Corporate Profits Surge as Companies Cut Nearly 1 Million Jobs (cbsnews.com)
- Reference: 0179996196
- News link: https://slashdot.org/story/25/11/07/1725230/corporate-profits-surge-as-companies-cut-nearly-1-million-jobs
- Source link: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/jobless-boom-ai-economy-labor-market-corporate-profits-layoffs/
The Federal Reserve lowered interest rates in September and October after Jerome Powell noted concerns about layoff announcements from large employers. The Department of Labor suspended monthly employment reports when the government shutdown began October 1. ADP reported private employers added 42,000 workers in October. The unemployment rate stood at 4.3% in August. The rate has remained stable because the labor pool is contracting due to baby boomer retirements and reduced immigration under Trump administration policies. Art Papas of Bullhorn disputes the AI explanation and argues companies are recalibrating after pandemic overhiring.
[1] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/jobless-boom-ai-economy-labor-market-corporate-profits-layoffs/
The "expectations market" is in command (Score:3)
It's the Welch-era GE all over again, but across all companies.
Not AI (Score:3)
Just like COVID introduced an accelerated market change, so has the introduction of AI. Not because of any real changes in productivity patterns, rather, it just gives an excuse for the snap-back of the market realities. Underperformers are being cut after years of hanging on, not because of AI productivity improvements, just because there's been a hiring boom and years of not much turnover.
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
Technology has a history of eating jobs from the bottom, are you new here?
Re:Not AI (Score:4, Insightful)
AI is bullshit and vastly overrated.
Re: Not AI (Score:1)
Same for crony capitalism.
Re: Not AI (Score:1)
Unfortunately the wrong people overrated it, the people with too much money or equity. When the knife falls, it wonâ(TM)t be them who would be mostly hurt.
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> AI is bullshit and vastly overrated.
Well, it's not really AI in any sense of the honest term; it's not a self aware machine. AI has become a marketing term for servers running a bunch of fancy scripts that produce dialogue that can pass for human speech fairly well. BUT... AI is a game changer economically because those fancy scripts are already killing jobs, jobs that won't be replaced by something else. So in that sense, AI isn't "bullshit". It's an extinction level event for entire classes of formerly human work. And the economic and socia
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AI has problems for sure. Not a month goes by without news of yet another idiot lawyer getting sanctioned because of the hallucinations were presented as fact. However......have you tried coding with AI? I have. I'm 5x more productive than before, and I can solve problems now that I wouldn't have touched before. I still test my code. I still review it. But man, this thing is a game changer. I can see why people are paying big money for it. It absolutely is delivering.
To give you a recent example - I know no
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Funny thing, "underperformers" have to eat too.
Slavery (Score:2, Funny)
They are forcing people back down towards slavery. If you get paid barely enough to live then that counts as slavery in my opinion.
I think it's more than slavery (Score:2, Interesting)
I think this is the fundamental breakdown of capitalism back into system of feudal Lords.
I think the billionaire class have gotten tired of being dependent on consumers and employees. Just like everyone else has they've asked the question "if nobody has any money who's going to buy our products"
But they didn't answer it the way working people and consumers do.
If you work for a living the answer to that is they're going to have to give us more money so we can be good little consumers.
But try
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I agree and was actually thinking this would be a more apt description after I wrote my comment.
Re: I think it's more than slavery (Score:3)
Does Musk need people to buy his cybertruck or was just advertising it enough to boost Tesla stock so that he gets his market cap bonuses?
If trillionaires make all their money from stocks going up and the stock market is independent of the real economy, why not encourage bubbles while printing a strong basic income?
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Tesla stock is only up a cumulative 6% from the peak it achieved exactly 4 years ago. That is not even close to keeping up with inflation - 18% over the same time period. So if just getting attention from a market flop is a strategy for driving up the share price, I guess it isn't working very well.
Re: I think it's more than slavery (Score:2)
If people don't buy stuff eventually the corporation collapses. The principals can make a profit before then, but repeat this enough times and the whole boat sinks as it happens to too many major employers at once. Hence too big to fail, which is of course the result of failure to enforce antitrust law.
