It’s a symptom of our wealth imbalance that the value of a company generally exceeds the total assets owned by its workers by quite a bit.
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There is 121 posts as of now and most relate to labor cost. Look up pollution in Monterrey Mexico to find out why it may really be cheaper to produce products at a new factory in Mexico. The devices may be “well made” but at what cost? I lived through rust belt cities’s rivers catching fire to know that that style of manufacturing is not sustainable. The large factories in Monterrey will pack up and leave, and the residents will be left holding the bag.
IPhones are mostly made in China, right? Are we to believe these factories are doing what they can, and spending money and resources to make their factories as environmentally friendly as possible. I doubt that is the case but I can’t see them from my house, and as far as I know no executives from Apple live downstream from these factories to report to us.
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Does your daughter have fulltime live-in servants? When she graduates school, will she have to find a job or can she while away the hours doing needlepoint, riding horses, and entertaining suitors? When you die, will she inherit an income-generating estate or a suburban condominium?
If you think a $170 TV is a sign of real wealth I don’t know what to tell you. Watch some Downton Abbey on it and recalibrate.
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No, no live in servants. But what would they do? She walks to the corner where a driver picks her up and takes her to a place (school bus) where trained professionals educate her. Mid-day, she chooses from a variety of foods that were prepared for her. After a few more hours of education and enrichment, her driver brings her home. How does the education she gets today compare with what was available to girls of wealthy families 100 years ago? (yes, this is ridiculous)
If you think a $170 TV is a sign of wealth
You may have missed my point. A kid has access to global markets to raise enough money to purchase it herself. Sure, the furthest she has mailed anything is Nova Scotia, but still, 100 years ago only very large businesses were conducting business outside of a neighborhood.
And you might think a TV is boring, but look at what it really represents. With an antenna, she gets 22 channels of high definition content 24 hours a day. With the Roku she has access to thousands of movies instantly. That’s a luxury that even 50 years ago was unimaginable to wealthy people and now it’s something a kid can acquire.
You are right about one thing though - she will have to find a job when she graduates. I personally don’t see lack of responsibility as a sign of wealth, but I can understand those that do. One hundred years ago, a young girl (even from wealthy families) didn’t have a lot of opportunities in front of them.
As for Downton Abbey, if you think those people were generally happy and satisfied with their lives, then I’m not sure what to tell you. A few years ago my daughter had a pretty bad bout of pneumonia that resulted in her hospitalization for almost a week. In the Downton Abbey era, she would have died no matter how wealthy.
Your question though about what is real wealth is a good one though.
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You mean the people World War I was being fought on behalf of? Good question.
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The level of privilege for the top 0.1% 100 years ago, like the level of privilege of the equivalent group today, is so far beyond what a white middle class suburban kid could ever dream of. Everything you listed, there’s not much difference between the classes when it comes to access for those things, now. Food from all over the world? Yeah, my kids know why there’s an orange at the bottom of their Christmas stocking every December. 100 years ago, the only kids who could eat oranges in December were the 0.1%. Now, any kid in any state can have an orange 12 months of the year. Your kid sits in a class with 25 other kids learning Spanish for a few hours a week, just like millions of other kids all over the U.S., both richer and poorer than your family; but back then only the 0.1% had access to formal foreign language instruction, by hiring a private tutor, and they would even be able to travel to those countries without financial constraint. Yes, the trip would take longer, but wearing white tie and ball gowns to dinner on an ocean liner is a lot nicer than flying coach with 2 stopovers. And communication with people from other parts of the country or world happened all the time, for those with enough education, money, time, and access to the postal service, telegraph office and/or a private phone (which probably wasn’t even available in your current area until at least a decade after the wealthy had their lines put in). Poor teenagers have always done crafts at home and sold them to locals or at market. A 0.1% teen back then would have actual managerial experience with household employees and also working at the family business (the source of the wealth, and no job application needed).
And let’s expand on the point @L_Mariachi made. A middle class kid in the U.S. today is looking at meager job opportunities if they don’t go to college, but if they go to college then after graduation they will have significant debt that cannot ever be excused for any reason. And how will they stand out to potential employers? There will be a thousand other applicants to compete with. Back in 1916, the tiny percentage who were able to go to college would never have to worry about unemployment, because they were an elite group. All the good jobs were reserved for them. But now, we’ve got a generation of young adults who are holding off for a decade on what used to be normal behavior for that age range: getting married, having children, saving for a house. Heck, they’re not even buying cars anymore. All their debt is already taken up with student loans, and they’re lucky to be making any paycheck at all, with no employment guarantees for the future. Hard to make long-term plans under those conditions.
So, a kid like yours has a few electronic devices and better healthcare options due to 100 more years of available research – which were exactly the exceptions I listed in my OP – but otherwise is just one more person in a very large community that spans 99.9% of the population. How is that more privileged than being at the top of the food chain in 1916? (Hint: there’s a reason for all the reforms put in place during the 20th century. Too bad they’re being dismantled. Your daughter would be in a much better position if they hadn’t been.)
