Where does time go?

It's been far too long since I last posted anything here. My apologies to one and all. The "salt mine" is trying a new cost effective tactic, which in the old days we called "short staffing". Ever wonder why wages don't keep pace with inflation, but productivity is up? Unfortunately the brains at corporate, and the bean counters often get the terms "cost effective" and "cheap" confused... they are NOT synonyms.

One of my favorite functions at my last job was to explain to new employees, and sometimes lower management, the realities of the Orwellian world of Corporatocracy. I would usually this by explaining the HQ view of the favored term of Human Resources. By simply breaking it down into the two terms that composed the mythological beast that projected a false aura of benign concern for labor.

• Human: You and I. Members of the species Homo Sapiens (or Homo Modernus). The people doing the toil because HQ doesn't want to invest in robotics on the scale that is needed to replace us all, and despite the opinions of some of the executives, monkeys really can't be trained to do this work effectively. Besides the customers don't respond well to interacting with AI drones.
• Resource: A commodity, or set of commodities to be exploited for profit, with the lowest possible investment. Remember that from atop the Dark Tower of the Masters, labor is not seen as individuals but a mass of warm bodied energy sources to generate wealth, why do you think they usually refer to workers as the 'labor pool'. Now let's get back to our pods and plug in, Copper Tops, the CEO needs a new jet.

I thought for a long time about inserting something on the line of a disclaimer, possibly even an apology to those dedicated individuals who do try to do the human thing working in Human Resouce positions. I decided against it for two reasons.

• I'm jaded, cynical, in other words a pragmatic realist, and strive for honesty in every word and action. I report on what I observe and while this is subjective, so is life. It's all personal in the end. While I try to avoid hurting peoples feelings to fill some emotional need to make myself feel better at the expense of anothers suffering, I learned a long time ago that cushioning the blows can often the be the cruelest thing to do in the long run.
• Too many people buy into the underlying power plays that form modern American business practices, in regard to Labor, by swallowing the bait of becoming a house slave and elevating themselves from being a field slave. How they deal with the cognitive dissonance depends on the individuals, but I will not reinforce any self-deceptions that allow any of us to continue believing the false myths that keep most of us in actual and intellectual poverty.
  

It is all too obvious in observing many current issues that the Corporate view of Labor is an exploitable resource, and that this resource is self-perpetuating as long as the system itself is not examined by the workers. When ethics, real ethics, has to be put to the Cost Effectiveness test, which is the final deciding factor in formulating practices and policy, then it is time to ask the questions that the elite don't want us to even be aware of.