Mass layoffs have become a routine corporate strategy—not because companies are struggling, but because Wall Street demands it. In Wall Street’s War on Workers, labor educator and author Les Leopold exposes how stock buybacks, deregulation, and financialized capitalism have made job cuts a tool for enriching CEOs and hedge funds at the expense of workers and communities. He joins Nick and Goldy this week to explain how this happened, why both political parties have failed to stop it, and what we can do to fight back.
Les Leopold is a labor educator, author, and co-founder of the Labor Institute, where he has spent decades advocating for economic justice and worker rights. He is the author of several books, including Runaway Inequality and Wall Street’s War on Workers, which exposes how financial elites have rigged the economy in their favor.
Social Media:
Further reading:
Civic Ventures Produced Comic on Stock Buybacks: Trillion Dollar Heist
Website: https://pitchforkeconomics.com
Instagram: @pitchforkeconomics
Threads: pitchforkeconomics
Bluesky: @pitchforkeconomics.bsky.social
Twitter: @PitchforkEcon, @NickHanauer, @civicaction
YouTube: @pitchforkeconomics
LinkedIn: Pitchfork Economics
Substack: The Pitch
Nick Hanauer:
The rising inequality and growing political instability that we see today are the direct result of decades of bad economic theory.
Speaker 2:
The last five decades of trickle-down economics haven’t worked, but what’s the alternative? Middle-out economics is the answer, because the middle class is the source of growth, not its consequence.
Nick Hanauer:
That’s right.
Les Leopold:
This is Pitchfork Economics, with Nick Hanauer, a podcast about how to build the economy from the middle out. Welcome to the show.
Speaker 2:
I was forwarded a link to a review of a book I think you might be familiar with, Nick. It’s called Corporate Bullshit something or other, like that.
Nick Hanauer:
Yeah.
Speaker 2:
You know what I’m talking about?
Nick Hanauer:
I do, our book Corporate Bullshit, that everybody should buy.
Speaker 2:
That’s right. Corporate Bullshit: Exposing the Lies and Half-Truths that Protect Profit, Power and Wealth in America. It turns out this was on site called Labor Notes, and they were reviewing two books at the time, your book that you co-wrote with Joan Walsh and Donald Cohen, and a book by Les Leopold, which seemed right up our alley, titled, Wall Street’s War on Workers: How Mass Layoffs and Greed are Destroying the Working Class, and What To Do About It.
Nick Hanauer:
Yep, absolutely, and Les has clearly been at this for a long time, and identifies a lot of the same things that we identify as the problems that non-economic elites face in the country, stock buybacks, other things like that. Let’s talk to Les about what he thinks, and how to fix it.
Les Leopold:
My name’s Les Leopold. I am the executive director of the Labor Institute, which is a research and educational outfit. I’m the author, my most recent book is Wall Street’s War on Workers, which looks at the problem of mass layoffs across the country. I have a Substack, Les Leopold at Substack, and I try to write an article on these issues every week.
Nick Hanauer:
Les, we’re obviously in great sympathy with a lot of the stuff you’ve been working on in your career, but your latest book, Wall Street’s War on Workers, I think articulates that mass layoffs, which were once seen as a sign of corporate failure, are considered smart management today. How did that shift happen, and what role has Wall Street played in normalizing mass layoffs?
Les Leopold:
It’s a remarkable turnaround. I found articles from the early 1980s where CEOs were just about in tears about how they were unable to prevent layoffs, and they were upset even when they provided voluntary layoffs, where they put packages together to get rid of workers. Up until that point, layoffs were something that happened during economy-wide recessions, or if your company was failing. If it happened during good times, it made you look bad. What changed in the 1980s? Well, it had been brewing for several years. Actually, it had been brewing out of the University of Chicago for 30 years. The whole idea of government regulation being negative for the economy got a spokesperson in the name of Ronald Reagan, and he appointed people to various commissions that started to deregulate Wall Street, and two areas were deregulated. One was mergers, acquisitions, hostile takeovers, that stuff was now viewed as okay. It’s probably good for competition to have corporate raiders come in and slash and burn their way through a corporation.
