PoetSII, 9 months ago

God’s you’re stupid

OwenEverbinde, 9 months ago

In order to understand where people are coming from when they criticize this system, you must understand the difference between a worker co-op and a privately owned company.

Most people think,

Well, it’s just a different ownership structure. It’s not much different than when workers are rewarded with stock options. Co-ops and companies are both examples of capitalist organizations.

But to those of us criticizing the current system, that’s like saying dictatorships and republics are “just different examples of governments,” and that aside from a different managerial structure, both kinds of government fundamentally serve the same purpose.

They don’t. When it comes to dictatorships vs representative governments, the entire social contract is different. The entire relationship between government official and citizen, between worker and manager, is different.

Free Speech

The citizen in a dictatorship and worker in an… autocratic company (for want of a better word) must both self-police their speech, asking “will this get me prosecuted/fired?” Just taking a harsh tone with your boss can lose you your job. There’s a pretty good NPR article about what bosses are legally allowed to fire you for. And even having different political beliefs is on the list.

Meanwhile, the citizen in a democracy/republic and workers in a cooperative have no such limitations. Their speech is only limited by a general, “do not harm others” guideline that gets spelled out on a case by case basis in courts (for governments) or in discussions with your coworkers (at a co-op).

Expenses

Again, in both an autocratic company and an autocratic government, the citizen has no control over where money is spent and doesn’t get to choose which contractors/suppliers the organization uses.

Contrast that with democratic workplaces/governments, where voters are constantly discussing the budget, audits, social security, how to trim waste, how much to pay local farmers for ingredients, etc…

It’s not only that you must agree to become subservient in order to continue working at an autocratic company. You also get no voice in the organization that sustains itself (at least in part) off of your labor.

These are irreconcilable differences.

You don’t say “well, whichever governments come out on top must be the fittest, strongest governments. Let the arena of war be an impartial judge deciding which governments are superior.”

To the contrary, you most likely recoil in shock when a dictatorship invades a democracy. You most likely cheer on every strategic victory the democracy achieves.

Because the state of existence of a citizen under a representative government is considered worthy of protection independently of whether it helps that government achieve military victories. The rights of a citizen are considered more important than the question of whether a government that protects and respects those rights can be efficient.

All we ask of you is to consider the same for a worker. To consider the possibility that a worker might have certain unalienable rights that must be protected even if it’s hypothetically inefficient (in reality co-ops are more efficient, btw. As are democracies. The only reason they are less common is because unlike viruses, cancer, and companies owned by individuals and/or shareholders, co-ops do not have the capacity to induce rapid grow by destroying their host.) We ask that you consider the possibility that the worker – simply in working for a company – deserves a say in the operation of that company.

leraje, 9 months ago

I feel so stupid now. I can’t believe I ever thought a good way to save on costs was to not pay executives millions of pounds in wages and bonuses every quarter. Now I realise it’s better to lower wages/hours for minimum wage staff on zero hour contracts or lay them off.

axh, 9 months ago

Nice try Walmart’s PR department! You almost had me in a first half

slazer2au, 9 months ago

bit of a reasoning for why a company as big as Wal-Mart has to do things like cut down expenses or lower wages a little.

So you think it is Ok for a CEO to be paid millions of dollars a year plus stock options with quarterly bonuses in the tens of thousands, while the front line workers are being paid so little that they go to food banks or need second jobs to survive?

AdminWorker, 9 months ago

All the key provisions of the antitrust laws (sherman antitrust etc) have been effectively invalidated due to the incredibly high bar set by court precedents before a large company or (making a monopoly or oligopoly) can be sued effectively.

As such the large companies can dance in an effectively no competition space (well some parts have competition still, but other parts no). Any small business with actual innovation is going to have to pay in competition, and inertia, and harassment by incumbent monopolies to get a hold, and the monopoly is most likely going to copy (Whatsapp to Snapchat) or acquire (Microsoft store to blizzard Activision). So any small business owner will get to look forward to bankruptcy, or lawsuits until someone else eats your lunch.

Write your congressman about the antitrust laws? Start a business and hope you aren’t noticed doing something copyable?

dmention7, 9 months ago

Guys, hear me out… maybe rich companies aren’t evil because of some top-down direction to be evil, but because the system through which they become large and rich encourages them to be evil. In that light, Wal-Mart has two choices: either they can be large, successful, and evil; or smaller, less successful, and not as evil. Surely I’m not the only one intelligent and worldly enough to realize that these companies have no choice but to keep wages low and muscle out local competition if they want to dominate international retail.

Some real galaxy brain shit there, OP.

asphaltkooky, 9 months ago

If you have the squeeze the life out of your employees to run your business, does your business deserves to exists? Shops, supermarkets and malls existed before Walmart. Capitalism worked just fine before it.

WhoRoger, 9 months ago

like running small businesses out

Stuff like this, which you dismiss as just a detail, may actually be the root of the problem. This isn’t specific to Walmart, nor are people hating large companies just for being large, nor rich people just for being rich.

The issue is how it affects the rest of the society and businesses. There’s a reason why there are anti-trust laws and such.

ImplyingImplications, 9 months ago

People definitely don’t understand, but it might be people people like yourself.

a company as big as Wal-Mart has to do things like cut down expenses or lower wages a little.

Companies as big as Wal-Mart actually benefit from the economies of scale. Essentially, the larger an operation, the lower the expenses per item produced. Wal-Mart’s operating costs are huge, except if you break it down per item produced. If you do that then their operation costs are far less than most businesses. That’s why they’ve been able to push out small businesses. There’s no reason for them to lower wages other than to be greedy.

They think it’s as easy as being sat in a position and all of the money the company is withholding is all in some giant vault, that’d be withholding billions that they can distribute or something.

It literally is. Wal-Mart’s own balance sheet shows they have $10.5 billion dollars cash on hand. That’s literally $10.5 billion sitting in a vault. Companies do this because it’s good for their stock price.

You’re also skipping over the fact that the highest earners are shareholders, who don’t even work for the company. CEO and executives make way too much money but at least they actually work (they don’t work 1000 times harder than a minimum wage employee, but they do deserve some compensation). Shareholders sit at home and make millions from doing literally nothing, and companies cater to them instead of the labourers doing the actual work.

So yeah, the hate is justified. The downvotes are probably because you’ve inadvertently parroted the same talking points that executives use to defend their greed.

DharmaCurious, 9 months ago

Adding onto this that Walmart and similarly large companies use what is effectively a planned economy (that rivals or exceeds the size of some actual nations). There is no need for the executives to be making these last minute decisions on stock placement or layoffs or any of the shit they supposedly do. If Walmart transitioned to be employee owned (not through stocks, but actually employee owned), it could maintain the same centralized planned economy nature (since it’s almost entirely run through computers). It could benefit the workers directly, lift the economies of of the communities it existed within, and be an actual force for good in the world. All whole the actual products it sold would be much cheaper because they wouldn’t be supported an ultrarich parasitical class.

But instead it benefits like 100 people, and the planet gets to burn in response. Yeah, no, it’s not that we don’t understand. It’s that we do. These companies aren’t just bad for their workers, they’re bad for literally everybody.

dulce_3t_decorum_3st, 9 months ago

Maybe the downvotes are not a Reddit thing, but a you thing? You are, after all, the common denominator.

Repeating over and over and “people don’t understand” something does little to help when the balance of your post is incoherent.

kool_newt, 9 months ago

What are you some sort of corporate apologist?

Even if you’re right, the idea that a company has to treat people and communities poorly due to it’s size just means companies that size should not be allowed to exist at all.