All Episodes

April 18, 2024 16 mins

George Noory and author Les Leopold discuss how corporations layoff workers to boost stock prices and exploit employees, how companies pressure politicians to deregulate industries so they can layoff even more workers, and what happened to formerly massive companies like Sears, K-Mart and Bed Bath and Beyond.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Mark as Played
Transcript

Episode Transcript

Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Now here's a highlight from Coast to Coast AM on iHeartRadio.

Speaker 2 (00:05):
And welcome back to George Nori with Les Leopold's book
is Wall Streets War on Workers Less? You were about
to tell us a story before the break hit us.
You want to get into that.

Speaker 3 (00:15):
Well, I got to have a couple that I'd like
to tell you. One I'd like to tell you is
that these companies really are capable of people keeping people working.
Let me tell you the story of Seamen's Energy. Okay,
a couple of years ago, they decided to get out
of a certain part of their business. You know, I
have eighty thousand employees around the wheeld and they're going

(00:38):
to lay off seven thousand people, seventeen hundred in the US,
three thousand in Germany where they're based. Well, in the US,
all seventeen hundred workers lost their jobs, and I was
very heartbroken to see one of the plants go down
in only in New York, that's what they call the
Southern tier of New York, right above Pennsylvania spent a

(01:00):
hard hit area for years with plants going down. Well,
in Germany, what happened is they had this thing called
co determination where half the board of director seats are
held by workers. And this was a system that the
US basically encouraged Germany to do after World War Two

(01:21):
because they thought this was a way to keep Germany
from becoming you know, rearming in a bad way and
going fascist again, etc. So the US wanted this system. Well,
what happened in Germany is they negotiated, negotiated, and investigated, negotiated,
and finally Semens Semens agrees to keep all six of

(01:43):
these plants they are open, do no compulsory layoffs, only
voluntary layoffs, and put a new kind of put new
products into those six plants. So the towns around those
plants would suffer. So the same company didn't lay off
any body. They're laid off seventeen hundred people here. So

(02:03):
I know, this proves to me that large corporations have
the capacity to you know, rearrange the step chairs, put
something here, put something there. They don't have to do
compulsory layoffs. They do it because it's very profitable and
their Wall street backers want them to do it. That's
one story. The second story I want to tell you,

(02:24):
if you have a secure you know, think about this
for a second, you're in Pennsylvania, Western Pennsylvania. Your plant
goes down in a rural area, A thousand people are
out of work, and you're all scrambling look for the
few jobs that are available. If you and your neighbors

(02:44):
are now competing for all these jobs, it's very depressing.
But people are told, well, you know, your kids are
going to have it better. They're going to get involved
in the high tech sector, they'll get better jobs. Well,
last year, Georgia, touch this. They're the most the booming

(03:04):
high tech sector, right, the most profitable, you know, the
starship of the American economy during a boom, laid off
two one hundred and sixty two thousand workers, right and
so far this year another seventy thousand. And what they're
doing is they're using that money to reward their Wall

(03:26):
Street investors. They could keep all those people working, but
they're choosing to basically cash them in and then move
that money to the richest of the rich on Wall Street.
This has got to stop. And the underlying story here, George,
is that it's a real threat to democracy. People in

(03:47):
this country need to work, and they want to work.
Work is very important for people's own self work.

Speaker 2 (03:55):
It's prideful for these people.

Speaker 3 (03:58):
And it's a community of people. You're co workers, you
become part of it. When you take away a person's
ability to work, you are undermining their cold, the thing
that they need the most in their society. What goods democracy?
If I can't have a stable job for my family,
that's the thing I worry about the most. That it's

(04:19):
it's festering. It's been going on too long. We have
to address it. And you know, we talk about building
new jobs in the future, economic growth. That's not the
same thing as stability. You've got to stop laying off
these people right and left. It's bad for everybody when
you do that.

Speaker 2 (04:38):
You talk about the greed factor in your book, tell
us about that.

Speaker 3 (04:42):
It's funny. You know, we do these workshops all over
the country on economics, and I asked them, you know,
what happened? Why? Why? Why is it's all going on?
The first thing that people say is greed. The first
thing they say, I go greed with somebody. Just turn
on a switch, and all of a sudden, people got greedy.
Human nature changed. And I realized, you know, if I

(05:04):
sort of pooh pood what they said. And then I
started to think about it when I was putting this
book together, and I said, you know, they're right, because
what happened after nineteen eighty both with Republican and Democratic administrations,
is they deregulated Wall Street so that it was okay
to be greedy. You could buy up companies with borrowed money,

(05:29):
letoff workers, shut down facilities without any interference. You could
do this thing called stock buybacks, which was basically illegal
until nineteen eighty two, and now it's ubiquitous. Seventy percent
of all corporate profits go to stock buybacks, which is
really just sucking money out of a company moving it
to Wall Street. This was permitted, and a new philosophy

(05:54):
came out, which was that greed is basically.