Les Leopold:
That was new, but the other more quiet, and turns out to be powerful change was stock buybacks. Stock buybacks are when a corporation uses its own money to repurchase its own shares, the goal of which is to boost the price of the share. Automatically, when you reduce the number of shares in circulation, the earnings per share goes up. It’s just a mathematical truism. Up until 1982, if you did more than 2% of your profits in stock buybacks, it was considered stock manipulation and it was illegal, because they felt it was one of the contributors of the 1929 crash. After 1982, the Securities Exchange Commission took the lid off, and slowly but surely, corporations started moving more and more of their money into stock buybacks. That’s one thing that happened.
Les Leopold:
The second thing that happened was, these corporate raiders, once they took over a company, they didn’t go in and manage it themselves. They wanted to put a CEO in there that would do their bidding, and they’d move on to another company. Well, in order to do their bidding, they changed the way CEOs are paid. It used to be that 85% of a CEO’s pay were salary and bonuses, and maybe 15%, 10%, 15% were stock incentives. That flipped entirely around. Today, 85%, 90% of a CEO’s total compensation are stock incentives, and the rest are salary and bonuses. The stock price became the thing that mattered most.
Les Leopold:
Along this path, there also were very influential economists that said, “Oh, this is a great thing. We should only care about shareholder value.” This loose talk in the 1960s, 50s and 60s about stakeholders, multiple stakeholders, the community, the workers, the country, all that is garbage. Milton Friedman wrote a piece in the New York Times in 1970 that said all that matters is profits, and this became a mantra. Studies showed that this was more efficient for the economy, and that in the long run, all boats would rise because you’re just moving money from an unprofitable use in a company, where they have surplus cash, you’re moving it into more profitable uses. That was the new theory. What they didn’t notice, what nobody noticed was when you deregulate Wall Street, it shifts the balance of power in society. When labor unions were very strong in the 50s and 60s, there was pretty much a balance between corporations and capital, and Wall Street was a small player.
Les Leopold:
Once they were deregulated, they’re very good at finding ways to extract wealth from corporations, and one of the ways to extract wealth was through these stock buybacks, and to pay for the stock buybacks, mass layoffs became regularized. A profitable company would go to mass layoffs to get surplus cash to go into the markets, buy back their own shares, increase the value of the stock incentives for the corporate raiders, the hedge funds, we call them nice names now, hedge funds, private equity, and the CEOs and top officers who got most of their pay in stock buybacks. This cycle has not changed.
Les Leopold:
We just got a call and an invite from the workers at Alphabet, Google. They formed a non-collective bargaining union, it has 1,000 people in it, and they’re scared to death about mass layoffs. This is one of the most profitable companies in the history of the world, and all of a sudden, they’re going to mass layoffs. Why? Well, they’re doing tens of billions of dollars in stock buybacks. Anyway, that’s what’s changed. There was a deregulatory structure that changed, but also an attitude, and unfortunately, the prevailing attitude was not challenged by the Democrats. What became apparent was, the two parties started competing to get Wall Street’s favor through deregulation. Clinton’s famous triangulation was getting ahead of the Republicans on deregulation, and we paid the price in 2008/09, that’s for sure.
Speaker 2:
Yeah, I’m confused. You mentioned this word power, and I’ve read my Econ 101 textbook, and I don’t see power mentioned in there at all. What does power have to do with economics, when the market basically says that it weeds out outsized power just automatically? It’s an equilibrium, it’ll all balance out in the end.
Les Leopold:
Yeah, that’s what made it so hard. I remember sitting through economics 101, and I just kept scratching my head. We had this grand lecture where hundreds of students were there, and they started off saying how wonderful, this is in the 60s, how wonderful capitalism was because everybody got to vote with their dollar. I was ready to jump up and say, “Oh, you mean it’s a rigged election? We can stuff the ballot box if we’re millionaires?” The power starts right there. What scrambles up economic theory is, it’s not a level playing field.
