The March 2010 employee costs report was released today. The average wage is $20.67/hr. Benefits costs average $9.71/hr. This brings wages and benefits employer costs to a whopping total (sic) of $29.71/hr. Believe this or not, state and local government workers are the last holdouts in terms of getting good benefits.
Total employer compensation costs for private industry workers averaged $27.73 per hour worked in March 2010.
April 2010 Wholesale Trade Sales & Inventories was released today. Seasonally adjusted sales were up 0.7% from last month. Inventories were up 0.4% from last month. For the year, sales have increased 16.3% and inventories have decreased 3.2%. Seasonally adjusted durable sales was up 2.0% while non-durable sales was down -0.4%. Inventories for durable were up 0.3% while non-durable was 0.7%.
The tubez this morning are filled with discussion of a "senior White House aide" attacking organized labor for labor's support of Bill Halter, who nearly unseated incumbent Arkansas Senator Blanche Lincoln in the Democratic primary yesterday.
We have repeatedly heard over the past decade how “things just happened.”
How “…nobody could have foreseen that.”
Or, how everything came about due to “..unintended consequences.”
Conscious actions have intended consequences.
While at the same time we have repeatedly witnessed how the major perpetrators, culprits and predators go unscathed, facing no consequences for the abominations against the public.
In fact, we have observed them to be unjustly rewarded again and again and again.
Then there are those of us who must hustle endlessly for the next month’s mortgage payment, or rent due, or the next meal, are constantly chided with the admonition that “…we must innovate our way out of this!”
“We” have innovated endlessly, only to find ourselves bereft of employment while the technology we developed has been transferred, along with our jobs, offshore!
By Numerian Chances are if you are a typical American consumer you have purchased something made by Foxconn Technology Group. This giant Taiwanese-owned company is under contract to make Sony’s Playstation, the Xbox 360, the Wii, motherboards for Intel, routers for Cisco, and Apple’s iPhone, iPod, and iPad. As profitable as Foxconn is, it is in a fundamental sense a failure of capitalism. At a time when machine tools and robotics are available to make these products at high speeds, Foxconn uses manual labor to craft tens of thousands of electronic devices each hour, 24 hours a day. (Image)
To accomplish this, Foxconn employs over 800,000 workers in mainland China alone, and 420,000 of them at a massive “campus” in Shenzen. The workers in Shenzen are required to live on campus in dormitories with bunk beds, cafeterias, a medical unit, and a few recreational facilities. The overwhelming number of them range in age from 18 to 24, have moved to Shenzen from rural villages with no job opportunities, work six days a week at the factory for 10 hours a day including overtime, and make about $130 a month.
We can’t wait until unemployment is where we’d like it to be” or inflation gets “out of control” to tighten credit
The above is a quote from Federal Reserve Chair Ben Bernanke.
Gets worse, Bernanke believes the economy will not dip into another recession, yet of course, unemployment will remain at high levels.
While the Fed will raise interest rates from a record low before the economy returns to “full employment,” Bernanke said officials don’t know when that process will start. The banking system isn’t fully healthy and lenders are “cautious” in providing credit, he said.
“The unemployment rate is still going to be high for a while, and that means that a lot of people are going to be under financial stress,” Bernanke said at the event, part of a dinner hosted by the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.
Bernanke’s stance is consistent with that of several Fed colleagues. Atlanta Fed President Dennis Lockhart said June 3 that the central bank may need to raise rates even with “unacceptable levels of unemployment,” while Eric Rosengren of the Boston Fed said last month it wouldn’t be “appropriate” to have rates close to zero with the economy at full employment.
Even more bad news on Financial Reform. The main players in the negotiations between the House and Senate versions are Chris Dodd, Barney Frank and Timothy Geithner.
As a result, people who know them say, they are likely to show willingness to negotiate on parts of the bill they don't view as core, while being intractable on pieces they view as elemental.
