The 49 Staples

Several years ago, 98 to be exact a great thriller was penned and turned into a 1935 movie.  72 years later it became a Broadway play.

All three were called The 39 Steps.

On the screen it was directed by the great Alfred Hitchcock and starred, at the time equally great actor Robert Donat.

On the stage the thriller became a comedic mystery and ran for 4 years. (I saw it and enjoyed.)

All the above has absolutely nothing to do with the following blog post except for the similarity in names.

But both have a touch of the slight of hand necessary in any successful story, joke or movie.

In the business world it has always been important to keep a watchful eye on the bottom line.  After all it is, well the bottom line!

If your company does not make a profit and continue to do so it will eventually fail.

As a business owner you may use the rationale of cutting corners to save your company and thereby saving the jobs of your employees but truthfully there's a bit more selfish than selfless going around in that community these days.

And why not?

After all they started the business to make money and employees are merely tools to help them do just that.

One way companies turn a profit is offering something the public wants and can afford.

Another way to have a healthy bottom line is to make sure costs are kept in line.

And still another is to get the cheapest labor available and pay them less than they deserve while charging them for any benefit still offered and pushing any healthcare costs onto their backs.  And should they complain, well as long as the unemployment numbers are favorable you can always find someone else!

The wave of the future, make that the now in the business world is to stop chipping in on any pension or 401K retirement plan.

They are also dropping any spousal or family coverage from health insurance plans.

Some companies are even watching what their employees eat and quietly demanding they make healthier choices.  They are not doing this out of any concern for the employee but rather to lower costs on insurance as required by their actuarial bean counters and pencil pushers.

And finally we get down to the minutia or mind bending mindless micro managing mania most businesses are getting into so as to maximize perceived profit.

The tools of the trade must be protected and employees must account for everything they use.

I have spoken with and listened to workers who have slowly been struck by this trend and in order to do their jobs some must:

* Bring in their own pens.

* One gentleman told me he steals pens from a bank because his company no longer supplies them and he doesn't have that many at home.

* Sign requisitions for any supplies including pens, post-its and legal writing pads.  This from a legal secretary!! 

* Bring in your own monitor and keyboard because the only one the company would supply is filthy and disgusting and in need of tossing out of a very high window. This from a new salesman in the company.

* Use the back sides of every sheet of used paper that comes out of the printer rather than a new sheet.  Of course this means you better know which side of the sheet is the important one.  You have to stop and date each side and cross out the old items after use.

What these businesses are missing is the proverbial forest in and among those trees they make believe they are trying to save.

Productivity suffers when tools of your trade are inferior or hard to use or your employees have to worry about how many pens they need per month.

So finally would you like to get back to the title of this post and its relevance with the body?

Funny you should ask!

A stapler being used to attach tickets to our product ran out and I was asked to get replacements.

Count how many & win a prize?

I visited our supply lady and her reply was:

“How many?”

“Excuse me?” I said shaking my head.  “Uh, 49!  Just give me some please.” 

She opened the box took out a strip.

I grabbed it.

I believe there are 210 staples per row and I was not going to wait around for her to count!

There is no Hitchcock-like mystery here.

What’s going on is the simple insidious re-education of Americans who ‘don’t have’ by those who do in how to help the wealthy make and keep more money!

Corporate profit above people’s lives, livelihoods, and sanity has become a staple of nearly every industry.

And it’s being done one step at a time.

Corporate Baggage

Airlines will make around $3B more this year charging for bags. This is a revenue stream that did not exist before deregulation of the industry and another example of a ‘BWC’ fee. That stands for my ‘Because We Can’ invention that covers every raise or surcharge or rate increase the public is forced to endure while the raisers of those costs reap ever increasing profits for ever decreasing services merely, well because they can.  Who's going to stop them?

Gold Mine for Airlines

I don’t have the exact figure on how much the airlines pay baggage handlers whose numbers have dwindled due to corporate cost analyses but I am willing to bet they don’t share in the windfall.
The airlines will say that the increase in fuel costs caused their increase in fees but the numbers don’t completely add up and even if they did why hide the fare increase?

Telling a traveler that he has to pay extra to carry some luggage is like selling a car and then asking the buyer if he’d like a steering wheel with his purchase.

But airlines are not the only culprit in this corporate scheme to milk humans out of every remaining penny they have.

Anyone alive on Long Island is well aware of the inept Long Island Rail Road and it's ever increasing fares to complement their ever decreasing level of service or competence.

Note that the railroad considers its trains to be on time if they are only 5.9 minutes late!
Most riders would not 5.9 minutes late as on-time but rather a miracle!

But I digress.

A quick check into the business world reveals that most corporations have amassed unprecedented and record profits; cash cushions of nearly unimaginable amounts all while claiming that the current administration in DC has left them with a terrible feeling of uncertainty that is causing them to NOT hire new workers.

Does not knowing if you will triple your profits rather than merely doubling them next year constitute an uncertainty?

This absurd rationalization pervades every corner of every industry and threatens to eradicate the middle class completely.

But while I and many others write about the path we’re on nobody seems to have a solution.

One reason is that a major political party doesn't see the above AS a problem to be fixed.

The Republicans feel that the business world and the banks in particular should not be regulated at all, or if so we should allow them to self regulate.

Millions of potholes nationwide

Sounds like Mr. Romney’s call for illegal aliens to self-deport and equally as naive.

One possible solution to the job loss in America is right under our noses or rather under our feet.

Suddenly not an uncommon thing

Our nation’s infrastructure (a word former President Bush had trouble even saying) is crumbling. A no-brainer (The fix, not him although...) would be to start hiring workers nation-wide to save our streets, and highways, and bridges, and on and on.

Disaster on the clock!

The amount of architects and planners alone would take a chunk out of the unemployment numbers and therein is the problem.

Allowing anything to help the economy while the right wing controls the purse strings of the House and President Obama is still in office is anathema.

To paraphrase Senator McJowls, aka Mitch McConnell, an elected official sworn to help America in return for a huge undeserved salary; free health care; retirement funds for himself and family and exceptional perks far beyond his worth, “We simply cannot give this pretender a win.”

So there goes infrastructure repair!

And with it any hope of fixing America.

But I am not just talking about the roads anymore.  Now I speak of the entire experiment that is America.

One political party gets their marching orders only from the wealthiest of the country. They have now brazenly taken to fixing elections so even when the masses rise up against their terroristic-like tactics it will not be enough since their votes will not be counted.

And many on the right feel that is as it should be.  "The poor made their own beds and chose to be poor so their votes should not count!"

Never happen till Congress
finds out how to give
Exxon the profits

It is the ruling class that will decide when and where workers will be hired and what those workers should do.

There are many public works programs and ideas such as alternative energy as a way to ensure that the world as we know it will still exist in 50 years that are being blocked by the ruling class and their puppets in Congress.

They will not give in unless and until we bow to their superior intellect and allow them to reap any profits from any new industry.
We are now used to paying for luggage when we fly but until we divest ourselves of the evil and brain-dead, dead weight baggage in Congress we will never get anywhere!

I hope this is not just a
Pie in the Sky.