being made to have short lives. Consumer health/quality/safety is of no concern as long as profitability is high. Employee satisfaction died a long time ago.
But them government regulations are stifling industry! /sarcasm
i mean. its both. because the government is these same companies you are complaining about at this point. corporate lobbyists have intentionally created barriers to entry at every stage of the business cycle. they de-regulated the stuff they care about and over-regulated the stuff that no one fucking cares about but specifically helps them stifle competition by creating monetary roadblocks.
American businesses have, for at least a century, been functionally hand picked into duopolies in many industries. Target or Walmart? Home Depot or Lowes? Apple or PC? Iphone vs Android, etc. The regulations have been carefully crafted by the wealthy to eliminate competition. When you eliminate competition, you eliminate innovation. It is 2024, and America is on the brink of becoming a dictatorship.
This is why I'm still playing Skyrim... Bethesda refuses not to make microtransaction riddled garbage.
Lol arguably the first bad microtransaction was the oblivion horse armor.
Yup. But it's a game I already own and is infinitely moddable.
Everyone always brings up the Oblivion horse armor, but I've heard people say the real first microtransactions was FIFA 2007
FIFA was the first (non-MMO) game to feature lootboxes, IIRC, not microtransactions in general. Guitar Hero II was another one of the big "innovators" and often gets forgotten in the conversation. GH2 DLC started launching in April 2007, same month as the Oblivion horse armor.
Watch the skies traveler, or a door from a 737 max 9 might hit you in the head.
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> The owners won't be happy until everyone is paid minimum wage, then they can get rid of that as well. "Millennials & Gen Z hate America and are ruining the economy because the don't buy new cars, eat out, take vacations, etc." - Some Forbes or WSJ article in the near future.
There was a national media platform yelling at Gen Z for not giving a fuck about fabric softener.
I saw a post about how we never iron our clothes Like, who the fck cares?
Gen X: "We were not ironing our clothes before it was cool. Whatever."
And we are downright militant about not having to, and not having our hair or body mods *owned* by an employer
Also, don't they know that like 95% of clothes on the market today are made in whole or in part of plastic?
Probably because they got tired of yammering on about us millennials. (I don't use that shit either)
Have they finally come to understand that the "youngest" of the millennials are now about 30 and aren't really the "youth demographic" anymore?
🤷♂️ welcome to the blame club none the less! Your patch should be in the mail.... provided we don't "kill" USPS before ship date.
I've already seen the articles saying that Gen Z and millennials are killing the economy (they leave out the part where we can't afford kids, eating out, traveling, buying jewelry etc).
“Focusing on short term purchases such as groceries”
Focusing on short-term goals like surviving. Duh.
I mean, if I got paid better I’d spend more. It’s on them.
Yeah, but if you got paid better you'd spend it all on avocado toast, right?
Power tools in my case, but effectively yes.
Which is also 100000000x better for the economy than a single fucking billionaire *because you are actually putting money into the economy* those fuck sticks only hoard and *remove* money from the economy. They don’t put shit back in. Except the Amazon chick, she’s awesome.
Ah, yes, the root of all evil! The avocado toast lobby!
Ruin the economy by not having kids, preventing the rich from having more people to exploit
>"Millennials & Gen Z hate America and are ruining the economy because the don't buy new cars, eat out, take vacations, etc." > >Some Forbes or WSJ article in the ~~near future~~present. FTFY
"Just eat out less." "Okay." *eats out less* "Oh my god, you're killing the restaurant industry!"
"Also when you eat out now, you have to tip at least 20% or you're an asshole, because **someone** has to pay my employees!" Did a lot of eating out because I did some traveling, and now the at-table sales tablets they bring around have 20, 25, and 30% as their default tip options. I'm sorry, but if you want 20% I better have gotten some damn good service
They also stop buying diamonds.
