I will freely admit that I'm pretty severely radicalized by the ongoing big tech shenanigans, but it just angers me SO much that a company can announce mass layoffs and record profits in the same...
I will freely admit that I'm pretty severely radicalized by the ongoing big tech shenanigans, but it just angers me SO much that a company can announce mass layoffs and record profits in the same damn breath. And then in the next breath, they quite often request tax breaks and preferential treatment, because they are JOB CREATOOOOOOOORS...
Makes my blood boil, in part because I feel completely powerless and unable to do anything about it.
This is the logical conclusion of the capitalist growth mentality – once they dominate the market, they have to cannibalize the employees and/or the customers, otherwise the line won't go up.
This is the logical conclusion of the capitalist growth mentality – once they dominate the market, they have to cannibalize the employees and/or the customers, otherwise the line won't go up.
I think that line of argument proves too much: There are too many companies that don't cannibalize, do the mass layoffs and so on, for the sake of medium- and long-term profits to sensibly ascribe...
I think that line of argument proves too much: There are too many companies that don't cannibalize, do the mass layoffs and so on, for the sake of medium- and long-term profits to sensibly ascribe this behavior as a failure of "capitalist growth mentality".
Or that the behavior necessarily follows from the current state of affairs.
It's clearly at least in part an issue of lawmakers not doing their jobs and creating sensible regulations of employment, taxation and so on.
That's demonstrably the case. Letting elected politicians off the hook because of irresponsible business legislation is exactly what both businesses and politicians want. Because then we're sure the regulations won't change, and folks will just be angry in the future, while the right pockets get stuffed.
I'm equally sure that blaming "capitalism" for the failures of our politicians means losing a huge part of the audience/electorate we need on board to have the politicians make the needed changes.
I agree that there is some theoretical flavor of capitalism that doesn't practice these kinds of things, but what we see in the US is this kind of behavior all the time. As for (publicly traded &...
I agree that there is some theoretical flavor of capitalism that doesn't practice these kinds of things, but what we see in the US is this kind of behavior all the time.
As for (publicly traded & startup) companies that don't practice this or don't appear to, I think it's only a matter of the stage of the company. First they are very generous with both their employees and their customers in order to conquer the market. Then once they've reached saturation in the market, they have to go somewhere else for profit. Sometimes this means layoffs and "efficiencies" with employees. Sometimes it means cannibalizing the customer base. Anybody who is beholden to stockholders or a board of investors who want 100x returns is going to be forced into this or replaced with someone who will do it.
I think either of these strategies is more common than innovation and new products because there's less risk in it. The new thing has to be successful, and if it is not, the line goes down. It seems like there is a playbook somewhere for the customer and employee cannibalization process.
As for the relationship between politicians and businesses that leads to weak labor protection, I agree it is problematic. But I see regulatory capture as a strategy of capitalism as practiced in the US.
I don't think there's much ground to be gained by calling it something other than a problem with capitalism since any kind of basic improvement of the human condition in the US is regularly characterized negatively by its detractors as socialism or communism anyway.
Why wouldn't we blame capitalism for the failures of government when government is so clearly controlled (to a significant degree) by capital? Lawmakers aren't failing because they're earnestly...
Why wouldn't we blame capitalism for the failures of government when government is so clearly controlled (to a significant degree) by capital?
Lawmakers aren't failing because they're earnestly trying and in their incompetence they just can't make it work. They're failing because they're part of a system that, over time, has become an apparatus to serve capital. It won't let them control it.
That said it's not binary, lawmakers haven't completely lost their ability to reign in companies, as the current administration has shown. It's also shown, though, that there are some industries you don't touch, and on the whole the money keeps getting sucked to the top, where it can further influence lawmakers.
I'm ok with not labeling capitalism as the core problem. It's the best economic system we have. We could blame the founders for failing to create a system less susceptible to capture. Or we could blame any number of people along the way who could have pushed for changes before it was too late.
But either way, when you have free markets and you don't regulate them aggressively enough, this is what you eventually get.
IMO it's important to be clear about the problem if you hope to fix it.
But that's like saying that it's the animal handler's fault for not isolating the lion, keeping it well fed and making sure it's not exposed to any stimuli; it's not the lion's fault that it...
It's clearly at least in part an issue of lawmakers not doing their jobs and creating sensible regulations of employment, taxation and so on
But that's like saying that it's the animal handler's fault for not isolating the lion, keeping it well fed and making sure it's not exposed to any stimuli; it's not the lion's fault that it maimed 12 people.
Which yeah OK sure, but baked into that is the axiom that that's what lions do, they eat people so work your way around that. Not sure how well this maps to completely man-made and controlled financial systems. Seems like accepting that capitalism needs to be treated like a wild animal or a fire. Keep it under very tight control or people get hurt.
I'd say it maps pretty well. Making money, i.e. maximizing profits, is what companies do, it's their raison d'être. It's what differentiates them from *non-*profits. And sure, there are obviously...
Not sure how well this maps to completely man-made and controlled financial systems.
I'd say it maps pretty well. Making money, i.e. maximizing profits, is what companies do, it's their raison d'être. It's what differentiates them from *non-*profits. And sure, there are obviously still people in charge of these companies, but that doesn't mean they don't take on a certain life of their own.
I recently saw a comment somewhere here on tildes that made a very good point: companies are under evolutionary pressure to maximise profitability. Those that do not, get outcompeted by those that do.
Your penultimate sentence is incidentally exactly the way I usually frame capitalism: as a fire, an energy source, an engine that we can use to drive our society. And like with any energy source, you need to control and contain it, you can*'t* [edited to be negated as intended ] just set it up with no limitations in place, leave it to its own devices and go suprised_pikatchu_face when it goes wrong.
You wouldn't (I assume) call a burned down house an instance of "late-stage-pyrophilia" just because someone left an uncontained candle unattended. You would call it negligence.
