"Come to Circuit City, where service is state of the art"

4/1/07

Circuit City is firing 3,400 workers that its seven figure management has decided make too much money. Some make as much as a whopping $18 per hour, but others who were let go, like Dan Cavazos, featured in a 3/31 Sun-Times article, make about $12.40 hour. How dare these people, who face a demanding and often cranky public on a daily basis, make such unfathomable riches, reaching into what could be a larger bonus pool for Circuit City top brass? The fired workers were not given the opportunity to take less pay, but could re-apply for jobs at the lower pay scale after a waiting period deemed suitable by the corporate titans who employ them.

The lesson here is clear: Go to the right schools, schmooze the powers-that-be kiss the right hindquarters while kicking the corresponding anatomical bits of your employees (i.e., get in the corporate “club”), and you will make huge money while enjoying lifelong job security. Even if you somehow lose your job, other members of the club will take care of you. How many “highly skilled, professional managers” who have run Fortune 500 companies into the ground are now drawing seven and eight figure pay packages at other such companies or at sinecures in the investment banking world? On the other hand, start from the bottom, work hard, remain loyal, take good care of your customers, and get fired.

Two thoughts should be borne in mind:

• One can’t blame capitalism for this shameful outcome. This isn’t capitalism. This is corporatism, in which markets aren’t free but are gamed in favor of a corporate elite. Consequently, the fruits of the once great American production machine are increasingly being seized by those who have put themselves in charge. Our country has been moving away from capitalism and toward corporatism for years, and it will ultimately, along with decay in non-economic areas, prove our undoing.
  
• The next time some deep thinker who says he or she if “pro-market” but who is really pro-business (There is a huge difference.) says that unions are no longer needed because enlightened employers know that success depends on a satisfied, motivated work force, remember the workers at Circuit City who have been left to the visionary tender mercies of the kleptocrats who run Circuit City.
  
  The Pontificator