CAPITAL vs LABOR

[rffrydr]

East and West, "being rich has never been so expensive":

http://investorsinsight.com/otb.aspx

[HenryTo]

Now, it is Harley's turn. In our CFA LA Annual Forecast Dinner, Paul McCulley made an interesting point last night. That is, the growth of real wages have more or less tracked the growth of productivity over time. Over the last five years, however, real wage growth has lagged, and while he still thinks corporate profit margins will be relatively high going forward, he also believes that real wages will do some catching up over the next few years.

We're not talking about raising the minimum wage (this will do nothing to reduce poverty and will actually increase inflation, which will incidentally hurt the middle class). We're talking about anyone that is within the lower to upper middle class.
------------------------------------------------------------------
Union Strikes Harley-Davidson Pa. Plant
Friday February 2, 10:21 am ET
By Martha Raffaele, Associated Press Writer
Union Strikes Harley-Davidson Plant in York, Pa.

YORK, Pa. (AP) -- Nearly 2,800 union workers walked off the job Friday at Harley-Davidson Inc.'s largest manufacturing plant, with small groups quietly picketing each entrance of the York facility.
The workers said they were prepared to stay on the picket lines for as long as it took to win a better contract than a company proposal they overwhelmingly rejected two days ago.

"There's no sense in doing this if we're not going to stick together," said Nevin Bechtel, 59, who works in the plant's painting department. "If we regress now, we've lost everything we're struggling for, and the company will think they've won."

More than 50 workers gathered as the strike began at midnight, said Tom Boger, a union representative for the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers Local 175. Fifty members at a time were scheduled to picket throughout the day in three-hour shifts.

The company installed cement barricades to block access to all gates, even empty parking lots, Boger said.

The union voted Wednesday to authorize a strike after rejecting the company's contract offer, which would have reduced pay rates for new hires, required employees to pay part of their health insurance premiums and forced pension concessions.

In anticipation of the walkout, the company shut down production at the plant on Thursday.

"We are obviously disappointed by the union's decision," Fred Gates, general manager of Harley-Davidson's York operations, said Thursday. "The proposed contract was structured to help manage future costs that could be detrimental to our business over the long term."

But union members said they felt management's proposal would be a backward step.

"If they had kept the contract the way it is, everyone would have been fine with it," said Lucey Mrozinski, 43, a welding machine operator on the picket line.

Bechtel said the proposed two-tier wage system would hurt morale.

"We'll still keep building first-rate bikes, but when the second-rate people take over, what are we going to build then? Second-rate bikes," he said.

Russell Aldinger, 46, a mechanical assembler who said he had worked at the plant for 10 years, said he thought the company could afford to make a better offer.

"This company is very profitable, and for us to have to take concessions when we were earning the money that we were ... I feel it's ridiculous," he said.

The company said its proposal included annual wage increases of 4 percent over three years. But part of the increase depended on the union's agreeing to contribute toward health insurance coverage. Unionized employees currently pay no premium. It also would have doubled the company's 401(k) retirement plan contributions.

Boger said the union was prepared to return to negotiations.

"We'll wait for the company to call us," he said.

The facility employs more than 3,200 union and nonunion workers.

[rffrydr]

[rffrydr]

A little color-commentary in light of current events as only the Brits can provide:

“For the majority of homeowners, they are now ‘lobster potted' for the rest of their lives in the 21st Century's version of the Victorian treadmill. Welcome to modern debt-controlled serfdom, where if you lose your job, either through retrenchment or illness, you lose your home. It has become a veritable Sword of Damocles, or a stick with which to beat recalcitrant labor into a bloody pulp, should they ever prove restless or disobedient. The ruthless and faceless plutocrats who benefit vastly from this dreadful scheme must be laughing on their return to a status of demagogic power which is the modern equivalent of Roman or Medieval Aristocracy at its exploitative worst….

The mortgage weapon forms an integral part of the armory of the so-called New World Order (NWO) as it seeks to accumulate wealth and power to control people by stealth.”

--Economist Nigel Maund
_________________
Today is the Tomorrow you worried about Yesterday!

[rffrydr]

....And Old School in the Here and Now:

http://www.mineweb.net/whats_new/621638.htm

This in the context of commodity boom.
_________________
Today is the Tomorrow you worried about Yesterday!

