It's not ALL on the employers, but people like this woman act like it's all the fault of people who are struggling to make ends meet, as if all of them are only struggling because they are defective. If only they were willing to work, they'd be rich! As is usually the case, the truth is somewhere in the middle.
Maybe the author of the article and/or the interviewer wanted her to sound that way? [Channeling Captain Renault from Casablanca] The media
never tries to shade a story in order to create or fan a controversy.
Assuming that they didn't shade things, her perspective is that of a hard-nosed employer, not an objective observer of the situation. Of course she is going to see things from her viewpoint. In her world, everyone has their hand out or tries to put it in her pocket, so naturally she will be cynical of most people who are not in her position.
There are some companies that are struggling, sure. But even companies posting record profits are doing this as a regular practice now (this is why people have to put in 60 hour weeks and work through their "vacation" even as they haven't sniffed a raise in 5 years -- ALL redundancy has been removed and everyone is a potential single-point failure on the job).
True, but again, you have to see things from their perspective. Their loyalty is to their shareholders first and their employees second. This is how capitalism works. The shareholders control the company, while employees simply work for the company. This is perhaps a cold and heartless perspective, but it is nonetheless reality. The exception is where a business is closely-held and the owner(s) treat employees like family, with a willingness to take less profits (or even no profits) to ensure that their employees still have a paycheck.
I've been at this for 25 years. I've seen how the industry has changed. And it has little to do with actual profitability. The down economy is an ongoing excuse for many of them. The reality is that many of them are more profitable than ever, but shareholders won't let the executives treat labor decently because, in this market, they don't HAVE to. They can treat their workers like crap and get away with it because people are desperate. Even the most profitable companies are operating on skeleton crews now.
In clarification of my prior remark, it's not always the shareholders who are actively controlling things, but rather the perception of corporate management that the shareholders (i.e. Wall Street) won't be satisfied with anything less than double-digit growth. On the other hand, employees often treat their employers like crap when the economy is good, taking a new job at the drop of a hat if the pay and benefits are better. How do you think the employer feels after someone has received training, benefits, vacation, etc... in other words, all the "goodies" and then bolts for greener pastures?
Shareholders are demanding double-digit earnings growth in a no-growth economy. That math doesn't work. The only way they can do that, when they can't increase revenues, is to cut costs by screwing their employees.
But it does work - case in point the current economy. When growth is scarce, the only thing you can do is cut overhead. Shareholders expect their investments to grow.