I have a lot of respect for your posts ... usually BUT (ya knew that was coming!) I have a hard time agreeing with your contention that WDW needed to downsize ... and most of the folks they got rid of were not at the top exec/management level ... to use favorite whipping boy Phil Holmes as an example, you didn't see folks like him axed. You saw some of the top hourly folks ... some top long-time (top of the pay scale) folks at mid levels.
As to the inherent right to work, maybe it's the socialist, pinko Commie in me, but creating an underclass of people who can't find work or are making $8 an hour at Starbucks or Target when they were making $85,000 a year is a great way to destroy a country. Or make one third world.
I have friends who have been out of work, real work anyway, for YEARS now. Then there are folks who don't have one full-time employer and work for themselves and/or clients (like myself) who can go from making incredible money to nothing depending on outside circumstance and we don't even exist as far as the federal government is concerned. And I do feel the country owes everyone better.
Funny how socialism is OK for Wall Street and Detroit and how many banks that have failed this year (? 60?), but talk about helping individuals and all the crazy rightwingers suddenly think we're putting up statues of Stalin. But that's what WalMarting a nation is all about!
Sorry, Figment, but jobs are a very hot button topic for me. We need to put people to work, not justify companies adding to our downward spiral by putting more folks on the street.
We absolutely need people to work and I don't think you're going to meet much resistance to the contention that if someone was once making $85,000/year, they are only capable of working an $8/hour job at Target or Starbucks. I don't think the market has failed to the point where people were that over-their-heads in their occupations. I do, however, think that as the market grew (and this was false growth), a lot of companies ballooned and were not careful in hiring. What I mean by there being no right to work is that if someone is not willing or able to do their job, they don't have any "right" to be in it. A lot of hardworking and able individuals have also lost employment during the recent economic crisis. I am in no way justifying that. I think some corporations needed changes in their management regimes (as you say, the people at the top should've lost their employment), but that's a little more difficult to accomplish. If you stated that the SEC needs to enact more measures to counter management entrenchment, I would agree (although the SEC is largely incompetent, so I don't know how well that would've been implemented). Proxy wars, hostile takeovers, or simple 'shareholder flight' are often too unwieldy or too expensive for any meaningful change in management.
I also don't agree with the government propping up industries. You often paint yourself as a socialist, but I don't actually buy that given some of your arguments (not a knock at you as I think you make these comments in jest or for shock appeal, I just would consider you to be more egalitarian). Without a doubt, executives in key corporations got lazy and/or refused to do their jobs properly. As I said there is a constant strife between management, that wants to entrench itself and make personal gains, and shareholders. The former almost always wants to increase the size of the company to accomplish this. I think in the recent past, a lot of unscrupulous executives did this--and as a result, a lot of people who were not suited for their positions gained employment. Essentially, in-over-their-heads in their positions. I am in no way justifying the recent scandals in corporate America, nor am I justifying the response of bailing these industries out. In doing that, I think we're only postponing the inevitable return to reality, economically (so to speak).
I'm not trying to say that Disney made the right decisions in who to let go in reigning in this growth (heck, I'm not even saying the growth necessarily happened at Disney), I don't know enough about the company to make an informed statement as to that. I'm saying that as a general proposition, companies did "over-grow" in recent years. I have heard from you and others that those individuals who were cut were not the folks who should have been cut. I'm not defending those particular cuts, just the general principle that cutting jobs, at times, is a necessary evil (although my words wouldn't be "evil", since I believe those who should lose their jobs are those who are not capable).
Regardless of our disagreements economically, I think we are approaching the same ends--that a corporation such as Disney must continue to innovate and aggressively meet customer expectations in order to sustain growth (or to simply remain an industry leader). People in key positions aren't willing to make the tough decisions to get there, because it's often easier to make the safe decisions that don't cause stagnation. Now the means by which we get there are probably quite different, but I think we're still generally 'on the same page.'
(although there's a lot more I'd like to say, I'm going to keep this relatively short since it might disappear due to being political--for the record, capitalism and socialism are economic schemes, NOT political schemes. Talking economics here, so far as I know, is not prohibited).
