The Real Reason Layoffs Are So Common in Corporate America 

As hard as it may sound you can plan for the recession. If you are working, find extra work and get an Invest--advisor. Protect your deposits by having enough cash in short term fixed income. Then cut your expenses. Minimal insurance, cut utilities.

I think the current market might give opportunities to maximize profit within a short term, but in order to execute such strategy , you must be a skilled practitioner

Exactly why i enjoy my day to day market decisions being guided by a portfolio-coach, seeing that their entire skillset is built around going long and short at the same time both employing risk for its asymmetrical upside and laying off risk as a hedge against the inevitable downward turns, coupled with the exclusive information/analysis they have, it's near impossible to not outperform, been using a portfolio-coach for over 2years+ and I've netted over $800k.

You're right, with such market uncertainties are the reason I don’t base my market judgements and decisions on rumours and here-says, got the best of me 2020 and had me holding worthless position in the market, I had to revamp my entire portfolio through the aid of an advisor, before I started seeing any significant results happens in my portfolio, been using the same advisor and I’ve scaled up 750k within 2 years, whether a bullish or down market, both makes for good profit, it all depends on where you’re looking.

I won't pretend to know everything, though. Her name is Sharon Ann Meny but I won't say anything more. Most likely, you can find her basic information online; you are welcome to do further study.

The quality dropped *before* the Welchian era. The companies that didn’t act in the Welchian manner no longer exist.

​@@christianlibertarian5488 Quality has dropped significantly since the Welchian takeover. That's exactly what you see happening with Boeing. John Oliver covered it. Please check it out.

but they, the zombies, essentially get "free monetary money" to stay afloat at the expense of those earning money with "blood, sweat, & tears...........

It's called time changes and any company who doesn't change and compete is left behind. I.e. going under.

@@murimurimrui You can change without all these crap methods. Share buyback is for the benefit of CEOs and nobody else.

As intended by them ! That's exactly what they wanted.

In Germany we say "only sheep choose their shaughters"

What institutions did you build? Your an employee You din build shit You not entitled to shit

Yay capitalism!!

Patriotism, sensitivity to history, and Christianity OVER economics. Economics is but a side effect of human existence.

It's actually because they merged with McDonald Douglass who were notorious for loving Welsh.

@@KRYMauL that’s part of it

I heard one of their quality insurance inspector was so unhappy with their work tthat he rather ..... killed himself. If you could belive it.

Diversity hires

@@jameslave98 Boeing problems have been growing for years. I’m not interested in the racial crap, go comment elsewhere.🤦🏻‍♂️

I got the yank bit down

Most famously done by Crassus

Except the Romans only decimation as punishment when things went wrong, rather than companies using when things are going well.

@@nua1234 plus decimation was totally random. The annual 10% layoff wasn't random at all. Everyone was trying to find the project or position to make themselves "too important to boot." Mangers started getting instructions to lay off more of the higher ranked employees versus the low rank fodder that was often hired specifically as "lay-off material" to protect "more valuable" employees. I was one of the out-sourced "contractors" that she mentioned working in a GE-type meat grinder at Ericsson in 2010.

