But you’ve got to pay that kind of money to attract the right kind of people.
(Is there an emoticon for “sarcasm so angry it goes right around the block and punches itself in the back of the head”?)
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I’m quite sure that no one will disagree with me that this is THE perfect time to say:
“Late-stage capitalism!”
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The takeaway is that saying you can’t afford to work in the USA any more when your CEO takes in that insane amount of money is a load of bullshit.
People who’d like to claim “but that’s what all companies do, you can’t be mad at them staying competitive!” are wrong. In Japan at least some CEOs are willing to put the other employees ahead of a giant-ass salary.
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Speaking as the bearer of the news that we are ignorant, who made you do it?
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So maybe all these people in Indianapolis should start companies, name themselves CEO, then go play golf with each other and be ridiculously rich. It’s that easy, right?
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A better social safety net would be nice. Ten years from now, it will be needed. Twenty-five years from now, it will either be in place, or the US is going to be a mess.
These jobs are leaving Indianapolis, but I don’t think they will be in Mexico for long either. Manufacturing is something best left to the robots. Massive automation can drastically lower the cost of goods which means a decent standard of living can cost less. The things that are making better welfare programs necessary are the same things that make it affordable.
I’m hopeful because I look at my kids’ and think about how their lives are better than the lives of the wealthiest people 100 years ago. I don’t see why future poor people wouldn’t have lives better than the ones you and I have today.
I haven’t seen it mentioned here, but the manager making the announcement wasn’t a low or mid level manager. His name is Chris Nelson, and I’ve seen him referred to as company president in several news articles, but I believe he’s actually a UTC Vice President, and General Manager of Carrier. In other words, he’s not just the messenger, but likely was one of the decision makers.
I worked as an engineer in that industry for 15 years, for two different companies who supplied products to Carrier. Moving production to Mexico is not new for Carrier, or a lot of other companies in that industry. It’s been going on since the 1990s. What’s new here is that the announcement was recorded and put on YouTube. I hope Carrier doesn’t find out who recorded it, because if they do, I’m sure they will be fired, if not charged with some sort of bogus corporate espionage crime. I almost worked for UTC. The first company I worked for was bought by them a month after I left to take another job. UTC later sold that company off, thankfully, because my brother still works there.
The HVAC manufacturing industry is a very mature industry. Air conditioning technology, with the exception of controls, hasn’t changed a lot since Willis Carrier was alive. A lot of the products Carrier makes are, at this point, essentially commodity items. They’ve already squeezed everything they can from materials and design. The only thing left is labor. I’m not saying moving this factory to Mexico was the right decision. It’s bad for those workers, it’s bad for Indianapolis, and it’s bad for the US economy, but it’s also an understandable, if reprehensible, decision from UTC. I’m really starting to think publicly traded corporations are, inherently, bad.
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They aren’t, unfortunately. There are more electronic gadgets, and better medical research (if they have the money/insurance to get it), but otherwise the lives of the 0.1% 100 years ago was quite fabulous. It’s a very similar lifestyle gap to now, in a lot of ways.
And we’re already seeing the backward slide from all the advances made in the past 100 years to make this country more livable for a greater percentage of the population. The things that brought us to here – like a living wage and reasonable work conditions, as well as much higher taxes on extreme incomes, so a greater percentage of money was ploughed back into companies and donated to charity AND we had the tax revenue to do silly little things like build highways – have been systematically tossed aside.
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Rights are for winners. /s
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You sound conflicted, as if they had no choice – either pay the current workers Mexican wages (which they can’t do) or go to Mexico. And yet, going to Mexico is reprehensible (why?).
How about cut executive compensation instead? It seems like a sign of the times that you didn’t even mention that.
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Unfortunately, the executives would actually have to care about the long-term prospects of the company to be willing to make that choice.
Most of them will be at other companies in 10 years’ time, doing the same dance all over again.
