Deciding The Fate of Workers

BUSINESSES, BIG AND SMALL, ar always looking for ways to get the most out of their employees. this is the natural order things in capitalism; maximization of profit through maximization of worker productivity, which means, the most amount of work for the least possible amount of pay. Internships have been a popular way for companies, particularly large companies, to squeeze free labor out of aspiring, hungry young job seekrs. Also, of course, part time work allows the employer to avoid paying benefits. Another favorite is on call work, in which th employee does not know if or when there will be work, and agrees to work whenever the company needs it. That's quite a helpful arrangement for the business owners, like most any business arrangement. Large companies sometimes make use of a system which was famously used by Jack Welch, CEO of General Electirc in the nineteen eighties. In this system, every employee in the corporation is rated for job performance. The ratings are usually done by supervisors or managers; sometimes the employees themselves do the ranking. All the employees are compared to each other, not to some absolute scale. Usually suporvisors or managers do the rankings, sometimes the employees themselves do it, ranking everyone from best to worst. This automatically produces a bell curve, with a certain percentage of workers at the top, most in the middle, and a certain percentage at the bottom. The ones on the very bottom are terminated. (jobs, not lives). The bigt, fun, beautiful progressive Google Corporation does something like this. There are problems with this method. Mainly, employees tend not to like it, and it makes them apprehensive about job security. Just knowing, always knowing, that someone, and it may be you, will be fired soon. IN a more enlightened future corporate world, democracy will have finally infected capitalism, and those at the bottom of the pyramid will be the same ones at the top, deciding their own fate.