I was with IBM from 1978 to 2000. I lived through the Gerstner years as well as the preceding years with John Akers at the helm. IBM was literally DYING in those years. PCs and LAN-based distributed systems were growing rapidly, and Akers really had no idea how to lead the company. He was in well over his head because he was a born and bred "Blue Blood" IBMer who simply couldn't grasp the sea change that was happening in the industry. He came up with some bizarre program called "Market-Driven Quality" that accomplished nothing and that NO ONE ever understood, and he allowed the company to break itself up into a bunch of different "brands" like Pennant systems (printers), Adstar (storage), Ultimedia (multimedia-enabled PCs), etc. Customers were very confused in those years about exactly what IBM really was anymore, and where it was headed. I don't blame them... I was confused as well! We had a saying in IBM back then: "There they go. I must hurry, for I am their leader!" I lived right through the middle of the doomed PS/2 with its microchannel architecture, and OS/2... both of which were wonderful products in their own right, but both were DOOMED because of IBM's fundamental misunderstanding of the whole PC market. Intel and Microsoft just ran away from IBM and its VERY pricey fees for making microchannel expansion boards... an industry consortium dubbed the Gang Of Seven developed 32-bit EISA and then PCI, and the PS/2 and OS/2 just both very quickly died after that. And don't get me started on SAA (Systems Application Architecture) and its Common User Interface (CUI), etc. No customer EVER asked for a common code and UI architecture across mainframe and PC apps, and it never really worked very well. It was VERY complex and never really had much of a chance in the wild west PC world. Microsoft did a MUCH better job of signing up software vendors to write apps for Windows, and THAT is really what killed the PS/2 and OS/2. IBM never understood the nature and importance of PC apps... their old-world thinking was that customers would buy their microchannel PS/2s and OS/2 on their own merits, as customers had always bought IBM gear, and then figure out what to do with that gear. They were wrong, and that monumental failure shaped where the PC market, and the whole IT market, went in the future. It was indeed a horrible time for IBMers like me... we saw all manner of innovative new hardware and software coming to market in those years that did not need any IBM gear in the mix at all. Jim Cannavino, as President of the IBM PC Company, played a VERY large part in all of that, with what I call his "Big Iron Bravado" and frankly his outsized IBM executive ego as former head of the Data Systems Division, the mainframe part of IBM that had literally ruled the world in previous decades. But the PC world was a different game that he neither understood nor played well, and Intel and Microsoft simply didn't play by IBM's rules at all... they made their OWN world that had zero dependency on IBM. Big Blue struggled mightily to play in that world, and ultimately failed. My understanding was that IBM almost ran out of cash in the 90s, the stock dropped from around $172 all the way down to $38 (an astounding 78% loss in only a few years!), and the board brought in Gerstner to literally save it. He almost immediately brought IBM back together into the IBM brand, which was urgently needed. It's a good thing that the board hired him, because if they hadn't, IBM might well have gone under. So yeah, the Gerstner years were difficult, but he inherited an absolute MESS to try to fix. IBM had become so hideously bloated that quite drastic measures had to be taken. The IBM employee base had swelled to well over 415,000, and that was WAY too many.

I remember arguing with the IBM people about the advantages of Ethernet over token ring and they were so stubborn that they couldn’t realize the market was headed that way. I gave up on them

@@kencarp57 IBM is paradigmatic of the changes needed in the US between 1970 and 1990. The leaders of the big corporations didn’t realize that they had it easy with no world competition before 1970. So their thinking focused on salesmanship, not innovation, as how to move the company forward. Lack of competition let the corporation bloat.

@@kencarp57 Gerstner did some good work to clean up the bloat and they were bloated and stubborn to think well l, we’re Big Blue, no one can touch us. Until smaller companies started eating their lunch. My issue was they dumped many jobs, especially useless middle management, but went down the cheap path with development which cost them huge contracts. I was laid off in ‘09 as my entire project was shipped to Singapore as were many. It was a point my manager told me they won’t hire in the U.S. just off shore. The first team I managed was in Belarus with a dictator… I mean ‘President’ and on the USA’s special list. The architect of that mess was Bob Moffat who even had a patent for a calculation for offshoring jobs. He was supposed to follow Palmisano but some cheating on his wife and insider trading to his mistress killed his career. Palmisano was a clone of Gerstner but even he knew he handed a mess Ginny. Yes, cut the fat but there a point you have to stop and actually produce something. They stopped innovating and way overpaid for smaller companies. Oh well. I just fine post IBM, just the constant blind chase for shareholder value without stepping back to see the whole picture is dangerous.

@@artholyokeDon’t get me started on Token ring…. Sheesh.

And they don't care...............................

But the executives that screwed over the company long term took home huge bonuses, while they destroyed the company.

Most large companies have a bad reputation now. Tesla, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon, Apple, Walmart, Boeing... if being a 'good' company led to long term success, then why aren't there any?

Do you need a PE to be an engineering consultant?

In the corporate area now, real work is denigrated but conjuring is exalted.

@@lucysmith4242 - With the new AB5 law in California - technically yes.

So it's a state by state thing? I thing I'll just advertise engineering design services until someone tells me otherwise. I have the degree and the experience, but never was in a position to get a PE (I'm a ME)@@silvermica

EE here as well, and your story is almost exactly the same as mine, even the years are similar. My corporate employee folks even warned me before choosing engineering to "never stop looking for your next job because every engineer gets laid off eventually." That was very solid advice to be honest.

but wouldn't shares of the company as payment make the employees aligned with the stocks going up in price vs raw cash?

