Companies now putting it to their workers

That's a proven strategy, Boeing built bedroom furniture and speedboats to stay alive after the First World War.

Simple business math, your profit margin is a % of gross revenues, but your losses are 100% of expenses in excess of revenue. If you make 10% and your revenues are 1000 a day, but you lose 500 a day for 30 days before turning a profit again, that's 150 days of profit spent paying off your losses. Just because you're showing a profit on paper doesn't mean you're out of the woods, or you have the money to add staff (or that adding staff would be advisable since business could turn down yet again).

Bring back slavery and cotton will be king again and plantation house sales will go through the roof!

What's good for business isn't necessarily good for everything else. Being against screwed up economic policies doesn't equate to being "anti-business." That is a bit of anti worker, anti environment, anti social jingoism that only benefits a very tiny portion of the population.

Ed, it's painfully apparent that you are staunchly anti-management, but I would argue it's better to keep some employed than none employed. The alternative you present is exactly the reason you drive a Hyundai - witness the 1970s/1980s domestic auto industry. Eff the company, eff the product... you only end up effing yourself harder than anyone else ever could. It's self defeating, no matter how feel-good it might seem at the shallowest level.

Burger lay offs

NY Cap's philosophy ?? .. from every man according to his ability ..to every man according to his needs...would seem very fair and perhaps the POTUS believes it also.???

Burger lay offs

Ahhhhhhh, good old Marxist philosophy alive and well in NY City...seems for some history does repeat itself...

"It is not the employer who pays the wages. He only handles the money. It is the product that pays the wages." ~Henry Ford, 1922, also sometimes quoted as "It is the customer that pays the wages"

Not mentioned in the MSNBC article is the current regime's anti-business stance, uncertainty in regulatory issues, the health care debacle--businesses abhor such uncertainties and of course will limit hiring to only just what they need.
Obama in today's WSJ exhorting businesses to "stop hoarding money and start hiring" ...as if by hiring people that are not needed, that there would somehow be more demand.

But, then, the CIC nor ANY of his staff (Pre-Imelt et.al. in the past few weeks) have EVER had a real job.

Recall Jerry Ford and his [WIN] 'Whip Inflation Now' buttons. Another moron treating you and I like morons. I am an equal opportunity Dem/Republican basher, Ed.

Little Susie's lemonade stand business could teach these guys a few things.

Rant complete.

I was going to keep quiet on this but I need to put in my 2 cents. I attended a Small Business Conference in Miami last week sponsored by NAVSEA. The way they presented, it looked like they were seeking small businesses to be the avenue of the future for new products for the maritime arm of the government. The truth is that there is so much red tape involved that it makes it extremely difficult to get in. It almost seemed like a dog and pony show. I have e-mailed a couple of the presenters. I guess the truth will come out if I get responses from them. By the way, where are all the tax benefits promised to increase small business that is talked about so much by this administration? I haven't seen it. If someone has, please let me know.

Maybe the employees are just doing the amount of work they are supposed to do? If a company needed to hire people in order to get things done or produced they would hire people. When you have been going backwards as a company for 2 years, even when things turn around, it takes a long thing to get solvent again.