Addressing the Pay Gap

[Rogue 9]

Article is paywalled, but reader mode gets around it.

How to crack down on greedy CEOs, massive employee pay gaps
Sarah Anderson
13-17 minutes

Corporate boards, the small group of independent appointees who are supposed to protect the best interests of the world's largest companies, have spent the COVID-19 pandemic bending over backward to protect their CEOs' massive paychecks.

Boards are supposed to be a check on company executives, ensuring their actions are in the best interest of stakeholders — from employees to shareholders. But even as employees risked their lives on the front lines, many company boards focused on shielding their CEOs from the crisis. The boss didn't meet their bonus targets? No problem! Simply move a goalpost here, concoct a special "retention" award there, and voilà — pay cut averted.

In fact, according to a report I coauthored last year, 51 of the 100 biggest US corporations with median employee pay below $50,000 a year altered pay plans in 2020 to protect top brass. Chief executives at those 51 firms got an average raise of 29%, while median worker pay declined 2% to an average of $28,187.

As inflation started picking up in the second year of the pandemic, corporate leaders continued to fixate on fattening CEOs' paychecks — often with taxpayer backing. But taxpayers shouldn't be subsidizing the outrageous pay gaps between CEOs and their workers. Congress has so far proved unwilling or unable to reel in this taxpayer-subsidized greed, so it's time for President Biden to step in and encourage more equitable pay practices that would benefit workers, their communities, and even the corporate bottom line.

Big employers blew millions on stock buybacks instead of paying their workers better

A new study from the Institute for Policy Studies on the 300 US corporations with the lowest median worker pay found that CEO pay at these corporations increased by 31% in 2021, while leaving workers far behind. At more than a third of the firms, median pay for workers didn't rise above the rate of inflation. Among the 300 employers we studied, the average gap between CEO and median worker compensation is now a stunning 670-to-1. It's no wonder we're seeing record numbers of workers quitting their jobs and a surge in unionization.

Did these companies not have enough money to make sure wages kept up with rising prices? Hardly. In fact, 67 of the companies we studied spent a combined $43.7 billion on stock buybacks in 2021. Instead of increasing worker pay and helping millions of people pay their bills, these companies purchased shares of their own stock — which artificially drives up the value and, in turn, the value of executives' stock-based pay.

Stock buybacks were mostly illegal until the Securities and Exchange Commission loosened the rules in 1982. Since then, corporations have poured trillions of dollars into share repurchases to pad the pockets of their CEOs and wealthy shareholders. The tradeoffs are huge: Every dollar spent on buybacks is a dollar not invested in wage increases, research and development, equipment upgrades, or other productivity-boosting investments.

Among the firms in our sample where workers' wages didn't keep up with inflation in 2021, Lowe's spent the most — $13 billion — on buybacks. With that hefty sum, the home-improvement chain could have given each of its 325,000 employees a $40,000 raise. Instead, median worker compensation at Lowe's fell by 7.6% to $22,697, while Lowe's CEO, Marvin Ellison, raked in $17.9 million — most of it in stock-based pay.

Best Buy was another top buyback splurger. With the $3.5 billion the company spent on share repurchases, it could have given each of its 105,320 employees a $32,270 pay hike. Instead, median annual pay fell by 1.8% to less than $30,000. Meanwhile, Corie Barry, the company's CEO, enjoyed a 30% raise, to $15.6 million, after laying off =https://abc7.com/best-buy-layoffs-stor ... 00 workers. Barry told analysts the job cuts were necessary because the company had "too many full-time and not enough part-time employees." Part-timers are cheaper because Best Buy doesn't have to provide them with benefits or guarantee their hours.

Thanks to underhanded decisions like these, the pay gap between CEOs and their workers continues to expand despite low-wage workers' heroic efforts to keep the US economy going during the pandemic.