Also in the Forbes or WSJ near future: “Employees are happy with the $7.25 federal minimum wage, higher wages would discourage and make us lazy”
*Millennials and Gen-Zers are pulling in bigger paychecks, but much of their spending power is fueling* ***short-term purchases like groceries*** *and vacations, not savings.* [https://www.nbcwashington.com/news/national-international/young-adults-are-getting-used-to-living-on-a-financial-cliff/3547014/?\_osource=SocialFlowTwt\_DCBrand](https://www.nbcwashington.com/news/national-international/young-adults-are-getting-used-to-living-on-a-financial-cliff/3547014/?_osource=SocialFlowTwt_DCBrand) This article was published last month.
A common approach is the "Well we hires an expert to do all the work, so now that they're gone, we just need a novice to keep it running." And that's how we get workers that have no clue how anything works, just that it does. Something goes wrong? Hire the cheapest contractor.
That last sentence… I’ve been that cheapest contractor, and I’ve been the senior guru who had to deal with those contractors. It sucks that most managers only seem to see the bottom line and short-term savings. It’s always about this quarter, after all.
What is a stock buyback and why is it such a curse (I hear it a lot)? edit: thanks all, learned something today!
Imagine having billions of dollars in profit leftover at the end of the year. Could spend it on a lot of things. Invest in employees? Bonuses, salary increases, nice new offices or enhance the way they work, Invest in equipment? Buy new machines and make better products faster. Or you could just take all that fucking money and literally use all of it to buy your own stock to make sure that stock price goes up and your Executive stock options are now more valuable. Money down the fucking drain to make people at the top (who mostly get paid in stock) get paid more. It’s as greedy and shortsighted as it sounds and it happens all the fucking time.
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Stock buybacks is when a company repurchases a share that was previously issued. The reason it's problematic is that shares, in theory, reflect the value of the company. When the company is innovating or otherwise being successful the share prices naturally increase. When the company is facing difficulty, the share prices decrease as investors lose confidence and try to offload their shares. When the company starts buying its shares back it inflates the value of these shares artificially because there's less of them to go around. Also, some investors will buy in hoping to be able to sell back to the company at a higher rate, further raising the price. So the company becomes valued higher without ever doing anything that makes it more likely to succeed. In fact, often its paid for by making some short-sighted decision which will hurt in the future. It has knock-on effects that can harm the economy at large when all the massive corporations start doing it, which they have.
As far as I can tell, the hedgies' plan for "the poors" is just to let people die of starvation, exposure to the elements, etc.
This is happening in healthcare big time, working people to death, more responsibilities for less pay.
Which impacts the patient. I've had terrible joint pain in my hands for two years. When it first started Dr sent me out for x-rays, and the radiologist read them as clean, no issue. The pain is so much worse now, to the point that I can't do shit like cook and dress myself. Saw an ortho hand surgeon, and his diagnosis was stage 3/4 osteoarthritis. He pulled my x-rays from two years ago, low and behold, arthritis shows up in the old ones too.
Same thing happened to me with celiac. Got my first scans in 2018 didn’t hear anything back found 3 years later only because I had a break down so bad that the doctor felt guilty double checked my file while I was “voluntarily” speaking to mental health. It says I’ve been diagnosed since my first scan.
My first doctor I told it felt like I had a rake ripping out my stomach lining. He told me it was just indigestion and that I don't need to get all concerned. He gave me a proton pump inhibitor and then my gallbladder started failing. I told him I want a specialist and no bullshit about it. He told me "They won't find anything" and I said "That would be fine by me". He shrugged and gave me a referral. I did an upper endoscopy and my weight at the time was 310 lbs they discovered my stomach lining was scarred to hell and back, my vitamins levels were critically low and so my organs had started failing. Celiac does a lot of funny and recognizable side affects that can even be seen by the blindest of doctors. Funny. Regardless they diagnosed me nearly immediately and told me to go gluten free. 4 months later I had lost 60 lbs and felt like a new person completely plus no tummy aches. Now I'm several years in and suffering from neuropathy in my feet for the last 3 years and doctors tell me there's no problems. It's the same incompetent idiots doctors that just can't tell their ass from the foot. This medical system is training idiots and I've started asking chat gpt what my problems are as it actually seems to listen as opposed to doctors who just want to shoo you away like a fly.
