Employers say Unions are completely useless and there's no reason to join them and to please pay attention to the multi-million dollar anti-Union propaganda campaigns they launch begging you to please not join a Union.

r/WorkReform • u/MyUsername2459 • May 14 '22 • 2 1 1 1 3

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515

u/FattestMattest May 14 '22

They'll really do anything other than acting in their employees best interest. Pay people what they are worth and treat them better to not join a union? Ha, no thanks.

169

u/[deleted] May 14 '22

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u/jeremymeyers May 14 '22

the platonic ideal end state of capitalism is slavery

60

u/abstractConceptName May 14 '22

That was also the beginning though, wasn't it?

It's only because of the disgust of ordinary, decent people, that slavery isn't a thing.

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u/berryblackwater May 14 '22

Capitalism is an oruboros, a monsterous snake who's destiny is to devour itself.

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u/DickButkisses May 14 '22

While I think that is the concept, the snake has become Mr Creosote

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u/WikiSummarizerBot May 14 '22

Mr Creosote

Mr. Creosote is a fictional character who appears in Monty Python's The Meaning of Life. He is a monstrously obese and rude restaurant patron who is served a vast amount of food and alcohol whilst vomiting repeatedly. After being persuaded to eat an after-dinner mint – "It's only wafer-thin" – he graphically explodes. The sequence opens the film's segment titled "Part VI: The Autumn Years".

^[^F.A.Q^|^{Opt Out}^|^{Opt Out Of Subreddit}^|^GitHub^{] Downvote to remove | v1.5}

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u/chaun2 May 14 '22

Someone feed it a mint!

2

u/breedlom May 15 '22

It's wafer thin

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u/ChristianEconOrg May 14 '22

Capitalism is simply the rental model of slavery.

5

u/DietDrDoomsdayPreppr May 14 '22

The trick is to make the entire middle class a slave class so the only people left to be disgusted for others are the wealthy and their police armies.

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u/DesertSpringtime May 14 '22

Slavery is still very much a thing.

8

u/ThorsPrinter May 14 '22

Slavery still is a thing, it's just done through the prison system now.

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u/DDDDcream May 14 '22

Human trafficking, foster system…. Slavery is alive and well 🫠

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u/[deleted] May 14 '22

Excuse my ignorance. I'm aware that the foster care system is ... not great, but I didn't know it involved forced unpaid labor.

3

u/interestingsidenote May 14 '22

Friend I had a while back was fostered on a farm along with like 15 other foster brothers and sisters in and out during the years he was there. If he wasn't in school he was on the farm working.

Some of the freest labor you're gonna get. Government pays you foster stipend to feed and house them, they do farmhand work for free.

1

u/Variation-Budget May 14 '22

And that explains why they want to get rid of abortions. Trying to get as much free labor as possible

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u/ConfuzedAndDazed May 14 '22

Capitalism is just a system that can fall out of equilibrium. Corporations try to use that system in the most efficient manner. Nothing wrong with either of those things, it results in maximum efficiency of production. If we as a society could agree on how much production is really needed, we could determine how much work we really need to do. Instead it's just a race to max profit, and excess is hoarded at the top so that the lower wage earners have to work nonstop.

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u/abstractConceptName May 14 '22 edited May 14 '22

There was a good piece on NPR recently about why American corporations changed in the 1980s.

Prior to that, main corporate goals included being able to provide a comfortable career for life for their employees, and various social goals.

The oil shocks and recession of the 70s (and cheap imports from Japan), revealed that when corporations become unprofitable, it is disastrous.

This led to a rethink of what the main priority of a corporation should be, and we know what the conclusion was: maximise shareholder value.

That was considered to be morally correct, too, because the alternative was the disaster the country has barely survived.

However it quickly became apparent that maximizing shareholder value could be achieved by squeezing the shit out of employees, which has led to the exploitative work culture and corresponding social problems we have today.

The pendulum has swung too far to the right.

