Why am I writing this blog?

I have witnessed over the past year actions that have been made that have upset me as well as my friends and colleagues. I have seen companies including the one I used to work for lay people off in order to move the job to a cheaper country. The acronym that is now used in my former employer's company is LCC. It stands for "Low Cost Country."

Don't you find it amazing that companies can't do anything without making sure we have a cute acronym so that it looks great on a Powerpoint slide. When my former employer's company decided to ask its employees to take unpaid time off, management created another acronym, VUTO. It stood for "Voluntary Unpaid Time Off". I guess the executives and managers have nothing better to do in their corporate lives than to come up with acronyms. I got an idea. Instead of spending countless hours and emails on what acronym to use, you can spend the time fixing your companies and providing jobs rather exporting them to Low Cost Countries.

Why is corporate America exporting our jobs to other countries? Greed! If you take a look at everything that has happened over the past year regarding the mortgage, housing, banking, lending and investment industries, you will see rampant greed running through corporate America. CEOs receiving massive bonuses for doing nothing more than laying people off to save money so that they will look good for the stockholders. Do you really need to have a MBA to come up with the plan to lay people off? Come on, guys.

Take a look at the different companies that are closing plant around the world. Dell is in the process of laying off 1900 people in Ireland to move their manufacturing plant to Poland. To read the full Reuter's article, click here. While you are looking at that article, you should read the other Reuter's article about the European Union opening investigations regarding the Polish government and their funding of the Dell manufacturing facility. Click here for that link.

This is only one example of the greed. The list of companies that do things like this everyday is going longer and longer. Stockholders are screaming at corporate executives about their poor performance. The stockholders want to make more and more money for doing nothing and to retire to some island in the Caribbean and play golf all day long.

What has our society become? I'm not saying that we give up on money and become socialists. The free market system and capitalism is a good system. However, when it goes unchecked, it cannot help but become greedy. Someone once said that capitalism is its own worst enemy and I believe it. When we believe the profit is more important than people and we treat each other as fodder or grist for our mills to just grind down to nothing, then we have gone too far.

Some executives would say what they are doing is right-sizing a company. Those watching the company and doing nothing to stop it will call it downsizing. After having been laid off, I call it capsizing.