In September 2013, I visited a tea factory outside Marseille that was currently being occupied by its workers. There had been a standoff with local police for over a year. What had brought things to such a pass?
A middle-aged factory worker, who took me on a tour of the plant, explained that while ostensibly the issue was a decision to move the plant to Poland to take advantage of cheaper labor, the ultimate issue had to do with the allocation of profits.
The oldest and most experienced of the hundred-odd workers there had spent years tinkering with, and improving, the efficiency of the giant machines used to package teabags. Output had increased and with them profits.
Yet what did the owners do with the extra money? Did they give the workers a raise to reward them for increased productivity? In the old Keynesian days of the fifties and sixties they almost certainly would have. No longer. Did they hire more workers and expand production? No again.
All they did was hire middle managers.
For years, he explained, there had only been two executives in the factory: the boss, and a human resources officer. As profits rose, more and more men in suits appeared, until there were almost a dozen of them.
The suits all had elaborate titles but there was almost nothing for them to do, so they spent a lot of time walking the catwalks staring at the workers, setting up metrics to measure and evaluate them, writing plans and reports.
Eventually, they hit on the idea of moving the entire operation overseas—largely, he speculated, because devising the plan created a retrospective excuse for their existence, though, he added, it probably didn’t hurt that while the workers themselves would mostly lose their jobs, the executives who made the plan would likely be relocated to a more attractive location.
Before long, the workers had seized the building, and the perimeter was swarming with riot cops.
from David Graeber's 'The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy'
https://www.amazon.com/dp/1612195180/ref=cm_sw_r_tw_dp_x_CmGgAbH964MB4
A lot of this has to do with the fact of the great glut in people with MBAs or majoring in business. So the job market had to find a way to accommodate them all.
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