Same thing with capitalism. There will always be ruthless people that will use every available opportunity to maximise their profits, damn the human costs. As such it is the duty of the government to pass and enforce laws and regulations that punish those people who use those ruthless practices. And for all of us that live in a democracy, it is our duty to elect politicians that pass those laws and hold them accountable if they don't.
It sounds like we're in complete agreement but disagree on the phrasing. I "blame capitalism" because usually "don't blame capitalism" means "capitalism is awesome and everything it does is...
It sounds like we're in complete agreement but disagree on the phrasing.
I "blame capitalism" because usually "don't blame capitalism" means "capitalism is awesome and everything it does is awesome". I agree that it's a tool that if left unchecked its very nature will lead to destruction.
The irony being that in the long run, that’s gonna make the line go down hard. And stay down. Why is it that these idiot MBAs are blind to anything beyond the immediate short term? They’re...
The irony being that in the long run, that’s gonna make the line go down hard. And stay down.
Why is it that these idiot MBAs are blind to anything beyond the immediate short term? They’re sabotaging their own companies.
I think it's a common strategic mistake to view engineers as interchangeable laborers who produce X units of software per day, rather than as professionals and repositories of institutional...
I think it's a common strategic mistake to view engineers as interchangeable laborers who produce X units of software per day, rather than as professionals and repositories of institutional knowledge. Or the executives know but don't care because even if the software degrades in the long run, they'll be rich and kicking it in nice homes in Tahoe, Santa Barbara, or Atherton.
No offense to oversea engineers or developers, there are good ones (especially the ones who immigrate to the west), but from my experience the median one is quite bad.
It's my mom's experience too: she spent her entire career working IT for large traditional corps that thought they could save millions by firing those pesky, expensive American programmers and replacing them with cheap Indian programmers whose resumes looked good on paper. Of course, those projects rarely panned out: the outsourced programmers lacked institutional knowledge and context, and communication and technical skills to discuss and understand the specs. A few projects were returned as total garbage spaghetti, completely not to spec, and had to be discarded in their entireties, wasting millions of dollars and pushing back timelines by multiple quarters; but my mom was always the one they tapped to save the projects somehow.
The sad thing is someone wrote a famous book railing against that mentality...in the 70s. So nothing has changed. It's called The Mythical Man Month, and it has some very useful insights often...
I think it's a common strategic mistake to view engineers as interchangeable laborers who produce X units of software per day, rather than as professionals and repositories of institutional knowledge.
The sad thing is someone wrote a famous book railing against that mentality...in the 70s. So nothing has changed.
It's called The Mythical Man Month, and it has some very useful insights often applied to planning and managing software projects, though not as often as they should be.
I'm so the opposite. I've hired indians and Americans in the last year and the Americans are just generally awful engineers. Cheap labor is cheap regardless of where you pay for it. But expensive...
I'm so the opposite. I've hired indians and Americans in the last year and the Americans are just generally awful engineers. Cheap labor is cheap regardless of where you pay for it. But expensive labor in the us I find is pretty shitty.
They come in and are gone in three years. It's the same way engineers tend to hop companies for pay increases...only that environment of short term thinking and not investing in employee growth is...
They come in and are gone in three years. It's the same way engineers tend to hop companies for pay increases...only that environment of short term thinking and not investing in employee growth is fostered by the execs who bounce from company to company, making cuts and celebrating the "growth" they create while hacking away at the foundation.
I think there is awareness of the problem, but that the people making these decisions will have divested their interest and made their money by the time that happens. If you have a company that...
I think there is awareness of the problem, but that the people making these decisions will have divested their interest and made their money by the time that happens.
If you have a company that does something well and cares about doing it well, they are going to want to avoid doing things that will interfere with that vision.
When the company vision becomes incidental to making profit, merely a means to an end, then this behavior is completely in line with that vision. That's exactly what venture capital is. Just don't believe the hype that the company exists to make things better and make money. People, even the founders, might believe they are not just in it for the money, but as soon as the hard choices hit, and they start choosing money over vision, know that nothing is safe.
They’ll have cashed out long before then. Their ownership stakes only vest in the immediate short term (or they have enough from the early returns that the potential increase in long term wealth...
They’ll have cashed out long before then. Their ownership stakes only vest in the immediate short term (or they have enough from the early returns that the potential increase in long term wealth doesn’t mean much as front loading a smaller golden parachute)
It sounds like they're keeping the headcount though. Just outsourcing it. I'm an American working in Asia for a company wih an American tech branch, and generally the employees from it suck. They...
It sounds like they're keeping the headcount though. Just outsourcing it. I'm an American working in Asia for a company wih an American tech branch, and generally the employees from it suck. They can't learn or grow or adapt, and they frequently expect us to optimize for their happiness over getting things done (i.e. "I don't feel fulfilled working on <x> so you need to find someone else" rather than just "yeah, I'll put in the boring work to get my paycheck so I can enjoy my life"). Ive hired a shit load of indians in the last few years who are soooooo much better. It's fucking night and day. Im not surprised to see tech investing more there.
I see this as another form of enshittification. Once you've maximized profits via legitimate/moral (?) mechanisms, the only remaining options are then illegitimate or immoral. As you say, the...
I see this as another form of enshittification. Once you've maximized profits via legitimate/moral (?) mechanisms, the only remaining options are then illegitimate or immoral.
As you say, the market rewards constant growth and punishes the opposite. And so...
It’s easier to understand when you realise this is fallout from the TCJA from Trump that went into effect before layoff period. The TCJA forces tech companies to treat salaries as capital...
It’s easier to understand when you realise this is fallout from the TCJA from Trump that went into effect before layoff period.
The TCJA forces tech companies to treat salaries as capital expenses, depreciating over five years. Which means that before, they could inflate salaries and pay less in taxes (makes sense, you’re passing the profits to the employees essentially). Now, anyone with an inflated salary is a financial threat to the company, despite record profits. So… they lay off en masse.
Do not let people forget this is Trump’s crusade against big tech that caused this shit. And it was set to trigger after his presidency ended.
I hear you. I've been moving in the same direction for years now. As these companies suck and suck while proving less and less value to consumers and employees.
I hear you. I've been moving in the same direction for years now. As these companies suck and suck while proving less and less value to consumers and employees.
And more specifically, that CEOs, even after they have left, aren't personally held accountable for this. Even if it wasn't their direct decision, they were at the helm. You created X jobs, and...
And more specifically, that CEOs, even after they have left, aren't personally held accountable for this.
Even if it wasn't their direct decision, they were at the helm. You created X jobs, and that gave you Y tax breaks. Now you're taking N jobs away, so you're liable for M amount of money to pay back.
I'm trying to understand the significance of these articles. I'm just not seeing how "company lays off 0.1% of its workforce" is newsworthy. The last article was about laying off a team with less...
I'm trying to understand the significance of these articles. I'm just not seeing how "company lays off 0.1% of its workforce" is newsworthy. The last article was about laying off a team with less than 10 people. Certainly it's impactful to those it affects directly, but from a business standpoint it's a nothing burger reorg kind of move. Don't these kinds of things happen all the time with other companies? What's news about this other than it's about a tech company, and tech layoffs seem to be a popular narrative right now?
I'm biased since I work in tech, but I think one reason for interest here is that tech (and certain FAANG in particular) are viewed as not just regular companies. These companies claimed that they...
I'm biased since I work in tech, but I think one reason for interest here is that tech (and certain FAANG in particular) are viewed as not just regular companies. These companies claimed that they would not be traditional entities obsessed with nickel and diming but instead have real transformative impact on the world. Seeing that veneer be pulled away is shocking or vindicating and thus generates more interest than other companies doing the same or worse since it's expected behavior for them.
I feel like that's a bit of a non sequitur. I just don't see how being a transformative tech company means you will never have layoffs. I can see disappointment in decisions they're making that...
I feel like that's a bit of a non sequitur. I just don't see how being a transformative tech company means you will never have layoffs. I can see disappointment in decisions they're making that would conflict with "don't be evil," but whether they are doing interesting or non-evil tech things doesn't have much to do with whether they will find it beneficial to reduce staff at times.
The business perspective IMO doesn't help though. To each individual life now distraught due to having to quickly find a new job, it doesn't matter (much) whether 9 or 900 other people lost their...
The business perspective IMO doesn't help though. To each individual life now distraught due to having to quickly find a new job, it doesn't matter (much) whether 9 or 900 other people lost their jobs. Hence, the human impact is essentially scaled the same, just multiplied for each person impacted.
And hence the obligation for companies to be held responsible ought to not be based on their own size when it comes to criticizing them for each life impacted. Whether the company is 50 big or 500000 big, 10 people left without a job are 10 people left without a job who are now - potentially - struggling.
If anything, scale it with the amount and the monetary worth of the C-suites and board members, in effect making it so that the fatter the management is with money, the more they're on the hook for the problems they cause.
Remember friends, this is why the struggle against capitalism is international. So long as the capitalist can exploit weak labor protections in another country, be that minimum wage laws, laws...
Remember friends, this is why the struggle against capitalism is international. So long as the capitalist can exploit weak labor protections in another country, be that minimum wage laws, laws that protect working conditions, or even environmental laws effecting their mode of production, no job is safe.
Until capitalism is abolished globally, all of our livelihoods are at risk. The obvious first step is to fight it at home, but do not forget that is only the beginning.
Thats why open borders are essential if we want to leverage the good bits of global trade in an equitable way. Labor needs to be able to move as freely (if not more freely) than capital. We only...
Exemplary
So long as the capitalist can exploit weak labor protections in another country
Thats why open borders are essential if we want to leverage the good bits of global trade in an equitable way. Labor needs to be able to move as freely (if not more freely) than capital.
We only have a border crisis because of this inequality of labor.
Exactly right. Borders and passports are only a thing for the working class and the poor. The wealthy can always go wherever they please. I was thinking the other day about the whole Mexico border...
Exactly right. Borders and passports are only a thing for the working class and the poor. The wealthy can always go wherever they please.
I was thinking the other day about the whole Mexico border discussion, an interesting twist one might add when discussing people who favor shutting down that southern border might be to point out that would prevent people in the US from leaving. Like when Ted Cruz went to Tijuana while his state was in a black out. I wonder what people might say when they can't go vacation in Baja or the Yucatan.
I'll take issue with this because people aren't fungible units of labor that move wherever needed. They have families, friends, and communities which immobilize them by choice or necessity. It's...
I'll take issue with this because people aren't fungible units of labor that move wherever needed. They have families, friends, and communities which immobilize them by choice or necessity. It's not just borders and migration controls; most people wouldn't become itinerant labor given other options.
One of the grossest inequities is that wealth and work are so geographically concentrated. I'll agree that capital can quickly arbitrage costs across borders when workers aren't equally mobile. However, it's just another uncompensated cost to labor when the expectation is that people will move where our capricious masters care to create jobs.
This is the true origin of rural resentment - the constant uprooting and separation of families and destruction of communities.
I mean, what you describe is happening now anyway. It will continue to happen until such time that there is never any need to relocate factories or mines. Eliminating the invisible fences just...
I mean, what you describe is happening now anyway. It will continue to happen until such time that there is never any need to relocate factories or mines. Eliminating the invisible fences just levels the playing field for the people whom are already being excluded.
How would livelihoods be less at risk "without capitalism"? Answer: They wouldn't be. Livelihoods being unreasonably at risk stems from insufficient labor regulation in a host of areas. Employers,...
How would livelihoods be less at risk "without capitalism"?
Answer: They wouldn't be.
Livelihoods being unreasonably at risk stems from insufficient labor regulation in a host of areas. Employers, irrespective of whether they're public, private, in competitive sectors or non-profit areas all have the same problems.
In the US, at will employment and other employer rights for firing people willy-nilly have nothing to do with capitalism. It has to do with poor regulation, a flawed democracy and an electorate that collectively elects politicians with deficient values.
The root cause here is not the economic system.
Changing the economic system will not fix the core issue, or lack of labor rights for anyone.
In companies that are collectively owned(AKA co-ops), the workers are the ones who make the decisions about everything. One of the largest examples of this is the Mondragon Corporation in Spain....
How would livelihoods be less at risk "without capitalism"?
In companies that are collectively owned(AKA co-ops), the workers are the ones who make the decisions about everything. One of the largest examples of this is the Mondragon Corporation in Spain. It is a gigantic corporation that is completely owned by its employees. It operates in many sectors, kind of like a smaller Samsung. If one sector of the corp isn't doing so well and doesn't need many man hours, people are retrained and moved to other parts of the corp. They even have their own university to educate their own people. Please look more into it yourself, it's pretty unique and interesting way to run a company. I think that's a really good system that introduces the ability to weigh people's livelihoods against the need to turn a profit. Wages are flatter, the profits more evenly distributed. Company coffers aren't simply plundered for profit.
Answer: They wouldn't be.
Livelihoods being unreasonably at risk stems from insufficient labor regulation in a host of areas. Employers, irrespective of whether they're public, private, in competitive sectors or non-profit areas all have the same problems.
What regulation would you introduce that would permanently resolve the tension between the worker who needs to maintain a certain standard of living, and the owner(capitalist) who wants to maximize their profit? I personally don't think there is one. Unions are nice, but it doesn't go nearly far enough. The management and owners need to go, and let the workers run the business and reap the full benefit of their work. In my view, that's the only way to resolve that tension, is when the owners and the workers are the same.
In the US, at will employment and other employer rights for firing people willy-nilly have nothing to do with capitalism. It has to do with poor regulation, a flawed democracy and an electorate that collectively elects politicians with deficient values.
Actually it has everything to do with capitalism, it's the result of a power imbalance that gave the business owners(capitalists) the ability to write their own rules. People don't elect politicians, money does.
The root cause here is not the economic system.
Changing the economic system will not fix the core issue, or lack of labor rights for anyone.
Theoretically, changing the economic system, as in changing from Capitalism to Socialism or Communism, would presuppose a government in support of that economic system. Again, theoretically, a socialist government would ensure that there were no privately owned corporations, therefore ensuring every worker a voice in their own work. So yes, switching to another economic system would ideally bring labor rights with it.
There's a lot to unpack in your comment. Here are two major topics: Several systems to balance power between employees and employers exist. One of the most successful ones specifically deals with...
There's a lot to unpack in your comment. Here are two major topics:
Several systems to balance power between employees and employers exist. One of the most successful ones specifically deals with introducing the third party formally: government. This is the basis of the Nordic model.
Being public-run doesn't ensure employer rights. Quite the contrary. Some of the least secure jobs are in the public sector because they rely on budgets being passed right before they finance the future livelihoods of workers.
The Tripartite system or Nordic Model
What regulation would you introduce that would permanently resolve the tension between the worker who needs to maintain a certain standard of living, and the owner(capitalist) who wants to maximize their profit?
The Nordic model, or tripartite system. The tension is resolved through regular, regulated and continuous negotiations between the three parties in the employment sector.
The model acknowledges that government and regulations are foundational issues for resolving the tension between employers/owners and employees/workers.
As such, government is actively introduced into the Nordic model in wage negotiations, labor negotiations, pension reform and pension systems, vacation rights and on and on.
As worker organizations and employer organizations are actively part of the negotiations, they need to make things work too. They have to be party to talks as they're responsible to society for regulation, for workable rules, for avoiding hurting third parties with damaging strikes/lockouts, for losing out to international competition because working conditions are too expensive or too bad to recruit the workers needed.
As government and the public is a huge employer, they are also forced into the system to take care of public workers so they retain rights voters otherwise wouldn't grant them (who doesn't want public services to be as cheap as possible in ways that force unreasonable working conditions on public workers to have more tax-money to fund other services or cut taxes?)
I highly, highly encourage reading this report from 2015 that outlines in detail how and why this system works and why this leads the Nordic countries to have some of the very best working conditions in the world, while also having highly, highly profitable companies on the cutting edge in many industries:
So in short: the working conditions do not have anything to do with capitalism being the economic system. It has everything to do with regulation.
I want to highlight that the Nordic (tripartite) model is only one of many successful models that don't leave a huge power imbalance in favor of owners/employers at the expense of employees.
The US is one of the largest failures here, with the fewest protections for workers. Many Americans simply cannot envision a regulated, capitalist society and so they blame their failings of regulation on capitalism.
Public-run doesn't ensure worker rights
Many have things backwards: Often it's public workers that have the most pressure from their employers in terms of efficiency, poor working conditions and having little impact on their work lives.
Public budgets mean decisions made often late in December leave those working on public projects or in public functions without jobs on January 1st.
Socialist and communist systems have been places where some of the most ruthless employee conditions have been normal.
What does this tell us?
As stated in my previous comment: The issue isn't the economic system. The issue is labor regulation and an imbalance of labor rights.
Many capitalist systems have regulations that crush efficient organization of labor into unions, while the same regulations leave owners/employers empowered. Many people do not recognize the importance of being in a union.
It's obvious that company leadership stands to gain when they can set employees up against each other to divide and conquer as one single, strong unity, while workers fight among themselvs for their own personal goods. Standing together, workers are empowered to get their fair share of earnings.
Or these same workers, with proper regulations, can strike in ways that in the extreme can bankrupt their employer. Everyone's in the same boat, so everyone is responsible for the ship not sinking.
These two things leave us where we started: at the assertions I made in my previous comment.
Thank you for the thoughtful reply! I hope you'll forgive my delayed reply, I need to be in a certain mindset to write like this. I definitely didn't want to leave you hanging. First thing I want...
Thank you for the thoughtful reply! I hope you'll forgive my delayed reply, I need to be in a certain mindset to write like this. I definitely didn't want to leave you hanging.
First thing I want to point out, is it appears that you're either conflating or confused about collective ownership and public ownership. When I speak about collective ownership, I am not talking about government run entities. I am talking about entities that are entirely owned by their workers. Again, I implore you to learn a bit about the Mondragon Corporation to give you an idea of the possibilities that exist with collective ownership. Re-read my comment, I never said the words publicly owned.
I appreciate the level of detail you offer on the Nordic model, it's not something I have gone super in depth about but seems to have some promise of keeping the worst tendencies of capitalism at bay. I think it has its place in a transition toward the world I envision, where all workers are also owners in their workplaces, but I want to circle back to my original point regarding the broader struggle against capitalism.
The fact that there are countries which are capitalist, with few regulations, anywhere on Earth means that if a company doesn't like how the laws of say, Norway, they can simply choose not to operate there. There is nothing preventing that. This is what I mean when I say the struggle against capitalism is international.
The implications of this essentially nullify any benefit of that system outside of Norway. Now you may say, let's make the whole world operate under this system. To which I would say if we are going to go that route, of a single global economic system, to me Socialism or Communism would be greatly preferable. This is due to the creation of a class of people(owners) separate and distinct from the workers under the Nordic system. It is inevitable that once this class exists, they will accumulate money and influence and slowly dismantle this system. This cannot happen under Socialism or Communism because the ownership class does not exist. They are the same as the workers(under socialism) or the citizens(under communism).
Take a moment to consider how Norway was able to get this system into place. It's not because their ownership class is nicer and said "OK we'll make less money just because you guys are cool." It's because Norway is very rich in natural resources, and very early on, their government stepped in and created a sovereign wealth fund in order to provide for itself and its citizens. This gave the government of Norway(AKA the people of Norway; Norway is democratic) the power over the corporations to impose this system on the corporations. And it gives the government of Norway the power to continue under this system. Power that also resists from outside. You had better believe that there are capitalists all over that would love a piece of Norway's pie. A piece that is currently being enjoyed by its workers. It takes a lot to resist that. I don't know how long Norway will be able to sustain their system, I hope its for a long time.
In a way, we are agreeance. We agree that the problem is that the regulations on capital are insufficient. Where we disagree is that I want to regulate capital out of existence.
P.S. I do not appreciate your little jab of
Many Americans simply cannot envision a regulated, capitalist society and so they blame their failings of regulation on capitalism.
I am well aware of the varieties of systems that exist to regulate capital, and I consider them all failures which leave workers at risk of exploitation.
I will freely admit that I'm pretty severely radicalized by the ongoing big tech shenanigans, but it just angers me SO much that a company can announce mass layoffs and record profits in the same damn breath. And then in the next breath, they quite often request tax breaks and preferential treatment, because they are JOB CREATOOOOOOOORS...
Makes my blood boil, in part because I feel completely powerless and unable to do anything about it.
This is the logical conclusion of the capitalist growth mentality – once they dominate the market, they have to cannibalize the employees and/or the customers, otherwise the line won't go up.
I think that line of argument proves too much: There are too many companies that don't cannibalize, do the mass layoffs and so on, for the sake of medium- and long-term profits to sensibly ascribe this behavior as a failure of "capitalist growth mentality".
Or that the behavior necessarily follows from the current state of affairs.
It's clearly at least in part an issue of lawmakers not doing their jobs and creating sensible regulations of employment, taxation and so on.
That's demonstrably the case. Letting elected politicians off the hook because of irresponsible business legislation is exactly what both businesses and politicians want. Because then we're sure the regulations won't change, and folks will just be angry in the future, while the right pockets get stuffed.
I'm equally sure that blaming "capitalism" for the failures of our politicians means losing a huge part of the audience/electorate we need on board to have the politicians make the needed changes.
I agree that there is some theoretical flavor of capitalism that doesn't practice these kinds of things, but what we see in the US is this kind of behavior all the time.
As for (publicly traded & startup) companies that don't practice this or don't appear to, I think it's only a matter of the stage of the company. First they are very generous with both their employees and their customers in order to conquer the market. Then once they've reached saturation in the market, they have to go somewhere else for profit. Sometimes this means layoffs and "efficiencies" with employees. Sometimes it means cannibalizing the customer base. Anybody who is beholden to stockholders or a board of investors who want 100x returns is going to be forced into this or replaced with someone who will do it.
I think either of these strategies is more common than innovation and new products because there's less risk in it. The new thing has to be successful, and if it is not, the line goes down. It seems like there is a playbook somewhere for the customer and employee cannibalization process.
As for the relationship between politicians and businesses that leads to weak labor protection, I agree it is problematic. But I see regulatory capture as a strategy of capitalism as practiced in the US.
I don't think there's much ground to be gained by calling it something other than a problem with capitalism since any kind of basic improvement of the human condition in the US is regularly characterized negatively by its detractors as socialism or communism anyway.
Why wouldn't we blame capitalism for the failures of government when government is so clearly controlled (to a significant degree) by capital?
Lawmakers aren't failing because they're earnestly trying and in their incompetence they just can't make it work. They're failing because they're part of a system that, over time, has become an apparatus to serve capital. It won't let them control it.
That said it's not binary, lawmakers haven't completely lost their ability to reign in companies, as the current administration has shown. It's also shown, though, that there are some industries you don't touch, and on the whole the money keeps getting sucked to the top, where it can further influence lawmakers.
I'm ok with not labeling capitalism as the core problem. It's the best economic system we have. We could blame the founders for failing to create a system less susceptible to capture. Or we could blame any number of people along the way who could have pushed for changes before it was too late.
But either way, when you have free markets and you don't regulate them aggressively enough, this is what you eventually get.
IMO it's important to be clear about the problem if you hope to fix it.
But that's like saying that it's the animal handler's fault for not isolating the lion, keeping it well fed and making sure it's not exposed to any stimuli; it's not the lion's fault that it maimed 12 people.
Which yeah OK sure, but baked into that is the axiom that that's what lions do, they eat people so work your way around that. Not sure how well this maps to completely man-made and controlled financial systems. Seems like accepting that capitalism needs to be treated like a wild animal or a fire. Keep it under very tight control or people get hurt.
I'd say it maps pretty well. Making money, i.e. maximizing profits, is what companies do, it's their raison d'être. It's what differentiates them from *non-*profits. And sure, there are obviously still people in charge of these companies, but that doesn't mean they don't take on a certain life of their own.
I recently saw a comment somewhere here on tildes that made a very good point: companies are under evolutionary pressure to maximise profitability. Those that do not, get outcompeted by those that do.
Your penultimate sentence is incidentally exactly the way I usually frame capitalism: as a fire, an energy source, an engine that we can use to drive our society. And like with any energy source, you need to control and contain it, you can*'t* [edited to be negated as intended ] just set it up with no limitations in place, leave it to its own devices and go suprised_pikatchu_face when it goes wrong.
You wouldn't (I assume) call a burned down house an instance of "late-stage-pyrophilia" just because someone left an uncontained candle unattended. You would call it negligence.
Same thing with capitalism. There will always be ruthless people that will use every available opportunity to maximise their profits, damn the human costs. As such it is the duty of the government to pass and enforce laws and regulations that punish those people who use those ruthless practices. And for all of us that live in a democracy, it is our duty to elect politicians that pass those laws and hold them accountable if they don't.
It sounds like we're in complete agreement but disagree on the phrasing.
I "blame capitalism" because usually "don't blame capitalism" means "capitalism is awesome and everything it does is awesome". I agree that it's a tool that if left unchecked its very nature will lead to destruction.
The irony being that in the long run, that’s gonna make the line go down hard. And stay down.
Why is it that these idiot MBAs are blind to anything beyond the immediate short term? They’re sabotaging their own companies.
I think it's a common strategic mistake to view engineers as interchangeable laborers who produce X units of software per day, rather than as professionals and repositories of institutional knowledge. Or the executives know but don't care because even if the software degrades in the long run, they'll be rich and kicking it in nice homes in Tahoe, Santa Barbara, or Atherton.
No offense to oversea engineers or developers, there are good ones (especially the ones who immigrate to the west), but from my experience the median one is quite bad.
It's my mom's experience too: she spent her entire career working IT for large traditional corps that thought they could save millions by firing those pesky, expensive American programmers and replacing them with cheap Indian programmers whose resumes looked good on paper. Of course, those projects rarely panned out: the outsourced programmers lacked institutional knowledge and context, and communication and technical skills to discuss and understand the specs. A few projects were returned as total garbage spaghetti, completely not to spec, and had to be discarded in their entireties, wasting millions of dollars and pushing back timelines by multiple quarters; but my mom was always the one they tapped to save the projects somehow.
The sad thing is someone wrote a famous book railing against that mentality...in the 70s. So nothing has changed.
It's called The Mythical Man Month, and it has some very useful insights often applied to planning and managing software projects, though not as often as they should be.
It feels amusing that that particular book was written by an IBMer. I've seen a lot of comments recently accusing Google of turning into IBM.
I'm so the opposite. I've hired indians and Americans in the last year and the Americans are just generally awful engineers. Cheap labor is cheap regardless of where you pay for it. But expensive labor in the us I find is pretty shitty.
They come in and are gone in three years. It's the same way engineers tend to hop companies for pay increases...only that environment of short term thinking and not investing in employee growth is fostered by the execs who bounce from company to company, making cuts and celebrating the "growth" they create while hacking away at the foundation.
Simply, because by then they're gone.
I think there is awareness of the problem, but that the people making these decisions will have divested their interest and made their money by the time that happens.
If you have a company that does something well and cares about doing it well, they are going to want to avoid doing things that will interfere with that vision.
When the company vision becomes incidental to making profit, merely a means to an end, then this behavior is completely in line with that vision. That's exactly what venture capital is. Just don't believe the hype that the company exists to make things better and make money. People, even the founders, might believe they are not just in it for the money, but as soon as the hard choices hit, and they start choosing money over vision, know that nothing is safe.
They’ll have cashed out long before then. Their ownership stakes only vest in the immediate short term (or they have enough from the early returns that the potential increase in long term wealth doesn’t mean much as front loading a smaller golden parachute)
It sounds like they're keeping the headcount though. Just outsourcing it. I'm an American working in Asia for a company wih an American tech branch, and generally the employees from it suck. They can't learn or grow or adapt, and they frequently expect us to optimize for their happiness over getting things done (i.e. "I don't feel fulfilled working on <x> so you need to find someone else" rather than just "yeah, I'll put in the boring work to get my paycheck so I can enjoy my life"). Ive hired a shit load of indians in the last few years who are soooooo much better. It's fucking night and day. Im not surprised to see tech investing more there.
I see this as another form of enshittification. Once you've maximized profits via legitimate/moral (?) mechanisms, the only remaining options are then illegitimate or immoral.
As you say, the market rewards constant growth and punishes the opposite. And so...
It’s easier to understand when you realise this is fallout from the TCJA from Trump that went into effect before layoff period.
The TCJA forces tech companies to treat salaries as capital expenses, depreciating over five years. Which means that before, they could inflate salaries and pay less in taxes (makes sense, you’re passing the profits to the employees essentially). Now, anyone with an inflated salary is a financial threat to the company, despite record profits. So… they lay off en masse.
Do not let people forget this is Trump’s crusade against big tech that caused this shit. And it was set to trigger after his presidency ended.
I hear you. I've been moving in the same direction for years now. As these companies suck and suck while proving less and less value to consumers and employees.
And more specifically, that CEOs, even after they have left, aren't personally held accountable for this.
Even if it wasn't their direct decision, they were at the helm. You created X jobs, and that gave you Y tax breaks. Now you're taking N jobs away, so you're liable for M amount of money to pay back.
I'm trying to understand the significance of these articles. I'm just not seeing how "company lays off 0.1% of its workforce" is newsworthy. The last article was about laying off a team with less than 10 people. Certainly it's impactful to those it affects directly, but from a business standpoint it's a nothing burger reorg kind of move. Don't these kinds of things happen all the time with other companies? What's news about this other than it's about a tech company, and tech layoffs seem to be a popular narrative right now?
I'm biased since I work in tech, but I think one reason for interest here is that tech (and certain FAANG in particular) are viewed as not just regular companies. These companies claimed that they would not be traditional entities obsessed with nickel and diming but instead have real transformative impact on the world. Seeing that veneer be pulled away is shocking or vindicating and thus generates more interest than other companies doing the same or worse since it's expected behavior for them.
I feel like that's a bit of a non sequitur. I just don't see how being a transformative tech company means you will never have layoffs. I can see disappointment in decisions they're making that would conflict with "don't be evil," but whether they are doing interesting or non-evil tech things doesn't have much to do with whether they will find it beneficial to reduce staff at times.
The business perspective IMO doesn't help though. To each individual life now distraught due to having to quickly find a new job, it doesn't matter (much) whether 9 or 900 other people lost their jobs. Hence, the human impact is essentially scaled the same, just multiplied for each person impacted.
And hence the obligation for companies to be held responsible ought to not be based on their own size when it comes to criticizing them for each life impacted. Whether the company is 50 big or 500000 big, 10 people left without a job are 10 people left without a job who are now - potentially - struggling.
If anything, scale it with the amount and the monetary worth of the C-suites and board members, in effect making it so that the fatter the management is with money, the more they're on the hook for the problems they cause.
Remember friends, this is why the struggle against capitalism is international. So long as the capitalist can exploit weak labor protections in another country, be that minimum wage laws, laws that protect working conditions, or even environmental laws effecting their mode of production, no job is safe.
Until capitalism is abolished globally, all of our livelihoods are at risk. The obvious first step is to fight it at home, but do not forget that is only the beginning.
Thats why open borders are essential if we want to leverage the good bits of global trade in an equitable way. Labor needs to be able to move as freely (if not more freely) than capital.
We only have a border crisis because of this inequality of labor.
Exactly right. Borders and passports are only a thing for the working class and the poor. The wealthy can always go wherever they please.
I was thinking the other day about the whole Mexico border discussion, an interesting twist one might add when discussing people who favor shutting down that southern border might be to point out that would prevent people in the US from leaving. Like when Ted Cruz went to Tijuana while his state was in a black out. I wonder what people might say when they can't go vacation in Baja or the Yucatan.
I'll take issue with this because people aren't fungible units of labor that move wherever needed. They have families, friends, and communities which immobilize them by choice or necessity. It's not just borders and migration controls; most people wouldn't become itinerant labor given other options.
One of the grossest inequities is that wealth and work are so geographically concentrated. I'll agree that capital can quickly arbitrage costs across borders when workers aren't equally mobile. However, it's just another uncompensated cost to labor when the expectation is that people will move where our capricious masters care to create jobs.
This is the true origin of rural resentment - the constant uprooting and separation of families and destruction of communities.
I mean, what you describe is happening now anyway. It will continue to happen until such time that there is never any need to relocate factories or mines. Eliminating the invisible fences just levels the playing field for the people whom are already being excluded.
How would livelihoods be less at risk "without capitalism"?
Answer: They wouldn't be.
Livelihoods being unreasonably at risk stems from insufficient labor regulation in a host of areas. Employers, irrespective of whether they're public, private, in competitive sectors or non-profit areas all have the same problems.
In the US, at will employment and other employer rights for firing people willy-nilly have nothing to do with capitalism. It has to do with poor regulation, a flawed democracy and an electorate that collectively elects politicians with deficient values.
The root cause here is not the economic system.
Changing the economic system will not fix the core issue, or lack of labor rights for anyone.
In companies that are collectively owned(AKA co-ops), the workers are the ones who make the decisions about everything. One of the largest examples of this is the Mondragon Corporation in Spain. It is a gigantic corporation that is completely owned by its employees. It operates in many sectors, kind of like a smaller Samsung. If one sector of the corp isn't doing so well and doesn't need many man hours, people are retrained and moved to other parts of the corp. They even have their own university to educate their own people. Please look more into it yourself, it's pretty unique and interesting way to run a company. I think that's a really good system that introduces the ability to weigh people's livelihoods against the need to turn a profit. Wages are flatter, the profits more evenly distributed. Company coffers aren't simply plundered for profit.
What regulation would you introduce that would permanently resolve the tension between the worker who needs to maintain a certain standard of living, and the owner(capitalist) who wants to maximize their profit? I personally don't think there is one. Unions are nice, but it doesn't go nearly far enough. The management and owners need to go, and let the workers run the business and reap the full benefit of their work. In my view, that's the only way to resolve that tension, is when the owners and the workers are the same.
Actually it has everything to do with capitalism, it's the result of a power imbalance that gave the business owners(capitalists) the ability to write their own rules. People don't elect politicians, money does.
