Given the state of consumer indebtedness now, I think our economy is actually underperforming because there is not enough demand due to low wages.
The problem with Fordism is that if you are a manager, there are strong incentives for your firm to defect from paying high wages. If you are the only firm doing this, the consumer economy still hums and you have larger margins. If all the firms do this however, consumers' spending power diminishes over time.
Once the tide has turned, defection becomes a matter of survival as high wage firms become uncompetitive.
Someone like Jeff Bezos has enough market power and technology to turn the tide again like Henry Ford. But he chooses not to.
i think, this is a key point
we are beholden to someone with great power and wealth to be more fair; those who are under them dont have any kind of vote in the matter and therefore have little power to ask for more (whatever that may be)...
Amazon has 1.3M employees in the US and $11B in profit globally.
If you increase the wages at the bottom that pushes everyone up (why would a manager of the warehouse workers make less than the people they manage?).
So if you divide up that $11B in global profit across all 1.3M US workers, you get $8,700 per worker or maybe $500 extra per month after tax. A much appreciated boost by the folks at the bottom, but now global profit is $0.
I’m certainly not arguing against paying warehouse workers more. I’m just saying the “billions in profit” don’t go that far in a company the size of Amazon.
Amazon understands that in the context of organizations it stands to benefit from being seen as the meanest competitor, and that it can get public investment at scale by making this case. The argument isn't that it will hand more money to investors directly, it's that it will attack other things one can invest in, and make those things lose, and therefore it's the safe bet.
In so doing, the adoption of a crazy, aggressive, Spartan attitude among all its workers and management is beneficial, because the easiest way to convince the world you're a psycho axe murderer of a capitalist is to actually be one. In other words, 'making massive profits' isn't the end goal: 'killing other companies' is. And so, the workers do need to be paid that little and treated that harshly because every worker must be first a warrior, willing and able to trade away their health and well-being for the betterment of the company, and this goes all the way to Bezos, whom I'm convinced is going to live a shorter life than a billionaire might otherwise expect, from stress related damage. It's that or go soft and see his company go soft, and I think if he could do that there wouldn't be an Amazon as we know it: people will not follow a leader who doesn't at least pretend to represent what he is leading people towards, and Bezos is leading Amazonians to be warriors and throw themselves into the wood-chipper in order to destroy all competition.
They're paid more than they would be at easier, more civilized jobs. Part of the compensation is this emotional compensation intimately tied up in the American attitude, the cost-less, intangible compensation of knowing you are on the winning team. That is inherent to what Amazon is.