[rffrydr]

It's all here in the microcosm of one biography: the restrained pride felt by Mexico in their "Mr. Big" is giving way to disgruntlment that thier country has become a factory town.

http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-slim9mar09,1,3488330.story

Moral: the "global" perspective still predominates. Reaction in the air. The fight, if it comes, will be over the telephone.
_________________
Today is the Tomorrow you worried about Yesterday!

[rffrydr]

Kerkorian offer put Labor front and center...on the chopping block.

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=aXNxmo65UTO4

PE confronting the legacy costs in Autos will set stage for another wave of equity takevoers if sucessful--or become a political spark a la TXU and turn the tide back. At 89 years old this'll be quite a swan song.
_________________
Today is the Tomorrow you worried about Yesterday!

[HenryTo]

At the same time, the high-tech industry is running short of qualified workers:
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
India High-Tech Industry Out of Workers
Saturday April 7, 12:13 am ET
By Tim Sullivan, Associated Press Writer
The Trouble With Success: India's High-Tech World Searches Frantically for More Workers

MYSORE, India (AP) -- At the heart of the sprawling corporate campus, in a hilltop building overlooking the immaculately shorn lawns, the sports fields and the hypermodern theater complex, young engineers crowd into a classroom. They are India's best and brightest, with stellar grades that launched them into a high-tech industry growing at more than 25 percent annually. And their topic of the day? Basic telephone skills.

"Hello?" one young man says nervously, holding his hand to his ear like a phone. "Hello? I'd like to leave a message for Number 17. Can I do that?"

Nearly two decades into India's phenomenal growth as an international center for high technology, the industry has a problem: It's running out of workers.

There may be a lot of potential -- Indian schools churn out 400,000 new engineers, the core of the high-tech industry, every year -- but as few as 100,000 are actually ready to join the job world, experts say.

Instead, graduates are leaving universities that are mired in theory classes, and sometimes so poorly funded they don't have computer labs. Even students from the best colleges can be dulled by cram schools and left without the most basic communication skills, according to industry leaders.

So the country's voracious high-tech companies, desperate for ever-increasing numbers of staffers to fill their ranks, have to go hunting.

"The problem is not a shortage of people," said Mohandas Pai, human resources chief for Infosys Technologies, the software giant that built and runs the Mysore campus for its new employees. "It's a shortage of trained people."

From the outside, this nation of 1.03 billion, with its immense English-speaking population, may appear to have a bottomless supply of cheap workers with enough education to claim more outsourced Western jobs.

But things look far different in India, where technology companies are spending hundreds of millions of dollars in a frantic attempt to ensure their profit-making machine keeps producing.

"This is really the Achilles heel of the industry," said James Friedman, an analyst with Susquehanna Financial Group, an investment firm based in Bala Cynwyd, Pa., who has studied the issue.

"When we first started covering the industry, in 2000, there were maybe 50,000 jobs and 500,000 applicants," he said. Now there are perhaps 180,000 annual openings, but only between 100,000 and 200,000 qualified candidates.

For now, industry is keeping up, but only barely. A powerful trade group, the National Association of Software Services Companies, or NASSCOM, estimates a potential shortfall of 500,000 technology professionals by 2010.

On the most basic level, it's a problem of success. The high-tech industry is expanding so fast that the population can't keep up with the demand for high-end workers.

Tata Consultancy Services, for instance, India's largest software company, hires around 3,000 people a month. The consulting firm Accenture plans to hire 8,000 in the next six months and IBM says it will bring on more than 50,000 additional people in India by 2010.

A shortage means something feared here: higher wages.

Much of India's success rests on the fact that its legions of software programmers work for far less than those in the West -- often for one-fourth the salary. If industry can't find enough workers to keep wages low, the companies that look to India for things like software development will turn to competitors, from Poland to the Philippines, and the entire industry could stumble.

The responses range from private "finishing schools" polishing the computer skills of new graduates to multimillion-dollar partnerships spanning business, government and higher education. The biggest companies have built elaborate training centers. The Mysore campus, for instance, was little more than scrub-filled fields when Infosys, India's second-largest software firm, based in the nearby technology hub of Bangalore, began building here in earnest three years ago.

In America, the campus would be nothing unusual. But in India -- with its electricity outages, poverty and mountains of garbage -- the walled-in corporate fantasyland, watched over by armed guards, is anything but normal.

It has 120 faculty members, more than 80 buildings, 2,350 hostel rooms and a 500,000-square-foot education complex. There's a movie complex built inside a geodesic dome. An army of workers sweeps the already-spotless streets and trims the already-perfect lawns.

