One of the Republican candidates is being given a bad time for a comment that is a given truth for any successful supervisor or manager, shows a quality that I would think Tea-Partiers would cherish and is necessary for improving productivity. If you don”t have the ability to fire, you simply cannot get the job done.
Mr. Romney and Bain Capital apparently started out as industrial engineers consulting with businesses to make those enterprises more profitable.
Better methods, better designs, more productive employees. If you are not able to improve the workforce (i.e. get rid of the least productive employees) you cannot get the job done.
Sure, at one point you reduce jobs, but if the plan works and the more healthy business grows, you are able to add even more jobs. Bain went on to acquire enough capital to buy poor performing businesses at a favorable price, transform them into profitable enterprises and sell them to other investors. Of course they made a profit. Sometimes the sum of the values of the assets of the troubled firm exceed the value of the firm as it is operating. In that case the assets are sold and the firm eliminated. Good practice, not the pillaging it is sometimes called. The development of the ability to forecast and appraise potential leads to doing business as a venture capital firm and that does create jobs. It”s called capitalism and has been going on a long time. Remember Scrooge and Marley doing the number on Fezziwig or remember reading Cash McCall in the ?50s?
Although he has already had an introduction to the problem in Massachusetts, should he ever make it to the White House, Mr. Romney, sadly will not have the “ability to fire.
The 1976 act gave government employees the right to organize, bargain and louse up the free market for labor in the public sector. The problem is not that public employees should not be so allowed, but that there are no safeguards to prevent the shutting down of (whole) governments.
Where there is competition as in the private sector, job actions may shut down a single firm, but there are others to take up the slack. Not so when the government is a monopoly with regard to its services. Sadly, this problem has already caused problems with the Obama administration in its efforts to reduce government expenses and will continue to do so if he is re-elected. The potential for improvement is there, as it is in the educational and defense empires (as examples), but no one is about to be allowed the power to achieve it.
Guthrie “Guff” Worth
Lakeport
