An Injury to One is an Injury to All
The Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Morgan Stanley told their employees in New York that they must stop working remotely and, instead, go into the company’s offices to work.
He reportedly said this at a conference about financial payments and commercial real estate. His reasoning included allusions to more Americans being vaccinated. There was also some vapid statement about life slowly returning to normal.
In true 19th Century fashion he is quoted as stating, "If you can go to a restaurant in New York City, you can come into the office. And we want you in the office."
He apparently attended the remote meeting his office while wearing a suit and tie.
I could point out that I feel this is a heartless blustering by an individual who is out of touch with the world and technology (as well as fashion) but that mightwould be stating the obvious.
According to law a CEO must generate profit and provide investors with a return. If they do not they are subject to dismissal and someone who will do that will be put in their place.
I won’t dwell on how the current trend is for CEO’s to go beyond that and care for their workers and provide service to their customers because that’s all wrapped up in it. Most seem to concentrate on investor satisfaction only – which makes sense because most of them are investors in their companies themselves.
These plaintive cries calling for workers to return to the office point out several more problems with the entities known as corporations and with American business in general – at lease for the larger companies.
For a company as large, and so well financed (no pun intended) as Morgan Stanley one would expect that workers don’t need to go into the office. It would seem that such a rich company would have the wherewithal to ensure all of the employees can work not only from home but from anywhere they want to at any time they want to (for the most part).
In my opinion seeing such a corporation demanding that it needs its workers at an arbitrary office location to do work that does not require an office setting indicates a possible problem. The materials they deal with are mostly financial. The greater preponderance of it all can be done electronically. Except for some minor paper shuffling or face to face meetings with peers and parties with clients they don’t even need to have a busy office.
For all intents and purposes, if they had invested in the appropriate technology and still wanted to have a figurehead Morgan Stanley could have downsized all of their commercial real estate, set aside a corner office for Mr. Gorman all by himself. He would have to get fed so it could be arranged for a variety of breakfasts, lunches and dinners to be delivered to him each day. He could then appear at virtual meetings from behind his desk before a set of windows facing the walls of other buildings in Manhattan. He could also be provided a selection of suits and ties so he could switch them up all week.
Morgan Stanley, as an example only, is valued at around 165 Billion Dollars. This value has surged forward starting somewhere in May of 2020. It’s hard to say what they’ve been doing but a casual observer can see that a major transfer of wealth has been taking place in the United States and around the world over the last few years. During the Covid-19 Plague, however, the transfer seems to have taken on a frenzied pace.
The situation posed by Morgan Stanley is not unique. They are a monolithic corporation that deals in financial instruments of many kinds. Some of them may even be proprietary and that might be a reason to have to call everyone back. That would be a very serious problem. Many large American corporations were caught unawares of the needs posed by a tragedy like the Covid-19 plague and it made obvious that cost-cutting had gone way too far.
For example the distribution system for food was severely impacted early on in Covid-19 and even as it became clear that something horrible had happened to start all this the focus was on the availability of toilet paper and other paper goods. It expanded to major shortages involving drink, meat, grains and all groceries. At the same time large airlines, though restricted from going to and from certain places in the world were never grounded and continued to spread Covid-19 as their business model equates air travel to a bus service.
It is dangerous to bring all of those people back together again in New York City or any major city. It’s outdated and inefficient. Mr. Gorman and other CEO’s like him are bound by law and expectation to produce profit and growth of the company in order to benefit their investors. That’s just a plain fact. They could know that several of their staff will become sickened and perhaps die or infect others at work or at home but still, these CEO’s have a choice. If they want to keep their jobs they need to maximize profit.
My original point being that these companies are out of date in terms of really using the technology that should be available to them. They are showing a callous disregard to their employees and clients, the nation and the world. That is no surprise, however, as the Covid-19 plague has revealed that they have been behaving like that for decades and are responsible, for all their bluster and bullying, for the loss of real wages for American workers, the scarcity of reasonable medical insurance (and high medical costs especially in drugs) and the general instability of our economy and even our nation.
If they can’t conduct their business remotely in the modern world I wonder why are still conducting business at all. It was a bad idea to bail out these behemoths. It cut short the normal capitalist correction of our economy and ensured that people who should be orchestrating our financial system for the service and betterment of free business enterprise are stuck in the 1890’s where a suit, tie and a desk meant more than efficiency, clarity and real worth.
Don’t you think that enough is enough?
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