Finally, the wages they pay follow the same laws as the prices they charge. They pay their workers the least they can, either by law or because paying less would not attract the number of employees they require for operations. Just like every other business in the country. One point which seems to confuse the social justice battalion is this idea they seem to be stuck on that there is some sort of obligation or social contract which states that industry is obligated or intended to create jobs, and good paying ones at that. The fact is, job creation was never one of the driving factors in the evolution of industry. It was only a happy side effect. Business sees employees as expensive, problematic components in the corporate machine. (Sorry to be so harsh.) They get sick, they complain, they want raises, they make mistakes… robots are far preferable. But robots can’t do everything. One of the goals of any modern business model, I’m sad to say, is to reduce the number of employees to the minimum possible. All of these things render the McPoverty calculator pretty much irrelevant.
And that's how a whole hell of a lot of business owners (and Republicans in general) think. Employees are a detriment, a cost, a problem. They are a negative to be pared from a company's bottom line.
That social contract Jazz talks about used to exist in America. Unions made that possible on a large scale for millions of American workers. Then, somewhere along the line, employees became a business's greatest minus instead of the source of its growth and vitality. "Get away with as few workers and with as low pay as possible" became the rule in American business, and without unions to fight back, that became the new normal.
Henry Blodget strongly disagrees with that new normal.
This view, unfortunately, is not just selfish and demeaning. It's also economically stupid. Those "costs" you are minimizing (employees) are also current and prospective customers for your company and other companies. And the less money they have, the fewer products and services they are going to buy.
Obviously, the folks who own and run America's big corporations want to do as well as they can for themselves. But the key point is this:
It is not a law that they pay their employees as little as possible.
It is a choice.
It is a choice made by senior managers and owners who want to keep the highest possible percentage of a company's wealth for themselves.
It is, in other words, a selfish choice.
It is a choice that reveals that, regardless of what they say about how much they value their employees, regardless of what euphemism they use to describe their employees ("associate," "partner," "representative," "team-member"), they, in fact, don't give a damn about their employees.
I don't believe every business in the country operates like that, but nearly all of them do. Maybe we should be asking ourselves about why that is.
Interestingly, it also completely contradicts the "job creators" meme.
ReplyDeleteI'd actually agree that businesses hire as few employees as they can, for as little as they can, to achieve their business goals. This reality supports a government-mandated minimum wage. Just as we need environmental laws to prevent businesses from dumping waste into the air and water, we also need labor laws mandating businesses meet certain minimum standards for treatment of their employees.
Plus, treating one's employees as poorly as possible is usually not cost-effective. "Thou shalt not bind the mouths of the kine who tread the grain" is a good Bible quote in this regard - in a modern context: the high employee turnover resulting from treating people like garbage results in higher training costs and a less-motivated workforce.
The real problem, of course, is that many businesses at the low end of the spectrum view employees as disposable. If you've ever worked the lunch rush at a busy fast food restaurant, you know that's not true.