Otherwise known as the "Economic Boom".

"The bottom line, then, is that for most Americans, current economic growth is a form of reality TV, something interesting that is, however, happening to other people."

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/12/30/opinion/30KRUG.html

I don't know that I have a whole lot of rant to add to what Paul Krugman wrote in the NY Times.

I can understand greed and that people at the top want to stay at the top, and that means keeping the rest of us down. I don't agree with it, but I understand it.

What I don't understand is why it's so hard to understand that if you treat your employees well, they'll work faster, harder, smarter for you and you'll provide a better product/service, which will increase your customer base, thereby making far more money than you spent on your employees in the first place.

Is this rocket science? You'll have less false "sick" call-ins because people will want to come to work, or at the very least will enjoy their work environment. That alone will make up in productivity what you spend by giving your employees paid sick days and a couple extra days of vacation. People won't be surreptitiously looking for a different job on your time. If you paid them that extra fifty cents an hour, they could pay all their bills and they wouldn't come to work half-dead from not sleeping because they have to hold down a second full-time job just to keep a roof over their head.

Even if you look at people as resources to be used up and discarded (and I've never worked full-time for a company that didn't), it just makes sense that you'll get more out of them, both in current productivity and in longevity of service, if you treat them well and make sure they are taken care of -- even in the short term, which seems to be all anyone cares about these days.

I don't have any easy solutions for wage-slaves (if I did, I wouldn't need to rant about it because I'd be running a large business of my own with lots of employees and I could demonstrate by example), but it seems to me that this is just another form of oppression, just like people have been rising against for millenia. This kind has a more insidious grip, because no one wants to buck the system and end up on the street. But there must be some way to wake people up. There must...