Month by month, it's getting bigger. Today, some 4,500 students at a time attend the 16-week course for new employees. By September, there will be space for 13,000.

Infosys spent $350 million on the campus, and will spend $140 million this year on training, said Pai, the human resources chief.

"This is the enormous cost we have to pay to ensure we have enough people," he said.

They're not the only ones.

IBM's technical skills programs reached well over 100,000 Indians last year, from children to university professors. At Tata Consultancy Services, measures range from a talent search as far afield as Uruguay to having executives teach university classes -- all designed simply to make people employable.

Most industry leaders believe these investments will pay off, and India will remain competitive. But most are also guarded in their optimism.

"We should be able to get through this year, but if we don't get things like finishing schools into place we'll see an actual shortage," said Kiran Karnik, the NASSCOM chairman.

Much of the problem is rooted in a deeply flawed school system.

As India's economy blossomed over 15 years, spawning a middle class desperate to push their children further up the economic ladder, the higher education system grew dramatically. The number of engineering colleges, for instance, has nearly tripled.

But the problems have simply grown worse.

India has technical institutes that seldom have electricity, and colleges with no computers. There are universities where professors seldom show up. Textbooks can be decades old.

Even at the best schools -- and the government-run Indian Institutes of Technology are among the world's most competitive, with top-level professors and elaborate facilities -- there are problems.

The brutal competition to get into these universities means ambitious students can spend a year or more in private cram schools, giving up everything to study full-time for the entrance exams.

Instruction is by rote learning, and only test scores count.

"Everything else is forgotten: the capacity to think, to write, to be logical, to get along with people," Pai said. The result is smart, well-educated people who can have trouble with such professional basics as working on a team or good phone manners.

"The focus," he said, "is cram, cram, cram, cram."

Things are different at the Infosys campus.

"The premier concern in college was to get maximum marks," said Sanjay Joshi, a 22-year-old engineer midway through Infosys' training course. "Here, the focus is totally on learning."

Much of that learning is technical, mostly focusing on programming. But "soft skills" classes, as they're called, also include such things as e-mail etiquette and problem-solving.

Then there are off-hours. The average age on campus is 22 and for some of them it's their first time away from home. There's a soccer field, a cricket field, a swimming pool with a juice bar, a bowling alley and a gym. There are racks of bicycles to ride.

You could drown in politeness. "Ride Carefully" a sign warns bicyclists at a gentle curve in the road; "Enjoy your visit," a passing student tells a visitor.

Everywhere, there are well-groomed, well-mannered young people.

On a recent morning, students filed into a large classroom for a programming course.

By 8:45 a.m. -- 15 minutes before class began -- the room was nearly full. Row after row of students sat quietly, waiting for the teacher.

[rffrydr]

Looks like therre is another story here: not being able to utilize what India already has. Culture provides a background woven of interconnected links that business discounts. Like the computerized ID systems finding faces in the clouds Indian schools seemed to have missed the basics.


"Sociability:" Push any aspect of human development to the exclusion of others and oops.... you don't have "people;" therefore, employees anymore. Clearly it's not just a matter of being "nice." It a matter of working with other people.

Call it "inflation" but that these dramatically rising costs occur precisely in the area of abundance, labor in the case of India should not be surprising for those whom "nothing is obvious."
_________________
Today is the Tomorrow you worried about Yesterday!

[rffrydr]

Airlines in the pink--almost.

They want 350 LAX to Chicago; 1250 to Frankfurt, clearly the capacity problem and economy are in sync. (overpaid) Labor's concessions made it happen and "get" squat:

http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-airlines14apr14,1,5540724.story?ctrack=1&cset=true
_________________
Today is the Tomorrow you worried about Yesterday!

[rffrydr]

[rffrydr]

The Dialectic: Thesis X Antithesis = Synthesis


"If you're not in the game, you're really going to get really screwed," says Leo Gerard, president of the 850,000-member union, which represents workers in chemicals, paper, aluminum and several other industries in addition to steel.

[rffrydr]

AFL-CIO challenges Blackstone's IPO:

http://dealbook.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/05/16/why-blackstone-is-or-isnt-an-investment-company/
_________________
Today is the Tomorrow you worried about Yesterday!

[rffrydr]

They're talking the talk on CNBC:

http://www.cnbc.com/id/15840232?video=338862878&play=1
_________________
Today is the Tomorrow you worried about Yesterday!

[rffrydr]

An interesting expression of same: