this post was submitted on 08 Nov 2024
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While I agree with you - who can say which workers exert the majority of effort?
By the amount of physical effort - sure, blue collar workers do the most. But this effort is also easy to find from others - everyone can do unskilled labor. So should they receive a lion's share of the company profits just because, what? They managed to get hired?
By the amount of admin, maybe it should be IT or HR or some similar department. Without them, you wouldn't be efficient. Without them you'd never be able to expand. But they don't work on the actual product, they're just there for the ride and would be doing the same thing for any other business.
Should it be sales? Engineers? Security? All these categories have the same pluses and minuses going for them.
And now let's say I start a small business. I go through the trouble of being good enough in my field to come up with a product or service that people will like. I invest my own money into this small business, and I sometimes don't get paid so I can afford to pay my suppliers. I have months where I cut electricity at home so I can keep it on in the office. I fight the beaurocracy of the state, with its million forms I have to fill in and it's million hoops I have to jump through. And this business takes off, and I finally make enough to have it be worth it. And you're telling me I should share with the others? With everyone else who hasn't put as much as me on the line, but now wants to be part of the success? Motherfucker I will cut you.
Or let's say I don't keep the company, I sell it. It goes to some conglomerate who keeps it functioning but installs a new CEO to cut costs and streamline processes. Are you telling me they paid me tens of millions of dollars for the company just so that they can share the profit with the workers? So that they can take directions from them? From the workers, who paid nothing? Who offered nothing in exchange for the rights to the business? Fuck, I'm taking you to the parking lot and breaking your kneecaps with a baseball bat, where the fuck do you even get the balls?
Or let's say I go public. I sell shares, and people buy them. A lot of people invest a lot of money into the company, and want to get their money back. You're telling me that when I turn a profit and decide to share it, I shouldn't give dividends and reward the shareholders who believed in me - instead I should reward the workers who've been getting paid all this time, who've been risk-free in this enterprise, who've been profiting whether I go up or go under? Eat shit and die.
There is no universe where workers, who are staking nothing in a company, should get rewarded over those who have a financial stake in it.
Your comment is weirdly aggressive and is entirely predicated on the idea that we can't have any economic system other than the one where the ownership class and the working class are distinct.
The whole point of workers owning the means of production is that they will take on the risk as well as the reward. The belief in that idea conjoins with the belief that it shouldn't be possible to profit from the labour of others purely because you have money to start with. It's conjunctive with the belief that the investor class is surplus to requirements.
An argument against this is, how would we maintain productivity if no wealthy people were investing in new businesses or in reviving dying ones? There are entire industries that exist only to feed into this machine. This system, that claims to be only motivated by increasing productivity to increase profits, is only putting the brakes on human advancement and betterment of our quality of life. Advertising is, by many measures, the largest industry in the world. So much talent and effort is exerted on how best to sell people a product they don't need, an art form mostly now perfected to convince us we can't live without these things, all in the name of profit.
I'm not well read enough to say that I definitely believe that the world would be better if we enforced worker co-ops. There's so many other ways things could go wrong. I do think you need to open your mind to the fact that the systems we have in place exist only due to opportunism of those who came before us.