During the recession, companies slashed work forces, cut or froze workers' pay and took other aggressive steps to reduce costs.
Over the last year, many employers have slashed work forces and reined in spending to spruce up earnings.
This is one of the area's few booming blue-collar industries, since most of Chicago's famous steel mills, meatpacking plants and factories have moved away in search of cheaper labor or have slashed work forces through automation.
"Inflation Blues," an album previously unavailable on CD, features slashing work by the trumpeter Baikida Carroll — and an effective vocal performance by Mr. DeJohnette, on the plaintive, reggae-slanted title track.
So, as Bob Pozen, a former president of Fidelity Management and the author of "Extreme Productivity," a book on slashing work hours, told me, "Time becomes an easy metric to measure how productive someone is, even though it doesn't have any necessary connection to what they achieve".
Cutting costs, slashing work force and developing technologies that could later be spun off as separate companies, was the new mantra at the company.
It says employers have slashed work shifts to pressure the union to cave in at the bargaining table.
"Branson was all about dissolving the home-slash-work disconnect, so the personal becomes the professional," he said.
But average weekly earnings have expanded by only 0.7percentt, less than the increase in the cost of living, because employers have slashed working hours.
As the city's budget is cut and programs are slashed, working people throughout New York will learn that they have to struggle to hold onto what they've got.