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Too true. And so the march of the Bain Capital and so on vampire army continues, sucking ever more blood from ordinary North Americans (whose fealty to individualism, especially in the U.S., keeps them from getting together and fighting back).
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Or even go hey we have hit market saturation and there isn’t much more we can do. Dear shareholders be happy with just solid profit instead of ever increasing profit.
That’s what boggles me the most. The whole more money than last year thing. You can only sell so many widgets no matter how much you cut costs.
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Your candor is sincerely appreciated. But.
Why are you unquestioningly buying into the notion that commodity capitalism is in and of itself a moral value? “What’s good for GM is good for America” has been pretty thoroughly disproved, if there were anyone born within the past century naïve enough to accept that “truism.” You’re making solid business arguments, but not arguments for why we should accept them as some law of nature. Business exists for the benefit of not only itself, but also the society that enables it. The classic example is Ford deciding to pay his workers enough to buy the cars they produced. If the neo-Fords are telling their employees (and the rest of us by extension) to go eat a bag of dicks because all that matters to them is their own short-term profits, why are we still engaged in this fiction of capital being the foundational basis of a system that, by its very supposed nature, exists for the greater good? Capitalism isn’t supposed to be a mere trite observation — the strong eat the weak, big fish eat little fish — it’s supposed to be something we’ve designed to get past that biologically-imperative (dubious btw, cf. Kropotkin) system. If all we’re doing is reifying existing natural phenomena, what the fuck are we doing at all? We don’t make buildings out of excrement and mud just because, well, that’s how we do! Shit and clay, that’s all we got! We’re supposed to be making better systems, not merely justifying the most base self-serving ones with “Wellp, laws of nature! What can we do, amirite?”
Sorry for the ill-formed undergraduate half-assed Marxistish rant, I’m a little altered.
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I am not one bit conflicted. This whole thing sucks. Could they cut the compensation of high level executives by enough to avoid the move to Mexico? Perhaps. People rarely act against their own personal interests like that, especially at that level of corporate management. Could they live with lower profit margins? Sure, but what the shareholders think of that? Could the employees buy out the company? There isn’t enough stock available to purchase to do that. I’m not saying I think what happened here is right, and I thought I made that clear. I’m saying I understand how the decision was made and why, to UTC’s management, it makes sense. I’m also saying that I’ve just about come to the conclusion that there is a fundamental flaw in the publicly traded corporate model.
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Nice rant! (Except for the last, tiny, unnecessary line. 
)
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Executive compensation, as lavish as it may be, is rarely more than a rounding error on corporate books. Yeah, that CEO could take home $1M instead of $20M but for a large corp distributing the $19M amongst all its workers amounts to what, maybe 20¢ a day each? The optics are what make C-level pay so shameful, not the numbers. Carly Fiorina could have forfeited her giant golden parachute altogether and it wouldn’t have made a goddamned bit of difference to HP’s remaining employees or stockholders.
ETA:
Somebody needs to come up with a GIF for this. Wait, I had something for this!
Not to be snarky, but yeah.
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I agree, but I didn’t know exact numbers to prove that when millie asked why I didn’t bring up the issue of executive compensation in my original comment so I just said “Perhaps”.
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late stage… oh fuck it.
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Dude, you’re nuts if you believe that. My kids have access to foods from around the world. The medical care they have access to now is magical compared to 100 years ago. They have instantaneous access to an incredible number of novels, poems, and research papers. The gadgets you dismiss provide them with storytelling tools that film makers from even 20 years ago couldn’t afford. In their middle school Spanish class, they communicate with kids in Spain that are learning English.
Last year in school, they had a unit on businesses and each kid had to start a business. My 14 year old daughter’s business is still going (she makes things out of rubber bands and sells them online). She saved her money and was able to buy a 32" TV with a built in Roku for her room ($170). In the 1950’s, you had to be pretty wealthy to have a color TV and now they are available to children with meager savings.
How is she, as a middle class kid, worse off than the wealthiest people of 1916?
