March 2001 | Hightower Lowdown
Gooberhead Award
by Jim Hightower
Time for another "Gooberhead Award," presented periodically by the Hightower Lowdown to someone whose mouth is running 100 miles an hour...but whose brain is not quite in gear.
Today’s Goober goes to Mr. Bruce Tulgan, a management consultant who wrote a happy piece in the New York Times explaining that downsizing is good for you! Goodness knows there is plenty of downsizing taking place for Mr. Tulgan to cheer about. From high-tech to low-tech, hundreds of corporations are merrily tossing thousands of people out their doors. For example, in January alone, Whirlpool spun 6,000 workers out of its system, Sara Lee cooked 7,000 of its workers, J.C. Penney closed more than FIFTY stores and shipped out untold thousands of workers, Lucent Technologies zapped 16,000 workers, and DaimlerChrysler rolled out 26,000 workers. Also joining in the January Job-cutting Jamboree was AOL-Time Warner, Intel, Loew’s theaters, Sony, Motorola, and Amazon.com.
From his perch as a management consultant, however, Mr. Tulgan assures us we should not lose a single wink of sleep over any of this, for he believes that job cuts are an excellent way to keep the Wall Street boom booming. The new global economy, he’s thrilled to tell us, has "demolished job security forever," and the labor market has "transformed itself" form being static to being fluid. What a Goober. The labor market did not transform itself, rather it was transformed by greedheaded CEOs and their political puppets in Washington. As for labor market "fluidity," what that really means is your middle-class job is gone and you’re up the creek without a paddle — adios chump.
Nevertheless downsizing is good for our economy, Tulgan exults, because it allows corporations "to adapt quickly to changing global markets."
That means corporations can jump from one low-wage hell hole to another and you, too, can join the growing global ranks of sweatshop workers.
Jim Hightower is a columnist and author. To subscribe to The Hightower Lowdown, send $15, and your name, and address to: Lowdown, P.O. Box 20596, New York, NY 10011. Visit his web site for more info.
![[Send]](http://consciouschoice.com/sendlink/send.gif){kind=small}
Recommend this page to a friend
Top Ten pages recommended to friends:
