Here is a painful truth that I would venture that 95%+ of people don't know. In fact when I learned it, removing this small block of knowledge from my head toppled an entire ideological castle I had lived in until that point.
Low wage labor is not very valuable at all, and has very low margins on it. The gap between "profitable worker" and "unprofitable worker" is the absolute smallest at the bottom. These workers keep almost all value they create and are never in a position to generate massive value. They are perpetually right on the threshold of being unprofitable to employ.
So the problem then becomes "How do you keep a worker above that profitability threshold when they are barely above it?". You can have kludgey borderline inhumane approaches like this, or maybe try to use perks as coercion to hit targets, but not matter what it's a very difficult problem to solve.
Everyone jumps to "Pay them more" but almost everyone is unaware (and certainly unwilling) that that would necessitate cutting money from their checks to buffer the profitability threshold of these bottom tier workers.
I'm sure that's true for some industries and businesses, but obviously not true for all. Lots of very profitable companies employ low wage labourers (either directly, or as is often the case, indirectly). Nike had $5.7 billion net income.
But even if everything you say is true, we can still refer to these people as something slightly more humanizing than "number 17", and generally treat with a basic minimum of respect ("are you okay, work seems to have slower down" rather than immediately jumping to bollocking mode).
Productivity monitoring for factory workers is nothing new, or even controversial as such, but having a camera pointed directly at your face all day that your supervisors can monitor is pretty invasive (never mind that this is just the "bum on seat" type of "productivity").
Here's the rub though, you employ these exact same calculations in your day to day life. It's something that when broken down into small steps and questions everyone agrees with it, but then when you drop the big picture result everyone hates it.
If your job is to create one $20 bill every hour, why would anyone ever pay you more than $20/hr to do it? Maybe you get paid $17/hr to do it, $2 goes to overhead and $1 goes to the boss. There are 100 workers so the boss is making $100/hr. If you can solve this problem for how to make the 100 workers "rich" as well, then you will (ironically) become the richest person on Earth.
>you employ these exact same calculations in your day to day life.
Sure, and you know what I do when it's unprofitable? I just don't do it. I don't think "can I find someone and pay pennies for it?"
Your metaphor doesn't work because It's missing the human element to begin with. There's low paying jobs, and then there's dehumanizing jobs. That isn't a financial incentive, that's a power move.
Your words are nice but they don't provide a solution to paying the people making the $20 bills more.
We could have an amazing society if everyone was all in on "the human element", but the fact of the matter is that the "human element", verifiably, is "As much as I can purchase for as little money as possible".
Your boss wants cheap labor as much as you want cheap housing. Everyone everywhere wants everything as cheap as possible. Organic local carrots @ $6/lb are great, but not as great as the ones @ $4/lb, all else being equal (which doesn't even matter, the human element hardly extends beyond price already).
My point is that hand waving away reality under the guise of hollywood-esque black and white, good guys/bad guys is naive and childish. The world is not a movie or book. Real solutions with tangible benefits come from true understanding of how things work, not virtue signaling takes that con people into thinking capitalism is bad guys twisting mustaches and oppressed saints being exploited.
I can only imagine what a flop a movie based on everyday reality would be, where it's difficult to discern who is actually the bad guy.
>they don't provide a solution to paying the people making the $20 bills more.
I'm not providing a solution, I'm negating an unethical one. I don't have an answer to world hunger, but I can negate wiping out half the humans on earth as a solution, despite being a valid approach in a vacuum.
>Your boss wants cheap labor as much as you want cheap housing.
Okay, we don't live in Want-Land. Business have to follow laws and hire under regulations, and I have the follow the rules and find a way to house myself. What's your point? We don't get to break rules because they are inconvenient.
>I can only imagine what a flop a movie based on everyday reality would be, where it's difficult to discern who is actually the bad guy.
There's no purely good or buy guys. That doesn't mean that's an excuse to not strive for good. Fatalism does no one good and it's not really a good counterargument to injustices.
You can choose to do nothing. I'd rather not discourage good just because you personally have up.
The stark reality of capitalism is that it's a business transaction. If they can't make enough profit from the sweatshop to make a profit, why would they keep the factory running? They're not running a charity, so they will just close that factory and open it somewhere else with cheaper labor due to lax labor laws. If X > Y, where X is the cost to operate the factory and Y is the money made from selling the goods from the factory, the factory eventually closes.
I won't shed any tears for capital either, but pretending they're going to operate a charity out of the goodnesses of their hearts and not a business that generates profit is not a winning strategy to get them to socialize the means of production.
> If they can't make enough profit from the sweatshop to make a profit, why would they keep the factory running?
Various reasons. It's not like life is as simple as "make profit -> operate".
>They're not running a charity, so they will just close that factory and open it somewhere else with cheaper labor due to lax labor laws.
Okay, and we as a first world country should refuse to work with inhumane companies. If that passes costs to the first world, so be it.
> but pretending they're going to operate a charity out of the goodnesses of their hearts
I don't understand why you're taking the other extreme. You can not treat people like crap even if you are paying bad wages. It's basic respect, and that costs nothing.
The difference in price between a flight on Frontier or Spirit, and someone else, or the price between a flight on United in economy vs premium, says that they have worked out a price on basic respect. The fact that people keep giving money to Spirit and Frontier say it's a tradeoff people are willing to make.
They can choose not to treat people like crap, but I don't know about you, but when I go to the store, and the thing I want is made in China for $20 or not for $30, I have a hard time wanting to choose the $30 one over the cheaper one, and factory owners know this.
Yes, I am. More conscious about what and who I buy. I don't have perfect information, but I do try to avoid blatantly evil brands. $10 more on my groceries doesn't matter at this point ins life when everything's getting more expensive and worse quality.
I'm not in the best financial situation, but it is one of my missions to try and fight back against this long term. I won't let Apathy erode away at me as well.
Low wage labor is not very valuable at all, and has very low margins on it. The gap between "profitable worker" and "unprofitable worker" is the absolute smallest at the bottom. These workers keep almost all value they create and are never in a position to generate massive value. They are perpetually right on the threshold of being unprofitable to employ.
So the problem then becomes "How do you keep a worker above that profitability threshold when they are barely above it?". You can have kludgey borderline inhumane approaches like this, or maybe try to use perks as coercion to hit targets, but not matter what it's a very difficult problem to solve.
Everyone jumps to "Pay them more" but almost everyone is unaware (and certainly unwilling) that that would necessitate cutting money from their checks to buffer the profitability threshold of these bottom tier workers.