Full Metal Bolshevik said:
What the capitalist wants is to make money using the workers labourer, doesn't matter how little he gets, how bad the job is, how miserable he is, as long as he can exploit them for money. So it's actually good they find desesperate workers so they get paid less and are exploited harder.
So yes, same thing I said in the other post.
The desire for profit is not inherently evil. If it were, we would all have to atone daily.
I go to work
for the express purpose of turning my time into money, which I can then turn into anything else I need at a reasonable exchange, with a bit left over for things I do not need but do want. This is known as making a profit and I do it five days a week, sometimes six.
I do not feel especially guilty about this. Neither do I feel guilty that the company I work for and of which I own shares turns a (small) profit on the labor of its crew. Our wages are above average for the industry, we allow overtime, we buy health insurance for our workers, we have a retirement plan that matches employee savings dollar-for-dollar. We are small enough that each person's supervisor has done that person's job at some point and therefore understands how to
help them, rather than being some fresh-from-business-school twat who's never had a real job, bombarding them with ideas that sound great in the classroom but aren't terribly useful in real situations. In other words, the bullshit factor is minimal.
Short version, we're a pretty decent place to work. "Desperate workers getting paid less and exploited harder" does not fit the character of our business, and many others. Those places exist *cough*WalMart*cough* and will continue to do so as long as their business model is viable. But there is a whole spectrum of possible work environments. The existence of bad jobs does not disprove the value of an entire economic system.
Do the owners at my job want to make a profit? Of course they do! It's a lot of trouble running a business. A tremendous amount of knowledge is required just to make sure we are operating legally. Many if not most of those laws are there to protect the worker, and we obey them scrupulously and at considerable expense. Working folks are better protected now than at any point in history. (So much so that those very protections have become a haven for sloth, incompetence, and outright corruption among workers. If you think every worker is some shining exemplar of virtue being beaten down by the rich, think again. A small but significant percentage of them are exactly the sort of thieving, deceitful scumbag you seem to think all business owners are. Catch thieving workers red-handed on videotape? Doesn't matter. They
still have all the rights. Your business has none. "Punishment" means they basically walk free with whatever they stole, give you the finger on the way out, and go on to steal from their next employer, whom you are not allowed to warn. Tell me again, who's being exploited?) The burden of operating a business doesn't end there. I just completed our corporate tax return, you wouldn't believe how many pages it is. And before you assume, NO, we do not get enormous tax breaks allowing us to pocket 98% of our ill-gotten gains. If I told you how narrow our profit margin is, how little of the throughput is actually left.....you wouldn't believe it. Anyway, there has to be some reason to keep doing all that work, to employ the people we do, to keep the place going. Profit is the reason. Our greed and "exploitation" does profit us, but it also keeps thirty-five people in the black and out of the bread line.
Just out of curiosity, what's your system of choice, and why is it better?
