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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:
Until the 1980s, big companies in America tended to take a paternalistic attitude toward their workforce. Many corporate CEOs took pride in taking care of everyone who worked at their corporate campuses. Business leaders loved to tell stories about someone working their way up from the mailroom to a C-suite office.
But this began to change in the 1980s. Wall Street investors demanded that companies focus more on maximizing returns for shareholders. An emerging corporate orthodoxy held that a company should focus on its "core competence"—the one or two functions that truly sets it apart from other companies—while contracting out other functions to third parties.
Often, companies found they could save money this way. Big companies often pay above the market rate for routine services like cleaning offices, answering phones, staffing a cafeteria, or working on an assembly line. Putting these services out for competitive bid helped the companies get these functions completed at rock-bottom rates, while avoiding the hassle of managing employees. It also saved them from having to pay the same generous benefits they offered to higher-skilled employees.
Of course, the very things that made the new arrangement attractive for big companies made it lousy for the affected workers. Not only were companies trying to spend less money on these services, but now there were companies in the middle taking a cut. Once a job got contracted out, it was much less likely to become a first step up the corporate ladder. It's hard to work your way up from the mailroom if the mailroom is run by a separate contracting firm.
[...] The existence of such a two-tier workplace is especially ironic in Silicon Valley, a region that takes pride in its egalitarian ethos. Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt gave a remarkably candid assessment of the situation in 2012, in a statement quoted by author Chrystia Freeland.
"Many tech companies solved this problem by having the lowest-paid workers not actually be employees. They’re contracted out," Schmidt said. "We can treat them differently, because we don’t really hire them. The person who’s cleaning the bathroom is not exactly the same sort of person. Which I find sort of offensive, but it is the way it’s done."
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 03 2020, @12:09AM (7 children)
"Until the 1980s, big companies in America tended to take a paternalistic attitude toward their workforce."
And assholes like Welsh helped drive the 'fuck staff' attitudes we have today.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 03 2020, @12:26AM (6 children)
Well, let's not lay it *all* at the feet of MBAs.
The truth is that the fattest times for American workers were during the post WW2 years, when half the world had been bombed into oblivion, leaving the US untouched. It's easy to be generous with pay when you have limited competition. As the years dragged on, countries rebuilt and new foreign suppliers came online. Globalization in the 1990s took that into overdrive.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 03 2020, @01:03AM
Because the military industrial complex never completely wound down from the war.
It was fat city until the tech recession of 1969-70 when Congress started cutting back spending
and the space program wound down.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 03 2020, @05:55AM (4 children)
A contributing factor is real estate prices go up, which then increases costs in that area (rent, wages etc). And thus the same level of worker is less competitive than a worker where costs are lower.
At the high end it's worth paying extra for the top level workers. But for mediocre workers, you might as well go for the cheapest. And the US workers are far from top nowadays.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by sjames on Tuesday March 03 2020, @08:51AM (3 children)
Of course, those films left out the part about the Japanese workers being provided with a home by their employer and getting 8 weeks paid vacation. Also the part where if an employee's performance is inadequate it is considered to be the manager's fault and that termination of an employee is/was treated as the manager's shameful failure.
Nothing new, pay peanuts, get monkeys. If you want employees to care, you have to pay them enough to care.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Tuesday March 03 2020, @01:38PM (2 children)
Japanese never take vacation, though they technically get lots. The only time people take off is for a couple of days in the middle of Golden Week, when the entire rest of the country takes off also so everyone spends those days waiting in endless lines for absolutely everything.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 03 2020, @02:12PM
Doesn't matter anyway, those Japanese factory workers were soon mostly outcompeted by automation or cheaper Chinese workers, who are probably being replaced by bots and Vietnamese workers.
For all that hard work Japan isn't doing well in terms of GDP/capita compared to Australia, NZ or one of the less crap European countries. Japan isn't even doing better than France and I strongly doubt the French work as many hours as the Japanese. But makes for a nice place to visit as a tourist I guess (except for the recent virus thing).
(Score: 2) by sjames on Tuesday March 03 2020, @07:17PM
These days things are somewhat different in Japan than when American management wanted their workers to fetishize the hard work part and be ignorant of the high compensation, vacation, and job security part.
And of course, the American management remained impervious to the point that they too might have to work hard and take responsibility.