ACWI | Volume 3, Issue 23 | November 30, 2015
One reason warehouse companies have seen healthy growth in the consumer packaged goods business in recent years is tightening trucking capacity, according to the Boston Consulting Group.
“CPG companies are now forced to take a defensive posture, building inventory to hedge against transportation shocks and longer transit times,” says a BCG research report sponsored by the Grocery Manufacturers Association.
Despite gains in forecasting accuracy, more than 60% of companies saw inventories grow in the past two years and inventory on hand rose on average by nearly four days, BCG finds.
DOL’s Perez Is Said Wrong on Union Pay
U.S. Labor Secretary Thomas Perez recently authored a blog post in which he claimed that workers represented by unions earn $200 more weekly than non-union workers.
“According to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the median weekly earnings for union members last year were $200 a week more than for non-union workers,” Perez wrote.
“That’s not pocket change – $200 a week is the difference between paying the bills and worrying about whether the lights will go out,” he added dramatically.
Diana Furchtgott-Roth, a writer for MarketWatch took issue with the secretary’s claim in a Sept. 2 article. Among the facts she cites:
Perez’s data does not separate public and private sector workers, and 40% of all union workers are government employees. This is significant because union membership is more concentrated in higher-paying public sector jobs.
With the exception of government workers, jobs in unionized industries are shrinking. Employment in the construction industry, for example, which has a higher percentage of unionized workers, has declined by 13% in the past 10 years.
In the professional and business services industry, where there is job growth, union workers earn less an average of $113 a week less. Also, union workers tend to be older, and thus earn more money as a result of their seniority.
More union workers are located in the Northeast where wages are higher to account for the higher cost of living. A worker in Georgia earns less than one in New York, but the cost of living is less there.
The misconception that union workers earn more than their non-union counterparts may be a myth unions don’t hesitate to perpetuate, but this analysis
Cybersecurity Forever
More than 20% of companies will have digital security services for protecting business initiatives using devices and services in the Internet of Things by year end 2017, according to Gartner, Inc.
“The IoT now penetrates to the edge of the physical world and brings an important new ‘physical’ element to security concerns. This is especially true as billions of things begin transporting data,” said Research Vice President Ganesh Ramamoorthy.