That could mean easing provisions with strict limits on derivatives trading, proposed restrictions on fees banks charge retailers and even agreeing to allow auto dealers to be exempt from new lending rules.
Nice huh? Negotiations are supposed to be between the two houses of Congress only. The entire list of conferees is front loaded with corporate representatives. Not a single Congressional representative who was pushing for real reforms, such as the Volcker rule, Glass-Steagall, stronger derivatives reform was chosen as a conferee.
It's no wonder we get fraud, abuse of customers, ripoffs as standard fare by corporations.
Countrywide agrees to pay a $108 million fine for excessive fees on home loans, one of the biggest fines by the FTC.
When homeowners fell behind on their payments and were in default on their loans, Countrywide ordered property inspections, lawn mowing, and other services meant to protect the lender’s interest in the property, according to the FTC complaint. But rather than simply hire third-party vendors to perform the services, Countrywide created subsidiaries to hire the vendors. The subsidiaries marked up the price of the services charged by the vendors – often by 100% or more – and Countrywide then charged the homeowners the marked-up fees. The complaint alleges that the company’s strategy was to increase profits from default-related service fees in bad economic times. As a result, even as the mortgage market collapsed and more homeowners fell into delinquency, Countrywide earned substantial profits by funneling default-related services through subsidiaries that it created solely to generate revenue.
Countrywide is now owned by Bank of America. In 2008, Countrywide held a mortgage portfolio valued at $1.4 trillion.
Countrywide even tried to skirt bankruptcy law and make broke homeowners, now out of a house, pay even more fees after the fact.
Bank Of America, you know that corporation based in the United States, land of the free, home of the brave, is telling investors to sell because wages in China might have to rise.
Investors should sell shares of Chinese cement and metal companies as increases in labor costs will curb capital spending in those industries, according to BofA Merrill Lynch Global Research.
Seven Chinese provinces raised minimum wages in the first quarter after halting them last year amid the global recession, according to the Labor Ministry. Higher salaries may deter foreign investment in China, which has been a low-cost manufacturing base.
Astounding huh? The Yuan is still undervalued ranging up to 40%, yet the minute Chinese workers get anywhere with wages, investors should pull out.
Chinese Honda workers managed to get a 30% wage increase and 30 states increased the minimum wage by 15%. This amounts to $23.5 a month. That's a cocktail to investors. Suck it up!
I guess BoA just wants workers to continue committing suicide so as to not disturb ROI:
Labor Productivity for Q1 2010 was significantly revised from the original report. Labor Productivity rose 2.8% in Q1 2010 versus the original 3.6% reported.
Nonfarm business sector labor productivity increased at a 2.8 percent annual rate during the first quarter of 2010, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today, with output rising 4.0 percent and hours rising 1.1 percent.
Hourly compensation increased 1.6% for the last four quarters.
For the year labor productivity increased 6.1% and hours worked fell 3.0% and output increased 3.0. They haven't seen numbers this high since 2002.
What caused the revision? People worked more hours than originally thought.
The basic equation for labor productivity is
Where Q is the total output of industry and Labor is measured in hours only. Both values are normalized to a base year.
Hourly compensation was also revised from 2.3% to 1.5% in gains. But this number is a bit misleading because in terms of real compensation, the people gained zero. In other words, people worked much more, yet hour per hour, gained nothing.
Unit labor costs in nonfarm businesses fell 1.3 percent in the first quarter of 2010, as the 2.8 percent increase in productivity outpaced a 1.5 percent gain in hourly compensation.
Chances are if you are a typical American consumer you have purchased something made by Foxconn Technology Group. This giant Taiwanese-owned company is under contract to make Sony’s Playstation, the Xbox 360, the Wii, motherboards for Intel, routers for Cisco, and Apple’s iPhone, iPod, and iPad. As profitable as Foxconn is, it is in a fundamental sense a failure of capitalism. At a time when machine tools and robotics are available to make these products at high speeds, Foxconn uses manual labor to craft tens of thousands of electronic devices each hour, 24 hours a day. (
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