You are absolutely correct. Stockholders tend to be bullies.
Expecting use of the companies private Jets, penthouse apartments in New York and other major cities around the world. Seats at various opera's theaters , concerts etc. in exchange for election support on various positions.
In other words profit isn't the only priority at major companies. Keeping major shareholders in line. Is also a priority.
Toyman! said:In reply to alfadriver :
I don't disagree, but my point about the consumers is they don't care beyond what something costs them. ZFG. They want the most for the cheapest even if it means their shoes are made by slaves in 3rd world countries and their cars are made by large evil corporations without a care for their fellow man. Unless it's a $10 Starbucks coffee so their barista can get paid $15/hr to do a minimum-wage job, they just don't care.
In general, I agree. Lots of people do care beyond that, there is a lot of ethical boycotting and ethical investing, but your point earlier is correct: profit is the driver. And they only reason a company is going to support [insert cause/feature/process/change of any sort] is because it is profitable for them to do so.
It means to have a big change (like the OP posted so long ago) you would have to A) have a gigantic portion of the consuming public on board to support your cause and vote with their wallets OR B) have a gigantic portion of the consuming public vote in favor of the government controlling it.
Toyman! said:But all companies are controlled by people.
To expand further on this point...are they really? Perhaps a company where one person is effectively the king of the company, like small single-owner-operator businesses and larger ones where a single exec owns a controlling share of the stock, such as Facebook. Most larger companies have a company controlled by a CEO, an owner, and a board with shareholders having some influence. The end result is a mixing on intentions and a diffusion of responsibility where no one person's will is reflected in the company's actions. It's sort of like when someone hooks up a robot to the Internet and lets people vote to control its movements. And often it seems that the emergent behavior from this in a company is the most business-optimized and least human.
That's looking into how a company is controlled, and when you combine the actions of companies in general (most of which do not have just one person in total control), you end up with an economy that's totally indifferent to human life, the environment, or even the laws of physics, a distributed resource allocation/wealth accumulation algorithm that only cares about numbers in a spreadsheet and doesn't take into account what they could represent in the real world. Life, the environment, and the laws of physics are treated as consumable resources and/or act as invisible walls to blindly smash into on the mindless march toward profit and growth.
In reply to alfadriver :
Yes, they are. This is why blaming it all on the companies is absurd.
Consumers are getting exactly what they want and most of them don't realize that their buying practices are part of what is causing their own jobs to move overseas or pay poor wages.
SV reX said:In reply to frenchyd :
So, you are suggesting we reward people for trying to get by doing the bare minimum? No thanks.
Well we certainly don't pay them more for doing more, sure maybe a few do. But wage stagnation for the last 4 decades while productivity has increased massively, with the wealth being more and more concentrated at the very top would seem to be proof of that.
Just like in Office Space -
Peter Gibbons : The thing is, Bob, it's not that I'm lazy, it's that I just don't care.
Bob Porter : Don't... don't care?
Peter Gibbons : It's a problem of motivation, all right? Now if I work my ass off and Initech ships a few extra units, I don't see another dime, so where's the motivation?
You end up with people who do just enough not to get fired.
Toyman! said:In reply to GameboyRMH :
So, what motive would you replace it with?
Profit is the only reason most people get out of bed in the morning. That includes business people and employees.
I'm not sure I would replace it but putting limits on its worst excesses would be a good start. Putting artificial limits on it is the only thing keeping us from working 7 days a week alongside children for gruel right now.
In reply to GameboyRMH :
A company is controlled by its shareholders. They hold the final say in who runs the company by voting their shares. Guess who they vote for? That's correct, they vote for the person that can increase the value of the shares.
My company used to have 2 shareholders, both owning 50% of the shares. I bought all of my partner's shares. Since I now own all the shares so I control the company. I will admit I have different priorities for my company than the average shareholder has.
Elon Musk didn't like the way Twitter was running the company. Now he's buying all the shares so he can control the vote and put who he wants in charge.
There isn't a giant cabal that controls the shares to screw the little man and the employees. I own shares in several companies. I vote my shares based on my priorities, not the priorities of the guy that is sticking tab A into slot B.
GameboyRMH said:Toyman! said:In reply to GameboyRMH :
So, what motive would you replace it with?
Profit is the only reason most people get out of bed in the morning. That includes business people and employees.
