Free Your Call Is Important To Us by Laura Penny

hired. Nobody mourned the passing of the age of Doug the First. In fact, a middle manager culled in the bulk firings said, “The mood is pretty lousy, but this shake-up was long overdue.” Stockholm syndrome is one way of coping with a pink slip.
    The truly disturbing thing about the Coke case is that it is the rule, not the exception. The CEOs with the five fattest paychecks in 1999 all fired more than a thousand people, or at least 5 percent of their employees. Since labor is generally the largest fixed cost for any corporation, CEOs discovered that they could achieve a nice little bounce in their stock prices, and consequently their bonuses, by downsizing aggressively. The speculative economy, once a way of raising capital for productive ventures, began cannibalizing the productive economy.
    In the business press, the phrase
a commitment to productivity
has gradually come to mean a commitment to getting rid of the people who produce things. As GE CEO “Neutron” Jack Welch once said, “Strong managers who make tough decisions to cut jobs provide the only job security in today’s world.” It’s not just that people like Welch are willing to slash hundreds of thousands of jobs, export work to countries with nineteenth-century labor laws, and destroy years of union advocacy for well-paid work. They also have the nerve to insist that getting rid of good jobs somehow magically creates job security. If Jack Welch was your boss, how secure would you feel knowing that the grand poobah has nary a qualm about firing tens of thousands of people at a shot? Nevertheless, the business press hails him as a managerial genius, and credits him with GE’s phenomenal market growth.
    When I first began writing this book, Jack Welch was riding high, with an autobiography,
Straight from the Gut,
on the
New York Times
best-seller list. Granted, he did retire from GE earlier than planned, in September of 2001, after European regulators refused to allow GE to acquire Honeywell, but his retirement elicited heaps of laudatory eulogies. Since then, though, GE has been accused of using overly aggressive accounting measures under Welch’s reign. He also went through a highly publicized divorce in the wake of his highly publicized affair with a former editor from the
Harvard Business Review.
She went to interview him for a profile, and the rest, as they say, is adultery. Though Jack and Jane Welch reached an out-of-court settlement before their divorce went to trial, the court papers provided the press with another peek at the lavish world of CEO perks. After he retired, Welch still had the use of an $80,000-per-month apartment in Manhattan, where his needs for food, flowers, laundry, and wine were tended to by GE. Welch also had the use of company luxury vehicles, season tickets to sporting events, and jaunts on the company Gulfstream. Bear in mind that when Mr. Welch left GE, his personal fortune was an estimated $900 million. I think the dude can spring for his own roses, but these sorts of perks are de rigueur for the imperial CEO, and evidence that we live in an Oscar gift bag world, where those who have the most get the most for free.
    The fact that there is a direct correlation between mass firings and gross prosperity for the fortunate few is not just unfair, is not merely bullshit; it’s also unsustainable. There is no cost savings to the company when you follow up your mega-downsizing with obscene bonuses for the people on top. Instead of giving the millions to hundreds of people, to spread around their respective communities, this gives those same millions to a handful of old white guys who already have millions. Down at the economic bottom, job security becomes a distant memory, an artifact or antique. Nobody expects to sign up at Imperial Widgets and stay until retirement with a gold watch and a decent pension anymore. The manufacturing sector in North America has been eviscerated because capital can pull up stakes, relocate to the