America's Big Speed-Up: No Wonder the Jobless Rate is Staying at Depression Levels

Unless you realize that this is the “New Economy,” and like the over-worked employees in Hertz rental offices, managements everywhere--at Hertz, at Merck, and just about everywhere else, knows that their employees are so frightened about losing their jobs that they will work twice as hard, especially if the person in the next office or at the next desk is given the axe.

Another word for what is happening is a speed-up.

Another might be serfdom.

It’s the reason that the economy is staying in a state of depression (not recession, which just refers to the size and direction of the gross domestic product). Instead of hiring more workers as profits rise, companies, which have reportedly piled up an astonishing $1.2 trillion in profits, instead of spending that money are making existing smaller workforces just do more work in the same number of hours (overtime is actually down, and paychecks are shrinking). They are even figuring, “Hey, we’ve got these people working harder for less pay, so why not make them work even harder?” and are laying off even more people, like Merck says it will be doing over the next few years. (If they do spend any of their cash hoards, they spend it abroad in cheap-labor countries, not here in the U.S.)