Worldwide economic turmoil

You don't think the $500 fine for violating that regulation didn't hurt the fishermans business? I do.

I agree, previously and again now, that there are little regulations all over the place that are stupid and pointless. We know all about the insect oriented variety here. But they don't account for anything other than personal hassle for small business and individuals, the kinds of business that could never afford to set up an installation overseas anyway or afford to damage a politician by not contributing, or worse by contributing to opposition. I'm talking about releasing tax burdens of companies that choose to operate overseas rather than at home. Your product should be taxes more than the person's who figure out a way to make it here using our American hands and resources to do it. Fisherman Bob might have a staff of 50 at best, we are talking about giant acres of factories teeming with people making pennies a day, rolling cigarettes in Indonesia and gluing shoes together in China so we can buy them here. Big picture.

Big picture is this: Make it tough for an industry and it will move. USA has so many regulations that it costs millions if not billions of dollars for businesses to hire lawyers to muddle through all the rules and codes good or bad. Look up and read the other regulations in the site I posted. If Starkist was fined for helping whales - it would get passed to the consumer too. Echo.....Big Picture.

Watch the cartoon about regulations:
www.businessinsider.com/ridiculous-regulations-big-government-2010-11#this-isnt-funny-anymore-13

Your relatives are lucky then that they were all offered insurance because they got a full time job. I know for absolute fact that this is not the national trend and is quite unusual. Almost all employees on the lower pay scale nationally are kept at 32 hours or less weekly because it precludes them from benefits. I too have family that have worked for some of these same companies, some of them to this day, and they are still not offered benefits or full time employment. If they complain, they can be replaced- they are unskilled labor, very easy to find more of. That's the idea. You compartmentalize your labor so that only a very few are important enough to keep around, the upper management of course, that way in case your employees find something better and more profitable to do or don't cut it because they don't care enough to try, they can be switched out for one of the many applicants in the stacks these companies all maintain. That's why the turnover rate is so incredibly high at all of the companies you mentioned, not because they are these wonderful positions.

To go on then, turnover rate for unskilled labor is high. Maybe your store was an exception, but nationally this is the business model. In some sectors it is even as high as 75% annually and is automatically factored into most budgets per annum based on the trends of preceding years. By the way, committing to even a few years doesn't equal long retention- 10+ is worth real investment in a skilled laborer. If not, you come with a high price tag from the get go like an artist might. I was not in my current position my whole life obviously, I worked at a fast food national chain, as a waiter in a local restaurant, in a pet store and where I am now. Some independent, some chain. All still in business today. Each had there own mode of management, some like to do things themselves and others contracted (strangely it is the idependent who are do-it-yourselfer's and the corporate which contracted- has to do with assets available of course). All maintained the majority of their floor staff, which is not that many at any given time even if you are talking about a super Walmart- a hundred?- at or very near minimum wage and over 90% less than full-time. Many employees could work full time, but that application and paperwork you fill out and sign before working these days? You know what that is called? A contract. I will have stipulations about holiday pay, your scheduled tour of 32 hours, and so on. So even if you work more than the 32 and are working as full time, by law you are not considered full time and therefor are not offered benefits. Many even have clauses allowing termination without notice or reason. In order to work, you have to sign. And you know if you don't, someone else will be there waiting to take your place. So you have no choice. Thus you are a contract employee and probably don't even know it. The same thing is being built into our education system right now. State and Federal employees on the lower end all enjoy this status. This is nothing new, it's just more pervasive then you would think because most people don't understand what an "application" really is.

I did explain the "don't let them move model"- that's about tariffs. You just make it more expensive to manufacture overseas and viola! no business will move. They will go to the place that is best for business, so they will sell here, but whether or not they manufacture here and use our employees is dependent on whether import taxes are high enough to counteract what amounts to virtually free labor relatively by simply opening a giant manufacturing city in China for pencils or floor tiles that go in BigLots. Look up from the floor and you start to notice shelving, light fixtures, signs, paper, ink, the printer in the corporate office that shoots out the ad banners every week or two (see, I told you I worked retail). This is all manufactured elsewhere in general. Of course there are exceptions here and there, but the overwhelming number of things you will see and touch in that store are foreign, and the majority of those foreign items are Chinese. Now let's move on to the people. You have a big staff at big lots during the day, let's say 30 people because it's a really busy store. My local big lots, in a fairly big city, has five plus the manager on the busiest days. Even say two shifts, or three. So 100 Americans working in a store in America. Those people make up the staff that maintains the storefront. Is that all there is to a business? I think not.