I'm not sure I would replace it but putting limits on its worst excesses would be a good start. Putting artificial limits on it is the only thing keeping us from working 7 days a week alongside children for gruel right now.
I don't buy this. 75 years ago when the company owned the company town and unions were actually useful, maybe. In this information age where most people aren't willing to work 40 hours a week, dads get 4 weeks of family leave so the wife can have a baby, and unemployment is sub 5%, I call BS.
Capitalism in the USA has done a better job of dragging people out of poverty than any other system or country in the world. If you want to change it, get Crony Capitalism out of the mix. That's the evil that is driving stupid high CEO pay, lobbyists, and corrupt politicians.
Separation of business and state should be as sacrosanct as the separation of church and state.
Toyman! said:A company is controlled by its shareholders. They hold the final say in who runs the company by voting their shares. Guess who they vote for? That's correct, they vote for the person that can increase the value of the shares.
[...] I own shares in several companies. I vote my shares based on my priorities, not the priorities of the guy that is sticking tab A into slot B.
Voting solely based on your interest in increasing the value of the shares is what makes the system act as an inhuman profit/growth maximizing machine. This isn't malicious, that's how the system normally works and is meant to work, but you can see where it comes from.
Toyman! said:There isn't a giant cabal that controls the shares to screw the little man and the employees.
Not of shareholders, but in board members there is actually something like this.
I'd like to take a little detour and point out a cult called the Fellowship of Friends. A very interesting thing they do is take over companies with high-paying jobs. A cult member will get a job there, use their influence get another cult member hired who will use their influence to hire more etc, until the company is made up of mostly or entirely cult members. This makes their members wealthy which brings in more money for the cult. Google Developer Studio was the most recent company they targeted. You can think of that as a vertical takeover, entering one company and putting members in place reaching up and down.
There is a giant cabal doing a high-level horizontal version of the same thing, a social class of executives who work in CxO and board-level positions. They get a job on a board, nominate their board-level pals to board and CxO positions (with influence that can easily reach across companies), and vote each other's pay straight into the stratosphere at the cost of the little man and everyone else who isn't in their club. I like to say that if they were a species of gray aliens it would be obvious to anyone that an in-group was hijacking whole economies for personal gain, but they blend in with the rest of the population decently enough.
Toyman! said:In reply to alfadriver :
Yes, they are. This is why blaming it all on the companies is absurd.
Consumers are getting exactly what they want and most of them don't realize that their buying practices are part of what is causing their own jobs to move overseas or pay poor wages.
There was a time when employees of companies would dare drive a competitors car on the parking lot and fully expect if they drove an imported car that somehow serious damage would occur.
The unions were pretty good about getting the word out to employees about what was acceptable conduct and what wasn't.
Henry Ford actually had written rules about off time conduct.
Perhaps we are better off now ?
But I started selling Clark Forklifts and because they were Union made they were the dominant forklift in Auto plants. ( and other Union controlled industries).
Toyman! said:GameboyRMH said:I'm not sure I would replace it but putting limits on its worst excesses would be a good start. Putting artificial limits on it is the only thing keeping us from working 7 days a week alongside children for gruel right now.
I don't buy this. 75 years ago when the company owned the company town and unions were actually useful, maybe. In this information age where most people aren't willing to work 40 hours a week, dads get 4 weeks of family leave so the wife can have a baby, and unemployment is sub 5%, I call BS.
We're in this relatively cushy position now because the unions got rid of the company towns etc. and fought for rules to keep them out. If, for the sake of argument, those rules disappeared tomorrow, kids wouldn't be crawling into the guts of a machine for gruel the next day, but in a generation or two I expect they might. See the pay and prospects of baby boomers vs. Gen X. vs. Gen. Y as a mild example of how quickly things can go downhill.
Toyman! said:Separation of business and state should be as sacrosanct as the separation of church and state.
Agree super hard on this one.
GameboyRMH said:Toyman! said:There isn't a giant cabal that controls the shares to screw the little man and the employees.
I'd like to take a little detour and point out a cult called the Fellowship of Friends. A very interesting thing they do is take over companies with high-paying jobs. A cult member will get a job there, use their influence get another cult member hired who will use their influence to hire more etc, until the company is made up of mostly or entirely cult members.
The thought of that gives me the creeps, because I know its probably perfectly legal. It's basically organized labor, but top down, instead of bottom up.
Thanks all, for keeping this civil. It's been enlightening.