@@marcialabrahantes3369 yeah, but that's part of the problem; if the CEO is going to jump ship, or has some bonus, for hitting a share price target then their incentive is to juice the share price at a specific time, even if it's detrimental to the company in the long term. This is why a lot of the issues mentioned in the video are so prevalent; the executives are buying back shares, or cutting R&D funding to boost short term profitability, these things boost the stock price in the short term but damage the company in the long term.

@@marcialabrahantes3369 I think Capt. mostly meant "compensation" pay for executives who manipulated stock prices with buybacks, but didn't reinvest enough in the companies.

@@marcialabrahantes3369The shares go to the executives not the hourly employee. With such corporate consolidation today the only 'cost' they can control is labor. This is why corporate howls about increasing the minimum wage. They'll increase prices just to keep up their inordinate profits and bonuses.

​@@marcialabrahantes3369Only the "corporate" high end employees got stock, not everyone, so that wasn't fair. Also, short term decisions were made to temporaritly increase stock prices and the decision makers knew the expiry date of the apparent revenue increases so they'd exit before the collapse.

I like your gory explanation. Private equity bought the company I spent 15 years at, but fired me because they thought they might save $10-20K per year on salary on someone else. They didn't care to understand all the hats I wore as a software programmer, drafter, engineer, field service support, and quality assurance. Jumped on me and walked me out, like the others one by one, until nobody with experience remained. It was the people and what they could do, and not the CAD files on the network, not the worn out machine shop, not the clunky inventory system database. How the bankers and suits could be that rich but that out of touch baffles me to this day. I'm sure they got their one extra egg.

The flip side is it gives other companies a chance to overtake them and it will usually lead to higher wages for the people at the other companies trying to take market share. Obviously it’s bad for the people that get laid off though

Then in his memoirs, the captain portrays the sailors as lazy drunks who smoked indoors.

The captain (CEO) looks at his burning ship with a large hole in its hull and thinks to himself that fixing the hole is too expensive.

@@O5680 - That's right! Why spend money on ship repairs when you could use the money to buy back the shipping company's own stock! Plus, with any luck after the ship sinks all the witnesses will drown.

Having read the report on the Costa Concordia disaster, I think the above gives too much credit to the captain. Announcing abandon ship gives the passengers a chance to force the Captain to rush in getting away. Any situation that has the coast guard literally swearing at your Captain to get his ass back on the fucking ship has got to be the low point of everyone's career who was involved. By the way, despite being ordered with profanity multiple times, the piece of shit never returned to his ship. Among other tidbits in the report was that the captain's mistress was on the bridge at the time. To impress her he ran the ship near the coast at night. As the coast was unlit, it was not impressive. So he had the ship do it again but closer, leading to the obvious. People like this really strain my opposition to capital punishment.

actually this was played out in Lord of the RIngs the dragon was attacking town and the mayor was on his boat trying to escape

I know! Fake news! Communist propaganda!

Every person who worked on this should know this is the reason I am disliking the video. And not subscribing.

Wage stagnation and income inequality started in 1971 (bonus points to anyone who can figure out what happened in American finance & economics that year)...but since when have leftist whamens let facts get in the way of a good man-hating, competition-hating, amd merit-hating narrative.

@@user-wg2vw3mz1vwages didn’t even stagnate. It’s a complete myth.

They didn’t need to cover it in detail they just needed to cover it accurately. I don’t know why this concept is so hard for so many people. Chocking up the decisions made as simply greedy takes the same amount of time as accurately explaining their reasoning. “They cut jobs because they don’t like poor people and would love nothing more to see them suffer in the streets” is just as long as “they cut jobs to remove bloat, bureaucracy, and unnecessary expenses” Simplification is fine but misinformation isn’t This is especially bad when the video in question appears to be a cut down/less in depth version of a how money works video that was posted 3 weeks ago called “the worst business practice in history”

Do you mind sharing info of the adviser who assisted you?

Thank you for this tip. It was easy to find your coach. Did my due diligence on her before scheduling a phone call with her. She seems proficient considering her resume.

Working for the enemy

dont we see this playing out now, HUGE companies with HUGE profits (so not broke) still laying off 1000s and then asking their boards for MORE MONEY as a good job payment

What's worse is that the government allowed those companies to get tax breaks and incentives for sending those jobs overseas

@@scpatl4now Exactly. Our government sold us out.

