Changes in the Structure of Business Enterprise - Essay Example

Changes in the Structure of Business Enterprise Introduction There is a contrast to the mid of 20thcentury of business enterprise era, in which the European or US multinational manufacturing performed the vital role.In 21stcentury,business enterprises is rapidly structured by a set of supplying chains that are dominated by retail chains, for instance, that of Wal-Mart in the United States. However, this shift in the center of corporate power in business sector has arisen out of two circumstances: the first, the logistical integration made necessary and possible by the revolution in information and transportation technology sector and secondly, the neoliberal transforming of the political economy globally. However, this has come with its outcomes, for instance in the United States, this has facilitated the massive expansion of a very low-wage and the retail sector which depends on import of goods and services. In the coast of the republic of China, this structural transformation generated a big export-manufacturing booming. However, the worldwide supply chain linking the province of Guangdong to Bentonville and Arkansas became a rapidly fragile. This was because the process of employing of tens of millions of poor Chinese was no longer going to be smooth, especially under conditions of authoritarian governance1. Globally, the world of business and labor has existed for centuries. Globalization differs from that of the past few decades because of the contemporary role played by thechain of retailing business enterprise. They are in charge of markets by setting commodityprice as well asdetermining the global labor distribution and flowing of goods across continents. The retailers and marketers who stand at the apex of the buyer-driven global commodity chains of our day are best understood as brand marketers2. They do not make their products or goods. They offer designing services and advertisement, thus results to a market based on products of image and recognition. Actual manufacturing takes place in a worldwide set of independently-owned contract factories that purchase the raw materials, recruit and pay the workers, and oversee all aspects of the actual production process. This chain system is recent within the global of business enterprises but the output of more complex, capital intensive products, including high value aviation and computer parts are becoming significant link in these word wide supply chains3. Therefore, the main focus of the essay is to discuss how changes in the structure of business enterprise, the location of production, and the ideology and practice of management have made life difficult for workers, both in the U.S. and abroad. Then discuss the extent to which changes in the law, politics, and worker organization and consciousness have generated resistance. The evisceration of so many US goods-producing firms has entailed not just cheap labor competition from abroad, but a historic shifting of the power within the structures of world capitalism, to the retail sector which was initially manufacturing. Today, it is commanding the chain supplies in the world and directs the power labor of the working people whose condition reproduces exactly characteristic of only the most desperate people4. Currently, the era we are entering in, which a qualitatively high percentage of integrating production and distribution has started to shape again the entire buyer-driven worldwide commodities chain. Two trends have come up in the last decade, particularly in the region of Pacific Rim. This region is removing the boundary between manufacturing sectorand retail sector. There are emerging big retailing sector and the rapid growth of the correspondingly large factory contractors who serve them. These emerging changes and trends have resulted to vast new low wage earners, with a wide array of implications for labor struggles within the world of industries, business enterprises and transportation that sustains it5. For instance, majority of workers have constructed their dreams and their families and houses around working in companies and business enterprises. A good example, a trunk who hauled Radio Corporation of America television sets and parts between Indiana, and the Mexican borders heard the shocking advertisements that assembly business plant in Bloomington was to be shut down. Most of the workers had given all their energies, life and their blood most of the time. In most cases, they were obliged to work under pathetic conditions for many years and ages. Finally, they made a lot of people extremely wealthy and rich. However, management had given the workers the option of either to take a hefty cut of wages in order to sustain their jobs or to lose them6. Hatton, in his book, noted that the temp of industries’ and business enterprise degraded the employment. Majority of workers were viewed as being liabilities and this, however, dominated most management circles and discussion. Laborers wages and salaries were frozen, and there were massive layoffs of employees and the same time industries have been closed, and jobs moved abroad. Permanent employees were replaced by contingents of workers hence making access to benefits more