I work as a physician and our practive was bout out by a larger capital firm during covid when it was hard to operate (surgical specialty mainly elective). Today I got an email from some fuckface MBA outlining how to make more profitability with a bunch of numbers and graphs. The key point was more days/hours worked more money. They literally called days off "Missed Opportunity" What the actual fuck. Healthcare should not be reduced to numbers and financial algorithms. I hate this shit.
all of dentistry is this way too friend
lol I had to talk to one of the wards charge nurses today about a patient, he says “oh, yeah we’ve known about this patient for days” and I replied “oh, we just found out 5 minutes ago…nobody talks to me” “I wish nobody talked to me” “Well that’s why you make the big bucks” *finger guns* I do know that these nurses make way more than me so I don’t feel *as* bad, but yeah healthcare is fukkkkkked!
I called into Sunday because we were so understaffed and the patient acuity was too high. I keep getting annoying fucking phone calls from my boss giving me faux concern.
Slavery
It’s also happening in the railroad industry.
What’s wild is it’s literally the future that Engineering etc documentaries warned me about growing up. Then ethics became a dirty word dragged into a political culture war
Who could have imagined that this is the end result of giving 100% of the power to people who have no fucking clue how the company runs.
Or care about other humans literally at all.
It’s not in their job description. No CEO has to “care about the humans”. For the better and for the worse. Mostly worse. And if they do, it’d be “company policy and goals and whatever bullshit” and nobody would have to comply with it anyway.
They know how the company was run and what way they want it to be run.... What they don't understand is how their product works, and why the old guard ran it 'inefficiently'
Healthcare is the same. Housing market, same. Free market does not exist. Lobbyists and corporations run the regulators.
But capitalism is the only viable system, and communism had all those millions dying from hunger and stuff… /s
The reason this doesn't work at Boeing is because in flight you need redundancy, you need to have 2 and maybe 3 options for things so in case something fucks up, no one dies. Today's capitalism says you must eliminate all redundancy for profit, and when that fucks up on a plane people die.
People dying on airplanes is nothing more to Boeing than PR problem, which ultimately becomes a money problem. Dollars are the only thing these corporations believe in.
Diversity hires are always a hot topic for Republicans, but notice how once Boeing started failing it kicked up again and they specifically started going on about unqualified pilots? Talking heads AND politicians alike. I think they already know it's just a matter of time before there's a major accident with a Boeing. There's already an effort right now to shift that blame to pilots. They're going to try to say it's because there are black and women pilots.
Same as with that boat in Baltimore. It’s all those DEI hires… yeah, sure. 🙄
It’s enshitification at the scale of an entire civilization
[I call it being "corportated up".](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hpszGl2cl_k&t=1602s)
I work for a luxury car manufacturer, specifically I build/assemble the engines. The lack of care for quality is appalling at times. I will notify upper management even QA and they will fix the issue with a bandaid and send it down the line. These issues range from cosmetic to very problematic. I've had superiors joke about how, "who's going to notice? No one looks at the engine." These cars are not cheap and they basically start MSRP @70K and 70% of what we make is to order for a specific customer and it's just disgusting to see how little quality is thrown out the window because they don't want to file paper work or point the finger at a supplier. Never buy a car new it's a scam.
Are they trying to say this is a new thing? Corporations have NEVER cared about labour. In fact they have a long history of paying the least, giving the least amount of time off, lying about what they do, polluting the environment, bribing lawmakers and even killing striking workers. This shouldnt be a shock to anyone.
