US Big Business Sheds Jobs - Again

Two reports highlight this post.

One is from November 21, written by Dee-Ann Durbin of the left-wing Associated Press via Yahoo News. General Motors (GM) will be shutting down twelve of it's manufacturing plants by 2008. About thirty thousand jobs will be lost as a result of the cuts. According to the report, GM blames rising health care costs and fewer sales.

The second, written today - the 28th - by Angela Zimm and Nicole Ostrow for the globalist Bloomberg news service, report that Merck - the world's third largest drug maker - will get rid of seven thousand jobs thanks in part to continuing stock earnings decline and lawsuits involving the now off-the-market Vioxx drug it made. This is on top of 5,100 jobs it already shed last December.

Along with exporting the manufacturing base overseas, "free-trade" friendly policies and keeping the dollar on a "fiat currency" standard, one of the reasons why giant like Merck and GM suffer what they go through is because they insist that "bigger-is-better". As author Kirkpatrick Sale put forward in his 1980's era book Human Scale, when companies get too big, they get unwieldy, inefficient and very corrupt. If both GM and Merck didn't believe in the lie that "bigger-is-better", they would not be where they are today -- losing money, jobs and peace of mind.

In a Distributist society, said companies wouldn't be allowed to get so big. Neither would national or state government be allowed to expand to it's current stifling levels. Economic and political subsidiarity are part and parcel of a Distributist society. Let's learn from the sad lessons of GM and Merck, and promote small businesses and co-ops over big business no matter what.