Yes, and one guy tried to stop it, (at least partly), and you can see what they did, (and are doing), to him.@@Saliferous

Our should when you're s spreading propaganda to stupid ppl with short attention spans

Our government?@@Saliferous

i want to know who hurt him and he had such bad ideas. he was trying to play the tough guy when clearly he was not.

@@giorgos-4515 He wrote in his books that the 1920s "The Roaring '20s" and his father's small business at that time was the model he considered ideal. He conveniently left out the Great Depression that followed on the heels of that great technological revolution. He also conveniently left out the great benefit to strengthening all of America that results from Progressive leadership that Teddy Roosevelt and others gave. He wore the proverbial "rose-colored glasses".

@@markhathaway9456Thank God for mental gymnastics 🙏🤣

@@markhathaway9456progressive policy caused the Great Depression, not laissez faire.

rugged capitalism for the poors, cushy socialism for the rich. Just look at Ayn Rand on welfare in the last years of her life.

Wouldn't be surprised if he scored right up there with Ted Bundy.

Most of the graphs were normalized for 1980 (that may not be the official term - I do sociology, not stats). Whatever two variable they're measuring, like wages vs productivity for example, are both set at "0" for 1980. The graph then measures how those two variables have changed relative to each other since 1980. So if the productivity line is way above the wages line, then we can see that productivity has increased faster than wages since 1980. While it's true that normalizing for 1980 doesn't mean the trends weren't present prior, 1980(ish) is a bit of a consensus. The rise in inequality is tied to the rise of Neoliberal economic policies popularized during Thatcherism and Reaganism, which had their heights in the 1980s. What this video described was an aspect of neoliberalism. The way they presented the graphs was bit confusing, but the data's legit

You have a point truth is Presidents before Regan did many things that precipted societal collapse too

Perhaps because Americans equate socialism (which was mentioned) with communism

She touched on it a little bit when quoting Milton Friedman. Milton believed that executives who were looking out for the interests of the people instead of the interests of shareholders and profits were obstructing the free market and ‘preaching socialism’. He probably considered himself a patriot 🤡

@@AlphaGeekgirl they do. If you ask them to differentiate them, they can't.

​@@Saliferous not even Marx made a distinction between the two

@@YellowJelly13 you know how long ago Marx lived?

There’s an organization trying to make that more common called Ownership Works

Part of the problem is leadership. Ask those who had so much stock in Enron and then it went to crap. They were shareholders in a company they believed, but leadership was a crooked. Worker/shareholders is a great idea, but it still comes down to who is telling the workers what to do.

​@@kcarter5823Shareholders vote for boardmembers.

You should read about the practice of "codetermination" that they have in Germany.

All employees who have worked there for two years should be able to elect their manager.

You're right, with my current crpyto portfolio made from my investments with my personal financial advisor Stacey Macken , I totally agree with you

YES! that's exactly her name (Stacey Macken) I watched her interview on CNN News and so many people recommended highly about her and her trading skills, she's an expert and I'm just starting with her....From Brisbane Australia

I'm surprised that this name is being mentioned here, I stumbled upon one of her clients testimony on CNBC news last week

This Woman has really change the life of many people from different countries and am a testimony of her trading platform .

Investing has proven to be an incredibly beneficial decision. My cryptocurrency profits continue to play a substantial role in growing my overall wealth, reducing my reliance on my salary

Take a look at Robert Reich's video series from UC Berkeley. There is a lot of cause and effect that occurred during the 70s, and the economy felt it in the 1980s.

You are right that it is not one man. Or any human. The universe is indifferent to whether you live or die. All life, from human to bacteria, has to face this issue. Creating new means of producing that are cheaper and/or more robust is why we have civilization, and why we now live better than in the past. Work sucks because defeating the universe is difficult. It literally takes everything we have, every day.

@@christianlibertarian5488 Fantastic step back from the usual analysis of things. It's also a huge reason we need to approach issues like how and where we get our energy or how we might continue as a society if we have machines that can do all the physical work. These huge issues rarely get the attention that smaller things get.

Milton Friedman was a money guy, not an engineering guy. Instead of improving innovation and engineering - both he had no clue of - he "improved" financials. Which SEEMED to improve things for 10-20 years but now fires back - look at BOEING.

Because that wasn’t true. Ford raised salaries because he couldn’t hold employees. Turnover was killing productivity.

@@christianlibertarian5488 All those things were true at the same time. That is the problem with the topic. It's not 2 men or anything close, but it's a wonderful lure.

