The Disposable American and Jobs Scam

[Lawood]

The following are enlightening and informative and tend to induce indignation in all but corporate managers and local government officials.

" The Specter Haunting Your Office
NYT Review of Books

Donald Davis was not concerned about imports in the late 1960s, when he started out as CEO of the Stanley Works, the country's leading manufacturer of hand tools. By the early 1980s, the challenge of competing against inexpensive tools made in Taiwan, Korea, and China had swept most of Davis's other concerns aside. His first response was a plan to streamline management, reducing the company's white-collar ranks through attrition. An old-school CEO who had been with Stanley most of his adult life, Davis considered layoffs a last resort. But by the time he stepped down as CEO in 1987, hundreds of factory workers had lost their jobs on his orders...
Wall Street, however, was not impressed. Securities analysts, comparing the jobs eliminated by Ayers with the layoff numbers at other old-line companies—Scott Paper (11,000), Sears (50,000), General Motors (94,000)— suggested that Stanley's key problem might be leadership rather than imports. At age fifty-five, according to Louis Uchitelle's The Disposable American, Ayers concluded that he did "not have the stomach" for any more job-cutting.

In The Disposable American, Uchitelle makes it plain that he is writing about a long-term change...
"The permanent separation of people from their jobs, abruptly and against their wishes," he asserts, has become "standard management practice."
2.
The economic development story goes back to the 1930s when a group of southern governors set out to capture some of the manufacturing business of the North by offering cheap capital on top of the traditional lure of cheap labor. In more recent decades, the practice has gone national, and the private sector has taken firm control. .......................

LeRoy puts the national cost of these deals at $50 billion a year; they go a long way, he says, toward explaining a sharp decline in corporate taxes as a share of state revenues— from 9.7 percent in 1980 to about 5 percent today. The falloff in some states has been even more precipitous. Corporations paid a third of all taxes in Arkansas as recently as the 1970s; by 2002, the figure was 2 percent.

Entire review at http://www.nybooks.com/articles/20275

[Barbara Fitzpatrick]

Now if we re-instate the tariff system & quite subsidizing the petroleum industry that makes shipping costs next best thing to immaterial...