Speaker 2:
You’re suggesting that Elon Musk has several hundred billion votes to my one.
Les Leopold:
Well, you can see it now, at least $250 million, which is what he gave Trump in the last election. Look, it’s a complicated model, to show how power in society creates the rules of the playing field under which competitive enterprises operate. If you have a rule, give you the obvious one that is impacting people right now, if you don’t enforce antitrust regulations, which started with Teddy Roosevelt over 100 years ago, but that also, by the way, stopped during the Reagan Administration, and hasn’t started much since, you’re going to get oligopolies or monopolies. You’re certainly going to get oligopolies, and we have them in the food industry. We have a few large firms that dominate the food industry and can set the prices. Their reaction to a supply chain problem or a bird flu, or whatever incident comes up is, the theory should be, well, their competition should actually stabilize prices, and even bring them down to deal with the situation, or at least have them rise modestly.
Les Leopold:
But if you have a cartel, you raise them as much as you think you can get away with raising them, and no one’s going to stop you. That’s where the power comes in. Are you going to enforce the rules or not? There was a stock buy rule, by the way, it’s not enforced at all anymore. Some companies, catch this, spend more than 100% of their profits on stock buybacks. They borrow money as well as do layoffs. The rules are set by the power relationships, and that’s political.
Les Leopold:
The other overarching thing that happened here was, when we were fighting the Cold War, it was very important for the government to make sure that free labor that could strike was very important, to show working people in other countries that, “Look, we’re capitalists, but we don’t put people in jail when they go on strike. We have free unions, you don’t in the communist countries,” and that was a strong selling point. Once the Cold War was over, that pressure to have a more balanced system went out the window, and now, there are very few mass strikes. I just saw the latest number, it’s under 10% in the private sector, unionization. It was 35% in the mid-50s. That makes a difference. The power balance is different. Regardless of what your textbook says, we have to introduce the term power back into the equation.
Les Leopold:
The question that I’m staring at right now, and I’m working on as hard as I can is, how do you build political power for working people who have become totally alienated from the Democrats? It now looks to them is if the Democrats care more about professionals, highly educated elites than they do about working people, and they’ve admitted as much. If you look at the exit polls from 2024, you can see, Harris’s support was largely, the higher you went up by the income and education ladder was her support, the lower you went down was Trump’s. The question is, with billionaires dominating both parties, where do working people go, and answering that question, I think, at least it’s the question I’m going to go out swinging on, trying to figure out ways to address it, at least get a debate going around it.
Nick Hanauer:
Yeah. Les, we’re in violent agreement with your basic analysis, and we’ve been writing about stock buybacks is, if not the cause of a lot of what’s wrong with America, one of the biggest examples of what’s wrong with America. I can’t remember what the latest figures are, but stock buybacks over the last 20 years have got to be at least $10 trillion, or something like that, all the money you need to fix everything in America
Speaker 2:
Over 20 years? Oh yeah, that’s an understatement, $10 trillion. It’s more than that.
Les Leopold:
I think this year, the projection I believe is $1.25 trillion, just for 2025.
Nick Hanauer:
Yeah, so 100% of the money you need to fix every problem in America is right there, right? Pretty much. Maybe a little bit more would be helpful. Where do you think the Democratic Party really went wrong, and what would you do to fix it? Clearly, the big problem is that the Democrats became neo-liberals too, right?
Les Leopold:
I think they went wrong under Bill Clinton. I worked with him, and I find it hard to criticize him, because he’s actually nice a guy.
Nick Hanauer:
For sure
Les Leopold:
He adopted neo-liberal principles.
Nick Hanauer:
Yeah, but what would you do to get the party back on track?
Les Leopold:
Threaten it. Really the only way to get them back on track is to build a quasi party, at least for starters, outside the Democrats, and prove that a very strong anti-Wall Street populist platform can attract people. I’m going to say this first on the air with you. I’m going to advocate for a committee of 1 million signatures that would call for a new party of working people that would basically support a very simple but powerful populist program against stock buybacks for job security, price controls to stop oligopoly inflation, four or five simple planks. If we could succeed, it’d have to be a union led effort, but if they talk to their own members about this, they’ll see that they would sign this thing rapidly.