Equitable companies perform better

About 40% of the 300 companies we studied are, in some capacity, federal contractors. That means they're receiving taxpayer money while enriching their top executives at the expense of their workers. CEO-pay apologists regularly argue that corporate leaders deserve their massive compensation packages because they bear enormous responsibilities and must take extraordinary risks. This argument quickly falls apart when we compare CEOs at major contractors with the government officials ultimately responsible for their contracts.

The secretary of Defense, for instance, manages the country's largest workforce — more than 2 million employees — and makes life-or-death decisions on a daily basis. Yet this Defense secretary and other Cabinet members in the Biden administration make $221,400 a year, less than three times as much as the $76,668 average federal employee's annual pay. Contrast that narrow gap with the situation at Amazon, which raked in more than $10 billion in federal contracts for web services over the past three years. Andy Jassy, the CEO of Amazon who took over for Jeff Bezos in 2021, received $212.7 million in compensation last year — 6,474 times the company's median worker pay and 961 times the salary of the secretary of Defense.

The truth is, pay-equity incentives would deliver a bigger bang for the taxpayer buck. Study after study has found that companies with narrow pay gaps tend to perform better because they bring out the best in all of their employees. In fact, one recent analysis of 235 CEOs who served in the top job between 2006 and 2020 found that the best-performing companies had the lowest-paid CEOs. Similarly, a Harvard Business School study found that companies with overpaid CEOs and underpaid workers had significantly lower revenue and higher levels of employee dissatisfaction and turnover.

Maximus, the largest low-wage federal contractor we studied, offers a case in point. The firm, which services student loans and operates Affordable Care Act and Medicare call centers, has bagged $12.3 billion in government contracts over the past few years. Most of the gains from those lucrative contracts have flowed to the top of the company's ladder. Last year, Maximus CEO Bruce Caswell collected $7.9 million in compensation — 208 times the firm's median paycheck.

Half of Maximus' 49,800 employees earned less than $38,059 in 2021. Before Biden's April 2021 executive order to raise the minimum wage for federal contract employees to $15 an hour, many of the company's call-center workers earned as little as $10.95 an hour. It's hardly a surprise that Maximus employees are attempting to unionize and have organized multiple walkouts this year demanding decent pay and benefits.

Workers at Amazon are also pushing for better treatment. Despite fierce company resistance, Amazon employees on Staten Island successfully organized the company's first US union earlier this year, and organizing drives are underway at Amazon facilities in other parts of the country.

How to close extreme pay gaps

An April report from Just Capital, a nonprofit research organization, found that of the 1,037 people it surveyed, 62% of Republicans and 75% of Democrats support a cap on CEO pay relative to worker pay. That's a roughly 10-point increase since before the pandemic.

In the Build Back Better negotiations, Ron Wyden, the Senate Finance Committee chair, floated a more modest alternative to a rigid CEO pay cap: an excise tax to encourage narrower gaps. His proposal was loosely modeled on the Tax Excessive CEO Pay Act, which would apply graduated corporate-tax increases based on the size of a company's gap between CEO and median worker pay. The tax penalty would kick in at 0.5 percentage points for companies with pay ratios of 50-to-1 or higher and max out at 5 percentage points for ratios above 500-to-1.

If this policy had been in place, Lowe's — with a pay gap of 787-to-1 — would have owed an extra $560 million in federal taxes in 2021, a year in which the retailer raked in a record $11.2 billion in pre-tax earnings. If it had narrowed its pay gap to 99-to-1, the company would've owed an extra $56 million. And if it had dropped the ratio to less than 50-to-1, it would not have owed an extra dime.

This tax reform, despite being a sensible way to encourage narrower pay gaps, is stalled in Congress, along with much of Biden's agenda. But the president does not need to wait for legislation to act. He could wield the power of the public purse by making it hard for companies with huge CEO-worker pay gaps to land lucrative federal contracts. Given the large number of low-wage employers that rely on these contracts, this would be a significant step to close the gap.

