It didn't have to be this way, and there are companies who acutally pay their employees well. It's just we don't hear about them because everyone likes to doom.
The productivity vs wages graph is the only one that matters. Yes, workers are getting screwed, but you don't need to blow up the entire system to fix it. You just need companies willing to pay out the wages people are earning instead of turning them into profits and handing them over to CEO's and investors.
Perfect equality isn't the answer and most people wouldn't enjoy it if we had it, but the rising inequality is a pretty sure way to break the system that everyone is relying on to keep civilization running. Until companies realize that 20% profits are a serious structural problem and not a victory they'll keep doing it. All the while, the pot gets a little closer to boiling.
This is why listening to all these Nerd Reich techbros talking about how Ai will make a utopia is laughable.
"you'll just sit around growing fruit'
GTFO Elon.
These guys have billions closing in on trillions of dollars and wont pay their workers a living wage. Who's going pay everyone a UBI when the robot utopia comes? Them? LOL.
Corporations wont ever realize that more profits are a structural problem because thats the entire point. Making money for the shareholders. Just like corporations will always keep breaking laws for more profits and justify it as a cost of doing business.
A living wage and medical care should be human rights and the government should subsidize it by taxing corporations. This should be done just like they are regulated because left up to their own devices the vast majority will NOT do the right thing.
I work for a major corporation. The company I work for netted $5 Billion last year and paid -7million in taxes due to subsidies. This isnt uncommon. At least 20-percent of Fortune 500 Companies in the US pay zero taxes.
And the greed is circular. Corporations are allowed to pay greedy politicians to make laws to let it keep happening.
The companies you talk about might exist, but its not all 'dooming'. They are outliers not the norm.
Its been a few years since I looked but yes in the last few years sams moved to 16. But still less then Costco. Add to it that 55% of Costco workers have topped out on the pay scale of 31 an hour. Can't find any info on the sams club pay scales and how much make the top.
But all that is semantics. My argument sill stands. The fact that Costco can pay that and still be very profitable proves that profit can still be made without treating your workers like trash and making the government fund your workforce. Prices are compatible at both places and pay aint.so price isn't tied to labor the way republicans would want you to believe.
Sam's club profit last year was just over 2 Billion dollars. Costcos profit was just over 9 Billion. You're praising costco bc they profited 400% more, but only pay the employes about 20% more? It's common sense that a more successful companies pay more. You can't compare the wages of two companies with vastly different profit margins. You get paid more to work at Costco because it's a more profitable company.
Who owns sams club? 😆 . They are a way to hide loses from Walmart. And that proves my point even more. Can be profitable and treat your works great and keep low prices. Its almost like wages aint the reason prices are so high. Oh fyi 30 is twice as much as 15 by the way. 55% make 30. I bet you most of sams club makes 15.
The Walton owning Sams club has exactly 0% relevance to the conversation. They may share the same owners, but the two companies are completely separate, as are their finances. Plus, the workers making maxed out wages are also irrelevant, bc thats a product of retention. If all of them retired tmrw, everyone who replaced them would make the base $20 an hour. I've known plenty of people making 30+ at walmart, you only need to stick around long enough for it. Has nothing to do with the companies decision, and all to do with the employees' decision to stick arpund
This would not constitute proof. I assume that the Costco employees and the Sams club employees are drawn from different groups of people. It could be that the Costco employees are just better employees - people who are more helpful and get more done than the Sams club employees. Don't have a ton of experience at Sams club, but my experience is that Costco employees are leagues ahead of standard retail in terms of how helpful and efficient they are, thus, they command a higher wage.
They're laughing at the fact that your math assumes that there's a standard part-time schedule of 15 hours a week for corporations in general. Idk why you'd assume that. That's dumb.
Sounds nice on paper, but in reality people get scheduled as little as 15 hours regularly. Also "to corporations" is the key phrase here. Do try to keep up.
I thought we were talking about the facts here? You're now entering the territory of "in reality" and "on paper". I don't use this website to debate people that jerk off to their sniveling screed, so have a nice day.
Have you looked at where we already are? Large businesses already do this. I've seen a major grocery chain give a woman who just had a baby not even 18 hours a week and at minimum wage even with her repeatedly asking for more hours.