Les Leopold:
It wouldn’t take that much time and money to get a million signatures, given social media and every other way you could do this. That would let the Democrats know that they’ve got a problem, that there’s at least a million people who are going to run independent candidates. I wouldn’t run one candidate until you had a million signatures, but then you could support people like a Dan Osborne in Nebraska, who did so well running for Senate as an independent, a labor union president who ran as an independent. He lost by 7% in the Senate. Kamala Harris lost by 20%, so he ran 13% better, 13 points better than Harris. There are possibilities in the future, but the threat has to be so real that the Democrats would have to negotiate over-
Nick Hanauer:
My question is more oriented towards what your policy platform would be.
Les Leopold:
Okay, here’s one, and we’re in the midst of doing the YouGov poll, and I’d love to share the results with you, it should be ready in three or four weeks or less. Here’s a policy that we’re testing. Right now, the federal government gives out, in contracts, $750 billion a year in taxpayer money. I don’t care what Trump and Musk do to it, maybe they’ll knock it down to $740 billion, but this is the way government operates. There are an enormous number of very large corporations at the trough, getting taxpayer money. I would want to add, through an executive order, one clause to every contract. During the life of this contract, where you’re getting taxpayer money, you can’t involuntarily lay off taxpayers. All layoffs must be voluntary. You have to buy them out. What’s wrong with protecting the workers, the taxpayers who are paying for this contract?
Les Leopold:
Why should a corporation who gets a federal contract be able to reduce its footprint to do stock buybacks, or to pocket more money for themselves? If they have the money to do these other things, let them do voluntary buyouts. Now, where did I get this idea from? I got it indirectly from the chairman of United Technologies. They own Carrier Air Conditioning, and Carrier Air Conditioning, if you remember, in 2017, Trump pressured them not to move to Mexico. Carrier was moving to Mexico because they could save $60 million a year or something, and United Technologies, the parent company, was doing a $5 billion stock buyback. They wanted the cash, but the chairman gave in. An interviewer asked him, “Well, why did you give into this? Why didn’t you hold out? They couldn’t force you.”
Les Leopold:
He goes, “Ah.” He says, “I was born at night, but not last night.” United technology gets 10% of its money from the federal government, defense contracts. They weren’t going to jeopardize being first in line for the helicopters, etc, etc, that they make, because they wanted to lay off 800 or 1,000 people. They could easily make the calculation. You can say to corporate America, “Look, you want to lay off workers involuntarily? Go ahead. You just can’t take taxpayer money. No tax breaks specifically for you, no subsidies, no contracts.”
Nick Hanauer:
What else?
Les Leopold:
You want a bigger policy than that?
Nick Hanauer:
Yeah.
Speaker 2:
Well, should we repeal the 1982 SEC rule that legalized stock buybacks?
Les Leopold:
I’d go after that right away. I can tell you a funny story about that, if you have time for a story, a little one. The idea of having a Democratic Party, for example, come out against stock buybacks, especially to companies that are getting government money, I thought, “Oh, this is a great idea.” I googled that, and I find the platform that says, no COVID money can go to a corporation that’s doing stock buybacks, a variation on the theme I just had. I was about to just write about that, and then I look more closely, it’s the 2020 platform. They didn’t mention stock buybacks at all in 2024. It’s not on the agenda. It’s not on the radar. Yeah, Elizabeth Warren mentions it every now and then, and of course Bernie would go for it, but it’s just not there.
Les Leopold:
You’re absolutely right, that would be the next thing to deal with. Then, I think you’re going to have to do something with oligopoly price gouging, especially in pharmaceuticals, healthcare and food. You have to directly intervene. You’ve got to do trust busting. Interesting, the most controversial proposal, however, would be this. A professor friend of mine keeps bringing it up, and it pulls really highly, and it’s that every person has a right to a job at a livable wage, so we can talk about raising the minimum wage to a little wage, whatever that would be. If the private sector can’t provide that job, the public sector must, so this flies in the face of your Goldie’s economic 101.
