No, it's absolutely a strawman. The exploitation billionaires create isn't direct. The problem is that Billionaires amass this wealth while people beneath them struggle.
Jeff Bezos shouldn't be making 12-figure gains while his warehouse workers are on welfare. Those warehouse workers shouldn't be paying a higher tax rate than he does on their income.
That IS an unquestionably exploitive relationship between a CEO and his employees, even if he isn't personally being an exploitive monster he isn't doing anything about the systemic exploitation he lead the way in creating.
This is pretty much true of any billionaire, regardless of their personality or views.
The existence of billionaires is a economic luxury that should only be afforded once society as a whole has taken care of its people. The co-existence of billionaires and homelessness is an economic failure, especially when some billionaires possess more capital individually than the entire homeless population of this country.
And if, say, Jeff Bezos hired his warehouse workers as employees, paid them an inflation-adjusted minimum wage (eg about $25/hr), and offered real benefits, he and his company would still be making massive profits. That’s what makes it unethical and exploitative: They don’t actually need to be paid so little or treated so harshly for the company’s economics to work!
Henry Ford paid his workers shockingly high wages for the time, which enabled them to purchase the cars they built. A mass consumer economy ensued.
Given the state of consumer indebtedness now, I think our economy is actually underperforming because there is not enough demand due to low wages.
The problem with Fordism is that if you are a manager, there are strong incentives for your firm to defect from paying high wages. If you are the only firm doing this, the consumer economy still hums and you have larger margins. If all the firms do this however, consumers' spending power diminishes over time.
Once the tide has turned, defection becomes a matter of survival as high wage firms become uncompetitive.
Someone like Jeff Bezos has enough market power and technology to turn the tide again like Henry Ford. But he chooses not to.
we are beholden to someone with great power and wealth to be more fair; those who are under them dont have any kind of vote in the matter and therefore have little power to ask for more (whatever that may be)...
If Amazon hired warehouse workers at $25/hr would it still be making massive profits?
Amazon has 1.3M employees in the US and $11B in profit globally.
If you increase the wages at the bottom that pushes everyone up (why would a manager of the warehouse workers make less than the people they manage?).
So if you divide up that $11B in global profit across all 1.3M US workers, you get $8,700 per worker or maybe $500 extra per month after tax. A much appreciated boost by the folks at the bottom, but now global profit is $0.
I’m certainly not arguing against paying warehouse workers more. I’m just saying the “billions in profit” don’t go that far in a company the size of Amazon.
What if the warehouse workers outnumber the tech and managers 100:1? With >1 million employees, that ratio is likely pretty steep, in which case, even if all managers and tech workers were paid zero, it still wouldn’t move the needle for everyone else.
Because it's spoken like someone who has never dealt with human resources inside a company. The people making more money have more options - they'll just leave Amazon.
Each role has it's own supply and demand. You can arbitrarily start paying less for a role and not expect there to be a negative impact.
You (and others, evidently) don’t pick up on the tongue in cheek nature of the comment. We all know we can simply raise pay at the bottom without needing to cut (or inflate) anyone else’s pay. They are similarly absurd propositions.
They're paid in victory, which costs nothing and which you can't eat. That is fundamental to operating something like Amazon, which is designed to avoid switching into the 'rake in money' stage of capitalism as long as possible, in order to compete more harshly with other organizations that DO try to rake in money as soon as they can.
Amazon understands that in the context of organizations it stands to benefit from being seen as the meanest competitor, and that it can get public investment at scale by making this case. The argument isn't that it will hand more money to investors directly, it's that it will attack other things one can invest in, and make those things lose, and therefore it's the safe bet.
In so doing, the adoption of a crazy, aggressive, Spartan attitude among all its workers and management is beneficial, because the easiest way to convince the world you're a psycho axe murderer of a capitalist is to actually be one. In other words, 'making massive profits' isn't the end goal: 'killing other companies' is. And so, the workers do need to be paid that little and treated that harshly because every worker must be first a warrior, willing and able to trade away their health and well-being for the betterment of the company, and this goes all the way to Bezos, whom I'm convinced is going to live a shorter life than a billionaire might otherwise expect, from stress related damage. It's that or go soft and see his company go soft, and I think if he could do that there wouldn't be an Amazon as we know it: people will not follow a leader who doesn't at least pretend to represent what he is leading people towards, and Bezos is leading Amazonians to be warriors and throw themselves into the wood-chipper in order to destroy all competition.
They're paid more than they would be at easier, more civilized jobs. Part of the compensation is this emotional compensation intimately tied up in the American attitude, the cost-less, intangible compensation of knowing you are on the winning team. That is inherent to what Amazon is.
Jeff Bezos shouldn't be making 12-figure gains while his warehouse workers are on welfare. Those warehouse workers shouldn't be paying a higher tax rate than he does on their income.
That IS an unquestionably exploitive relationship between a CEO and his employees, even if he isn't personally being an exploitive monster he isn't doing anything about the systemic exploitation he lead the way in creating.
This is pretty much true of any billionaire, regardless of their personality or views.
The existence of billionaires is a economic luxury that should only be afforded once society as a whole has taken care of its people. The co-existence of billionaires and homelessness is an economic failure, especially when some billionaires possess more capital individually than the entire homeless population of this country.