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Wait, is that even an option in the USA? I thought cooperative companies were a banned concept out of being too communist-y.
Ha, no, not that I’m aware of. That does sound like the good ol’ USA, but AFAIK, it’s allowed, and I actually know of many such companies (see upthread for some examples).
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As someone who use to be an HVAC technician, and worked at a Carrier parts & equipment wholesaler company, I can make the educated guess that this need to move their plant to Mexico was brought on by the company’s own failures in their products. There’s been a massive warranty ordeal in many of their secondary heat exchangers, draft fan motors, and several types of TXVs; which they sold the units with the defective parts for several years (everywhere) before they became aware of the problems. I don’t have the numbers to quantify the cost incurred by Carrier to figure out the problems, creating the solutions to the problems, having the solution to the problem manufactured & distributed, covering the costs as warranty for the new parts, and for most of the labor cost to install the new parts. However, this has to have been setting them back quite a bit the past few years.
Why do I say all of this? Because it really makes me mad that the people taking the hit from Carrier’s product blunders are not responsible for them.
I guess a company that still heavily depends on using FlexGen / Cobalt operating software to conduct business should be expected to only handle bad business situations (of their own making) with old world business type of responses.
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“I want to be clear: this is strictly a business decision.” https://soundcloud.com/prisonforkids/business-decisions
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its allowed, they just tend to be smaller niche companies.
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It’s the same tone-deafness that’s behind the insipid “I’m sorry for your loss.” The manager is running on a script he is unaware of.
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I think what I was clumsily trying to say is that saying middle-class people today are better off than the wealthy a century ago because they didn’t have antibiotics and cheap LCD TVs is like saying Bill Gates isn’t really rich because he doesn’t have a holodeck or teleporter. Obviously we all reap some benefits from technological advances. Your 1916 people were better off than their 1816 forebears because someone realized that drinking sewage water causes cholera. And the 1816 people were better off than the 1716 people because Einstein discovered that we don’t have to throw virgins into volcanoes to appease the gods, we can just move away from the volcanoes. Or something. I’m a little fuzzy on that era.
Why hasn’t the pace of development of our social systems kept up with that of our technologies? We’re still (barely) tinkering around the edges of a polity that wouldn’t be strange to Aristotle. There’s plenty of food for everyone, there’s plenty of TVs, there’s plenty of medicine, so why are people sleeping on the sidewalks? Why are 1400 Carrier workers scrounging for their next rent checks? Why aren’t all those people plundering the mansions and stringing this motherfucker up from a lamppost?
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Your Bill Gates example is a good one. Bill Gates is one of the wealthiest people of all time (so far) in every way. But if in 100 years, regular people do have holodecks, transporters, replicators, and have the bodies of 35 year olds at age 100, they could very well be better off than Gates who will probably die of heart disease in the next 25 years.
What we have here in the US, is a class of people who literally have to hold conversations about what steps they can take to extract wealth and resources from the population, while stopping just short of taking the step that would cause an armed and angry population to hunt them down and kill them.
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Sounds vaguely analagous to something… oh yes, history.
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If the 200,000 employee number above was accurate, that $25m would be approximately $125 per employee. That’s one of the reasons why incredibly high compensation packages are not uncommon. In big companies (which are usually the ones with big executive compensation packages), even eye-watering compensation packages are peanuts compared to the costs of even a moderate pay increase to everyone.
I’ve been outsourced before and I don’t quite get the sentiment. I’m selling my labour to the company and I don’t really expect them to continue if they feel they can get a better deal elsewhere. Likewise, lots of companies sell their goods and labour to me. Should I feel obliged to continue to employ them forever? In fact, people seem to gleefully report how much they save by using Amazon, etc.
I’ll admit admit to being a bit flummoxed by companies being bitterly criticized for behaviour that’s pretty much the same as what we practice each and every day.
Now having said that, the presentation was massively leaden.
I have to ask, would most people here work for an employee-owned company? I’ve never had the opportunity, but I would think that requiring each employee to put a few hundred K (or whatever it costs to buy your share of the company) on the line would increase tensions significantly. I could see the fact that you could lose your house as well as your job if the company failed could put immense pressure on employees to ensure that everyone pushed themselves as hard as possible to make the company succeed, no matter what the personal cost.
Maybe that’s why I have no interest in being an owner rather than employee. I’m not willing to risk anything but my job on the success of my employer.
Anyone have any experience working for such a company? Are my fears unfounded?
Maybe use the wall to keep Carrier products out?
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Many American industries realized they didn’t need Americans anymore a few decades ago. They’ve kept wages flat while they racked up huge profits, gambled with our savings and homes and got bailout money for blowing it all up in 2007. They are increasingly moving jobs out of the country along with the fabulous profits they make so they don’t have to contribute in any way to the needs of the country. But they still want to live here. This evil has happened throughout history and it usually ends with long periods of suffering -or in torches and pitchforks. Yet about half of Americans will still vote for Republicans who have supported it _ all_.
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