THE FUTURE OF MONEY Bernard A. Lietaer - library.uniteddiversity ...

ecause I was there at the beginning. I was one of the creators ... But
the fact is, once out of the bottle, the re-engineering genie quickly
turned Ugly.'
And like all genies, it cannot be put back into the bottle.
Large corporations world-wide have been shedding people at a rate
of. Between one and two million people per year. And this is
happening for the first time at all levels in the corporation. When
Kodak reduced its number of management layers from thirteen to
four, a lot of people who never thought it could happen to them
found themselves out of a job. Of course, a lot of new jobs are being
created outside these corporations, but they usually do not measure
up in terms of income level or security that people were used to and
had grown to expect.
What is important to realise is that these 'strategic layoffs' are of a
totally different nature from the traditional cyclical layoffs. It was
considered normal for example that factory workers would be let go
whenever inventories of finished goods piled up as the business cycle
moved into low gear. They would also be re-employed as soon as
those inventories were absorbed and the good days of the cycle
returned. But with strategic layoffs, there is no reason to expect that
the business cycle will reverse the trend. What is going is gone
forever. Growth without increased employment is not a forecast; it is
an established fact. William Greider's statistic is worth repeating: the
world's 500 largest corporations make and sell seven times more
goods and services than 20 years ago, but have managed
simultaneously to reduce their overall workforce.
Even the people who remain or are hired in these corporations face
a very different process from previous times. The old criteria for
hiring used to be the matching of job specifications to the classical
three E’s: Experience, Endorsements and Education.