Speaker 2:
Oh, it’s not mine.
Les Leopold:
No, it was your textbook. I didn’t say you wrote it. You were forced to unfortunately read it. That textbook would tell you that the price of labor goes down to the point where everybody gets hired, and then you get to equilibrium, even though it shouldn’t be a starvation wage, but it could be close to it. I think people are tired, especially in rural America. They’re absolutely exhausted by the nonstop job insecurity and downward pressure. When Bernie says they live paycheck to paycheck, he gets an enthusiastic response because in fact, that’s real. The county I point to the most that was the shocking revelation, I stumbled on this county virtually by accident, Mingo County, West Virginia. I was trying to find the county that had the largest number of coal jobs that were lost. This county of 25,000 people lost 3,000 jobs from 1996 to the present, in the coal industry, 3,000 in a population of 2,500, and that’s the number one county in the country in this dubious distinction.
Les Leopold:
I thought, let’s take a look. What happened with the Democratic Party vote? Well, 1996, when they had 3,300 jobs, bill Clinton got 70% of the vote of Mingo County. This was a gung-ho Democratic county. As the jobs went down, it went down every four years, down, down, down, down, down. Biden got 13%, Kamala Harris got 12%. By the way, if you think racism is a problem, Obama got 40%. What happened here was, the Democrats never offered an alternative to these workers. The reclamation of the land, the rebuilding of the infrastructure, the internet, hospitals, schools, roads. Put people to work, give them jobs at a livable wage, and rebuild this area. And then, the private sector is going to come in when they start seeing money is going that way.
Les Leopold:
Let me tell you what happened instead. This is textbook 101. The private sector came in, and the industry in the form of a pharmacy, a small pharmacy, figured out that if they could quickly create opioid prescriptions, they would make a lot of money. They got a doctor an hour away who was willing to sign these things via fax, and they started selling a lot of opioid prescriptions. Then, as competition would tell you, a second pharmaceutical drug store came in, another small one, and they started competing. One of them got so good at this, they put out one prescription per minute. They were putting out more opioid prescriptions than the largest drugstores in the largest cities of America. Cars were lining up from a five-state area to get their opioids. This is what free enterprise did for Mingo County, and unfortunately, the Democratic Party did nothing, and they paid the price.
Speaker 2:
See, and now that we’ve regulated that industry out of existence, we just have the Mexican fentanyl coming in. At least it was American-made addiction.
Les Leopold:
I’ve got to see whether fentanyl put the drug stores out of business. You may be right.
Les Leopold:
Between stock buybacks, guaranteed jobs and no layoffs for federal money, those would create enough of a fight to last at least a four-year administration.
Speaker 2:
We’ve talked about a job guarantee on the podcast before, and one of the things that intrigues me about it is that it is an automatic, anti-cyclical policy, that it really kicks in when unemployment is rising and phases out as the private labor market recovers.
Les Leopold:
Here’s the thing that I’m trying to understand better. It turns out, even when unemployment is low, the turnover from compulsory layoffs is still enormous. Right now, roughly 1.7 million workers a month lose their jobs due to no fault of their own. They’re forced out. I think this job guarantee, even in a non-countercyclical situation, would be very attractive to the workers that are getting bounced out, and it also might lead to enough of a labor shortage so the workers who are still employed have more leverage.
Speaker 2:
Right, yeah. Do you want to get to the final, I guess that was the benevolent dictator question, right?
Nick Hanauer:
Yeah.
Les Leopold:
Oh, that’s what I was, okay.
Speaker 2:
Unless you’ve got something else, essentially, if there’s some other thing you would do, absent political constraints?
