Entries Tagged 'Government' ↓

Have you ever said yourself, “Uh, oh, I’m broke”! What’s the first thing you think of doing? Tightening the old belt, right? And then what? What if you really can’t do without much more? What then?

You go out and look for a job don’t you?  Surely, I’m not the only one who has worked three jobs at once to make a go of it am I?

What if you already have a job and you’re broke in spite of that? For heavens sakes, you don’t get rid of the job you have already just to cut expenses do you? Do you say, “Gee, I can’t afford to commute, so I’ll quit”. Continue reading →

German workers have considerable job security (See Upjohn Institute’s Labor, Business, and Change in Germany and the United States, 2001). Not only do German workers have labor unions, they also have labor union representatives who make decisions right along with management. When the financial crisis hit, many German companies, with the approval of their unions reduced overall work hours for each employee rather than resorting to layoffs.

And German banks did not have a mortgage mess. Mortgage problems in Germany were mostly due to foreign banks.

Business and economics journalists point to Germany’s “surplus” or lack of government debt as the reason it survived the financial crisis so well. Could there be another reason? Could the reason for Gemany’s success actually be the job security of its workers? Continue reading →

Recently at one of the local city pools, a woman began loudly complaining about the young staff not caring much about their work. She zoomed in immediately on all 20 million government workers in the US. All government workers, she said are overpaid and don’t work. The government is run by “fat cats,” she ranted.

Well, let’s look at that claim. Do you agree government employee salaries are too high? The President of the United States gets paid $400,000 a year to run the biggest economy in the world. And he pays taxes on that amount! This is the man who decides whether he should push the button if that red phone (that we saw so much of in the ads during the last Presidential election) rings in the middle of the night.

$400,000 for a job guaranteed to turn your hair gray in four years? Continue reading →