Theoretically, changing the economic system, as in changing from Capitalism to Socialism or Communism, would presuppose a government in support of that economic system. Again, theoretically, a socialist government would ensure that there were no privately owned corporations, therefore ensuring every worker a voice in their own work. So yes, switching to another economic system would ideally bring labor rights with it.
There's a lot to unpack in your comment. Here are two major topics:
The Tripartite system or Nordic Model
The Nordic model, or tripartite system. The tension is resolved through regular, regulated and continuous negotiations between the three parties in the employment sector.
The model acknowledges that government and regulations are foundational issues for resolving the tension between employers/owners and employees/workers.
As such, government is actively introduced into the Nordic model in wage negotiations, labor negotiations, pension reform and pension systems, vacation rights and on and on.
As worker organizations and employer organizations are actively part of the negotiations, they need to make things work too. They have to be party to talks as they're responsible to society for regulation, for workable rules, for avoiding hurting third parties with damaging strikes/lockouts, for losing out to international competition because working conditions are too expensive or too bad to recruit the workers needed.
As government and the public is a huge employer, they are also forced into the system to take care of public workers so they retain rights voters otherwise wouldn't grant them (who doesn't want public services to be as cheap as possible in ways that force unreasonable working conditions on public workers to have more tax-money to fund other services or cut taxes?)
I highly, highly encourage reading this report from 2015 that outlines in detail how and why this system works and why this leads the Nordic countries to have some of the very best working conditions in the world, while also having highly, highly profitable companies on the cutting edge in many industries:
https://www.fafo.no/index.php?option=com_zoo&task=item&item_id=7253&Itemid=923&lang=nb
Here's a "Nordic Model for dummies" that gives a good overview:( PDF-warning) https://samak.info/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/THE_NORDIC_MODEL_FOR_DUMMIES.pdf
So in short: the working conditions do not have anything to do with capitalism being the economic system. It has everything to do with regulation.
I want to highlight that the Nordic (tripartite) model is only one of many successful models that don't leave a huge power imbalance in favor of owners/employers at the expense of employees.
The US is one of the largest failures here, with the fewest protections for workers. Many Americans simply cannot envision a regulated, capitalist society and so they blame their failings of regulation on capitalism.
Public-run doesn't ensure worker rights
Many have things backwards: Often it's public workers that have the most pressure from their employers in terms of efficiency, poor working conditions and having little impact on their work lives.
Public budgets mean decisions made often late in December leave those working on public projects or in public functions without jobs on January 1st.
Socialist and communist systems have been places where some of the most ruthless employee conditions have been normal.
What does this tell us?
As stated in my previous comment: The issue isn't the economic system. The issue is labor regulation and an imbalance of labor rights.
Many capitalist systems have regulations that crush efficient organization of labor into unions, while the same regulations leave owners/employers empowered. Many people do not recognize the importance of being in a union.
It's obvious that company leadership stands to gain when they can set employees up against each other to divide and conquer as one single, strong unity, while workers fight among themselvs for their own personal goods. Standing together, workers are empowered to get their fair share of earnings.
Or these same workers, with proper regulations, can strike in ways that in the extreme can bankrupt their employer. Everyone's in the same boat, so everyone is responsible for the ship not sinking.
These two things leave us where we started: at the assertions I made in my previous comment.
Thank you for the thoughtful reply! I hope you'll forgive my delayed reply, I need to be in a certain mindset to write like this. I definitely didn't want to leave you hanging.
First thing I want to point out, is it appears that you're either conflating or confused about collective ownership and public ownership. When I speak about collective ownership, I am not talking about government run entities. I am talking about entities that are entirely owned by their workers. Again, I implore you to learn a bit about the Mondragon Corporation to give you an idea of the possibilities that exist with collective ownership. Re-read my comment, I never said the words publicly owned.
I appreciate the level of detail you offer on the Nordic model, it's not something I have gone super in depth about but seems to have some promise of keeping the worst tendencies of capitalism at bay. I think it has its place in a transition toward the world I envision, where all workers are also owners in their workplaces, but I want to circle back to my original point regarding the broader struggle against capitalism.
The fact that there are countries which are capitalist, with few regulations, anywhere on Earth means that if a company doesn't like how the laws of say, Norway, they can simply choose not to operate there. There is nothing preventing that. This is what I mean when I say the struggle against capitalism is international.
The implications of this essentially nullify any benefit of that system outside of Norway. Now you may say, let's make the whole world operate under this system. To which I would say if we are going to go that route, of a single global economic system, to me Socialism or Communism would be greatly preferable. This is due to the creation of a class of people(owners) separate and distinct from the workers under the Nordic system. It is inevitable that once this class exists, they will accumulate money and influence and slowly dismantle this system. This cannot happen under Socialism or Communism because the ownership class does not exist. They are the same as the workers(under socialism) or the citizens(under communism).
Take a moment to consider how Norway was able to get this system into place. It's not because their ownership class is nicer and said "OK we'll make less money just because you guys are cool." It's because Norway is very rich in natural resources, and very early on, their government stepped in and created a sovereign wealth fund in order to provide for itself and its citizens. This gave the government of Norway(AKA the people of Norway; Norway is democratic) the power over the corporations to impose this system on the corporations. And it gives the government of Norway the power to continue under this system. Power that also resists from outside. You had better believe that there are capitalists all over that would love a piece of Norway's pie. A piece that is currently being enjoyed by its workers. It takes a lot to resist that. I don't know how long Norway will be able to sustain their system, I hope its for a long time.
In a way, we are agreeance. We agree that the problem is that the regulations on capital are insufficient. Where we disagree is that I want to regulate capital out of existence.
P.S. I do not appreciate your little jab of
I am well aware of the varieties of systems that exist to regulate capital, and I consider them all failures which leave workers at risk of exploitation.
Seize the Means!!