Globally, we’ve seen jumps in prices in the last year that are unsustainable. It seems like everything in the grocery store is more expensive, and prices seem to continue to creep up. The impact must be felt around the world, and cost rises like this unjustly affect people below and near the poverty line more than they affect anyone else.
Now throw on top of this the loss of a job for the main breadwinner in the family, and the results are devastating. Unfortunately a lot of people are about to lose their jobs.
We are reaching, in the next couple months, the fiscal year end for a lot of large corporations, and two related patterns we’ve seen a lot of recently are going to repeat.
- Profits over people
- Massive layoffs
Corporations care about pleasing shareholders and maintaining stock value over caring for the people who work for them. This is the ugly side of capitalism. Eliminate thousands of salaries and suddenly the balance sheet proves to be more profitable. Never mind that these are people’s careers and livelihood that are being cut short. And never mind about loyalty to the company.
Cut. Save. Profit. And in a year, repeat.
And we aren’t taking about a few dozen jobs, we are talking about tens and cumulatively hundreds of thousands of jobs worldwide. We are talking about people with mortgages, people losing health care, people who were already living paycheque to paycheque, suddenly jobless. People who thought they were going to be ok, suddenly seeking a job in a challenging market where thousands like them are in the same situation.
Beyond purely meeting shareholder targets, AI and robotics are also taking jobs away. Companies are choosing to use the former salaries of employees to buy chips and memory storage. Manufacturers are replacing employees with robots that don’t take breaks or sick leave, and which don’t need to end their shift after 8 hours. On top of shareholder pressures, there are pressures to eliminate jobs and have the AI Revolution transform the workplace more dramatically than the Industrial Revolution did.
I think this year we are going to see this happen at an alarming scale. The irony is, the large scale layoffs that I see about to happen, added to soaring prices, are going to drastically affect the spending of consumers who buy the products these large companies need purchased. However, many of these billion dollar companies are circumventing this too, by committing billions of dollars to purchase goods and services from each other, again inflating their perceived profits for shareholders.
All this to say that I see a lot of short term financial pain for a significant number of people in the coming months. I’m predicting the fiscal year end squeeze is going to be a hardship like none we’ve seen before, and a lot of people, a lot of families, are going to struggle as a result.