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Maybe you should be rooting for China, the government is securely in control of the corporations and supports a Marxist revival. Communism failed you say? Well with robots doing all the work it's vision who's time has come, with a final form close to The Culture. What did Iain Banks say about Capitalism:
> The market, for all its (profoundly inelegant) complexities, remains a crude and essentially blind system, and is – without the sort of drastic amendments liable to cripple the economic efficacy which
Re: I think it's more than slavery (Score:2)
The idea that workers should be paid enough to buy their own companyâ(TM)s products never made sense. Why did you idiot communists keep pushing it? Does Ferrari need all its employees to be able to buy a Ferrari? I pay you $10 to buy my $8 product? What kind of stupidity is that? Where is the logic in that. I lose $2. If profits could be made like that, I could have a bot clicking âoebuyâ on my website.
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The billionaire class. Yeah right. That's nothing but mumbo jumbo, as if the billionaires all wanted the same thing. Do you think Elon Musk and George Soros want the same thing?
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We've heard all of that before in Citigroup's "Plutonomy Memo" (right before the GFC): "We don't need ordinary consumers, we only sell luxury goods to ballers and McMansion dwellers, just look at the stock market, the ordinary consumer may be squeezed from all sides, but the line keeps going up!" Then the GFC happened, and the line stopped going up, because most of those "ballers" were poor people maxing out their credit cards. And the housing bubble collapsed too, since many of those McMansion dwellers had
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For old-timers who need more info, Gen-Z has invented the concept of the "blown account", which is basically a Klarna account (or similar service) with lots of debt that you don't use anymore and just let the debt in it to exist. Much like leaving the debt on a maxed-out credit card to exist. Which is all fun and games until you run out of accounts to "blow" (much like running out of credit cards to max out) or until the debt inevitably goes to collection.
Note: The term "blown account" should not be conf
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
You seem to lack an understanding of what slavery actually is, and how much better off someone who "gets paid barely enough to live" is compared to a slave.
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Are you arguing that the fortunes of the working class are actually going up, or just reminding people of what they would find in the dictionary?
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Neither. In arguing that there is a universe of difference between poverty and slavery.
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Agreed. I have already conceded that the nobilty and serfs model is way more what I intended to say in the first place.
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Nobody's forcing anybody. If you're not satisfied with your pay, hold out for more! If the company won't give you more, go find your desired rate of pay somewhere else! If you can't get more money for the job you're willing or able to do because somebody else will do it for cheaper, that's not the company's fault, that's the other guy's fault. Maybe the other guy doesn't need as much to live as you do. Does that make him a slave?
What is a fair wage anyway? Should they have to pay you more if you have a fami
In other news (Score:3)
Water is wet
Re: (Score:3)
Don't be so sure [1]https://www.sciencefocus.com/s... [sciencefocus.com]
[1] https://www.sciencefocus.com/science/is-water-wet
Frightening expression (Score:1)
"jobless boom."
What a mix of negative (jobless) and positive (boom).
Next thing you know they'll say that all those eliminated SNAP benefits (and resulting purchases) are saving money on storage space, refrigeration, gasoline (for transport), labor. All that money saved!
Re:Frightening expression (Score:5, Insightful)
The difference between poetry and rhetoric is being ready to kill yourself instead of your children. When condemning anyone to death, it is best started with yourself.
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
I haven't had children and have no plans to do so. You and your children are welcome. I've already done infinitely more to help the world's climate change issue then anyone that had a child.
Re: Frightening expression (Score:1)
Infinitely more would be removing yourself from the equation in a carbon negative way. I suggest swallowing seeds and falling into an early grave.
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> Next thing you know they'll say that all those eliminated SNAP benefits (and resulting purchases) are saving money on storage space, refrigeration, gasoline (for transport), labor. All that money saved!
Call me old-fashioned, but if you are not actively looking for a job, you shouldn't get any benefits from the government (including SNAP). People permanently reliant on SNAP are a burden on taxpayers and a contributing factor to inflation (since they consume without producing). To reply to your assertion dir
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If you can do your job from home, then an Indian can do your job from India for a fraction of the price. Why even bother hiring America?
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Did you see who our President is?
Boiling frog myth (Score:2)
Today its Americans that are the boiling frogs
So this is actual profit (Score:4, Interesting)
Meaning the companies are making more money with less people.
Some of that is automation and ai. Some of that is forcing workers into 996 and some of that is price gouging because we don't enforce and he trust why anymore.
None of this is sustainable. Our consumer-driven capitalist economy is breaking down.