I'm also impressed in the agreement that private companies might have a slight advantage in terms of pro-labor policies in abesence of being overly concerned about stock price.
Toyman! said:There isn't a giant cabal that controls the shares to screw the little man and the employees. I own shares in several companies. I vote my shares based on my priorities, not the priorities of the guy that is sticking tab A into slot B.
The wealthiest 10% of Americans own something like 90% of the publicly traded stock.
Many/most will vote to increase their own wealth at the expense of employees, and possibly the long term good of the company.
I think it's sad that you don't consider the guy on the assembly line when you make decisions.
Someone please explain to me how an individual's success in life is tied to an employer. Correct me if I'm wrong, but no employer in this country can...
Prevent you from a acquiring more valuable skills. To the contrary, most employers pay employees to teach them skills, which they are then free to shop elsewhere for higher pay.
Prevent you from moving to an area with better job prospects.
Prevent you from changing jobs/ careers
Prevent you from buying stock in the company you work for or any other company.
Prevent you from going into business for yourself.
Personally, I'm thankful that my success is dependent on my effort and actions, not reliant how much others will give me.
Even the lowest earners in our country live in a manner in which billions of people in the world today would gladly trade places.
In reply to Boost_Crazy :
Job mobility isn't as simple as you make it. If your home is near your employment finding a similar job with better pay includes calculating the cost of the move. Either commute costs that may be significantly higher or selling you home which may have serious costs to your long term fincial health even with higher pay.
The cost of selling is typically around 10% of the houses valve between listing costs, required repairs, updates, moving costs, and acquisition of required items to make the new home liveable.
If you live in a typical $250,000 that's $25,000 moving costs which come from the equity in your home which may have taken you 10 years to achieve.
In reply to CrustyRedXpress :
What the 10% do with their publicly traded stock doesn't really affect me beyond making my stock prices go up.
As far as the tab sticker, he has more control over his life than I do by voting my few shares of stock. He should step up and be responsible for his own life. A man that isn't willing to be responsible for himself gets exactly what someone else decides he is worth. If he doesn't like the way his company is treating him, he should leave. If enough people leave, the company will realize the value of its employees. I left the huge international company I worked for. I thought they treated their employees like E36 M3. Management sucked and pissed off customers faster than I could find them. So I quit. Then I called all those customers that the huge corporation pissed off and opened my own shop. Since I understand the value of an employee, the best guys in the business work for me. Everyone in town knows it.
If you understand that wealth isn't a finite resource, life is much easier. Just because some rich guy got his doesn't mean he stole it from some poor guy or me. The rich guy can't stop you from getting your share by being rich. Just ask the people that controlled Sears, or Kmart, or any number of companies that no longer exist because some poor guy came along and did it better.
In reply to Toyman! :
In college I worked at a Kmart and around 1981-1982 managers were telling us that Kmart is on a growth track to bypass Sears to become the largest retailer in North America. We might become #1 and it was hard to believe it could happen.
Then Walmart showed up.
Toyman! said:Capitalism in the USA has done a better job of dragging people out of poverty than any other system or country in the world. If you want to change it, get Crony Capitalism out of the mix. That's the evil that is driving stupid high CEO pay, lobbyists, and corrupt politicians.
Separation of business and state should be as sacrosanct as the separation of church and state.
I regret that I have but one thumbs-up to give.
Toyman! said:If you understand that wealth isn't a finite resource, life is much easier. Just because some rich guy got his doesn't mean he stole it from some poor guy or me. The rich guy can't stop you from getting your share by being rich. Just ask the people that controlled Sears, or Kmart, or any number of companies that no longer exist because some poor guy came along and did it better.
Strongly disagree on this one, in fact it's one of the most dangerous misconceptions on the economy IMO. While the economy technically isn't exactly a zero-sum game, it is a lot closer to one than some kind of manna-from-the-sky free-for-all. If someone isn't personally doing enough valuable work to earn their pay, then that pay has either been misallocated from other workers, or is the result of some kind of unfair or monopolistic pricing scheme affecting the buyer (likely in addition to the first problem). And a day of executive management is not worth more than a year of hands-on work. There is not a minivan's worth of people who have been more productive than the less wealthy half of the planet.
If a company hired a guy for $100k/yr to sit on the shop floor and eat cheetos and play video games, the problem would be obvious. Yet that would be small potatoes compared to the misattribution of productivity that benefits any one person in upper management and above at large companies.
