Put on your tinfoil hats: Corporation hiring spree to elect Bush?

[TruthIsAll]

Hire 'em in 2004. Fire 'em next year. The ultimate scam. With Diebold waiting in the wings.

I hope I'm not giving Rove an idea.

[donco6]

1. I gotta admit, it's ingenious.

Perfectly clean way to make illegal campaign contributions.

[FloridaPat]

2. Hmm. Choices, choices. Hire a bunch of employees enough to

make a dent in the unemployment or send election contributions (the bribes) to the RNC. Another problem with employess - they might give that money to the Democrats!

I personally think unemployment is planned to halt money from the middle class going to the Democrats. How's that for tin foil hat???

[Junkdrawer]

3. That's GOP standard operating procedure - rev the engine just before...

an election - pay for the consequences later.

[whistle]

4. If they could hire people for free....

...then it would go over really big
:tinfoilhat: :tinfoilhat::tinfoilhat::tinfoilhat::tinfoilhat::tinfoilhat::tinfoilhat::tinfoilhat::tinfoilhat:

But the rethugs are too anal to take a chance like that, gosh, they might have to pay unemployment for 25 weeks afterwards..:puffpiece:

[Yavin4]

5. Nope. Greed Trumps All Logic

You'd think that corporate America would indeed just go on a hiring binge in order to help Bush get re-elected so that they can hold onto their tax cuts and regulation breaks, but it won't happen. Greed is as addictive as Oxy Contin. The corporatists are too greedy to think long term. It's all about getting it all now, screw tomorrow.

[Florida_Geek]

6. Plus the costs of desks and workspaces adds up

very fast. You just can not hire people and have nothing for them to do.

No I do not see this happening.

[I AM SPARTACUS]

7. not impossible, but I don't think that the math works out...

in order to make a dent that'll show-up, there'd have to be hiring in increments like 50,000 people per month for at least two-three months. Even if you apply part-time temp wages and short-term hiring, you start getting big numbers very quickly. It seems like it'd be a cheaper option - not to mention easier - for corpoRATS to just give the RNC-Smirko Gang another 100 million for throwing away on advertising...

[maggrwaggr]

8. Nope. Self defeating.

That's a very paranoid notion, and although I don't fault you for thinking of it, I don't think businesses will conspire in any way like that, they're too competetive for one thing. They would only do this if they were forced to.

Also, it would cost them a ton of money. What's the point?

[sadiesworld]

9. No, they will just have the government do the hiring...

oh right, it's already happening.

[Wapsie B]

10. I think big oil

will probably drop the prices of gas at the pumps after Labor Day to give us peons cheaper gas before the election. But hiring people just for this year to pump up the job stats? No, not likely.

[buycitgo]

11. I was thinking about that after reading a story in the Chicago Trib today

not your scenario, but if the economy eventually generate some job growth.....

from an otherwise very cautionary article for the pugs:

The story is becoming familiar: Strong gains in productivity mean companies can avoid hiring, even as production increases.

Donald Washkewicz, chief executive of Parker Hannifin Corp. in Cleveland, said that's exactly what's going on at his company, a manufacturer of motion and control technologies. The extra-long downturn in the industrial sector, he explained, gave the company time to re-engineer how it does business.

"We have a system called `lean'--a new way of engineering our shop and office," Washkewicz said. "It means we can do more with fewer people."

Parker, which tends to mirror the industrial sector because it touches so many businesses, saw orders soar 20 percent in the past month. The trend has been pointing upward for the last four months. But because the company is so much more efficient, it hasn't even put on a third shift in its factories.

Parker is reluctant to hire more employees until it absolutely must.

"We spent $100 million to cut back 8,000 workers over the last few years," Washkewicz said. "So we don't want to add any back unless we're sure we need them."

The good news is, Washkewicz is feeling confident. He predicts Parker and other companies will be hiring in big numbers by summer as long as demand keeps up.

"I can guarantee you that we can't take care of a 20 percent increase in business without some hiring."

will he GUARANTEE the big numbers, just as Bob Novak did tonigh?

http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/chi-0403060274mar06,1,1640386.story?coll=chi-business-hed

two questions come to mind:

one) just how comfortable will employers like this feel about hiring, and in what numbers?

two) what about the impact the apparently very steep oil price increases will have on the apparently ready-to-boom economy?

[movonne]

12. I was also thinking that. Some way to make more jobs.

[buycitgo]

13. almost forgot........nobody seems to be talking about this:

from same article

Another troubling aspect of the report was a lack of substantial wage growth. Lee Price, of the Economic Policy Institute think tank in Washington, said that including a small gain in February, wages have risen only 1.6 percent over the last year, the slowest rate in the 40 years the data has been collected.

That may be because industries creating jobs these days pay less than industries contracting. From the end of 2001 to the end of 2003, according to the institute's research, the industries losing jobs paid wages of $16.92 an hour on average, while the industries gaining jobs paid an average wage of $14.65.


lowest increase in FORTY FRICKING YEARS!!!!

this raises the obvious question:

what are those at the top of the earning curve enjoying, in terms of their own pay increases?

you know the CEOs aren't skimping on their own packages

did you read where Kenny boy had a $460 MILLION life insurance policy?

[buycitgo]

14. this also puts the lie to their widely spread claims about new jobs.......

you know, the ones that outsourcing enables our benevolent managers to create from the ashes of the old way?

the voodoo economists+junta apologists assure all that the MYRIAD new jobs created will be of a much higher paying nature.

sure doesn't look that way, does it?

when are the dems going to start assembling all this data into a coherent refutation of the fairy tales being spread by these liars, and largely repeated unquestioned by the media handmaidens?

[seemslikeadream]

15. CORRECTED: Job Growth Anemic in February

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. economy added a paltry 21,000 jobs last month, according to a surprisingly weak government report on Friday that turned up the heat on President Bush (news - web sites) as he seeks re-election....

The details in the report were uniformly bleak. Private-sector employment showed no gains. Government hiring was the only reason the nonfarm payroll count rose.

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/nm/20040305/ts_nm/economy_dc_41