Question for everybody, we're not going to do socialism we all know that because nobody is going to accept giving people money for nothing. You could try Ubi but we all know that's useless in the face of monopolies because monopolies will just jack up their prices and suck that money out of the consumers.
So socialism isn't on the table and Ubi gets counteracted by systems we refuse to criminalize and ban.
Is there a third solution I'm not seeing or are we just going to descend into a feudal dystopia?
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
The third solution is a revolution. It’s going to get really crazy when people in the USA realize that there’s not enough food, a couple big Wall Street companies own all the housing, and there are 400 millions guns in private hands.
Revolution isn't a solution (Score:1)
Ignoring that most violent revolutions and in fascism because people who are good at violence tend to be the ones that win in a violent revolution and people who are good at violence tend to be fascists.
After your revolution you still have to put up a government and some kind of system to distribute goods and services and maintain a society.
I know the anarchists want to say you don't need a government and I know the libertarians want to say you just need a small government but in practice you just c
Re: (Score:2)
The most violent (against their own citizens) political leaders in modern history are: Mao Zedong: Communism, Joseph Stalin: Socialism and Pol Pot: Communism. . Which of these yielded the most peaceful and abundant results without the need to opening themselves to capitalism??
Re: (Score:2)
> For the typical person, both Russia and China were better places to live after their revolutions than before them. I am not sure that even the Cambodian revolution wasn't an improvement for the rural peasants who supported it. The Indian revolution likewise, despite the orgy of violence that the partition created.
> The reality is that real revolutions are usually acts of desperation by people who have nothing to lose and history is usually written by people with a lot to lose. So the damage a revolution's excesses do to those that had something to lose is always emphasized whether its the French Revolution, the Indian partition or Pol Pot.
> We are a long way from having enough desperate people in the United States to have a violent revolution. I would watch the homeless crisis, the crackdown on immigrants, the defunding of food stamps and medicaid, the growing personal debt and the failing retirement system, rather than AI or global warming, if you are looking for the seeds of revolution. When looking to the future is staring down into a bleak deep cavern, people will be willing to risk violence to change things.
The revolution will be quashed (Score:2)
Even with 400 million guns, the citizenry would be no match for the military All the current regime needs to do is make sure that the military doesn't splinter when the revolution starts. This could be done by bifurcating the current military into something like Iran's revolutionary guard, and the rest of the military (The latter would have inferior weaponry, and basically be cannon fodder)
So what if there's a revolution in the future where the regime is going to lose? Well, the "evil team" can handle this
Re: (Score:2)
> All the current regime needs to do is make sure that the military doesn't splinter when the revolution starts.
Not easy to do if the revolution has popular support and you have a citizen army. One question is to what extent the US military is a volunteer army as opposed to a professional army. But, unlike wars, revolutions aren't won by "blood and iron" alone.
The country is divided and people are forced to choose sides. Those choices get made for all sorts of different reasons and will be fluid. The winner will be the side that holds together a core of people that is determined to win and/or has no alternative. Its
Re: So this is actual profit (Score:2)
Most of those guns are irrelevant, as guns don't kill people by themselves, and a person can only realistically use two at a time, and can only use one at a time well.
Plus, you know, the government has thermal vision, guided munitions, satellite overwatch...
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> Plus, you know, the government has thermal vision, guided munitions, satellite overwatch.
And training.
The majority are hunters and sport shooters. About 2/3rds have had basic safety training, and the numbers drop precipitously from there for anything more advanced. Best number I can find is 10-20% have some form of defensive/tactical tactical training. Less than 5% have had ongoing/professional training. Someone's ability to successfully wield a deer rifle diminishes rapidly when the "prey" starts shooting back.
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And ammo. Yeah some people have thousands of rounds of ammo. The military has millions of rounds, and enough men to go with them to effectively utilize suppressive fire. If you do get in an old-fashioned firefight with soldiers they can simply outbullet you if for some reason they don't have an armed backpack drone. Which by the way they totally do.
Re: So this is actual profit (Score:2)
What if we at least try basic income with indexation to fight inflation? What have we got to lose, but outdated economic models?
Re: (Score:1)
Your idea has failed miserably on every significant attempt in history - the result is sometimes an initial chimeric short-term fluff-up but always a long term disastrous decline. Far better:
- Tie reward to productivity, not identity. A reasonable minimum wage can help here, although Sweden has none.