difficult. The chances of getting a lifetime employment became a rare commodity. It was replaced by a state of job insecurities and myriads of unemployment challenges. Careers promotions collapsed, and the majority of workers found themselves at the bottom for long 7. There were also changes of law, and this created a policy vacuum. A good example is the change of American labor law. However, business enterprises such as the Wal-Mart took advantage of this and exploited it up to the maximum. The Wal-Marts provided low-wage retail operation and kept its logistics system non-union. Truck drivers and warehousemen made a union that wasin historic vigorously present, especially in Wal-Marts growth frontier which is located in Missouri, and this happened all through the years of 1970s. The workers in these centers were aware that wages and salaries were higher across the Missouri corridor, and they also knew that Wal-Marts tremendous growth was pushing them to their physical limit and exploiting them. However, organization of efforts and massive striking, therefore, took place in almost every Wal-Mart distribution center in the 1970s, and in Mexico and Clinton, Missouri union attempted tomount at two of the enterprise early discount warehouses as well. However, the management attempted to crush all these efforts by fighting the emergence of interracial unionism in the upper South in the 1940s, and a quarter century later, had been employed by the new cohort of antiunion meatpacking firms in Nebraska and Colorado, who were determined to keep Chicago-style unionism out of their territories. In later years Wal-Mart would develop an infamous Union Prevention Index for each store, designed to measure and track employee discontent, and if necessary, trigger the rapid deployment from Bentonville of a squad of antiunion executives skilled in the latest union avoidance techniques8. In addition, the results of conservative politics generated the terrain upon which retailers would flourish smoothly without obstructions on their ways. This was achieved through the collapse of the real value of the US minimum wage and disintegrating of the Wagner-era labor law, and the growth of a free trade regime. This has proved exceptionally beneficial to the conquests made by Americas new retail, for example, the Wal-Marts extraordinary success. The world integration of capitalism is a product of better technology and trans-Pacific currency readjustments. The generations of top executives have been groomed, innovative and energetic entrepreneurs, who quickly deployed each new generation of telecommunications computer software and hardware to build a system that can track, order, and price a tube of toothpaste from one end of the planet to the other9. There were also protests that were directed toward the national governments, local authorities, specific employers, and corrupt officials. For instance, they have not, and seem unlikely, to achieve the national character of the Solidarity movement that challenged the Communist regime in Poland a quarter century ago. They have a far more local, although hardly a parochial, thrust, seeking to pressure factory managers and provincial officials to live up to Chinese labor and environmental laws, as well as to the specific employment contracts and working condition promises which brought so many to Guangdongs business districts in the first place10. The protesters are fighting for the kind of democratic citizenship that will liberate them from a workplace regime that has left them in a purgatory half-stateless and half-free. As they push back against this system, they begin to crack the chains, supply chain as well as others, which have given businesses such as the Wal-Mart and its retail competitors such overweening power in the global economy11. Conclusion In conclusion, the changes in the structure of business enterprise, the location of production, and the ideology and practice of management, both in the U.S. and abroad, have made life difficult for workers globally. Majority of workers depended on employment wages to sustain their families and therefore cutting their wages brought a lot of challenges. In addition, the changes in the law, politics and worker organizations generated a lot of resistance.Groups of workers organized themselves by forming unions to resist some of those challenges they encountered. Bibliography Appelbaum, Richard, and Nelson Lichtenstein. "A New World of Retail Supremacy: Supply Chains and Workers Chains in the Age of WalMart." Journal of International Labor and Working-Class History 70, no. 1 (2006): 106-122. Cowie, Jefferson. Capital Moves: Seventy Year Quest for Cheap Labor. New York: New Press, 2001. 1-2. Hatton, Erin. The Ten Economy from Kelly Girls to Permatemps in Post-War America. Temple University Press, 2011. 1-6 Philip Goodman and Philip Pan. "Chinese Workers Pay forWal-Marts Low Prices," The Washington Post, February 8, 2004: 1-2. Gary Gereffi andMiguelKorzeniewicz, “The Organization of Buyer-driven Global Commodity Chains:How U.S. Retailers Shape Overseas Production Networks": Commodity Chains and Global Capitalism. 1994: 95-98. Sam Walton and John Huey, Sam Walton, Made in American: My Story. New York: Cambridge University Press,1992.162-163. Read More