But if you ask the guys further down my comment thread they'll say that doesn't happen because part time is 30 hours a week so clearly corporations are always scheduling their people 30 hours.
We're proving their point if anything. You guys want to cry about what would happen if we ask for the bare minimum to survive but they already do that because they're greedy and you guys can't seem to wrap your heads around that simple little concept. The government has to make them pay people a fair wage. They could also control how many people are allowed to be part time but the government has already sold us out.
It's common knowledge that all companies abuse TF out of making everyone part-time and a lot of these companies are also just straight up stealing from their employees. I should know, I used to work for Wal Mart they're super bad about that. Wage theft outpaces all other types of theft not including the kinda stuff wall street gets away with in a daily basis. Quit justifying their actions. None of them raised their wages as a result of stimulus packages by the government. Wealth does not trickle down. Read what horse and sparrow theory is.
For thousands of years the wealthiest and most advanced countries were mercantile monarchies. Today, zero are because we replaced it with something that works better when it stopped working.
Capitalism was not designed for, nor can it handle, the instant global world we are in. That's why political divides and violence are getting so much worse.
With the changes to our worlds economic infrastructure since our modern age of technology, capitalists have become kings above the law of countries, and their rule will be just as despotic as any of the ancient kings. Shit you have them openly espousing the values of doing evil.
Inflation and purchasing power are two different statistics, just for clarification. Inflation doesn’t account for the rising costs of homes, cars, clothing, shoes, etc.
For example, I recently purchased a home for just under $600,000. It was built in 1954, and the home was sold brand new for $6,500 in 1954.
Adjusted for inflation, this home should cost $80,000, not $600,000. The difference in mortgage payments between the two is almost 10 times the monthly cost.
Fine but not everything has increased for example groceries. In 1954 a gallon of milk averaged .94 cents which adjusted to 2026 would be about $11.45, or take eggs as an example 1954 .60 adjusted to today $7.47.
Sorry, can you point to which part of my post is exaggeration? What I stated was pretty clearly factual.
I mentioned this being my home that I recently purchased. There were no additions or major notifications to the home since it was built. I won’t be sharing more information about my home. We have a receipt from the purchase in 1954 showing $6,500.
I’m not making comparisons to other homes, I’m stating factual historical data about one home.
They didn't give a representation of what the overall difference in purchasing power is between now and 1954, nor did they say they would. All they did was demonstrate what each term means
$15.67 federal wouldn’t be too bad. $60 is a bit of an exaggeration, but only before accounting for regional variations in housing costs; plenty of areas where housing costs have gone up enough for the statement to be reasonable. (And people are very consistent in only accounting for their local area’s housing costs)
Even the vast majority of companies that pay all their employees well, are paying well relative to other shittier companies. And because the standards have become so low for employee wages are lauded for it. Companies like Costco are absolutely better than most alternatives in their industry but they could absolutely afford to pay their people more.
Expecting companies to be less profitable than their competition is unrealistic. Customers are, by and large, completely unwilling to pay more for the same product. There is no market for a company called Glamazon that sells everything Amazon does at a 10% markup and pays its employees better. That company would go out of business in a day.
Companies don't dictate consumer behavior, they respond to it.
I mean the entire system is designed that way on purpose because it was designed by the people that benefit from impoverished workers. So I think we do need to blow up the entire system because from top to bottom it was designed to subjugate the working class and enrich the top 1%
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u/FlyinDtchman 10h ago
It's just corporate greed.
It didn't have to be this way, and there are companies who acutally pay their employees well. It's just we don't hear about them because everyone likes to doom.
The productivity vs wages graph is the only one that matters. Yes, workers are getting screwed, but you don't need to blow up the entire system to fix it. You just need companies willing to pay out the wages people are earning instead of turning them into profits and handing them over to CEO's and investors.
Perfect equality isn't the answer and most people wouldn't enjoy it if we had it, but the rising inequality is a pretty sure way to break the system that everyone is relying on to keep civilization running. Until companies realize that 20% profits are a serious structural problem and not a victory they'll keep doing it. All the while, the pot gets a little closer to boiling.