Use us till you use us up.
The syndicated National Public Radio (NPR) programme On Point, which originates from WBUR in Boston (90.9 FM), had in its first hour this past Monday, 28 April an interview with Steven Greenhouse, the labor and workplace correspondent for The New York Times, who was flogging his new book, The Big Squeeze: Tough Times for the American Worker.
The show is archived indefinitely, and may be heard here. It runs around 53 minutes.
Greenhouse related several depressing anecdotes from his book (such as that of the Wal-Mart security guard whose job was to apprehend shoplifters: told by the store manager that there was a woman trying to kite a check, he chased her into the parking lot and was run down by her accomplice as they made their getaway; the guard went to ER, but reported to work the next day; however, when he told his manager roughly a month later that he would be filing a workmen's compensation claim and taking about three months off for back surgery and recovery from same, he was terminated -- because Wal-Mart encourages its store managers to sack any employee who files for workmen's comp because that drives up the store's costs), and several callers chimed in with even more despair-filled tales of woe.
F'r instance:
OTOH, The New York Times reported in its Thursday, 1 May edition ("Workers of the world, UNITE!") that Europe's middle class -- however the various countries define it -- is also being squeezed thanks to stagnant wages and ever-rising prices. While Italy is the hardest hit, other Western European countries are also suffering, and even economic powerhouse Germany has seen a "decline in purchasing power" since 2000, and "more than one million Germans lost full-time jobs during and after a recession in 2000 and 2001." France, home of the seemingly utopian 35-hour work week, has seen bread prices rise so much in the last six months that some French workers have resorted to buying a bread-making machine. (As one woman opined, "'In France, when you can’t afford a baguette anymore, you know you’re in trouble.....The French Revolution started with bread riots.'")
Nom du chien!
So basically it looks like if you're not a hedge fund manager or stock broker both lucky and conniving enough not to have some of your dirtiest laundry sniffed out by the feds, a corporate lawyer, or possibly a doctor or inventor of the next Google, Yahoo, eBay, Facebook or MySpace, you're screwed. Horatio Alger, he dead.
The show is archived indefinitely, and may be heard here. It runs around 53 minutes.
Greenhouse related several depressing anecdotes from his book (such as that of the Wal-Mart security guard whose job was to apprehend shoplifters: told by the store manager that there was a woman trying to kite a check, he chased her into the parking lot and was run down by her accomplice as they made their getaway; the guard went to ER, but reported to work the next day; however, when he told his manager roughly a month later that he would be filing a workmen's compensation claim and taking about three months off for back surgery and recovery from same, he was terminated -- because Wal-Mart encourages its store managers to sack any employee who files for workmen's comp because that drives up the store's costs), and several callers chimed in with even more despair-filled tales of woe.
F'r instance:
- The woman who said that her husband was a top-rated software engineer at IBM who has not had a raise for three years, because IBM wants to remain "competitive". (And here I thought that getting excellent performance reviews but no raise for three years was a travail unique to Your Correspondent.)
- The woman who made c. U.S. $80k/yr at a small software company who was told, with the other 17 programmers, that they would all be fired in a month's time, and if they wanted to get any severance pay at all, they needed to spend that month training their replacements from India, who would be paid the equivalent of U.S. $5k/yr.
- The construction engineer who delivers newspapers (for a "paper of record", as it turned out...) to help pay for the fancy-pants schoolin' for his three kids, who reported that a customer can squawk for any or no reason about his service -- paper was on the right side of the porch instead of the left, etc. -- with the result being that he has to deliver another twenty papers to that customer before he'll start being paid for that customer again. (He said that he gets six cents for each paper delivered. He gets up at 2:30 a.m. to deliver his papers, and said that he'd had five hours of sleep in the last forty.)
OTOH, The New York Times reported in its Thursday, 1 May edition ("Workers of the world, UNITE!") that Europe's middle class -- however the various countries define it -- is also being squeezed thanks to stagnant wages and ever-rising prices. While Italy is the hardest hit, other Western European countries are also suffering, and even economic powerhouse Germany has seen a "decline in purchasing power" since 2000, and "more than one million Germans lost full-time jobs during and after a recession in 2000 and 2001." France, home of the seemingly utopian 35-hour work week, has seen bread prices rise so much in the last six months that some French workers have resorted to buying a bread-making machine. (As one woman opined, "'In France, when you can’t afford a baguette anymore, you know you’re in trouble.....The French Revolution started with bread riots.'")
Nom du chien!
So basically it looks like if you're not a hedge fund manager or stock broker both lucky and conniving enough not to have some of your dirtiest laundry sniffed out by the feds, a corporate lawyer, or possibly a doctor or inventor of the next Google, Yahoo, eBay, Facebook or MySpace, you're screwed. Horatio Alger, he dead.