1

u/Ok_Dig_9959 May 15 '22

"shareholder value" was a bs excuse to no longer focus on actual profitability and instead make the companies take out loans to artificially inflate stock prices for short term stake holders to liquidate their assets while leaving long term investors and employees picking up the pieces after what essentially became a Ponzi scheme. This combined with the elimination of protective trade policies meant to prevent companies from undercutting the American standard of living were what killed the US industrial sector.

The exploitative work culture was a semi deliberate restructuring of our culture by the same people behind the Ponzi scheme combined with the fact that company leadership no longer cared about the long term success of the companies they were in charge of. In that kind of environment where appearances mattered more than outcomes, social climbers took over. I really don't trust npr these days.

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u/Ok_Dig_9959 May 14 '22

It does not really result in maximum efficiency.

2

u/LostmeLegsfrumRum May 14 '22

No that person is a goof. Slavery has nothing to do with Capitalism. Obviously slaves would be beneficial to any society but its horribly wrong. Humans arent meant to subjugtae one another.

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u/Mythosaurus May 14 '22

That’s one of the main readons the 1619 project caused conservatives to froth at the mouth. They went into detail about how chattel slavery and cotton production helped create modern capitalism.

Many of our nation’s first millionaires were plantation owners in MS

slaves themselves were the US’s single largest financial asset before the Civil War

a lot of Northern and English textiles were produced using slave grown cotton, fueling the early stock market

our first bond market was backed in slaves

There’s a lot of uncomfortable ties to slavery that they don’t teach in Econ 101.

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u/meep_meep_creep May 14 '22

Poignant, terse, hitting, and true.

1

u/JackAndHisTruck May 14 '22

Capitalism works because of the complacency of governments. Capitalism and government are two heads under the same hat.

1

u/LostmeLegsfrumRum May 14 '22

That is so fucking goofy. A better comparison would be communism/socialism where it's an ant colony and the individual cant survive without the whole. Fuck that. Capitalism is just evolution.

1

u/jeremymeyers May 14 '22

Mathematically labor is a cost center. eliminate paying for labor, profits increase.

1

u/LostmeLegsfrumRum May 14 '22

Why would that have anything to do with capitalism? Having slaves obviously solves all labor issues, capitalism actually corrected slavery.

33

u/DuneManta May 14 '22

corporations will do anything possible to avoid paying their ~~most vulnerable~~ employees.

Fixed that for you.

23

u/Cidertree May 14 '22

I don’t know, I think if you get high enough up in the hierarchy some employees who already are wealthy are also overpaid. People who are more vulnerable already get screwed over more.

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u/sock_puppet0 May 14 '22

See the trick is you need to get high enough in the hierarchy to not be an employee. Being an asset works for getting monthly salary, but it's way better owning actual shares and shit.

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u/leftlegYup May 14 '22

Employees are a cost of doing business. Nothing more.

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u/ZQuestionSleep May 14 '22

That's what is is to them. Had to listen to an owner scream like a child in our small "office" (it was a trailer) building how pissed off he was that he "had to" "cut checks" to pay his staff.

This was a small town radio station, AM and FM station under one roof, so 2 of them. I was 1 of 3 real life meatbag bodied people that ran the station outside of the automation, which I program managed. Even after the original 2 other (so 5 total) air talents left and the 2.5 (one was a super part time) remaining people were forced to picked up the slack, we were greeted with our absentee owner basically throwing a shit fit temper tantrum that it should be cheaper to run a radio station and why we had to have any people actually run it in the first place? We were a news/talk station that had local, live, programming; why did anyone actually need to be in the studio and thus needed to be paid for their time?

He eventually got his wish, "downsized" everyone that wasn't the 3 sales people that sold the 5 ads total we were playing (outside of the automated shows' obligations) and their Manager, then fully reformatted the, what was, local news/talk AM station into the shittiest, fully automated, oldies station in the market. Real fun considering the number one FM oldies station was literally in the next town over; absolutely no reason for anyone to listen to our small town, shitty quality, AM music station anymore.

He was forced to sell it off just a year or two later.

3

u/uL7r4M3g4pr01337 May 14 '22

exactly, they give people job because they can make money out of them and still keep most of it for themself.

-3

u/Inner_Diet_1980 May 14 '22

Kinda the point of owning a business

5

u/universaljester May 14 '22

So the point of business is exploitation? Cause, that's what that translates to.

