Dialogues in The Echo Chamber: Letters from the Unemployment Office

Featuring the Fabulous Dadbots

Mark Mamerow., Dave S., Mark O., Dennis Curley, and Geoff Carter

From the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, February 6, 2022:

‘It’s not like we don’t have enough jobs here in Wisconsin’: Ron Johnson won’t try to land Oshkosh Corp. postal vehicle work

Sam LaRussa, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Republican U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson said Saturday he won’t try to persuade a Wisconsin manufacturer to place more than 1,000 new jobs in his hometown.

“It’s not like we don’t have enough jobs here in Wisconsin. The biggest problem we have in Wisconsin right now is employers not being able to find enough workers,” Johnson said about Oshkosh Corp.’s plans to locate the jobs in South Carolina.

Letter to the JS Editor, February 9, 2022:

To the Editors:

Senator Ron Johnson’s position on the Oshkosh Truck postal vehicle contract is appalling. Johnson refuses to fight for Wisconsin workers and local businesses by using his influence to bring this lucrative contract to Oshkosh. Johnson’s biggest concern is for CEOs like himself, who are having temporary issues finding workers as we recover from the Covid pandemic.

Senator Johnson does not appear to understand that we have a market economy. The Oshkosh Truck contract would bring more than 1,000 family supporting jobs to our state. If those jobs arrive, the laws of supply and demand will be completely adequate to the task of matching qualified Wisconsin workers to suitable employment.

Economics is all about “growing the pie”, not slicing up the existing pie. Instead of worrying about how the current pool of workers is allocated between existing businesses, Senator Johnson should work to grow the Wisconsin economy. Only economic growth will lead to more and better paying jobs, and to more successful businesses.

–Mark Mamerow

Give ‘em hell, Mark. The idiot deserves it. They’d be fools not to print that. Let me know if you want me to post it, too.

–Geoff

Triple ditto Mark! Good on ya.

Thanks for doing that. Pretty sure I read about these trucks. The duty cycle of postal trucks is perfect for ‘lectric vehicles—which use regenerative braking just like hybrids…thus range anxiety is lessened since all that stopping recharges the batteries. So not only more jobs, but jobs with highly transferrable skill sets given the age of electrification

Dave S.

Yes. Nice job with the letter, Mark. By putting it in terms of economics even free market zealots would concede your point and have to conclude that RoJo is either an obtuse numbskull or a loathsome weasel who is blatantly selling out his constituents in order to fill his campaign coffers with corporate PAC money.

–Dennis

So, inspired by a recent trip to Southridge Mall, what I actually wanted to write was this:

“Apparently Senator Johnson is more interested in keeping Foot Locker and the lunch rush at McDonald’s fully staffed than in providing family supporting jobs blah blah blah….”

But my wife thought that was denigrating and talked me out of it.

–Mark M.

This story draws parallels to an episode with direct impact on me in the later stages of my engineering career. In the late aughts, my employer, Lockheed Martin, won a huge, long-term contract with the Navy. This work needed to be assigned to plants that were capable of performing the work, of which there were several located across the country. The plant I worked at, in Eagan Minnesota, was one of the front runners. We had all the talent, capacity, physical infrastructure, etc to fulfill the contract requirements. What we didn’t have was congressional support. In fact, our representative in DC, a Republican named Ron Klein, went public stating that decisions on the assignment of defense contract work is best left to the corporate decision makers, with no interference by political actors. Sound familiar? In simplistic economic theory, that may be true. In the eyes of military brass, of which Ron Klein was an alumnus, that may make sense. Unfortunately, that isn’t how these decisions are made. Politics ALWAYS play a major role in these decisions. The congressmen of other districts do not take this idealistic view of patriotic optimal economic efficiency. A congressman from New York lobbied hard for the plant in his district to be rewarded the contract work and he won. Here’s where it gets interesting.

