U.S. corporations now use humiliation as a management tool, laying people off unnecessarily, under-paying them, firing them. Strangely, many in American society persist in the belief that our society is basically fair and that those at the bottom deserve to be there. Such an attitude allows us to shed any sense of responsibility toward the poor and disadvantaged. Such an attitude encouraged the popularity of the Contract with America, a political directive credited to former Republican House Speaker Newt Gingrich. Corporate downsizing, on the scale that we have unhappily observed in the 1990s, is essentially the unnecessary firing of workers without thought to personal or social impact.
Companies downsize when they are healthy and when their businesses are profitable.
They must consider themselves as freelance workers, as self-employed vendors who must sell their skills to a company, on a tenuous, temporary basis. Meanness on the part of the employers begats not only anxiety, homelessness, and poverty, but also backlash meanness on the part of the employees. The same forces that create a feeling of violated expectations here also encourage brutality and exploitation in foreign workplaces, as we find in Asia, South America, and other countries where American corporations re-locate. Exploited American laborers are not usually sympathetic to exploited foreign labor, however. The content of our entertainment is also a sign of the mean times.