Look For The Union Label
And rip it out. Megan McArdle continues to take the wood to the UAW.
The good people at those banks have better alternatives than being a Nissan line worker, and have usually invested substantial amounts of time and money in building human capital, rather than hitting the line after high school. If you cap their pay there, they will leave to pursue those other opportunities, leaving you a firm staffed with the rejects who can’t work elsewhere. Given that we are trying to save the banking industry, not destroy it, that’s not a good idea.
Mmmm, I doubt that the market for bankers and insurance workers looking for work is really good right now. Go ahead, cap their pay, let them leave. After all, these are entrepreneurs right? Let them ply their trade. Executives are like Lego’s, just like every other worker in the world. Just pop one out and pop another in its place. Overblown egos taking down oversized salaries.
Yes, it is a symbolic step to cap their salaries and it is a necessary one. Imagine walking past a CEO around 5:00 on Janurary 2nd. That man (and it almost certainly is a man) has already made more this day than the average worker will make all year. Unless and until the executives fear for their incomes and livelihoods the way all others do, things will not get demonstrably better. M&A’s lead to bonuses for executives and pink slips for the drones. Make it the other way around and we won’t hear so much blather about “taking advantage of synergies”.
The world would be better off if nine out of ten M.B.A. programs vanished overnight, taking the terms “financial engineering” and “loan product” right along with them.
This is a country of people before businesses, or at least it should be. If a company does not contribute to the common good (and that means more than making a profit), it should be left out of bailout programs.
One Response to “Look For The Union Label”
What bugs me about Megan, to the point of having nicotine-patched fueled vivid dreams of heated arguments with her, is the implicit elitism in her writing and philosophy as demonstrated in her quote. The midwestern hometown girl in me bristles at “hitting the line after high school” as though the line were not an important spoke in the economic wheel.
Perhaps that’s shallow. I understand that she is libertarian by nature, but her dismissal of all but single focus pragmatism lacks heart, IMHO.
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