Mining magnates should be forced to work at the coalface. The Waltons should be forced to stock shelves, Bezos should be in the distribution centres.
The list is endless, and unfortunately this is nothing new. The best we can do is minimum wage laws and unions to try and "negotiate" with billionaires to give us a crumb.
Falling back to social engineering and forced labor (hopefully) won't win you many points in the "let's re-architect the system" debate. If the Waltons never stopped stocking shelves and started scaling, we'd never have Walmart. It's possible you think that's a good decision for the world, but it's clearly not the worlds decision for itself.
If there's one billionaire with intimate knowledge of the "lower" levels of his business, it's Bezos.
I'm not here to tell him how to run his business, but let's not pretend he would be happy to work in his warehouse.
I’m a computer guy, but there I was loading trucks, packing boxes, etc.
It was a fantastic experience and connected you viscerally to the business. I believe it is still required. This is the culture that Jeff shaped for the company.
I wouldn't overstate it though -- the ability to tolerate a week of something does not necessarily extrapolate to a month or a year.
A week in the rainforest is an adventure. A life in the rainforest is difficult and short.
But I don't intend any criticism of Bezos. He has done the math on warehouse employee satisfaction as a contributor to corporate goals, and made his decision.
The scrappy days of packing his own shipments are long past, and that experience gives him not-much insight into the working conditions for the people in his warehouses.
That's fine, but it's not a basis for deification.
For you, I imagine it was a week-long challenge where you knew that you would have a better job afterwards and make a lot more money.
True
> It doesn't even really encourage it.
False
> Wanting more and more money regardless of the (human) cost does.
Capitalism is explicitly about encouraging a behavior with more and more money.
It's not immoral per se, it's just that humanity is not in the value function. That's where regulation/subsidy/taxing comes in.
It tends to encourage it by putting those at the top who manage to exploit the most. Capital also begets political power which makes it hard to counter that trend.
> Wanting more and more money regardless of the (human) cost
Congratulations, you've accidentally defined capitalism.
Some countries do better than others, in various metrics. That's the "what else" you can look at and emulate.
What I'm advocating against is the idea of a wholesale changing of a system of politics and economy.
People only have so much time and capacities. A software engineer isn't going to spend a lot of time on the sales room floor, but they might have started off in help-desk support. A CEO might not know what goes on in the warehouse, but he or she may have worked at a McDonalds growing up. If someone hasn't worked entry level jobs elsewhere, would working on the factory really develop empathy? Would that change policy? Probably not.
It's so easy to make two boxes, one for the oppressor and the other for the oppressed, and place everyone into those two boxes. If each oppressor works a day in the shoes of the other box, does that make a difference? If the workers throw their wrenches into the gears and seize the means of production, what if they're completely unprepared to keep that machine moving and end up with famine?
The issues are complex, much more complex than "Before you get your license, you should have to ride a bike on the streets for two weeks."
To say he has not been made aware and had the opportunity to address these issues over years is giving him too much credit.
Blame capitalism is all the rave. So are companies hiding from responsibility. Shell companies shell companies to evade responsibility and incing their companies on remote islands they clearly don't primarily operate on to evade taxes and giving abuses NDAs which effectively offer full silence regardless of any federal felonies committed or else they take severence or healthcare taken away. Companies can do whatever they want under an NDA and sue anyone to the point even if they did something very illegal, they still wouldn't be liable because the fact that someone spoke about it is illegal in the same way a VC investor was caught beating a woman 300 times in a row as she tried to escape the guys san Francisco mansion but the evidence was thrown out because it was obtained illegally and he got a $500 fine instead.
Blame capitalism exists because publicly shaming companies away from egregious abuses even to the point of being often illegal is the only way to have some type of check and balance and it always takes a few people beginning by speaking out and losing their jobs and getting nothing for it before the masses come to agreement and hold companies responsible for better practices. Unfortunately this is not just a fun trend. It's a reaction that attempts to check and balance abuses and it often only happens after many yrs and many people have gone silent and a few have chosen to take the risk and speak out. We should definitely have something better than blame capitalism but to say it just appeared out of the blue is a bit misleading.
You've got a point there. The capitalist will most likely continue to act as a capitalist. The incentives are fundamentally wrong, so moralizing on an individual level won't do much, which brings us back to: blame capitalism.