This weekend my friend The Dog Whisperer finally begins a semi-cross country trek to her new job, something that ended up taking here almost 4 months to find. Her stuff has gone on; she and H The Wonder Dog depart from New Home this weekend to make the journey.
As I was scouring the InterWeb for layoffs (as I always do), I noticed that a work location similar to what I remembered hers being announced they were having layoffs. I checked in with her: yes, that was her location and no, no-one had contacted her about any impact. And although they were saying it was a minor layoff in the face of their total employee count, it was not the sort of not one wants to start one's job one.
It is true of me as well: during one of the few times I checked the news while I was in Turkey, I found that my own company announced a series of layoffs - not at my site, but certainly at my division. Again, limited numbers - but there was no internal mention of the event at all.
The Dog Whisperer's response to my inquiry was "At this point, no industry is safe from layoffs".
Her comment sank deep within me.
It is probably not fair to say without hesitation that "this is the new normal". And yet, there is something within me that makes me feel that this sort of instability is the new normal, or at least the new normal within my own lifetime.
It is probably true that I am more sensitive to this than most, given the fact that with my own recent history I am almost at the point of jumping at my own shadow. And yet, the shedding just seems to keep on coming.
There has to be a point where all of this reaches critical mass, when there are so many people not working and paying their bills (and directly dependent on government to do so) that it finally upends the economic apple cart. Those that do not earn do not spend on the sorts of things that a service and consumer economy relies on for revenue.
It is a burden enough for those of us in our latter earning years; I cannot imagine the level of instability this will contribute to younger workers. Sometimes it feels that at the rate we are going, more layoffs and longer periods between employment will become more and more of a thing.
Managing through this, effectively at the end of my career, is difficult enough. I cannot imagine how a generation that has had not had the experience we had will do so.
I guess I would argue that layoffs are not becoming more frequent or a "new normal." They have always gone on. What changes, is what industry they occur in. Those in "safe" industries for the last decade or two are no longer immune to layoffs while new "safe" industries are being created every day. As you stated in an earlier post, many industries don't change with the time and thus become irrelevant and one of the signs of that irrelevancy is that they have to take cost cutting measures by laying off people. Looking back at time, history is littered with massive layoffs in previously thought "safe" industries.
ReplyDeleteHewlett Packard laying off 25,000 back in 2008
Daimler Chrysler laying off 27,000 back in 2001
AT&T laying off 40,000 back in the late 1990's
Sears laying off 50,000 in 1993
All are examples of industries going through radical shifts and not keeping up.
Ed, I might push back on that a bit, at least on the "new normal" aspect. Certainly in my industry, at least - larger and larger companies are liquidating larger tranches of people as well as smaller companies. Has it always gone on? Yes - but the reality is when the larger companies lay off, it has a two impacts. The first is that it places more people into the job pool - in my own job search (thanks to a feature in LinkedOut) one could see precisely the level and education of people that were applying for similar positions; I was competing against much higher educated and higher level people for what was a step down job for all of us. The other is that it reduces the overall companies that can hire.
DeleteThe underemployment aspect - Item 1 - is, I suspect, a larger and larger element. In theory, I am "underemployed" in that I have an individual contributor position when I have had years as a manager. In my case I am okay with it (no desire to manage people anymore, as we have discussed), but it does have a real impact on my income and potential future, so long as I work in the industry. We are lucky; we can absorb such a hit and will do okay. Not everyone can.
And for the people that are left at those companies, I can assure you they are quite aware of the fact that the heavy hand of job cuts can hit again without warning. That impacts every day on the job.
Ed is discussing properly about the normal mostly stable money supply Business failures.
ReplyDeleteCurrent situation is more politically driven then economic changes.
As we have discussed before, Businesses that require cheap money to survive and perhaps thrive in the past are facing HIGHER COST of Money.
The Bond Market many times the size of the Stock Market we watch daily is demanding MORE Interest to Buy Gov.com Debt AKA T-Bills and THE T-Bills set the floor for all other debt interests.
The Fed spiked the punchbowl with free and nearly free money for almost a decade. Now they have to decide, inflate AND DIE or suffer a Greater depression and get the toxic debts and businesses to fall away.
Inflating the money supply makes more dollars chasing fewer products. At some poorly understood time cycle it goes from mild inflation, to inflation, to high inflation to HYPERINFLATION aka Weimar Germany
Knowing how political the Fed is it's Inflate and see the US Dollar reduced (IF we are lucky) to the status of the Mexican Peso. Thought goes in the Feds echo chambers is repay current debts with CHEAPER MONEY (YAY!). Nothing New Under the SUN here.
Also called "The SOFT Landing". I'd welcome anybody to post ONE SUCCESSFUL such Soft Landing WITHOUT Reducing Governmental Spending.
Cannot fight the burning house of a debt driven government by allowing them to add ONE Trillion extra dollars of debt every 100 days. Google that, it's happening. Bread and Circuses, expensive wars and graft.
Highest probability according to history is more like Zimbabwe trillion-dollar bills, Ex-Confederate Dollars or the Weimar Germany "Paper Marks."
The one that keeps his family safely fed and sheltered is the winner of a Greater Depression.
Some mostly well-connected Rich Folks like the book "Richest Man in Weimar Germany" described them using rapidly deprecating paper marks to buy REAL ASSETS like Train Companies and Iron Mills to repay that DEBT of effectively pennies on the dollar in a year or two.
I'd love to be wrong.
Michael, I saw that figure of the rising national debt as well this week. I would say it is shocking, but it seems that outside of a narrow window of people that pay attention, most people do not notice. At the moment.
DeleteA cut in government spending would at least help the trajectory, but it seems at this point that is the least likeliest thing to happen. We will literally spend ourselves underground.
Looking forward and around is pretty scary for a lot of people. Even I often want to hide my head in a good fiction book or three instead.
DeleteCutting Gov.com Bread and Circuses AKA Mass Media and EBT cards-"Entitlements" would cause the Powers that Be to LOSE POWER and they will not do that until the culling of the useless eaters (Their own words in Open to Public WEF documents). You know the "You'll own NOTHING and BE Happy" crowd.
But we are called to live in this age. We can be part of the brainless sheeple mass heading towards the sheep shearing shed (If we're lucky) or the slaughter house when we are not useful to the Powers that Be.
OR we can look ahead, as well as back towards history to SEE what's going on and most likely to play out AGAIN as collapse and tyranny are nothing new.
I always suggest rather strongly to cover the basics of life first and set aside the endless chattering most do (instead if actually DOING something useful) about politics.
What will bless your family more? The supplies and skillset to fix your damaged home during the destructive chaos about to visit us, or deep understanding of the subtle differences between fascism and socialism etal? Yet many will spend hours and days arguing about that.
How about water? Ever really try out a weekend of low water living? Worth the experience TODAY while you can turn on the faucets to fix the problem, eh?
The gallon of water per person per day is BAD INFORMATION. It's 1950's bare minimum to hide in a bomb shelter and not die from dehydration. No cooking, no bathing, no extra water for sweating while you're doing "Manual Labor" and so on. 5+ gallons a day is what I could "Get By" on when I was off grid and hauling water-doing rainwater collection. That was with helmet bathing, no showers.
Basics. I actually FEAR the "I Gotta GUN and Lotta AMMO" "Survivalists. They are a Threat to me and mine when they discover they are dying of thirst and cannot shoot a single frozen pizza for dinner.
Any sort of economic sanity is far behind us now, and likely there is no-one left who could credibly suggest cutting spending, let alone a strong enough group to have the courage to carry it out. That said, an economic collapse simply seems to be a matter of time at this point.
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