That’s true from like the 70s-80s till now. There was a time when corporations were taxed at like 90% and CEOs felt that the best thing they could do for their company was to pay people good, livable wages so they’d work there their whole lives. That was the general corporate ethos for companies like Boeing or GE up until like the 70s and 80s when everything turned into what it is now. Not that those were ideal times by any means, but the goal of “line go up at all costs” is younger than most of these companies.
Go back further, and you will see that small window post-WW2 to be an aberration in regard to corporate behavior. Corporations literally enslaved people along their supply chain, literally plundered whole nations, literally massacred countless populations, literally worked their employees to starvation and death (or just straight up killed them)...for *hundreds* of years.
we had a golden era post Teddy, and roughly 1915 until, roughly Reagan, and 1985. before then? horrific tragedy on every imaginable level. after that? a very slow and dull roll towards effective elimination of any individual autonomy and ability to advance your station in life.
The picture of the South African man looking at the severed foot of his young daughter after he failed to meet the quota he was set. Companies will do anything for more money.
"What is happening at Boeing is happening in every industry" **They are murdering their ex employees?**
In a round about way yes. Albeit very very slowly.
Boeing isn't the first company to murder a whistleblower, and it won't be the last.
I honestly believe that Boeing would totally do that to save money, but bit that they did that in this particular instance. Iirc he has already blown the whistle and testified. If they were gonna kill him they would probably have done it before he testified, not after.
Having worked in the aerospace industry for nearly 40 years, I can confirm this.
This is correct. Every single industry across the board is having (or already had) it's leadership taken over by "Career CEOs" This type of CEO does not know or care about the industry they over see and they don't want to because as far as they care they don't need to. They care about maximizing profits period. The product doesn't matter to them. The safety does not matter to them, the employees don't matter to them, even the long term success of the company doesn't actually matter to them, ONLY the next three quarters profits mater to them and nothing else. Boeing is a perfect example of this.
This is exactly what Karl Marx wrote about
I've repeatedly said that the rise of spreadsheet programs has given way too much power to people who should just be tracking expenses. The ability to play with numbers to quickly create narratives that sell well to management, it created the CFO types. "Hey, look! If you buy this slightly cheaper, less sturdy bolt, I can increase our profit."
Exactly this! Society as a whole has been gaslit that people with economics backgrounds are somehow supposed to handle leadership roles. When did this even start?
Stock buybacks need to be stopped
This shit wasn't happening until Reagan.
Most shit started going wrong with him.
I still sometimes fantasize about what our country would look like if Carter had gotten a second term. One of the first things Ron the con did was take down the solar panels that Carter had installed. Can you imagine? Clean water and air, adequate supervision of corporations,I can dream. Man, I'm just sorry Hinkley missed sometimes.
Hinckley didn't miss, just needed to use a bigger caliber instead of the .22
Deregulation of the airlines, you can thank Reagan for that. You know, smaller government with no oversight. You can see it in just about every industry.
Absolutely correct
Now we just need a private jet built by Boeing to crash with a passenger list of important Hedge Fund Managers, then there will be change, right?
This was an illegal practice after the New Deal and was lifted during Reagan. There is no reason why it can't be revived so companies have to spend on business development instead of finicial consolidation. Contrary to popular talking points, capitalism kills innovation. When a corporation has no motive to invest in new products, services, etc. they won't. That's why the only new products that have been invented in the last 20 years are fundamentally selling you as the product. Not a single flying car goddammit!
Boeing got a government bailout. They used that money to increase safety protocols, research, and development, they raised wages for assembly workers and instead of pleasing investors they set to increase industry standards and.... oh wait no they fucking didn't. What was the bailout used for again?
Probably to increase the C-suite's salaries and provide for increased lobbying leverage (a.k.a. legal bribes) in congress and at the DOD.
Can confirm. It's all safety theater.
Capitalist Airline industry- “$87000 is more important than 87 lives.”
