let them eat cake

[winterbadger]

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A campaign worker for President Bush (news - web sites) said on Thursday American workers unhappy with low-quality jobs should find new ones -- or pop a Prozac to make themselves feel better.

"Why don't they get new jobs if they're unhappy -- or go on Prozac?" said Susan Sheybani, an assistant to Bush campaign spokesman Terry Holt.

more at
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=615&ncid=696&e=4&u=/nm/20040729/pl_nm/campaign_jobs_dc

Comments

Re: Opinions of an ignoramus

[winterbadger]

In theory, those companies with boards of directors who pay senseless amounts of money to CEOs who do little/nothing for them will eventually lose the competitive battles with better-run companies.

That's a nice theory, but I'm not sure that it carries much water in reality, especially if most corporations are already paying CEOs multimillion-dollar salaries.

Plus, I don't think it's much consolation to the employees who get paid minimum wage, or less.

Which is where the discussion came from originally; not a suggestion that corporations should somehow be prevented from paying CEOs millions of dollars but that it might be reasonable to raise the minimum wage a little bit, so that it might be a bit easier for workers with the lowest kinds of jobs to survive, and also tighten up a few of the loopholes that allow companies to get away with not paying employees at least that much. Our budding Andrew Ford (or C.M. Burns?) here needed convincing that workers who want better pay aren't simply malingering, hence the comparison of workers' and CEOs' salaries. While I doubt that CEOs' contributuions to their corporations justify the imbalance in comparative wages, it simply defies rationality to contend that those contributions continue to grow while employees' contributions are decreasing. This isn't the market at work; it's unrestrained greed.