She literally used Henry Ford to exemplify that someone might have one or many concurrent, perhaps concealed motives, and that it's hard to nail down with certainty the motives of a given historical figure. Her point was that other things might be true of Ford than the prevailing narrative, and that she would be touching on some of the true things for the two figures the video addreses.

How about LARRY FINK ceo of blackwater ?

@@zachariah7114 blackwater?

Absolutely not. Wage stagnation and income inequality started in 1971 (bonus points to anyone who can figure out what happened in American finance & economics that year)...but since when have leftist whamens let facts get in the way of a good man-hating, competition-hating, amd merit-hating narrative.

Not at all great research. She lied from the very start

Lowering the top rates on income taxes did something that I don’t think anyone really expected at the time. It gave CEOs a reason to pickpocket their employees to inflate their own salaries. When tax rates rose steeply as income rose, you didn’t have much reason to want a super sized salary, because it didn’t increase your take home pay very much due to taxes. In the 70s there were even jokes about that baked into sitcoms.

Actually, one thing that turned out to have a bad effect was mutual funds. Previously, whether people were rich or middle class, they owned the stocks of a company directly and so could influence the company's CEO or Board of Directors directly. Now, most people have 'their' shares held by a mutual fund, which now, along with 'hedge funds', control almost everything, with the small or medium-small investor counting for nothing.

That's part of my point, though. A flood of hundreds of "investors" with no concern for the company itself. It forces the chasing of quarterly earnings bumps. These types of funders, don't typically buy shares at issue and leave as soon as the grass is greener elsewhere. Whether the company even survives is completely unimportant to them.@@user-hx2wx7mk8n

Yeah MB is so great! I think it's because all of their videos focus not only on social issues but how sociology and economics mesh to create these companies and trends...and their nuanced. It's not a "capitalism = bad" channel.

I agree its so great to find an echo chamber which rebounds the sounds I've already been pre-determined to like, it makes it easier to bounce my own ideas back off myself rather than being challenged. I love the confirmation bias, and prepackaged, consumable content designed to slant my worldview to one very warped one. Hurrah!

@@zachariah7114 gotta love the sarcasm! Hurrah!

Channel?

Cheddar. RIP@@_hellogan

Tell me, has a poor man ever offered you a job?

💯 agreed

He won the Nobel Prize in economics, but I’m glad to see you and this tart presenting are here to lead the country to the new socialist utopia. You’re far smarter than Milton.

While there may not be legislation requiring the supremacy of shareholder value, to not have company policy geared towards shareholder value exposes the company to lawsuits by or on behalf of shareholders.

@@hridd1 Then the worst aspects, the sharpest edges of that kind of law must be filed down to harm society less.

@markhathaway9456 that's the problem, it's deeply rooted in American business culture. Shareholders, as in large fund management firms, will flee if the company doesn't put them first. It's not really something a piece of legislation can fix.

Short term over longterm. If you starve to save money your body deteriorates and over time your abity to make money will too. These Companies are all ailing as a result of such shortsighted measures

...its just that the policies he advocated create such positions. His type of market economics and anti-socialist tendencies was one of the drivers for US imperialism (and free market expansion) abroad, like Vietnam for example, where the draft was enacted. The income inequality and lack of intervention that creates poverty 'worthy' of receiving rebates was also informed upon his almost-Austrian school of thought. It's not a great idea to ascribe 'abuse' to what is clearly an expected consequence of his advocacy. Leftist groups have not shifted their position, and were vindicated. Can't beat the Keynes machine.

I haven't studied economics, but the way she describes it in the video doesn't connect. Profitable company increases its shareholder value, but they are still two very different things. These days the companies skip the healthy profit building that Friedman was talking about and jump straight into stock price manipulation. Serious investors don't do stupid things like closing R&D, because they know it will hurt them long term. It's the short term investors, and managers driven by annual bonuses, that seem to be the problem here.

@@milobem4458 Milton Friedman was a very academic and nuanced thinker. Guys like Jack Welch were just greedy and power hungry CEOs and took ideas that fit his vision and ignored everything else. It was a problem Friedman was aware of in his time and even addressed it on interviews.

@@lemonlite_Keynes is garbage and Milton Friedman had nothing to do with imperialism

@@milobem4458 Many people in those days became very cynical, perhaps because of the Vietnam war and Watergate, but they did. They took that into companies and said, YOLO, so let me get mine now. That pushed everything to the short-term and a lot of what you see today.