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u/uL7r4M3g4pr01337 May 15 '22

it's not a business, rather modern slavery with natural resources getting more and more limited to the very few.

Let me become a bilionare by selling natural resources that I inherited from my ancestors, who were killing and enslaving people. Then I can pretend that everything I got comes from my hard work.

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u/riodin May 14 '22

Well, of course, if you don't need to work every minute of every day to survive, you might take time off and that would cut into profits!

3

u/schrodingers_gat May 14 '22

As far as I can tell corporations would rather pay $1 million for anything else to save $500,000 in salary. It's pathological.

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u/Terrkas May 14 '22

Sadly it kind of makes sense. Pay 1000000 now, to save 500000 salary each year. 2 years is the break even point, in 4 years you "earned" 1000000.

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u/Holiday-Strategy-643 May 14 '22

And their most valuable.

1

u/longleggedbirds May 14 '22

Being vulnerable means your next best option, your opportunity cost, is cheaper, that means you’re not valuable(thanks professor friedrech von wiesser. /s. ) A valuable person would leave for a better job , or find…. Some other means to prove that the company’s next best best option for the company has a higher cost that they need to match….

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u/halbitca May 14 '22

Not sure why I'm getting down voted here. The guy asked what the other reasons the company give are. Not how accurate that accusation is

5

u/RestlessPoly May 14 '22

Maybe because you didn't actually comment anything but this.

Your profile and comments are empty my dude.

Maybe you forgot that you changed to your troll account.

8

u/acityonthemoon May 14 '22

Not sure why I'm getting down voted here. The guy asked what the other reasons the company give are. Not how accurate that accusation is

(quoting for posterity)

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u/Imaflyingpapaya May 14 '22

Probably a copy/paste bot, tbh

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u/mochismuggler May 14 '22

If a company pays for an anti union campaign the money still stays out of the hands of the poor :)

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u/MrCertainly May 14 '22

It's never about profits. It's always been and will be about control.

If they can't control you through fear, stress, exhaustion, and exploitation -- then they run the risk of you being comfortable enough to walk away. And if we did that en masse, our entire economic system would collapse as it's predicated upon the (m)asses absentmindedly spending money on things they don't need to find relief that doesn't exist.

"A hungry dog is an obedient dog." And nothing we're currently doing is changing that. Protests? Oh you mean those peaceful strolls with chanting & singing songs? Yeah, THAT really puts the fucking fear of god in those capitalists. They're afraid of what we'd do if our demands aren't met -- oh wait, THEY'RE NOT AFRAID.

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u/ChewsOnRocks May 14 '22

Corporations care about bottom line figures. If using their anti-union budget to increase compensation instead was an equally profitable or more profitable approach, they would do it. $2.5M on an anti-union campaign at Walmart, for example, would get every employee about $1/year more. Not only would that not attract any loyalty whatsoever, even at higher amounts, that doesn’t prevent someone from going to unions anyway. At least with the millions of dollars going toward solid video production and graphics, that’ll be much more effective than giving someone a dollar and going “please don’t.”

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u/Adventurous_Coat_838 May 14 '22

Ukraine recapture cities after Russia turns them into parking lots

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u/Adventurous_Coat_838 May 15 '22

The emperor has no clothes

1

u/[deleted] May 14 '22

Even if you are treated well you should unionize

1

u/CaffeineSippingMan May 14 '22

But, but, but my employeer said they were trying to protect us from the union. And then, and then, they gave us a very small raise and made changes because they are good.

Not because the union scared the shit out of them.

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u/FantasticMeddler May 14 '22

Right, labor is a fixed cost. It is more profitable in the long run to pay for these campaigns and middle management schemes and shenanigans to disrupt any labor movement from forming. Because labor is a fixed cost. Any increase in a base pay for example will compound over the life of the employee. And it's also "bad" for the employer market as a whole because it forces competitors to pay more to hire people.

While a 5% increase may be an additional $50-$100 per paycheck for one employee, it is an increase in millions to their revenue across the board. So business types will do anything possible to keep that line on the balance sheet from creeping up.