From: lip@s1.gov (Loren I. Petrich)
Subject: Corporate Shortsightedness? (was Re: SigGraph, Chicago, and Unions)
Organization: LLNL
Date: Thu, 20 Aug 1992 03:11:26 GMT


	In arguments over vacation time and other subjects, I often
see the implied premise that corporate management _always_ (yes,
_always_) acts on enlightened self-interest. But there is a such thing
as _unenlightened_ self-interest, as the dedicated Adam Smithians seem
to ignore. And there is also short-sightedness.

	Examples:

	In the nineteenth century, railroad cars had to be coupled by
hand. A railroad worker had to stand between two cars that were being
pushed together and drop a connecting pin in at the right moment. This
was a very dangerous line of work, and there were many railroad
workers who lost limbs and lives in the process. In the mid-nineteenth
century, an automatic coupler was invented that would not require
anyone to play Russian Roulette between railcars, but the railroad
companies resisted refitting their cars with the new kind of coupler.

	How times change can be illustrated by a plaque on a
locomotive I saw recently honoring an employee who had had an
essentially perfect safety record. The difference is clearly in how
"expendable" a company sees its employees. If there are always more
where they came from, then a company will have a different policy than
if suitable employees are hard to find.

	I'm not saying this to whitewash unions. They are fully
capable of arrogance. Consider the practice of "featherbedding". For a
long time, railroad-employee unions had kept engine stokers on the
job, long after diesel fuel pumps and electric cables had made their
jobs obsolete (you don't shovel in diesel fuel, let alone electricity
:-) Admittedly, a policy of retraining employees whose jobs became
technically obsolete would have been better for labor-management
relationships. Perhaps a stronger example is the baseball-players'
strike of some years back, where the baseball players got no sympathy
whatsoever from the general public -- what they demanded was seen as
crying in their beer.

	Here are some other examples of corporations caught
flat-footed:

	For the first half of this century, the a large part of
business number-crunching was done by punched-card electromechanical
calculating machines, which could be programmed by appropriate switch
settings and patch-cord connections. But with one exception, none of
them saw the potential of the electronic computer, which was coming on
the scene in 1950, and all of them went out of business. The exception
is IBM, nowadays best known as a computer company. Interestingly, IBM
appears to be trying to avoid that happening as high-powered personal
computers and workstations eclipse mainframes in many applications, by
rather belatedly getting into that kind of business, and soliciting an
abundance of outside help.

	American car companies took a long time to catch up with the
demand for small cars.

	Clear-cutting of forests is another example. Though it is
cheaper in the short run, it leaves the land in poor shape to grow
trees on. Selective cutting keeps more of the land in place, and is
more sustainable, though it does not produce such quick economic
returns. It might even be good for the health of a forest to remove
all the sick trees.

	Unwillingness to do what is necessary to avoid being too
dependent on foreign oil; here in the United States, there is too much
dependence on gasoline-fueled cars and kerosene-fueled airplanes for
transportation. The widespread use of natural gas and fuel cells and
efficient batteries, the latter two for electric power, in cars and
buses, and expanded urban, suburban, and intercity rail service, could
do much to lessen demand for foreign oil. The French TGV, and even
NYC-Washington Amtrak, successfully compete with airline travel (for
more details on American highway and airline subsidies, see Joseph
Vranich's _Supertrains_), and do so with much less fuel expenditure.

#sarcasm ON

	Can they all be blamed on the pernicious effects of government
regulation?

#sarcasm OFF

Xref: sparky talk.politics.misc:41333 talk.abortion:33003 alt.politics.bush:2536 alt.fan.rush-limbaugh:4758 alt.rush-limbaugh:3862 alt.politics.elections:11310 alt.politics.clinton:2623