The people who remain employed during a recession are people who have worked to become irreplaceable (or just aren't replaceable enough at the moment to make the loss of productivity and efficacy worth firing them).
Completely ignoring that in businesses that don't have union rules to prevent it, the people most frequently laid off in bad quarters are the more experienced, longer working employees, because they draw higher salaries than new hires. Or that a huge part of America's unemployment are manufacturing workers whose life training only applies to industries that have left the country through no fault of theirs, aside from wanting a wage commiserate to American market prices instead of Malaysian wages.
The more experienced people
in fungible positions disappear, yes. Experience is less important than the fungibility of your position. And guess what? Manufacturing jobs are fungible. So's janitorial work. So's ditchdigging. You cannot be "special" in those jobs. They're monkey-work. So yeah, people in those jobs are going to get canned when things get tight or when it stops being reasonable to employ those people here. It doesn't matter how experienced you are if you are doing a job a robot or a Malaysian can do just as well.
And guess what? I agree
entirely that it's no fault of theirs. That also doesn't really matter, now, does it? It doesn't matter that it's not their
fault the jobs disappeared. It remains their
responsibility to not remain in those positions. We've known for, what, twenty years that American manufacturing was going away? Even longer? It's not like we're reading tea leaves here.
Twenty years. Most of these people who are getting laid off from front-line jobs
started those jobs when this was already staring us in the face. It's not like this is blindsiding anyone with a clue. I have little sympathy for people who, quite simply, should have known better and are now receiving the results of their bad choices.
Truean: Your post has very little to do with what I said. I'm well aware of the cause of the recession, thank you, and it doesn't change anything I said. Of
course the current recession was caused by financial irresponsibility. Nobody's contesting that. What I am saying is that the majority of people who are getting laid off in this recession are the people who don't have anything special about them to encourage their employers to keep them employed. They are fungible. They are easily replaced or done without. So they are the ones who get the axe.
(And in a more generous moment I'd probably even say that it's a reasonable role for the government to play, retraining those workers. It's not ideologically preferable, but it's a reasonable service that has trickle-down effects to benefit everyone instead of people on an individual level. And it wouldn't be
that expensive.)
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Topic: Why do people argue and fight instead of calmly debate? (Read 7548 times)