A couple of handy graphs. Here we can see where the money came from and should've gone...
And here we can see one of the main places it's going:
Note that the way "productivity" is measured for the first graph is basically "gross national income," so it's kind of a smoking gun in itself.
In reply to Toyman! :
In addition to the $25,000 moving costs, the wage slave needs to make up for lost wages. For the sake of simplicity I'll assume the wage slave and his wife both work each makes $20/ hr so the lost wages will be $1600. Plus an assumption of 4 weeks finding, getting hired, and starting. $6400. =$8000. For a total of $33,000. To break even in 1 year the new jobs will need to pay almost $16 more dollars per hour.
Employees are really wage slaves.
Oh, you can make all sorts of assumptions. He's single and a renter moving costs go down. Or it takes him longer to find a good job etc.
What if he has a couple of school aged kids? Taking kids out of schools is not easily done. Being the new kid? What if they start doing poorly? Have trouble adapting etc
Finally what if the new job fails? Dozens of reasons. New owners, new managers, etc
Very interesting discussion and kudos to all for keeping it clean. So many forums on the net would have members start going to nasty places. After working, mostly in manufacturing, for the last 40 years I have seen some strange things done in the name of keeping a company running.
Bottom line to me is people and conscience.
Capitalism is good until it isn't. Some people forget they work with people having a life and needs, the perceived needs of the ones on the top over ride the needs of those below.
Private companies can be run just as greedily as public. Sometimes more. If you aren't publically traded and small abuses are commonly overlooked.
Unions are good until they aren't. They helped correct unsafe, underpaid situations. But then the people running them got greedy and started killing the companies. I worked for GM in the 70s, the unions were no longer helping a company, they were not really helping their employees.
The stock market might have been good at one time but not in my life. It does seem to be a racket but it is the only way to make money you saved grow. I don't have a lot and most of it is in FDIC protected stuff. But the little I have invested has done well, until the last 6 months! But is seems to be the king of greed rules types.
The future will prove to break many rules. Why? Baby boomers are leaving the workplace and there just aren't enough people in the pool anymore to practice what used to work. Right now those trying to "fix" the economy should not put as much weight on employment numbers unless there is a retirement correction figured in. Manipulating the interest rates is needed, it has been too low for too long and that created more problems. Why not get a second mortgage and put it in an index fund, net gain is better than what the banks give. That is a bad model that has made many rich.
Sorry no happy ending or forecast of the future. Except we all will die one day, I will go knowing I tried to not screw my fellow man.
In reply to GameboyRMH :
Excellent points.
Finally, what about the coming robots and AI. ? Fewer and fewer jobs for more and more people. Much of the purpose of middle managers is to forecast coming trends. Which will easily be done by AI. So even the middle class will be reduced if not completely eliminated.
Look at much of what surgeons are doing. If they can work on eyeballs and other delicate organs with robotics all they are needed is to connect AI to those and even doctors become obsolete.
My diabetic wife has her blood sampled periodically and tell her what her blood sugar levels are in order to more accurately use insulin.
How long before smart watches tell her doctor it's time to do microscopic surgery for this or that potential ailment? In plenty of time to avoid more serious treatment?
In reply to GameboyRMH :
The feds have created close to 10 trillion dollars in the last two years alone. It's as close to manna from heaven as you can get.
Have you ever run a company? Even running a tiny $1m company like mine is worth more than hands-on work. When I was an hourly guy, my work day started when my pay did and my work day ended at quitting time. Now my day starts whenever I start thinking about business and ends when I stop. That's with me doing my best to leave work at work.
The hands-on guys, while valuable to the company, are replaceable and in most cases can't destroy the company with a mistake. The CEO can tank a company with a bad guess or even the swipe of a pen. 65% of businesses fail within the first 10 years. They can also send it to the stratosphere the same way. Employees don't share the risk but expect to share the reward.
While the guys are considering today and the work ahead of them for the next 6 hours, I'm considering the next several weeks, months, and even the next several years. Trying to guess what the economy is going to do. Where the market trends are headed. Are my cash reserves enough to cover the $45k in materials that were delivered this week? Do I hire another person? Adjust pricing to combat the inflation I and my employees are fighting? Pay raises? Can I afford better insurance? Should I replace the old Ford Ranger?
Thinking management and employee value are equal is amusing. Even communist societies don't believe that.
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