[quote name='elprincipe']Thanks for the article. Obviously, I take back some of what I said above.
This seems like an incredibly stupid move by Circuit City. It will obviously have harsh effects on employee morale (see: this thread) and skill levels. The dumbest thing is that they raised these people's salaries and then decided later that they were too high and they had to be fired for it...if you don't want to pay people that llevel of wages, don't raise their salaries to that level. It just seems really stupid what they did.[/QUOTE]
It's fascinating to see that they were frustrated that their "overpaid" employees were making around $11 an hour. Apparently, earning $22,000 in one year is far too much for CC.
If CC is losing money and laid employees off in the short term, well, that's one thing. It's another to see what's going on here. It's part of the wider trend to cheapen labor; I truly think (but have no proof, and nobody else has made this argument) that we've, as a consumer nation, hit a tipping point where a company's further expansion is redundant.
As a business, you earn more money by (1) increasing sales or (2) decreasing costs. When you see an interstate exit that's the same as everywhere else (omigod! A Wendy's! McDonald's! Denny's! Burger King!), you can see how it becomes less and less likely that companies can expand to increase sales.
Let me ask you this: do you really need another Best Buy/Home Depot/fast food joint by your house?
So, cost cutting becomes the way to improve a company. Technology has improved that it will eventually be cheaper to have a fast food joint beam your value meal order to an employee working in India before it is beamed back to the restaurant where you pick up the order. We've hit a point where companies are improving cost and efficiency by finding people to work even *cheaper* than minimum wage workers. Apparently, $13,000 to $14,000 a year is too much to pay some people.
That's the end of the trend I'm seeing here. Any non-mandatory job will be outsourced to cheaper labor, coupled with increasing executive pay and stock options. Meanwhile, the greatest lie ever told (American workers' greed is responsible for the loss of their own jobs) will become a mantra that the majority of Americans believe and falsely accept (and you can see that trend if you look at public attitudes towards labor unions, as well as union membership numbers as a percent of the population in the US currently). If you make food, you're safe. If you clean our toilets, mow our lawns, or do any sort of labor that you must be present for, your job is safe. The rest of us? We're
ed. Hardcore. All of us.
