Today, Wandering Mind, one of our very good Homespun Bloggers, gives us Part One of Three on Anti-Americanism in Europe.
By giving his employees a ‘piece of the action’, he said, he knew he could count on his employees loyalty and hard work. The Frenchman and his wife were aghast. They could not understand the employees allowing themselves to be so exploited and that even worse, those employees might somehow upset the balance if the company succeeded and others didn’t.
My friend then went on to say that Europeans regarded the working class as a ‘necessary class’ (read: not upwardly mobile) and that business succeeded on the stability of that class.
I remember Europe well in this regard. There is, to this day, a strong class system, although there are now fewer classes. When we speak of “class” in this country, it comes nowhere close to what the real meaning of that word really describes.