The government already gives small businesses owned by women, disabled veterans, and people of color a leg up in some contracting competitions, and it is illegal for the government to give contracts to companies that discriminate based on race or gender. In a similar spirit of leveling the playing field, the administration could give priority to corporations that pay their CEOs no more than 100 times what they pay their typical worker.

In other words, if two similarly qualified companies say they could do a job for $20 million, but company A has a pay gap of 300-to-1 and company B's pay ratio is 75-to-1, company B would get the contract. This would encourage corporations to narrow their pay gaps, ideally by both reining in the top and lifting the bottom of their wage scales.

Existing rules for federal contractors send the clear message that our tax dollars should not be subsidizing racial or gender inequality. Why should we support companies that are driving extreme economic inequality?

Taxpayers shouldn't fund inequality

Workers, of course, have their own tools to fight for better treatment and fairer pay: unions. But many of the same low-wage contractors that take taxpayer money and treat their employees terribly are also using those taxpayer dollars to crack down on the employees organizing for better treatment. While pocketing billions of dollars in taxpayer-funded contracts, Amazon has been spending millions of dollars fighting union campaigns at several of its warehouses.

The administration could also wield the power of the public purse to crack down on union busting. Requiring federal contractors to sign neutrality agreements in organizing campaigns would be one way that Biden could use his executive authority to strengthen workers' rights.

Contracting standards could also address the problem of wasteful spending on stock buybacks. In his 2023 budget proposal, Biden called on Congress to ban executives from selling their own shares in the years after a stock repurchase. This would prevent CEOs from timing share repurchases to personally cash in on a short-term price pop they artificially created. A 2019 SEC investigation revealed that such shenanigans are a common practice: In the eight days following a buyback announcement, top executives sold five times as much stock on average as they had on an ordinary day.

But why wait for our hopelessly divided Congress to act? Instead, Biden should get the ball rolling by imposing a buyback restriction on federal contractors, a set of companies that employ an estimated 25% of the US private-sector workforce.

CEOs' pandemic greed grab has stoked public outrage across the political spectrum. Just Capital's survey found that 87% of Americans view the growing gap between CEO and worker pay as a problem not just for workers, but for the nation as a whole. Through federal contracts, ordinary Americans are forced to support this obscenely inequitable corporate economic order with their tax dollars — and Biden could do something about it today.

[GrosseAdmiralFox]

Yeah, no. It's been consistently proven that the pay gap started back in the '70s and '80s (the exact year is disputed, but it's been consistently in that time period). NBER has recently released a paper on that topic.

Basically, you either outlaw automation (fat chance, it's a prisoner's dilemma at this point) or simply accept that you'll need to setup a UBI...

[LadyTevar]

Yeah, no. It's been consistently proven that the pay gap started back in the '70s and '80s (the exact year is disputed, but it's been consistently in that time period). NBER has recently released a paper on that topic.

Basically, you either outlaw automation (fat chance, it's a prisoner's dilemma at this point) or simply accept that you'll need to setup a UBI...

No, it's not a Dilemma. It can be dealt with by taxing Capitol Gains, by making Stock Buybacks illegal again.

A UBI would be nice, true... but you'd never get the US to do that because too many see it as an Undeserved Handout, just as they do any kind of aid to the Underprivileged. The US has this problem of fucking over 9 good people just so the 10th isn't "cheating the system".

[GrosseAdmiralFox]

Yeah, no. It's been consistently proven that the pay gap started back in the '70s and '80s (the exact year is disputed, but it's been consistently in that time period). NBER has recently released a paper on that topic.

Basically, you either outlaw automation (fat chance, it's a prisoner's dilemma at this point) or simply accept that you'll need to setup a UBI...

No, it's not a Dilemma. It can be dealt with by taxing Capitol Gains, by making Stock Buybacks illegal again.

A UBI would be nice, true... but you'd never get the US to do that because too many see it as an Undeserved Handout, just as they do any kind of aid to the Underprivileged. The US has this problem of fucking over 9 good people just so the 10th isn't "cheating the system".

