Boeing, Starbucks...

Yesterday's news brought even more layoffs: Boeing and Starbucks.  These are just the mega corporations we hear about, look around your neighborhood and notice all the small businesses going under (a local high-end consignment shop posted a sign in the window saying: Uncle! as it goes out of business).  Even the Stanford Business School laid off people last week!

While the economy is dominating my thoughts, I also wonder what is happening with employment in this country.  It used to be, post World War II, that corporations made a covenant with both white collar and blue collar workers: produce and you'll be employed for the rest of your life.  Pensions were given, health care benefits, raises, promotions.  Men primarily, but some women, routinely stayed at the same place of employment for 40 years!  Now days, the average American worker stays in one job for no more than 4 years.  That's right.  4 years.  

That is a lot of mobility in an employment structure that is not conducive to mobility.  When you leave a job you lose medical benefits.  You have myriad confusing forms to figure out what to do with your retirement, and chances are close to 100% if your employer controlled your pension (if you have a pension) it was invested in the employing company stock which is probably worthless (think United Airlines, Enron...).  And with the unemployment, despite the federal laws requiring continuation of medical benefits if the insured is willing to pay 102% of the premium, there is a huge huge strain on the medical system either from delayed and deferred treatment or people seeking treatment without the capability to pay.  

Then there are the actual jobs.  Aside from lawyers and doctors, does anyone actually work in professions they trained for?  Do any "blue collar" workers perform work that they enjoy?  What do 18 year olds want to be when they graduate from college?

Our whole work world has been re-structuring for the past 20 years, people not made sufficient wages or salaries to keep up with the costs of living, so they hocked their homes, their cars, their children's education savings in order to pay the mortgage, the electrical bills, buy groceries.  Instead of paying good wages, our economic geniuses relied on credit to keep workers working.  The covenant that was made: produce and we'll take care of you has been broken and now the economy is broken.

John Thain defended giving bonuses at Merrill Lynch after suffering huge losses by saying if he hadn't given the bonuses the "Bull" would have lost good people.  Who were those good people?  The company was losing money, lots and lots of money!  Yet good people who work hard, very hard, are being laid off because of the numerous mistakes, no, the greed of a lot of Merrill Lynch "good people."

So how do we begin discussions about employment in this country?  How do we talk about the burden and hardship we put on people, demanding they re-train, re-train, re-educate every four years?  How do we help maintain health insurance and retirement?  How do we make work important to our lives, not something we panic and worry about every morning, lose sleep over at night, and cringe at doing.

Maybe those questions are also part of economic stimulus.