Submitted by lizzy36 on 02/07/2012 01:19 -0500
Congressional Budget Office
ETC
Gross Domestic Product
President Obama
Recession
Unemployment
On Friday every main stream media organization was hyperventilating over the amazing NFP number and the Unemployment rate. Three years after the great recession ended JOBS were created. Hallelujah - end of story. But has anyone really thought about what kinds of jobs are being created (other than Zerohedge). Has anyone thought about how their tax dollars are being used to support the very generous compensation packages of Executives (higher stock prices are always good for executives who are compensated in stock) while the “newly employed” are compensated with barely sustenance level wages and NO benefits. Has anyone raised the notion in this election cycle about how the “soft landing” in American living standards, is going to affect GDP growth going forward, considering that the US is an economy based 70% on consumption.
On Friday Caterpillar announced they were closing a factory in Canada. They had wanted the workers to take a 50% pay-cut plus a substantial cut to benefits. The workers understandably were not excited at the prospect of going from earning $67,000 a year to $28,000. One might think that Caterpillar was a struggling company, asking workers to accept a 50% pay-cut, one couldn’t be more wrong. Profit was up 36% in 2011 vs 2012. Oddly the CEO’s (also Chairman of the Board) pay package in 2010 (latest available numbers) was quadrupled from 2009, to a total of $22.5 million including a $16 million stock grant.
Caterpillar's decision, ending a standoff with locked-out workers huddled around barrels of burning scrap wood outside the London factory gates, may benefit another downtrodden manufacturing city: Muncie, Ind., where Caterpillar last year opened a locomotive plant and where it is trying to fill jobs at about half the pay workers in Ontario received. At a job fair in Muncie Saturday, Caterpillar will be offering jobs at that plant at wages ranging from $12 to $18.50 per hour. Wages for most workers at the Ontario plant are about 35 Canadian dollars an hour.
If Caterpillar does move theses jobs to Munice what does it stand to get from the City and the State?
http://www.zerohedge.com/contributed/should-you-be-subsidizing-executive-compensation-name-job-creation
Realist - Everybody in America is soft, and hates conflict. The cure for this, both in politics and social life, is the same -- hardihood. Give them raw truth.
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