I laugh at this statement because you assume that automation isn't going to wipe out jobs when it already has for decades. We need something on the order of tens/hundreds of millions (I'll have to double-check, but I believe the former is the most likely one) of jobs opening up just to stay above water, so to speak.

That hasn't been the case for decades.

There has been research outright stating that, outside of the people with natural talent, there will be no jobs soon. Computers, programing, and robotics have advanced to that point.

[Straha]

Yeah, no. It's been consistently proven that the pay gap started back in the '70s and '80s (the exact year is disputed, but it's been consistently in that time period). NBER has recently released a paper on that topic.

Basically, you either outlaw automation (fat chance, it's a prisoner's dilemma at this point) or simply accept that you'll need to setup a UBI...

No, it's not a Dilemma. It can be dealt with by taxing Capitol Gains, by making Stock Buybacks illegal again.

A UBI would be nice, true... but you'd never get the US to do that because too many see it as an Undeserved Handout, just as they do any kind of aid to the Underprivileged. The US has this problem of fucking over 9 good people just so the 10th isn't "cheating the system".

I laugh at this statement because you assume that automation isn't going to wipe out jobs when it already has for decades. We need something on the order of tens/hundreds of millions (I'll have to double-check, but I believe the former is the most likely one) of jobs opening up just to stay above water, so to speak.

That hasn't been the case for decades.

There has been research outright stating that, outside of the people with natural talent, there will be no jobs soon. Computers, programing, and robotics have advanced to that point.

I mean, none of this holds up under scrutiny.

Let's use just two assumptions:

1. That automation has been a viable option to employers since the '70s, and has become something with widespread potential since at least the dot-com boom of the '90s.
2. That the population has grown since the '70s.

If both are correct (and... they are) then we should see massive unemployment as more and more companies automate jobs leading to fewer and fewer employed total employed people, while the increasing population creates a surplus of unemployable people.

And yet, the US is at at full employment in the 2020s, and global employment has been more-or-less rock solid since the fall of the USSR. See: the World Bank.

This explanation of 'automation has been, is, and will destroy jobs and is the cause for inequality' simply doesn't track with observable fact or offer a better explanatory metric compared to other, much closer, explanations. (Notably, the collapse of unions and union power in the US coupled with major easing of tax burdens and deregulation.)

So, this is bullshit. We can debate why it's bullshit. There are sociological explanations (see: Bullshit Jobs by David Graeber which makes the case, simply put, that humans like the feeling of employing other humans to do thing when they have the chance), to technological (just like the replacement of the horse carriage by the automobile devastated the widespread farrier and horse husbandry industry, but led to the creation of the automobile industry, future shifts will create future opportunities for employment), to political (companies don't like engaging in mass lay-offs because it's bad press and potentially brings about political solutions that constrain their agency.) But, bullshit it remains.



To the OP, what I find noxious about the article is its lack of imagination. "How do we fix inequality? By offering minor incentives for contracts!"
Palpably laughable.

You want to fix income inequality? Raies minimum wages. Impose ruinous income taxes on high earners. Apply those same taxes to stock buybacks. And engage in forced transfer of ownership shares and excess profits to workers.

[Rogue 9]

To the OP, what I find noxious about the article is its lack of imagination. "How do we fix inequality? By offering minor incentives for contracts!"
Palpably laughable.

You want to fix income inequality? Raies minimum wages. Impose ruinous income taxes on high earners. Apply those same taxes to stock buybacks. And engage in forced transfer of ownership shares and excess profits to workers.

The article is addressing what the President could do without Congress, and none of the things you name are in that category.

[Straha]

To the OP, what I find noxious about the article is its lack of imagination. "How do we fix inequality? By offering minor incentives for contracts!"
Palpably laughable.

You want to fix income inequality? Raies minimum wages. Impose ruinous income taxes on high earners. Apply those same taxes to stock buybacks. And engage in forced transfer of ownership shares and excess profits to workers.

