Bernard Lietaer - The future of money

because I was there at the beginning. I was one of the creators ... But the fact is, once out of the bottle, the re-engineering genie quickly turned Ugly.'

And like all genies, it cannot be put back into the bottle.

Large corporations world-wide have been shedding people at a rate of. Between one and two million people per year. And this is happening for the first time at all levels in the corporation. When Kodak reduced its number of management layers from thirteen to four, a lot of people who never thought it could happen to them found themselves out of a job. Of course, a lot of new jobs are being created outside these corporations, but they usually do not measure up in terms of income level or security that people were used to and had grown to expect.

What is important to realise is that these 'strategic layoffs' are of a totally different nature from the traditional cyclical layoffs. It was considered normal for example that factory workers would be let go whenever inventories of finished goods piled up as the business cycle moved into low gear. They would also be re-employed as soon as those inventories were absorbed and the good days of the cycle returned. But with strategic layoffs, there is no reason to expect that the business cycle will reverse the trend. What is going is gone forever. Growth without increased employment is not a forecast; it is an established fact. William Greider's statistic is worth repeating: the world's 500 largest corporations make and sell seven times more goods and services than 20 years ago, but have managed simultaneously to reduce their overall workforce.

Even the people who remain or are hired in these corporations face a very different process from previous times. The old criteria for hiring used to be the matching of job specifications to the classical three E’s: Experience, Endorsements and Education.