Because the Minnesota plant did not receive that large and long-term infusion of business, it found that the existing and sunsetting business it had was not enough to support the overhead of a large facility such as ours, making the accounting look bad on ALL the work we had. Within two years, Lockheed Martin decided to close our facility, redistributing all the jobs we had to other parts of the country. Of those one thousand, one hundred high paying professional jobs was one belonging to yours truly. All those jobs, gone permanently. Where our high-tech design, development, test and assembly operation was, an ubiquitous suburban shopping mall sits, where I’m sure they are having trouble trying to fill dozens of $12/hr jobs. It still makes me angry about how short-sighted our political leaders can be and how oblivious they often are to their constituents’ plight. And I’m a lucky one. I was able to land on my feet with a decent job at a different facility. Many people were not so lucky.

Cheers.

Mark O

Jeebus. That is pathetic. And Spencer Gifts, Hot Topic, and Foot Locker STILL can’t find staff.

FFS, the military blob runs hundreds of bases and weapons programs based solely on Congressional “input”. It may not be economically pure, but that’s how the game is played. Why would this single Congressman be such a naive purist? Especially as a former high-ranking officer. I actually wonder whether the guy was paid off.

In other “jobs” news, get this quote from a Times article today about stresses and strains in the pharmacy industry: “In October, Walgreens increased its starting wage to $15 an hour for technicians, a rate that will increase by a dollar this year. The company has also awarded bonuses of $700 to $1,250 to pharmacists and new technicians.”

Seriously? The techs are getting raised to $15 only now? That is crazy. The techs at the South Milwaukee Walgreens run around like a one-armed paper hanger with hives (as my dad would say). They are busier than a mosquito at a nude beach! Yes, we can always count on our captains of industry to do what it takes to run their businesses in the most efficient way possible.

In other news, the JS will be running my letter on Sunday. Good thing I didn’t wander into a discussion of cross elasticity of demand, capital adequacy ratio, and Pareto Efficiency.

–Mark M.

In terms of jingoistic political self-preening, no one beats former Governor—and idiot emeritus Scott Walker. I still get mad when I think about how he deep-sixed the high speed that was all set up and ready to go. By rejecting it (because he didn’t want to be beholden to federal money), he broke the contract (which had to be settled for millions of dollars of Wisconsin taxpayer money), lost God knows how money decent jobs and made himself and the people of our fair state look like idiots for electing him.

Then, he negotiated the blockbuster FoxConn deal. Wow!! That was some shrewd wheeling and dealing there. Once again, we’re paying for next to nothing. FoxConn swooped in, saw a pigeon with a bald spot, and took him to town.

I wish there was some kind of firewall between not only economic negotiations like these and Johnson’s recent idiocy; while we’re at it, it might not be a bad idea to keep corporate money out of politics, but that’s probably just wishful thinking. McCain-Feingold was passed but then somehow the powers that be passed it by. They ran over it.

Let’s get that Johnson to pull out of Wisconsin.

–Geoff

This lends itself to a movie recommendation. Wild River, 1960, with Montgomery Clift and Lee Remick. Clift plays a TVA gummint man sent to clear land to make way for dams and their impoundments. The local politicians and businessmen (cotton planters mostly) are not too keen on this idea of progress because it gives their labor force an option for better jobs. That labor force happens to be children of former slaves who are now essentially serfs in the Jim Crow south. Both romantic leads are great and complex. Clift manages to get beat up by locals repeatedly. He never gets physical vengeance. Can you imagine such a Hollywood script today, where the hero doesn’t get to whup ass on the bad guys at the end. Inconceivable!

MarkO

Interesting…will check it out. The Clash wrote about Monty: The Right Profile.

–Dave S.

They say that Clift was already in decline by 1960. You can’t tell it by his performance in this film. Of course, one can’t really tell what an actor brings to a film performance unless you are on the set. Was every gesture and word spelled out in the script or did they emerge organically? Did he nail the first take or did it take 50? The final product is all that matters.

Mark. O

Clift was great in Red River, A Place in the Sun (with a stunning Liz Taylor) and The Heiress—and others, before he got addicted to just about everything. I guess he was a method actor and liked to crawl inside the character. I don’t know how was on the set.

I do know Anthony Hopkins will rehearse a script to death, working on a line until he has it exactly the way he wants; I guess that’s how he makes it look so natural. “I ate his liver with a nice Chianti”.

I read that he hates improvisation and ad-libbing, so he must have worked on that line a long time.

–Geoff