Three years ago, Harvard Business School asked thousands of its graduates, many of whom are leaders of America’s top companies, where their firms had decided to locate jobs in the previous year. The responses led the researchers to declare a “competitiveness problem” at home: HBS Alumni reported 56 separate instances where they moved 1,000 or more U.S. jobs to foreign countries, zero cases of moving that many jobs in one block to America from abroad, and just four cases of creating that many new jobs in the United States. Three in four respondents said American competitiveness was falling.
Harvard released a similar survey this week, which suggested executives aren’t as glum about American competitiveness as they once were…
Companies don’t appear any more keen on American workers today, though. The Harvard grads are down on American education and on workers’ skill sets, but they admit they’re just not really engaged in improving either area. Three-quarters said their firms would rather invest in new technology than hire new employees. More than two-thirds said they’d rather rely on vendors for work that can be outsourced, as opposed to adding their own staff. via U.S. Corporate Executives to American Workers: Drop Dead.
I thought about titling this post: 'Yeah, I gotchur employee engagement right here.' Snort and spit.
So, let's see. These 'leaders,' with their Boards of Directors permission,:
- hoard record amounts of cash on their balance sheet - $1.64 trillion at the end of 2013.
- And, what they don't hoard they give to themselves and their company's shareholders. 91%.
Year after year they do this, then they play the victim card and say U.S. employees, the ones whose ideas and executions and sacrificed families and health delivered these results, are not competitive.
That's where employee engagement went.
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