Word: profitable
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...state enterprises. These decrepit firms, employing some 100 million workers, are swamped by debt, surplus labor and bloated inventories. Their out-of-date equipment and Marxist management, corrupt and incompetent, make them hopelessly uncompetitive. Half the 100,000 enterprises operate at a loss, and one-third barely turn a profit. At one time or another, half of all state employees have been furloughed or have had their pay or hours cut. Workers earn most of their income moonlighting for private firms...
...chose the steel-company job instead. Now her goal is to revamp the internal management at clanking CSN, whose steelworks began operating in 1946 in Volta Redonda, a town 100 km northwest of Rio. Marques is introducing new management policies--such as dividing the company into separate profit centers by product--that are virtually unknown to Brazil's insular corporate world. "If I don't watch out," she allows, "someone will start importing what I produce within three or four years. CSN will have to be as cost efficient as the Japanese and the Koreans...
Imagine the hardship to be endured by the workers and their families. Imagine the depression, the foreclosures, the strain on marriages. These folks are white collar Americans, like us, and they're about to suffer greatly. Maybe Levi's will break its profit record...
...where shall the rest of us find ourselves? It is doubtful that even the greatest pains of poetic justice will deter the profit-starved college students from seeking a position that permits the immediate destruction of thousands of lives with a single decision. The allure of money, power and corporate expense accounts attract the ambitious and well-educated like sharks to a shipwreck. Rest assured that for every job you ever take, dozens of your classmates are vying for the opportunity to downsize you. Or maybe you will be the one pruning the workforce, sending a former teammate or study...
Harvard students likewise are abandoning the traditional fields populated by generations past--law, business, medicine, banking--in order to set up shop as experts not in any particular field, but as wise souls able with the slightest effort to raise profit margins. In some respects, one can't blame students, who are often laden with debt, for taking high-paying positions with anyone. And it's not that consultants are killing women and children. Rather the problem with consulting is just that it's so, well, unnecessary...