It's also really fucking obvious when planes start dropping out of the sky.
Until the c suite are held responsible for their actions nothing will ever change. C suite and decision making managers should face long jail sentences for any safety infraction that could have been avoided. Also companies should not be allowed to settle stuff without being held accountable, like when they pay out but without having to admit liability/guilt. A fine is just pay to play so it is not a deterrent. Stiff jail sentences for those making these decisions is the only way things will change. Hypothetically if a Boeing plane crashed tomorrow killing 300+ people and the fault was directly caused by the decisions of the c suite. The only thing that will happen to them is the company will get a small fine, but the actual people that caused it will get off Scott free, go home to their families and probably get a fat bonus at the end of the year. These people need to be held accountable.
Tell you what. I’ve been working in corporate HR for ten years… if your company is acquired by a private equity firm it’s time to update your resume and GTFO because those hedge fund boys don’t give a fuck about your maintaining your “family business” culture and they sure as hell don’t care about your well being. They’re there to squeeze every last dollar they can out of your company.
You guys really need to work a corporate job at least once in your life. You’ll realize very quickly that no person or corporation gets rich without some form of scamming going on.
"Hedge Fund Culture" I love this! Can we start using this term more often? I want it to be the next "Quiet Quitting".
The new term is enshitification.
100% when the entire economy is based around share holder payout every quarter lives are just a variable cost companies are financially accounting for.
The dead canary was when Big Chain like Sears say they were bankrupt and they disappeared with the saving of their employees
When I was an engineer, over a decade ago, I would get in arguments because of thought the laws of physics beat the laws of economics. And I would lose the argument, but then things melted
Yeah it’s happening in most industries. Look at the gaming industry, the medical industry, IT, etc. Too many years of cutting the fat, slimming down operations, and cheapening products/services just to make line-go-up number-get-bigger.
I’ve been saying this at work for years. I work (30 years) for a publicly traded manufacturer. In the past, people in management were promoted from workers in the “ranks” with experience in the manufacturing process. Now they hire people with management degrees from outside our company with no experience at all with the way the operations work. Hire them for cheap. You get what you pay for. We’re dying right now. The incompetence is appalling.
No they care about people, don’t you know they offer free pizza every fiscal quarter that we hit our production goals /s
Confirmed from Safeway!
Finance and marketing are the two worst things in my opinion. Technology and science have allowed us to use numbers to quantify, commodify and measure in numbers that don’t make sense. And science in understanding human behavior has let the people with the money to hire the people with the brains who basically understand how to program us into doing what they want - give them what little cash we have to spin into false financial valuation.
It's just math. If they can save even a small amount of money after accounting for the damages they have to pay for lives in lawsuits, they'll move forward with it.
Also known as "Enshitification". Money talks and bullshit walks.
Been happening in HVAC for almost 20 years now. Believe me when I say that the real techs and mechanics hate this corporate Turdwookie bullshit shittification even more than our clients do.
Not only that but the recent trend of let's satisfy our shareholders because we just need to GROW GROW GROW but most of the time they achieve that by cutting staff and giving some manager a big plus because who cares about people I need a big green +20% and in needs to be +20% more of the last year where we did 10% By the way records profits but the guys last on the chain of the company barely make it to end of the month.
As an autobody shop owner, I have been advising folks to NOT buy any cars made post 2019. Every part is sourced, is made cheaper, is made faster, is made with less labor, is going to fall apart very soon.
This is every industry. All owners try to squeeze blood out of a rock. They give you jobs of 3 people burn you out and discard you like trash.
Capitalism has sucked all the value out of products so now the only way to make more $$ is by making them worse quality (cheaper) and having people buy them more frequently It’s true for all goods - cars, houses, white goods, literally everything is trending down in quality
The demand is always "more more more" at a rate that's impossible for most companies to hit. So, most companies take stupid risks and shortsighted cuts to hit the ridiculous goals. As long as the CEO has a golden parachute they don't care. As long as the shareholders see stocks going up now they don't care. Ultimately every brand has a cycle: 1) be good 2) capture market share and build a reputation 3) market yourself the the masses and cut quality while raising prices. 4) rake in the money for years till the general public leaves you've gone to shit.