Which brings me to the next point- "etc, etc"- you focus on small picture in that you are involved in your role in the store and your families role. Where do you think all the components that went into building the store came from? And the people who built the store, were they official BigLots employees? No, they were contracted construction workers- which I also have in my family and have recently worked with having had my home remodeled in the last year- they get no benefits, they are paid minimum wage and are, by definition of "contract" a temporary employee. Some months they have work, others they don't. Many are picked up at the day labor organizations in their respective towns the day that work will happen. The floor people may know what they are doing, but they are not paid for it. Two of the stores I worked for had these floor people, and both stores replaced them over and over for cheaper newer contracts. These were also unskilled laborers and thus expendable. In my opinion (and I accept that it is an opinion here, maybe you are a harsher overlord than I would be), handling of any people in this manner is not very decent and more over, how is population kept in this situation ever going to contribute to a booming economy? If you don't even know if you are going to be paid day to day, as many contract employees may find themselves, then you obviously aren't buying anything. That takes care of the background people who built the store and those people who maintain it. Then there is everyone who goes into everything else in the store- the factory that made the drywall, the company that makes the hangers for the clothes, the company the manufactures the candy on the shelves- you get the idea here or should I expand "etc. etc. etc." here as well? Again you will find behind all of these things a vast majority of foreign hands producing everything. The same thing is true of any store, McDonald's, Sears, whoever. The machines that make coffee, the cutlery, the ketchup dispenser. Big, multinational corporations that manufacture on a big enough scale to supply a national franchise as prolific as McDonald's. Those hands are not American and they represent far more hands than the ten people on staff at any given moment. And then there is the food. Sometimes we occasionally package our own food here but much of it is grown elsewhere, in places where farm labor is cheap. Places where cutting down large swaths of forest to raise trillions of chicken nuggets is... wait for it... not regulated.

The difference here is that you are expressing your irritation with the frivolous ridiculous regulations that sometimes pop up and interfere with what reasonable people know should be acceptable. Those I absolutely agree with you are stupid. They make the valuable regulations get lumped in with them and dismissed as one. But there are plenty of regulations that we do need, especially in the area of big business (not local, not fisher bob, not lady importing butterflies for framed art, think "multinational" because they are the only ones that control vast numbers of jobs that can effect big things downstream, like national economies). Those laws would no doubt be classified as international business regulations but I'd have to have my wife, a lawyer, for assistance finding the official heading title for regulations pertaining to international manufacture and exchange. You can't lump them all together, they are distinguished under various headings in the official documents for this reason. Law makers and officials don't view them this way, they focus on the appropriate sections of interest for each situation. They each have there own scope, their own limitations and each have to be evaluated on a case by case basis if you really want to bore yourself to death and get down to it. If you look at the legal structure, you notice the numbers in the heading? That is the coding for the cladogram of laws, that is how you can quickly interpret which laws are related. You will find that harassing/molesting whales or other protected wildlife is not a concern of any body regulating international trade. This is where our government needs to communicate a little better- and there are countless other examples of that as well (want them? not germane so I leave them out). No oversight.

Admittedly, again, there is a lot of junk that could be cut out of the regulations because they are poorly designed rules that were for a specific purpose which is not well represented or no longer relevant or has changed scope and so on. But this topic is about the global economy, about how our national economies could recover so the world doesn't turn on its head. Keeping our respective large corporations working but less able to take advantage of every sector of the world (after all they get access to the cheapest labor and the most ridiculous spenders at once, seems unfair to the little guys like Bob that only has one fishing vessel and can't compete because he doesn't have a billion dollars to spend on a fleet and thus can't earn a billion dollars to buy the fleet in the first place) whilst hoarding the bulk of the world's money would correct things quickly. The range between high and low classes is a good indicator of national stability (not counting outliers of course)- a bimodal population is likely not very stable. The largest players in the shape of our income curve are big businesses, because they affect lots of people at one time and control huge amounts of the global income. Keeping jobs where they are, paying relatively well, rather than paying as little as possible in a place where they could pay much more and still come out way ahead, is the key to stabilizing the economies of the world. Since we are all connected in the market, we all have to do our part which means no more corporate welfare-by-loop-hole-or-fee. It's not that it is so unappealing to do business here, some companies do it just fine and some that operate internationally do so in a fair manner. It's that it is even more appealing to do it where it is all but free relatively. It just has to be made less appealing to operate abroad, that is precisely how China manages this problem and it works fine in terms of keeping their economy stable and production based.