- Tie welfare to individual need, not identity. This is the Swedish and U.S. model.
Re: So this is actual profit (Score:2)
Who has ever tried UBI? Make sure your answer is about UBI and not just BI for a test group.
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I tend to agree. What we need is to actually bring back service and service by humans. Who here has not in frustration with automated phone support systems started ranting "Agent" or "Representative" because the fucking automated system is shit. AI is not helping. And here is a thought to google/tesla/amazon, how about real phone numbers that have real people behind them for customer complaints or a PR dept to respond to news requests for info? Instead we have a modern version of "Let them eat cake".
The billionaires will corrupt it (Score:1)
That's all. One of the things they figured out years ago is that instead of just outright blocking left-wing policy they sabotage it so that they can make sure that it doesn't work.
They figured that out in the '80s. With the projects. Basically we took a shitload of people mostly extremely poor and very black and brought them from blasted out rural hellscapes where they barely had roofs and brought them into what were for the time fairly modern apartments.
Then Ronald Reagan got in charge and he pull
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Why isn't anyone talking about taxing the rich? Massachusetts passed a surtax (4%) on certain income over $1M in addition to the regular 5% tax in 2013. As far as I know, no millionaires left. From the 1940's to the 1980's the highest rate was around 90% decreasing to around 70% (then Reagan and Grover Norquist killed the idea of higher taxes on the ruling class and estate taxes that only affected estates over about $5M). This revenue provided for things like the Interstate Highway (1950's), helped build a
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> Why isn't anyone talking about taxing the rich?
They are. You just can't hear them over the media noise.
When Obama proposed a "middle class tax cut" that extended the Bush tax cuts, the media consistently reported that, unlike the Bush tax cuts, people making over 250,000 would not get a tax cut. In fact, people making $500,000 got a tax cut over $7,000 and people making the then median income of $50,000 got a $600 tax cut. Like the rest of us, the rich got a tax cut on their first $250,000. The argument was whether they would get an additional tax cut
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> Is there a third solution I'm not seeing or are we just going to descend into a feudal dystopia?
Realistically? Make people farmland owners again, so they always have a job to fall back on (farming). That way, working for a corporation becomes optional. And stop allowing in illegal immigrants, who, being landless by default, will have to be substituted by the landed citizens one way or another.
Modern Feudalism incoming (Score:2)
We can look forward to a modern form of Feudalism incoming, sprinkled with religious and political extremism to keep the plebs focused. No panem, no circenses, just ora e labora and paying taxes to make up for the megacorps losses.
Re: (Score:1)
Feudalism is already here. Oligarchs enrich themselves by creating paywalls from chaos. The citizenry pay for things that were less expensive under true capitalist competition. Oligarchs use their wealth to dismantle rules, regulations, safety requirements, and oversight (aka neo-liberal deregulation) it break unions, pay remaining workers less money, monopolize and increase costs, buy up competition or smash startups with legal harassment, leaving us with shitty more expensive things that don't work and
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A couple of decades? That's strange. Some how, I was able to afford a condo in San Diego back in 2010 off a retail grocery job. Let that sink in for a minute. A high school drop out job afforded me a condo only 20 minutes from the beach.
For the moment, housing is clearly in a bubble and is still about double from pre-pandemic pricing. It's not sustainable and eventually it will change. Probably with the next recession.
Every goes in a cycle. We just need to hunker down, save our money, keep our debts low and
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> I was able to afford a condo in San Diego back in 2010 off a retail grocery job. Let that sink in for a minute. A high school drop out job afforded me a condo only 20 minutes from the beach.
That is not how it went for most people. You certainly could have bought a condo five years earlier with zero down. But in 2010 you would have found yourself under water on the mortgage with payments you really couldn't afford.
> For the moment, housing is clearly in a bubble and is still about double from pre-pandemic pricing. It's not sustainable and eventually it will change. Probably with the next recession.
It will make no difference because people who are under water on their mortgage aren't going to sell their houses. So the price of homes that do sell may be lower but there won't be many houses available for sale. The people who can buy will be the people with cash, aka the investor c
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And just to finish the loop If you bought that condo with zero down n 2000, by 2005 you would have refinanced it with a new affordable 30 year mortgage, lower payment and no mortgage insurance. Or sold it and traded up to something nicer. The results in 2010 from that decision were already discussed.