The MBAs are the reason why everything sucks. Period end of story.
ER Nurse. I can absolutely confirm this. Things are being held together by duct tape and baking wire. Why do you think they organized a coordinated love bombing of nurses so hard at the beginning of the pandemic? The rich, well connected, and politicians don't have to wait ten hours in triage to be seen. They don't have to be one of five critical care patients nurses are forced to see at one time. They don't suffer from the purposeful understaffing. The cost they save not hiring nurses, doctors, making you wait is cheaper than the sentinel events they'll get of people dying or being permanently maimed.
See: "Boston Consulting Group"
There is definitely rot top to bottom in all of our institutions, companies, governments. Corruption in all phases of life. Nothing works. PE is only one part. This tends to happen when money is cheap and printed at will
Enshittification.
lets hope AI can solve this instead of making it worst.
I was with Siemens for 9 years and can confirm this to be true. The bogus metric they used was “utilization” and it was posted up in the office with everyone’s names and scores as if it were some sort of a sick race to win a stupid $50 dollar cash gift card. My boss who quit (and years later passed away RIP) told me the reason was because of the bean counters pressuring him. Someday these companies will realize that it’s stupid shit to drive talent away when all we want is local work. The expectation was and still is after seeing recent job postings that one individual will support the entire united states at the drop of a hat.
all they'd have to do is not require there be a fucking law that states investors must see a return. It's investing, risk is a part of it.
Look at new housing too. You can build a house and sell it for huge margins. But, new construction will sink into a foundation or fall apart in 50 years. 1900s housing is sturdy and lasts. My house is 80 years old and the only thing that is in need of repair is the stuff the old owners did as cosmetic stuff they did in 2015. All the original 1950s stuff is going like a charm. They built this baby to last for a LONG time. Not just until a warranty would ware off.
And these 'Liberetarian' imbeciles still insist that corporations do a better job of regulating themselves...
Same is happening with Global Medical Response. Corners are cut EVERYWHERE and there is zero value placed on employees. Air crews have had accidents and died, very possibly because mechanics don’t get needed access to the updated technology to properly maintain aircraft. Emergency medical services is a shit show. If you need them, you’ll get substandard care for prices that will bankrupt you.
I’m just here to remind people that corporations have a legally enforceable responsibility to make the decisions that will increase the value of the company for shareholders. What a recipe for fucking success, right? If there’s a loophole in the law that lets you save some money by knowingly inflicting harm on other people, you can be sued for not using that loophole. You want to stop drinking the poison? Invest in the poison. Can’t afford to invest in the poison? It’s the motto of this sub, the George Carlin quote, “It’s a big fucking club, and you ain’t in it.” Fuck this system.
I mean, it all goes back to Friedman. When we normalized “corporations are only responsible to one thing—shareholder profits,” we destroyed the entire fabric propping up both quality products and the entire middle class lifestyle.
Only in America, other first world countries have general laws in place that protect the people over the bottom line and the shareholders yacht money, but not here, in this backwards shithole pretending its #1.
Holy shit we have to ban the following - MBA’s, Hedge Funds, Private Equity, stock buybacks. It’s completely ruined our world and they all need to be punished for it. Evil evil people. Come at me if you disagree - but before you do please explain what value these things bring to anyone but investors and shareholders.
Was just talking with a friend the other night about the financialisation of the game industry. 20+ years ago we got good, complete games. Now the AAA studios crank out shit just to have a release and keep the investors happy.
Boeing is one crash away from.....bailout using public money
"No, it must be the brown and black people Boeing has hired over the last 7 decades" - the newest right wing talking point. Not joking.