Speaker 2 (05:58):
Good for us. What said good?

Speaker 3 (06:03):
I didn't take that seriously, George, until these workers educated me.
They said it's got to be greed, And it turns
out they were right. We stopped we look in During
the Great Depression, the government realized that you could not
let Wall Street run wild. If you let it run wild,
it would cause another Great Depression, another crash like thineteen

(06:24):
twenty nine. Well, that worked beautifully. From nineteen thirty three,
all the way till the nineteen eighties. We didn't have
any financial crashes, and we had the most booming economy
in the history of the United States during that post
World War Two period. But you know, a new generation
came in. They forgot those lessons. They said, look, if

(06:47):
we unleash industry, Wall Street finance will have another big boom.
And it looked like things were going to be fine
until people start to realize, oh my god, I have
no more jobs stability, I'm losing My jobs are being
lost in good times and in bad times. And underneath

(07:07):
it all was a literally a blessing for greed. If
the rich do well, will all do well? Well? How's
that worked out for us?

Speaker 2 (07:17):
Yeah, exactly. You know, when you look at the situation,
as you mentioned, the chief officer of the company feels
responsible when these layoffs occur. If they go ahead and
do these anyway, isn't it the entire executive team that
failed when you have to have a mass layoff.

Speaker 3 (07:40):
You would think, George, that that's the way they would
view themselves, and back in the sixties, seventies, early eighties,
that's exactly what they thought to it. They would do
anything to prevent that. You know, it's funny. I have
a story to tell you. My cousin, who's now retired,
was a real estate developmer. We had a little team

(08:00):
of people, you know, ten fifteen people. They did senior
citizens homes around Washington, d C. Developments. I said, normal,
what did you do when there was a recession? Did
you lay off people? He says, no, I didn't want.
I never wanted to lay off anybody. We found some

(08:22):
other way. We cut down time, we shared jobs, We
did anything possible because once I put a team together,
I was committed to that team. I never wanted to
lay anybody off. Well, he's an old school guy. He
was a kid that grew up in the nineteen fifties
and came of age in the sixties and became a businessman.
That was the attitude at that time. It became a

(08:43):
cultural norm, and that cultural norm has been destroyed now,
and that that's what's so dangerous. You know, this is
what got me about Overland College. They thought that this
was cool to lay off people. They didn't regret it,
you know, they didn't regret harming these people's lives. They
thought this was what a smart business person that ran

(09:04):
a college. This is what you should do. You've got
to be tough. So now instead of what you said, George,
now it's the opposite. You go to grad school and
business and you learn to be tough. You got to
lay off people good times and dad, you've got to
squeeze that company and you've got to reward your investors

(09:25):
through stock buybacks. And that's just the way the game
is played. Is you can't play that game. You shouldn't
be in this business.

Speaker 2 (09:32):
Who lets the companies, who let the companies less get
so fat?

Speaker 3 (09:39):
Well, both the Democrats and the Republicans more or less
colluded on this. First there was the Reagan administration, then
it was Bill Clint's administration. They start competing with each
other to deregulate Wall Street, and once you deregulate, they
will do whatever they can to make more money, which

(10:02):
led to that gigantic crash in two thousand and eight,
two thousand and nine. I wrote another book about that too,
and it was like embarrassing the kind of stuff they did.
But they would deregulated, and once it starts. I'm sorry
to say this, Georgia. This is the cynical side of
myself and I don't like to reveal it too often,
but there's a competition for Wall Street cash for your campaign,

(10:26):
right You want that big business money, so both parties
start competing for it. Number one. Number two, you know
your new and your staff. You start thinking about what
happens if I lose the election. Where am I going
to work? Well, there's huge openings in lobbying firms in
Washington that work for these big Wall Street firms. Their

(10:50):
jobs on Wall Street. I think they have their eye
on you know, if I leave government, I can go
work for Wall Street if I'm nice to them. And
the third factor, George, is they lofty. People think they're
the smartest people in the room all the time, and
I think a lot of politicians view them as they
really know what they're doing. You know, they're the gurus.

