Skewing agreements The critics of downsizing apparently expect more than keeping promises. They want to retroactively rewrite the agreements between labor and management so that they mean things that were never intended by the parties. Don't lay them off even if only half of them are needed. Keep uneconomic plants open. It is unfair to corporations to hold them to promises they never made, but Reich's ideas are also bad public policy.
Corporations are at the mercy of market.
Or take another case. Not only does tying up resources in uneconomic plants mean that those resources aren't available to open new plants, it also means that corporations are going to be much more leery about opening a new plant if they know that if it doesn't work out, they won't be allowed to close it. For some time, Reich has been urging us to tame our savage capitalism by copying the humane labor policies of European countries. Since 1980, the United States has added 24 million jobs. During the same time the European Union has added just 9 million jobs.