Earlier quoted context omitted.
First of all, the Phillips curve, really? That's a flawed boomer way to correlate inflation and employment percentage. Tell me you are like 3000 years old and out of touch with economy and the world as a whole without telling me. It's not related at all to my argument. My point is the megacorps (especially in the energy sector) are one of the major causes of the current surge of inflation, regardless of borrowing, (u…
> First of all, the Phillips curve, really? That's a flawed boomer way to correlate inflation and employment Economics 101 always starts from the basics. It is indeed the case that all things about the economy can get more complicated. But, when starting out from the beginning, it is important to learn the baseline foundations before moving on to more complicated special cases. Kind of like how in physics they start…
The companies did all decide to have their layoffs at the same time frame, it's a fact, because that's what happened. You can claim they all acted in unison, because they all faced the same macroeconomic environment so they were bound to make the same decisions. And I agree, partially.
However, what I miss is the admission that the very same companies very much created the very same macroeconomic environment that now "forces them" to do the layoffs. They can't just simply claim it's the invisible hand of the market that makes them do what they do, and they are merely poor passive and unwilling participants. The whole idea of the free market is a funny one. There is no such thing as a "free market", there is already (not enough) a lot of governmental and financial institutions oversight, otherwise it all will collapse in days, just based on greed and speculation.
Let me ask:
- Who made them overhire?
- Who made them overborrow?
- Who led them to believe that free money is always going to be there?
- Who made them chase potential growth instead of financial soundness?
You can claim it's the market which caused all this, and that's partially right, but that kind of claim absolves their "leaders" of the responsibility for their lack of vision and foresight and putting their workers into unemployment, stagnating their wages, and having the ultimate effect of tanking the industry.
My claim is that the same way the poor corps were forced by the almighty market to let go of their workers en masse and stagnating their wages, the almighty market's conditions are forcing us, the employees, to band together in unions so we can counteract that. If you replace "market" with "corporate greed", in my statement, it's all the same to me, it's what I meant.
You can think that the robotic sameness with which they all played the same layoff playbook is due to it "being the logical thing to do at the time", but all I see is a bunch of stupid, amoral douches without any governmental scrutiny or oversight in search of a payout who wouldn't hesitate to use any opportunity for a buck.
And yes, most likely they didn't have a Machiavellian meeting in the dark, behind close doors to discuss how to trod on the working class. The banal truth is probably that once the insane manchild Musk started trashing Twitter, the other ones just followed suit, simply because it benefited them at the time.
This is still coordinated action from employers, and the best way to counteract that is government oversight, worker protection laws, and unions.