(11:11):
They are the people really understand how the world works,
so I have to listen to them. The combination of
those three things has been a disaster for us. We've
seeing wealth for the very few climb and climb and climbs,
and the average working person is dealing with incredible amount
of instability, economic instability. And you know, George, people like

(11:33):
you and I are lucky right, we're able to. I mean,
how long have you been doing this work?

Speaker 2 (11:39):
A long time, A long long time, And I've been.

Speaker 3 (11:43):
I started, I co founded our institute in nineteen seventy six.
It's the only job I've really had, so we're lucky.
But I've run into just hundreds and hundreds of people
have got gone through mats layoffs. In a workshop I
was doing with the steel workers people in the workshop,
I ask them, how many of you got through a

(12:03):
mass layoffs? Forty eight of them raise their hands and
it doesn't have gone through more than one. So you know,
this is a crisis, and it's not being talked about.
It's hidden under the table. Both political parties don't want
to talk about this because if they do talk about it,
they're going to their donors are going to get upsets.

(12:23):
So it's my job and I hopefully your listener's job,
to raise this issue. Mass Layoffs should not be taking place.
Corporations should should have an obligation to keep workers on
as long as possible. If they have to let them go,
they need to give them a package that's large enough
so they voluntarily leave, no forced layoffs. If they need

(12:44):
to do it in Germany. They can do it here,
same corporations, you know, it's not like they're different. And
by the way, Germany is more export oriented than we are,
so you think they'd be worried more about their costs.
It's not that expensive. You just can't do as many
stock buybacks. You can't do one hundred billion dollars worth
of stock buybacks. You know, maybe only have to do

(13:06):
ninety billions and use that ten billion to take care
of your workers. It can be done, George, but there
has to be a will, and your listeners have to
force corporations and politicians to start taking them Seriously. We
want job stability. I think everybody deserves that in America.

Speaker 2 (13:25):
Well, that's what happened to the companies like Sears, Robot, Kmart,
J C. Penny. Was it mismanagement or was it Amazon
dot Com that got them?

Speaker 3 (13:36):
Well, I can tell you the story of a similar company,
two of them Toys r Us and dead Bath and Beyond.

Speaker 2 (13:43):
Oh yeah, theyd Bath just bit the dust, didn't they.

Speaker 3 (13:48):
Yeah, thirty thousand workers and what happened there was they
basically milk the company. They saw the competition for Amazon,
but rather than create, you know, spend the money to
create a good online presence, a platform and all the
advertising everything has to go with it. They decided to
do gigantic stock five backs, literally took billions of dollars

(14:13):
out of the company to try to jack When you
do that, you jack up the price and the shares.
The people, you know, the investors that the Wall Street
investors that make a bundle, they sell their shares and
the companies left high and drive. They did that enough
until the whole place collapsed. I'll be writing about this
next week Wednesday on my sub stack. That very story.

Speaker 1 (14:35):
Another one.

Speaker 3 (14:38):
Which is Toys r Us, another New Jersey based company.
This one happened with the other set of villains, and
those those are the private equity companies. Three of them
got together and they they bought up Toys Rus using
a ton of borrowed money, like at least ninety percent

(14:59):
of the price was borrowed money. And then of course
they put that borrowed debt that's dead onto Toys r Us,
so the debt service went blind through the roof. And
after they then paint themselves the the the private equity
companies paint themselves out huge managemencies milk the company and

(15:21):
then the thing just collapsed. So this I don't know.
I've got to be honest with you. I don't know
the story of Sears and Kmart as well as I
know these two stories. But tens of thousands of companies
have been bought up with borrowed money put on those
companies then leading towards layoffs. Look, some of it is
the turning of you know, the marketplace, the shifts of

(15:46):
what consumers want, et cetera. But a lot of it,
a lot of it is this incredible what I call
financial script mining, literally stripping out the wealth of the company,
putting it in the investors pocket. I'm leaving the company
and its workers high and dry.

Speaker 1 (16:02):
Listen to more Coast to Coast AM every weeknight at
one a m. Eastern and go to Coast to coastam
dot com for more

The Best of Coast to Coast AM News

Advertise With Us

Popular Podcasts

Dateline NBC
Stuff You Should Know

Stuff You Should Know

If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.

The Nikki Glaser Podcast

The Nikki Glaser Podcast

Every week comedian and infamous roaster Nikki Glaser provides a fun, fast-paced, and brutally honest look into current pop-culture and her own personal life.

Music, radio and podcasts, all free. Listen online or download the iHeart App.

Connect

© 2024 iHeartMedia, Inc.