Les Leopold:
I do some little stuff right away. I would prohibit any member of Congress from dealing in stocks and bonds, ever. If they had any, they have to put them in a blind trust. They can’t have any connection with it. That seems like such a simple symbol. I can’t believe the Democrats wouldn’t go along with it. Nancy Pelosi wouldn’t entertain it. We need both very concrete things, but we have to find a way to help working people see the government and politics can work for them as opposed to against them. The biggest thing that troubles me is, at the height of the Vietnam War, in 1966, government had over a 70% positive rating, whether you trust the government to do the right thing. Now, it’s down below 20%, and that’s allowing this Musk attack on government to, at least so far, go relatively unimpeded, because people have lost their faith that government can work for them.
Les Leopold:
They see government as a function of elites, and that’s why I want to just come back to this. If we can get a million people to say they’re ready to start a new party, I think that would have a remarkable impact on politics and on legislation. I think there’d be competition. Instead of competing to get Wall Street’s favor, you better start competing to get these million people who are starting to vote against you.
Speaker 2:
A million people is nothing, Nick. What does it take to get an initiative on the ballot in Washington now? How many signatures?
Nick Hanauer:
350,000.
Speaker 2:
Something like that, and that’s just one initiative in one state.
Les Leopold:
Another place to do an initiative, by the way, would be Michigan, where there’s a lot of labor turnover, and I thought a ballot initiative about no tax money going to corporations that lay off taxpayers might actually fly in Michigan. I’m just trying to find some unions who are ready to take it up. That’s a whole different problem. They feel so besieged that it’s hard for them to start new stuff.
Speaker 2:
Well, if it wasn’t so late in the session, Nick, we might be able to push it through the legislature here. Final question, Nick? You want to ask it?
Nick Hanauer:
Why do you do this work?
Les Leopold:
It’s a great question. I came from a working class family. My parents were immigrants. They had incredibly high hopes for me, and I realized along the way, I didn’t feel comfortable becoming a professional professional. I got the bug that social change was a positive thing to work on, so many of us did in the 60s, and I found myself as a translator. When I went to grad school, my essay to get in was about how I wanted to be able to translate more academic stuff to working people, sort of like talking to my parents. I wasn’t going to go in a factory, and I wasn’t going to go underground or any of that stuff, so I ended up stumbling into this educational endeavor that we started in 1975, 50 years ago, and I’ve been unfit for anything else since. I’m incapable of working in a regular job. I’ve been working in my own educational world ever since. We design, pilot, test, retest and share educational programs for working people, largely around economics and politics. It’s been a great ride. I’m either very lucky or very unfortunate.
Speaker 2:
Yeah, very unfortunate that your life’s work has occurred entirely during the period where working people have gotten screwed the most in this country.
Les Leopold:
But my friends and I talk about this all the time, we wonder how much of that is our responsibility. Could we have done more to turn that around?
Speaker 2:
Yeah.
Nick Hanauer:
Well, thank you so much for being with us, Les. It’s really nice to meet you.
Les Leopold:
My pleasure working with you guys.
Speaker 2:
When did we first start writing about stock buybacks, Nick? Was it-
Nick Hanauer:
Good golly.
Speaker 2:
2015?
Nick Hanauer:
I think it was earlier than that.
Speaker 2:
2014? Was it when I first started working with you? I certainly never heard about it before.
Nick Hanauer:
2014, 2015, something like that. A pretty long time ago. It’s a great question, and I’m trying to remember.
Speaker 2:
A decade ago, somewhat, about a decade ago, we started writing about it, and I know when we did, we were pretty much the only ones. Other than a couple of economists who were researching it, there was very little data on it. It wasn’t something that was commonly collected. You had to dive into the data to pull out the detail, and when we did, it was really surprising. Les mentioned that some companies spend more than 100% of profits on stock buybacks, and I remember seeing that IBM was one of those companies, one of those iconic companies, iconic for the money they used to spend on research and development.
Nick Hanauer:
Now, they just shovel into the pockets of shareholders.