The article is addressing what the President could do without Congress, and none of the things you name are in that category.

You're not wrong, and I feel the frustration in the author's prose. But most companies just won't care.

The reason why stock buybacks are so popular is because they shove money into the hands of the shareholders both directly and indirectly. The reason companies do them is because they are beholden to the shareholders, not to the concept of the company. Lowe's, to use the article's example, potential loss of business when bidding for federal contracts might cost the shareholders a few pennies, but that's almost certainly not enough to actually change demand on the part of the shareholders.


Joe Biden doing this moves no needles. Joe Biden engaging in public agitation over income inequality and taking companies to task publicly quite possibly causes blowback, or shifts to the overton window, that can change behaviour or change the political landscape.

[Straha]

And, I don't know, I'm sick of think pieces where someone gets up and declares "Look, the real systemic change we have to do is impossible. So let's find some perfunctory option that will actually do nothing but which lets me collect a paycheck and make people at a dinner table who are invested in not fixing the problem feel very smart that they can nod along with while saying 'Why, yes, with a few tweaks I think this could be acceptable.' because then at least we're doing something."

And the excuse of "Well, at least this is a small step in the right direction." is such a pathetically complacent one.

[GrosseAdmiralFox]

No, it's not a Dilemma. It can be dealt with by taxing Capitol Gains, by making Stock Buybacks illegal again.

A UBI would be nice, true... but you'd never get the US to do that because too many see it as an Undeserved Handout, just as they do any kind of aid to the Underprivileged. The US has this problem of fucking over 9 good people just so the 10th isn't "cheating the system".

I laugh at this statement because you assume that automation isn't going to wipe out jobs when it already has for decades. We need something on the order of tens/hundreds of millions (I'll have to double-check, but I believe the former is the most likely one) of jobs opening up just to stay above water, so to speak.

That hasn't been the case for decades.

There has been research outright stating that, outside of the people with natural talent, there will be no jobs soon. Computers, programing, and robotics have advanced to that point.

I mean, none of this holds up under scrutiny.

Let's use just two assumptions:

1. That automation has been a viable option to employers since the '70s, and has become something with widespread potential since at least the dot-com boom of the '90s.
2. That the population has grown since the '70s.

If both are correct (and... they are) then we should see massive unemployment as more and more companies automate jobs leading to fewer and fewer employed total employed people, while the increasing population creates a surplus of unemployable people.

And yet, the US is at at full employment in the 2020s, and global employment has been more-or-less rock solid since the fall of the USSR. See: the World Bank.

This explanation of 'automation has been, is, and will destroy jobs and is the cause for inequality' simply doesn't track with observable fact or offer a better explanatory metric compared to other, much closer, explanations. (Notably, the collapse of unions and union power in the US coupled with major easing of tax burdens and deregulation.)

So, this is bullshit. We can debate why it's bullshit. There are sociological explanations (see: Bullshit Jobs by David Graeber which makes the case, simply put, that humans like the feeling of employing other humans to do thing when they have the chance), to technological (just like the replacement of the horse carriage by the automobile devastated the widespread farrier and horse husbandry industry, but led to the creation of the automobile industry, future shifts will create future opportunities for employment), to political (companies don't like engaging in mass lay-offs because it's bad press and potentially brings about political solutions that constrain their agency.) But, bullshit it remains.



To the OP, what I find noxious about the article is its lack of imagination. "How do we fix inequality? By offering minor incentives for contracts!"
Palpably laughable.

You want to fix income inequality? Raies minimum wages. Impose ruinous income taxes on high earners. Apply those same taxes to stock buybacks. And engage in forced transfer of ownership shares and excess profits to workers.

You are not using job participation statistics, looking at simply employment figures, which have been known to be faulty at best for years.

To be frank, job participation statistics constantly were shit for at least a decade.