4.3% (Score:5, Interesting)
You guys get that 4.3% is low unemployment, right? Something like 90% of the last 30 years have [1]had higher unemployment rate [stlouisfed.org] than that. It's the [2]participation rate [stlouisfed.org] that's dropping, and that's almost entirely a demographic issue... there are more people retiring every year than graduating. The labor pool, as a percentage of the total population, is falling. This was all known well in advance and has been talked about to death. Those lower 4.3% of the population... the vast majority of them are really difficult to employ. A small percentage of people show up work late, or get drunk before they come to work, or whatever, and it's that group that finds it hard to stay employed.
[1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/UNRATE
[2] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CIVPART
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This really isn't a difficult problem to solve.
You pay fast food wages you get fast food quality work in return.
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That's a real problem, but it ignores that the labor statistics are manipulated for political ends, so you can't trust them.
It's not at all clear to me that we currently have low unemployment among those who would be seeking jobs if they thought they had a chance. (Once you've been unemployed for a while I believe they stop counting you. Admittedly, it's been over a decade since I looked into that.)
Re: (Score:1)
The BLS employment stats may have strict definitions that don't match your political tastes, but they are not manipulated. They are, in fact, one of the gold standards for social science statistical data.
> It's not at all clear to me that we currently have low unemployment among those who would be seeking jobs if they thought they had a chance.
The labor force includes anyone who is employed plus anyone who is actively looking for work. The unemployment rate most often reported in the news is simply the number actively looking divided by the labor force. Why count people as unemployed if they are not looking for work? The [1]Bureau of Labor Statistic [bls.gov]
[1] https://data.bls.gov/toppicks?survey=bls
Re: (Score:1)
Those two numbers don’t tell the story. They don’t tell you if:
- Wages are keeping up with inflation, including housing and health costs.
- Jobs are in the public sector or the more productive private sector.
- Part time jobs are replacing full.
- Cheap imported labor is replacing native.
- Folks have stopped looking for work not just because of retirement - but perhaps out of frustration, forced retirement, or government subsidies replacing the need.
Re: 4.3% (Score:2)
You get that the unemployment rate is literally designed to be a falsehood because it stops counting people when they have been unemployed for a while, right? The methodology used for it has no concept of who is looking for work at all, it's based on a fundamentally bogus assumption that people who haven't found any for long enough aren't looking.
Re: (Score:1)
> it's based on a fundamentally bogus assumption that people who haven't found any for long enough aren't looking.
False. As long as a person continues to claim they are looking for work, they are counted as unemployed. Length of time out of work has nothing to do with this measure.
Economics, like all sciences, requires strict operational definitions of all variables.
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Unemployment rates only include those seeking employment. The 4.3% are not the "lower 4.3% of the population" whatever that is. They are anyone who is looking for a job and doesn't already have one. I am sure there are some people who are "unemployable" in that group, but most of those people stopped looking a long time ago.
Joke aside... (Score:1)
I recall a sketch related to crisis where someone was analysing a report from the news that said "unemployment is going down fast" and the guy said "Of course, people are dying". I think this is tragi-comic as well, all this automation, downsizing and moves to make numbers look good are artificial, people in general are not getting better, unemployment is on the rise, employment means doing the work of 3 or more people. But it seems we are managed by 5 year old rich people that only see the numbers.
4 stages of a company (Score:2)
1) Growth. Here you are growing and hiring. You have figured out how to make money and are doing it as fast as you can. Even if someone is bad at their job, they already know how to do it - so you simply let them keep it while everyone else is promoted. They have to really screw up to get fired. Business wise, every decision has to be profitable - but if you got a good product that can be easy to do because you have no real competition.
2) Expansion. Here your business has thrived and succeeded, but it
Record profits (Score:1)
stagnant wages.
Re: Record profits (Score:1)
Which would be solved soon. Lot of this firing is due to the overhire and the economy tightening. Now the economy is loosening and the ovefiring is going on. In a few months our esteemed geniuses will realise that we donâ(TM)t have anyone to get the job done( and so is not what they thought it is) and would pay the price to rehire. Seriously! Are we going to trust these incompetent people who made the âoemistakeâ of overhiring to solve them!