BEAN COUNTERS

Back when Henry Ford was figuring out the assembly-line process, and spreading fascist propaganda, there was a work theory called Taylorism. It's proponent was Frederick Winslow Taylor. It taught management how to break up factory jobs into small, easy-to-manage, units. Workers preferred to think of it as monotony. Later, as I took my place in the work-a-day world, they were known as efficiency experts, or "bean-counters". The corporate world is like that. I make a distinction between the corporate world and capitalists. Capitalism is your local pizza parlor. Corporatism is the international food conglomerate targeting the local pizz parlor to cut part of their business away so that Dominoes can make their P&L look good. 

I suppose there is something remarkable about capitalists hiring an extra employee who is not producing product. But underlying this workplace annoyance is the reality that the excess profits earned by the bean counter makes the P&L look good, which makes the corporate officer bonus pay look good. And the bean counter can be counted as a tax write-off. In the last century we have not seen any rewards shared with the people the bean counters annoyed as they produced the product. For a while that was okay because union workers were about 1/3 of the workforce. Ronald Reagan began weakening unions. The bean-counters remained. A small irony here: Ronald Reagan, back in the 1940s, was president of the Screen Actors Guild. But none of the succeeding presidents, of either party, did anything to protect unions. Some can claim complications, but working people have been working under these conditions for a long time. I am pretty sure that the Bean counters will soon be unable to retain their counting of beans thanks to AI.

Bean counters! I allowed my mind to wonder and the bean-counter in my head snapped me back. During that time between Jan.20, 1981, until late into George W. Bush's2nd term, corporate executive compensation went from 50x mean employee pay, to 350x mean workers pay as the recession loomed. In 2024 it had surged to 635 X mean worker pay. Very few corporate execs suffered during the recession, they got bailed out by the taxpayer, whether they needed it or not. Much of the home inventory was purchased with cash by various investment funds charged with making a killing for those corporate executives with this new mother-load of cash. Mean worker pay in most red states stayed pretty even. Some blue states allowed minimum wage to get closer to the low end of union pay. But red states continued oppressing the people making mean worker pay with mean Republican policies. Soon, all of that will be gone and we will be wandering around in crowds, unsure where we are going. Like Tuesday. Or any day we go to the mall, except the average age has dropped in half. Everybody will be out of work because of AI. The bean counters will be among that throng. No idea where they're going and no money when they get there. Just like us. Justice will be served.