The problem with laissez-faire capitalism

CEOs make the mistakes. And it's the workers who lose their jobs. That's the problem as expressed in an article called, "CEOs Fail, But Only the Workers Suffer". Here's an excerpt:

There are only two ways an assembly plant worker can hurt his or her employer: Do a lousy job, or ask too much money for it.

Neither applies to the employees of this city's Ford assembly plant, which opened in 1925 to build Henry Ford's Model T, and today rolls out a new F-150 pickup truck -- the world's best-selling vehicle model -- every 67 seconds. Of the three Ford plants producing the F-150, Norfolk has the highest productivity -- utilizing the fewest workers per truck -- and the lowest rate of defects.

So what have the 2,275 hourly workers in Ford's most efficient plant producing its most profitable product earned for their efforts? The end of their livelihoods. Ford on April 13 an nounced that the Norfolk Assembly Plant will close by 2008.

To listen to Ford, Norfolk was victimized by little more than geography; the plant is farther from the company's Detroit hub than the other F-150 plants, so the company is hoping to save the cost of shipping parts to the East Coast. Translation: It's not the Norfolk workers' fault. But they're going to pay anyway.

''If I'm in business to make money, I want to make money,'' quality control specialist and United Auto Workers Local 919 member Rick Page, 51, told me when I visited the plant April 19. "I can understand that Ford wants to bring everything closer to their hub.

''But the F-150 is the No. 1 best-selling vehicle in the world, and we build the highest quality F-150 of any plant in the country,'' said Page, whose father worked at the Norfolk plant, and whose son works there today. "We're one of the most efficient and productive plants of any in the United States. We have good people here. We take pride in what we do. And we feel we got slapped in the face.''

Heck, they did get slapped in the face. More than that - they got thrown away like a used tissue.

Here's a further discussion of what happens:

If CEO-gods get the credit for corporate successes, shouldn't they bear the responsibility for failures? Yet when was the last time you heard of a top corporate executive being fired -- without a golden parachute -- for racking up nine- or 10-figure losses? The Norfolk workers are paying for management's failure to adapt to a changing marketplace. And they are paying for the refusal of politicians to establish tougher fuel-efficiency standards, to structure free-trade agreements to protect the jobs of American workers, or to create a national health insurance plan that would allow U.S. companies to better compete with the rest of the industrialized world, where national health insurance lowers business costs.

Yet when capitalists in the contemporary free market make bad decisions, the blameless typically suffer far more than the culpable. These days, if the corporations' strategies succeed, good U.S. jobs flee overseas. If they fail, good domestic jobs just disappear.

It's just not right. There's no way you can tell me that this kind of business practice can possibly be ethically and morally right. But it is the predictable outcome of unregulated capitalism and a society that sees labor as the enemy to be kept down and exploited instead of its most precious resource.