Ever notice that no matter how much technology improves, no matter how massive the yearly profits get, the people at ground level doing the grunt work always remain understaffed and/or under pressure?
We have more billionaires than ever before, yet the cost of living for the workers is steadily rising. Apparently, these businesses are raking in record profits, and they simply refuse to allow anything but the bare minimum to trickle down to where the work is being done.
A choice has been made that profits for the shareholders takes priority over all else – which translates into those huge salaries, bonuses and golden parachutes for the executives of course.
The workers that perform the tasks that produce the wealth are treated as just another cost. The customers? They must be appeased – just try not to waste too much money on it. “Waste” = anything that detracts from shareholder equity and is a nuisance that needs to be dealt with.
The profits keep rising. Technological innovations keep improving efficiency. You’d think that for the workers, this would result in better working conditions all round. You poor simple fools. Where do you think the money is coming from to create all these fucking billionaires? If they shared the wealth, they might only end up being pathetic multi-millionaires, and that is unacceptable!
Sure, all that extra capital would greatly improve the livelihoods of the employees. Trouble is that “livelihoods of the employees” is hardly an investment, is it? Those ungrateful bastards would just waste it and come back asking for more. The insulting irony is hard to ignore: the mega-rich with their ostentatious excesses see no hypocrisy in their insistence on frugality for the plebs.
Okay, what about workloads? If technological advances allow a team to complete a task faster, why not allow the workers to benefit from the assistance? No sooner has a new system proven that it improves efficiency, has the team lost a member. Meaning, as soon as management notices any consistent down time they are compelled to redirect any excess resources to another task.
Wow! That sounds close to corporate jargon. This is mostly a corporate issue remember. A boss that owns the business outright may or may not be a tight-ass slave driver; that’s their prerogative. A business that is beholden to shareholders is obligated to extract the maximum profit from the operation. A highly effective way of reinforcing this aim is to keep costs at a minimum – i.e. be a tight-ass slave driver.
If they do not require an increase in output and can do the same job with less labour, I’m sure you can figure out what happens next. It’s very difficult to find shareholders who are happy to receive lower dividends for the warm fuzzy feeling of knowing that the workers are being paid more than they’re worth. I’ll resist going down the fair wage rabbit hole and stay on track.
What about safety? I’m sure I’ve covered this in an earlier post. Accidents, injuries, death and environmental incidents are bad for business, surely. They are also impossible to eliminate completely. Therefore, you end up with an extremely callous gamble between cost and risk. I suppose you would also throw possibilities of fines and compensation payouts into that equation too; plus, the potential sums of money lost and cost of legal representation – they’ve got people for that.
Let’s just say that the shareholders are fine with cutting health and safety budgets if it improves the bottom line. It’s a gamble, but you know what they say, “the bigger the risk, the bigger the reward.”
I hope this helps flesh out the point I am aiming for: the rise in billionaires coincides with all the ruthless cost cutting crushing the worker ants who keep the corporations chugging along.
So, was all that talk about automation freeing up the workers and providing more time for life and family a lie? Who knows? It makes no difference now. The people with the power have tasted ludicrous luxury and obscene opulence and they fucking love it! Or they always knew they weren’t going to share the spoils. Probably a bit of both; either way the workers are fucked!
Thus, we have this perverse game of workforce Jenga. When they cannot justify increasing the price of their goods or services and have reached the threshold of market share, it’s time to start taking from the bottom.
Cost cutting, downsizing, streamlining, trimming the fat; call it what you like. The reduction will affect the day to day working life of the people at the bottom of the pyramid. You cannot expect the executives to give up their bonuses and perks!
“Business class! How dare you! First class all the way asshole! Look at all the profits I’m making!”
All this hoarding of profits and we are only looking at one arm of the avarice apparatus. The one that at least produces something of worth for the population. Something tangible like food, medicine, appliances etc. or essential services such as transport and infrastructure. Even frivolous stuff like toys, sweets and entertainment. The business produces wealth by selling something to the masses – good or bad.
The more sinister side of wealth generation operates outside the dimension of coherent supply and demand. The people who play with the profits. The alchemists of capital creation. The money “experts”. These sorcerers are a whole other species. More on them in the future.
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