Speaker 2:
That’s right, just borrowing money to buy back stock. Even when we started writing about it, I guess for every raised eyebrow there was a roll of the eyes. People didn’t really take it seriously, but I think it’s interesting to see the connection that Les makes, because when we talk about stock buybacks, it’s easy to understand how they’ve been used to create inequality in the sense of enriching the people at the top, people like you. I think what we maybe haven’t done as good a job illustrating as we should have is how it directly immiserates millions, tens of millions of Americans through the mass layoffs that have been used to generate the profits to buy back stocks.
Nick Hanauer:
Yeah, and I’m not sure there’s an absolute correlation between those two things. Obviously, there’s all sorts of ways to look at this, but you are right. The thing about stock buybacks, if Les is right, I think he said it would be $1.2 trillion this year, something like that.
Speaker 2:
Right, which is not far off the peak. We’ve had trillion dollar years before.
Nick Hanauer:
Yeah. If you just assume that’s true, there’s 140 million workers in America, I think, plus or minus. That’s almost $10,000 per worker per year. That’s an astonishing amount. There’s no law of economics or the universe that says that money has to go to stock buybacks. It could easily go to wages, or it could easily go to wages for existing workers. It could go to wages for new workers, or it could go to lower prices for consumers. That’s the really shocking thing. It’s just the rawest, most obvious example of the power imbalance in the economy, that just, it is possible to appropriate what is effectively 4% of GDP. I think that’s right. GDP is $25 trillion now, or something like that.
Speaker 2:
Yeah, something like that.
Nick Hanauer:
One percent is $250 billion. It’s four plus percent of GDP, just because you can.
Speaker 2:
Yeah, and I think the other thing, which Les brought up, which I think is important, is how norms have changed over the past 50 years. This gets to the point of the voluntary buyouts, and I think that’s a great contrast, buybacks versus buyouts. It used to be, and this wasn’t just with well-paid white collar workers, it used to be when large corporations did layoffs, they did them reluctantly, and when they did them, they tried to avoid involuntary layoffs. They would offer packages to workers for them to take, and that was expensive. There’s a cost to that, but it certainly eased this transition from work to out of work, or from one job to another if you got a fairly generous buyout from your employer.
Speaker 2:
For the most part, unless it’s a unionized workplace where that’s required under the contract, it just doesn’t happen anymore. What you get instead are just two weeks notice and you’re out of a job. Everybody’s an at will employee. There’s no immediate cost. It used to be costly to do layoffs, and now it’s not. It’s cheap. I think that cost was largely self-imposed, and it’s not anymore because Wall Street feels that it has no obligation to the welfare-
Nick Hanauer:
Nobody gives a shit.
Speaker 2:
Yeah, and that’s not an economy we want, and as we’ve talked about, it’s not an economy that actually works well. This is not efficient, though it can be capital efficient, and that just enriches, I don’t mean to blame you for this, Nick, but enriches people like you. It’s not enriching people like me, but I’m sure you’ve been enriched by it even when you don’t know it, because you don’t know where most of your money is invested these days, do you?
Nick Hanauer:
No, for sure.
Speaker 2:
You’ve got other people. You can’t possibly keep track of all that.
Nick Hanauer:
No, it’s absolutely true. Capital accrues to more capital.
Speaker 2:
That’s right.
Nick Hanauer:
Well, anyway, it was interesting talking to Les. He’s clearly been soldiering at this for a very long time, and the book is in the show notes, is it not?
Speaker 2:
That’s right. If you want, you can buy his book, Wall Street’s War on Workers: How Mass Layoffs and Greed are Destroying the Working Class, and What To Do About It.
Speaker 5:
Pitchfork Economics is produced by Civic Ventures. If you like the show, make sure to follow, rate and review us wherever you get your podcasts. Find us on other platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and Threads at Pitchfork Economics. Nick’s on Twitter and Facebook as well, at Nick Hanauer. For more content from us, you can subscribe to our weekly newsletter, The Pitch, over on Substack. For links to everything we just mentioned, plus transcripts and more, visit our website, PitchforkEconomics.com. As always, from our team at Civic Ventures, thanks for listening. See you next week.