[EnterpriseSovereign]

Related to UBI, some welfare advocates suggest going a step further with a "robot tax" to fund welfare programs that help displaced workers, like job training, government-funded healthcare and the aforementioned UBI.

[Rogue 9]

You are not using job participation statistics, looking at simply employment figures, which have been known to be faulty at best for years.

To be frank, job participation statistics constantly were shit for at least a decade.

Anecdotally, unemployment local to me remains under 2% and employers are desperate to hire and retain. My employer has done two rounds of raises already this year, both larger than any previous annual raise during my tenure. I work in manufacturing, and high paying production jobs are going unfilled because there's simply no one to hire. Because there are high paying manufacturing jobs available the service sector has been deserted en masse; even fucking Denny's and Wal-Mart can't stay open late anymore when they used to be 24 hours. Are parts of the job automated? Yes, absolutely, and let me tell you cutting upholstery fabric with a table cutter beats the hell out of going at it with jigsaws (which we still have some people do for large orders too thick to go in the cutting machines). You still need people to operate the machines. We aren't being replaced. If everything was still done the old way, we wouldn't even be able to operate the plant because the personnel to do it simply are not there to hire.

[Straha]

You are not using job participation statistics, looking at simply employment figures, which have been known to be faulty at best for years.

To be frank, job participation statistics constantly were shit for at least a decade.

Barking up the wrong tree there. In January 1980 the US Labor Force Participation rate was 64%. In January 2020 it was 63.4%. There was an increase of about 3% between the 80s and mid-90s, and a slow decrease from that peak, exacerbated by the '08 crisis, but from 2012 until 2020 it was pretty steady, meaning that jobs increased to go with the general population increase of roughly 30 million folks. But nothing outside the bounds here.

For just a straight apples to apples comparison. Peak workforce participation rate is about 67% in January 1997. Population at the time was 272 Million. Means there were roughly 182 million filled jobs. Lowest participation rate on record was April 2020 where, during the peak of COVID lockdowns, the participation rate was 60% (rounding down slightly.) Out of 329 Million people that's a 197 Million jobs. Which means that even when comparing the catastrophic lowest ebb of employment in recent history to the highest peak of employment there's still been a solid net increase of jobs.


And just think about this in the abstract. If you really think that jobs are disappearing en masse while population has been steadily increasing, who is supporting and keeping the unemployed non-participating people alive? Workers as real wages shrink? The famously robust welfare state of Reagan, Clinton, and the Bushes? How do they afford shelter, food, and other sustenance?

The only way that your theory of a massively decreasing pool of jobs makes sense is if there's simultaneously a massive conspiracy of labor economists covering up what should be the biggest structural issue in recent history coupled with massive increases in community support and charity going largely unremarked on. That just doesn't make any sense.

[Straha]

Quick addendum for the sake of academic honesty:

The number of jobs is actually lower for both figures because labor force participation is built off of a baseline that excludes underaged individuals and those currently in the military or prison. So just using the number compared to raw population is going to be informative for what we're discussing ("Has there been a massive exodus of people from the work force caused by lost jobs from automation?" to which, no) but not accurate in a broader statistical sense for people making economic planning decisions.

[LadyTevar]

As stated above, they have been hand-wringing over "Automation will Replace People" since the 70s, which is literally my complete lifetime.

At this point, the ONLY THING I've seen where automation has lost jobs was in the Automobile Industry, where Robot Welders took over for humans putting cars together. And I think even then you have more Humans looking after the Robots than you lost in jobs.

If Automation worked so well, why have Companies been out-sourcing to cheap human labor overseas?
If Automation worked so well, why are most manufacturing jobs still 90% human labor?
Because HUMAN WORKERS are CHEAPER

It's simply too expensive to build/program a machine for something you can teach a human to do in a matter of weeks. Also, that human can be cross-trained to do other tasks. To use the Robot Welders again, they have to be re-programed for each car body. A Human doesn't need to be re-taught from scratch. A Human Welder can use his knowledge of other cars to know where the welds should go on the new body.

