Exactly. He is not the only person thinking this; he was just the only one who put his thoughts on paper. I remember when American capitalism was about succeeding by making other people successful. This kind of business - succeeding by sucking the blood out of your employees - should never be tolerated.
Henry Ford, capitalist extraordinaire, famously paid his workers $5 a day, double the average automaker's wage at the time. This extracted maximum value from said labor.
Has this actually been studied empirically? If you had to choose between paying your workers $1000 more and pocketing it, surely the latter option is the better one? Sure, they might use some of that money to buy your product, but they're not going to spend all of it, and after your own costs (eg. cost of goods sold), you're going to end up with less than $1000? How is that extracting "maximum value from said labor"?
Does it even need to be studied that heavily? What is India and China trying to do? They have massive billion people populations that are poor. Lift them into a lower middle class, voila, you have unmatched consuming class.
We’re going to lose this fight to these countries because our country cannot for a second think outside of squeezing the living hell out of a stagnantly growing 350 million person population. That’s why they squeeze you on home mortgages, rent, cars, salary, everything. They are squeezing because they see no fucking growth and that’s all these people understand. If the population isn’t scaling horizontally, they have no other creative ideas. It is unimaginable to them that an enriched 350 million Americans is as potent as a billion person population. We will actually go to your stupid diner and drop 50+ every week. Why are these people so fucking scared?
>Does it even need to be studied that heavily? What is India and China trying to do?
And how did they achieve it? By paying workers luxurious wages? The whole reason they're successful was that they industrialized and offered labor cheaper than the west, and the west outsourced labor to them. "Henry Ford, capitalist extraordinaire, famously paid his workers $5 a day, double the average automaker's wage at the time" has nothing to do with that's happening there.
Again, it’s how you see it. They brought jobs at mass scale there. We on the other hand, ship jobs out at mass scale, AND squeeze the people that are here. You can’t get away with both.
If your workers don't leave, enjoy their jobs, and do them well, how can you argue that's less valuable than Amazon worrying about running out of people to hire because they blow through workers like Patrick Bateman through homeless guys and coworkers?
My wife just left a manufacturing company because of the latter attitude, and they're fucked, because she was the only person left who could operate a 50s era prototype machine (that happens to make the only dry test slides in the world).
I'm fully aware this is anecdotal, but if that company had treated workers well, they wouldn't have to be asking people to come out of retirement to operate a machine. That's a loss of value for them.
Because they are humans that are not legal slaves. Happy employees don't quit, produce more and contribute to their community. In what way is denying all of that furthering anyone's agenda except the craven individual driving it?
Capitalism as a zero-sum game is myopic at best. Based on your comment I wouldn't be totally surprised to hear some esoteric argument to support the economic wisdom behind chattel slavery.
Civilization was created by people working together to survive, and then thrive. Throughout history it has been captured by strongmen annd enabled by fear. The US forgot the face of its father and started to concentrate on "Shareholder Value" insanity after Marshall Plan.
Pirate Equity firms swoop in and start dismantling all that was built for quick profits, not only destroying communities, but eliminating proficiency in all types of industry.
Do you think that pattern is valid, moral and what you'd want to achieve as an entrepreneur? I am curious and not trying to attack, is this the kind of idea you'd want promulgated into the future? How can that lead somewhere positive?
You seem to be arguing "companies should be nice to workers". I don't disagree that's a worthy goal in and of itself, but that's not what I'm asking/disputing. The whole idea of henry ford story is that paying your employees well benefits them AND the business, a win-win for all. The first part by itself (ie. "that paying your employees well benefits them") is pretty obvious and doesn't need discussing. My original comment is questioning whether the second part is also true, but your comment doesn't address that at all. If that can be proven, then we'll basically have zero opposition to eliminating poverty. Imagine: we get to lift people out of poverty AND billionaires get richer? Who can say no?
Ah yes, around the time of things like the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire, the Radium Girls, the battle for no child labor, legally segregated (by sex, religion, and race) jobs and education, and the Battle of Blair Mountain.
