Living in a Corporate World or The Big Lie

The labor force has been sold a bill of goods and so far we appear to accept it. We are being told that to reap the rewards of record revenue streams we must go above and beyond. In practice though the benefits of those profits are being increasingly realized by the corporations themselves.

I will take as an example the company for which I currently toil, a division of Fiserv. The premises I posit here have been true at other places I've worked and are true of many people to whom I have spoken. Here's the way the Big Lie works in this iteration. Our compensation package has a median increase of 2%, (That's roughly 2% below the rate of inflation for those of you listening at home). This is the increase for the people who do their own job acceptably. Those who do their own job well can hope for up to 4% (yep at inflation). The pitch is this. For those that go above and beyond they can aspire to raises as high as 9%. To go above and beyond means to do more than your job, perhaps doing someone else's for them. However the category that can aspire to 5%-9% is capped at no more than 20% of the company no exceptions. And note that 9% is not a guarantee it's the max of a range that starts at 1% above inflation. 70% of the workforces who performs from well to substandard fall in the range from 1%-4% and the Final 10% - the underperformers get bubkiss. That 10% is also mandated across the company. Thus even a high performing department has to put someone in the you get nothing category. Thus the carrot of this Big lie is 9% the reality is 1% below inflation.

There are lots of reasons why this formula is reprehensible, but let's stick to numbers. Fiserv as a corporation mandates a 10% or better year over year growth in revenue. See where I'm going with this. If we assume the most generous possible distribution we arrive at an average increase of roughly 3% for the workers. This means the company (The Stockholders etc) achieve a minimum of a 333% more return each year than the workers. This means that real wealth is redistributed upwards at that rate each year. It is just this sort of "upward mobility" that brought about the Labor Union and Communist Movements.

I have often heard and thought myself that Labor unions have outlived their usefulness, but as I watch the burden of doing business fall more to the workers, (Increased out of pocket expenses for insurance, decreasing real wages, limitations in retirement and benefits) and the rewards fall increasingly to the corporation (Stockholders, equity, management bonuses) I see that the labor movement is needed now as much as ever. Some of the issues are different, some continue, but for me the central issue is the equitable distribution of the fruits of labor. We all it seems work harder and harder for less and less while profits for many industries continue to grow. I'm sure there are places where this is not true, but for those of us for whom this is true we have no one to blame but ourselves. The fact that our employers profit increasingly at our expense is a result of our willingness to let it happen, of our willingness to believe the Big Lie.