So... Automation has been helpful, but it never, ever lived up to the hype.

[Spice Runner]

As stated above, they have been hand-wringing over "Automation will Replace People" since the 70s, which is literally my complete lifetime.

At this point, the ONLY THING I've seen where automation has lost jobs was in the Automobile Industry, where Robot Welders took over for humans putting cars together. And I think even then you have more Humans looking after the Robots than you lost in jobs.

If Automation worked so well, why have Companies been out-sourcing to cheap human labor overeas?
If Automation worked so well, why are most manufacturing jobs still 90% human labor?
Because HUMAN WORKERS are CHEAPER

It's simply too expensive to build/program a machine for something you can teach a human to do in a matter of weeks. Also, that human can be cross-trained to do other tasks. To use the Robot Welders again, they have to be re-programed for each car body. A Human doesn't need to be re-taught from scratch. A Human Welder can use his knowledge of other cars to know where the welds should go on the new body.

So... Automation has been helpful, but it never, ever lived up to the hype.

I've seen this personally at a large American life insurance company where I did a stint.i worked with the metrics and strategic planning departments

They were in the midst of a corporate reorganization and what I saw was a large push towards cutting costs.

They moved towards automating processes in customer service, risk and finance departments but their what struck me was their push to hire more people in the middle east and South Asia while cutting staff / less hiring in the US

[LadyTevar]

I've seen this personally at a large American life insurance company where I did a stint.i worked with the metrics and strategic planning departments

They were in the midst of a corporate reorganization and what I saw was a large push towards cutting costs.

They moved towards automating processes in customer service, risk and finance departments but their what struck me was their push to hire more people in the middle east and South Asia while cutting staff / less hiring in the US

And that's it in a nutshell. They moved the jobs to where they could cut pay as much as possible, while using the extra money to stuff their own pockets. Hell, for the most part they're not even really Investing in their own Product, they're not putting the money back into R&D or expansion, it's just all PROFIT goes to THEM.

Which is another reason why some of them are bitching about "millennials sinking businesses" -- the CEOs and Stockholders have focused so much on PROFIT over EVERYTHING, they've lost all loyalty from workers, lost credit for producing good products, but refuse to see the problem is on their own heads.

[Jub]

The threats of automation and globalization may not have contributed to outright unemployment but they have created a situation where low pay and underemployment are common. When the management at a grocery store can grumble about self-checkouts allowing them to cut 2 shifts per day it's tough to get the workers to stand up to them. This is slowly creeping up the chain into lower-level management positions and lower-level skilled positions. Sure new jobs are often created but if the new jobs pay less than the old ones, and they must or companies wouldn't automate them away, we're still losing wages to them.

[Spice Runner]

I've seen this personally at a large American life insurance company where I did a stint.i worked with the metrics and strategic planning departments

They were in the midst of a corporate reorganization and what I saw was a large push towards cutting costs.

They moved towards automating processes in customer service, risk and finance departments but their what struck me was their push to hire more people in the middle east and South Asia while cutting staff / less hiring in the US

And that's it in a nutshell. They moved the jobs to where they could cut pay as much as possible, while using the extra money to stuff their own pockets. Hell, for the most part they're not even really Investing in their own Product, they're not putting the money back into R&D or expansion, it's just all PROFIT goes to THEM.

Which is another reason why some of them are bitching about "millennials sinking businesses" -- the CEOs and Stockholders have focused so much on PROFIT over EVERYTHING, they've lost all loyalty from workers, lost credit for producing good products, but refuse to see the problem is on their own heads.

Indeed the level of corporate greed we saw was disgusting. We were pretty much training our replacements. They folded up metrics (5 good paying jobs) and shipped it overseas for cheaper payroll. Suffice to say I left that shit for a local company.

At the moment companies that want cheap but high productivity and humans seem to be the best option with current technology.