Who would have thought it?

That a time would come when workers were too expensive to keep around. Or that these same workers without jobs can't buy what's made cheaper by low-income people on the other side of the world, especially if the buyers have to pay the shipping costs to get the stuff back here.

Benefits, if they can still be called that are rapidly becoming a thing of the past. Pensions, while once a guarantee for those workers who devoted a lifetime of hard work and keeping a clean nose, are fading, simply being ignored or dumped on the government's “insurance program.” Money for that fund is hard to come by, what with so-called fiscal conservatives throwing too much tax money into pork barrels.

Health insurance is either gone or so watered down that the average worker can't afford to get sick, and even if the flimsy insurance policies now being offered do get a worker well, he or she will have to work the rest of their lives to pay for what the insurance wouldn't cover.

There is also the problem of serious miscalculations on the part of management, many of them making 200 to 400 times what their workers make. Their wrong guesses about what workers ought to be working on is leading to massive lay-offs and declarations of bankruptcy by companies once thought of as the best place in the world to work.

When it announced elimination of 25,000 jobs, Ford Motors said the old way of doing things wouldn't work in the future. It begs the question: work for whom? If you asked a thinking worker what's wrong, he could tell you in three words -- profits over product.

And the minimum wage in the U.S. is less than half of what most people know is a living wage. With each decade, we record the number of times a worker will change careers in a single lifetime -- it's now up to between five and seven times -- but we don't ever try to figure out why. That ought to be obvious, even to employers who whine about the absence of what was once called worker loyalty.

I think it was in the late 1970s-early ‘80s when I first noticed the shift away from viewing workers as a major resource in the economy. At the time, I worked for a state agency, so we were at the mercy of politicians bent on “cutting waste in government.”

Part of the workers' jobs in this agency was doing flights over very rough terrain, wilderness, in fact, to do surveys of the numbers of game animals in the various regions of the state.

The enemies of “tax and spend” set out to stop that, forcing agency workers to fly with low-bid pilots. After two crashes and the deaths of two workers, plus a third spending 36 hours in excruciating pain at a crash site before rescue flights (same low-bid pilots) could get him out, the legislators relented and allowed the agency to take higher bids.

In some cases, of course, workers ask too much of the companies they work for, but they learned this tactic from employers who, more and more, are asking too much of workers.

It is not the tragedy it has come to be viewed as for a company to dip occasionally into the red. Every company or business does it and always has. What's changed is that in the past, an employer could go to the workers and ask for more until both reach the black again. Today, however, that worker either isn't assured that his help will be appreciated, or he has gone two careers past the manager who's asking for the sacrifice.

It is unclear how long this wheel can spin before something flies off or the tiger turns into butter, but that point can't be too far in the future. The appearance of the product is ever more beautiful, but the quality is taking a seat closer and closer to the back of the bus.

Consumers, unwittingly it seems, contribute to the spin by blissfully consuming more of what they want and less of what they need. Many can no longer recognize quality; it has been so long since they've seen it. Plus, with continued job losses or the necessity of taking new jobs with scaled-back pay and benefits, the consumer will soon begin to fade the way jobs have faded.

It is astounding how many start-up businesses are making or selling items that no one actually needs, that are not required for a happy and comfortable life. It is doubly astounding the number who think profits will always grow and that there is no need to reinvest any of it in the company or business, not to mention the workers.

If the ever-faster spiral is ever to change, it won't happen in the marketing department nor in the board rooms of companies. It won't happen at the CEO level, among Wall Street analysts, nor in middle management. The only place the change can come about is in the human resources department.