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  • Henry Ford (fuckhead though he was) figured out that if he paid his workers a higher wage, then other companies would have to pay higher wages and he would sell more cars from more profit.

  • They know. It’s just the working class people they’ve fooled that get confused by this contradiction.

  • The funny thing is treating your workers well enhances their performance and productivity so the company literally gets their money's worth.

    This is a known factor between paid farm workers and prison slave labor (or immigrants exploited once they're locked in), the coerced worker does a shit job while the well-treated laborer is worth the extra expense.

    It's a pattern that recurs from the mailroom to the upper management, so it doesn't make rational sense why the c-suite doesn't endorse deluxe benefits packages and accommodations for their work force.

    They just like the sound of ruling with a hammer, and having an entourage, so our execs run their businesses like tyrants.

    It also might provide for short term profit gains, but those run out very quickly for the shareholders, encouraging them to sell off.

    Source: Macroeconomics 101 circa 1986 plus research into why AAA game companies still crunch their dev teams.

    • Well. Yes and no.

      Most labor jobs benefit most from young bodies.

      So it's in a companies best interest to get rid of older people. It's cheaper to replace them than keep them healthy.

      If the bottom line is to maximize profits over sustainability.

      So it's illegal to fire people for being old. But if you work them hard and their body can't do the work you can fire them for low productivity.

      The corps are literally designing a system to reduce life span to keep production up with little investment on their end.

      By promoting birth rates , they intend to make jobs more scarce to reduce wages.

      By removing social services and criminalizing homeless , they intend to do forced prison slave labor.

      But they are not very bright. The very things that keep people desperate to take low wage jobs decreased birth rates.

      So. Not going to work out for them.

      • There's a wide age-span of ability for labor, typically. A twenty-year-old laborer is not necessarily going to outperform a forty-year-old enough to be choosy. And then there's the matter of skill and experience: even the most trivial roles are benefited by workers who actually know what they're doing. The rank-up may not be the two-to-three years that differentiates ordinary seamen from able but even a year of experience is often a big difference.

        At the point you've simplified a task so that it can be done by exploited or truly unskilled labor, you might have simplified it enough to be automated.

        I was imagining as a for-instance, picking fruit on the field for fancy produce (that is produce sold to the consumer, not cycled into meal or processed food). Harvesting of this kind of produce benefits from both skill and care for the worker. So again, rudimentary farm-work is not an ideal venue either for prison or trafficked labor treated as slaves.

        Unless you don't care about the quality of your output, in which case, automation may serve better.

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