The Coming Deep Cuts In Wages

[marmar]

from the WorkingLife blog:



The Coming Deep Cuts In Wages
by Jonathan Tasini

Tuesday 16 of March, 2010


There is a lot of talking about the coming debt burden on companies:

Maybe they should have, because 2012 also is the beginning of a three-year period in which more than $700 billion in risky, high-yield corporate debt begins to come due, an extraordinary surge that some analysts fear could overload the debt markets.

With huge bills about to hit corporations and the federal government around the same time, the worry is that some companies will have trouble getting new loans, spurring defaults and a wave of bankruptcies...

...The period from 2012 to 2014 represents payback time for a Who’s Who of private equity firms and the now highly leveraged companies they helped buy in the precrisis boom years.

The biggest include the hospital owner HCA, which was taken private in 2006 by a group led by Bain Capital and Kohlberg Kravis & Roberts for $33 billion, and has $13.3 billion in debt payments coming due between 2012 and 2014. Another buyout led by Kohlberg Kravis, for the giant Texas utility TXU, has $20.9 billion that needs to be refinanced in the same period.

And who do we think will be asked to assume the burden of the leveraged buyouts and gambling-gone-bad? The workers. Because of companies can't get new loans, the first thing that will happen is a wave of severe cuts in wages--on a population that already has not seen real wage hikes in decades, compared to productivity.

The talk of recovery is not dealing with the real world of people.


http://www.workinglife.org/blogs/view_post.php?content_id=14766

[girl gone mad]

1. Not just cuts in wages..

sounds like many will also face big hikes in energy and health costs as a direct result of the sins of predatory capitalists.

[HillbillyBob]

3. Very possible

We are going 'green' and cutting our energy usage with more efficient use of energy and as the old appliances die off we replace them with as efficient ones as we can afford.
We plan to go off grid in the next few years. We saw all this coming several years ago and were called doom and gloom.
We started our energy efficiency plans several years ago.

[HillbillyBob]

2. Isn't HCA the Frist family?

Would love to see those sobs standing on street corner with a 'hungry will whine for food' sign.

[Tierra_y_Libertad]

4. At last! The Leveling of the Playing Field.

Which is already occurring. Mass unemployment combined with a rotting economy equals a Catch-22 "recovery". No work or work for less.

Of course, we can count on the ever humanitarian bosses not to take advantage of the workers, and the politicians to wring their hands while taking their payoffs from the bosses.

[MisterP]

5. I wonder if the John Stossels and Thomas Friedmans will survive?

I mean, their main tasks are encouraging libertarianism and providing glowing free-market talking points for economics and political-science departments to repeat to students and newspapers: with the US Dominicanized, they won't be needed

[Hannah Bell]

6. they'll jjust change talking points. they'll survive, they're both multi-millionaires.

and friedman's wife = inherited wealth.

stossel's wife is the daughter of this guy:

http://www.nytimes.com/1999/04/30/classified/paid-notice-deaths-abrams-arthur-l.html?pagewanted=1

who got sympathy notices from the like of financiers edgar bronfman and james tisch.

they may even be related, as stossel's wife's mother's maiden name = friedman.

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9806EEDB123AF93AA3575AC0A96E9C8B63

[Larkspur]

7. And then the corporations will pressure Congress to repeal the anti-slavery laws

that were enacted after the Civil War, but this time the corporations won't discriminate based on race.

The Chamber of Commerce is already lobbying for Congress to weaken or remove restrictions on importing products made by slave labor, including child slave labor.

[MisterP]

9. they're already attacking the 14th Amendment: why not the 13th?

they hate everything but the 2nd and 10th...

[Taverner]

8. This will trigger deflation

And I could see our dipshit congress doing it too, AND STARTING a trade war with China!