But as you say, that's not the world we live in.
I'd say it's a pretty big risk to become unemployed, especially where the welfare system can be unstable, and you have dependents to support. The investor, at worst, will have to take a "labour" job. The worker, at worst, will be food and shelter insecure.
>By all means go and start your own company if you think labor is the only part of the equation
That's not really a valid response to a criticism of the system which necessarily operates with the division of capital and labour. Obviously you need money; that's not what is in dispute here.
Capital and labour are integral parts of the equation, but the social function of an owner of capital who commands an army of labourers and sells the goods for profit is arguably not. Production can happen (and has happened) outside that social relationship.
The person I was responding to was acting as if there is NOT a division of capital and labor. I agree with you that we need both. You can't treat only capital well, and you can't treat only labor well. And the person I was responding to seems to have been suggesting that we treat only labor well. Production at our modern scale needs owners and investors and shareholders. That doesn't mean we can't and shouldn't improve things for the worker, though.
But how do you calculate how much value they created? If a worker turns $10 in raw materials to a $100 widget by himself, then it's clear that he created $90 worth of value. However, what if he did so using the company's $500,000 equipment? What if he was using a design that someone else created?
The factors of production are land, labor and capital. To produce any good or any service, anything of actual value you need them all, and by providing one you are entitled to a share of the profits proportional to whatever it is you put in. Shareholders provide the capital, workers provide the work, landlords provide the place. Workers get wages, shareholders get dividends, landlords get rents.
ALL OF THEM ARE RESPONSABLE FOR THE OUTPUT, you cannot build anything with workers alone.
just because someone doesn’t screw screws doesn’t mean they did nothing to earn the rewards.
It is not always that way. Sometimes the workers are willing to wait to see how much profit is actually made before receiving their agreed upon share, but there is a good chance they will end up with nothing in the end, and so the aforementioned model, which carries far less risk for the worker, has become the most popular way.
Ideally, workers would be paid a wage for their time, and later have the profits of their work shared amongst them. After all, they are the ones responsible for generating this wealth.
Personally, if you have a spare $15.5 million, I'd recommend a more diversified portfolio of broad-market low-fee index funds and (IMO) early retirement.
Someone joining Apple today did not create any of that wealth.
Not sure why a random hire today "rightfully" deserves some huge transfer of wealth from the "capitalist owners" (read: owners) on their start date. Can you elaborate on that step?
Everyone working for Apple, including indirectly, i.e. all the way down its supply chains, are collectively generating wealth for the company.
Just imagine how much fairer it would be towards all these people who did the actual work, if the profits generated from every iPhone, every iPad, every MacBook sold (and so on) ended up in their pockets instead.
When they showed up to the factory that day and turned a pile of parts into an iphone.
Where do you think the wealth comes from?
Instead, workers usually prefer to estimate what the profitability will be up front and determine what they want out of the pie based on that assumption. Then they lock in at that price regardless of what happens. If the business fails, they still get their agreed upon amount. If the business thrives, they might only end up with a small piece of the pie, but it was worth it given the risk of ending up with nothing. It's essentially a futures contract.
It seems a little much to get to have it both ways – to be guaranteed the estimated piece of the pie when the business fails, but also all the upside when the business succeeds beyond imagination. Why would anyone agree to that? Those rare moonshot wins are what pays the workers for the times that there are losses. If the workers got the proceeds from the moonshot wins and the proceeds from their futures contracts, the math would stop adding up and employment would grind to a halt.
I'm not certain what you mean here. When does this happen? This doesn't sound like the usual method or motivation for job seeking.
When the future is unknown, when the futures contracts are being established, one can only guess as to how much money that labour input is going to return. The value that is established for a given job, commensurable to its relation to producing that future income, is always done on a best guess basis, knowing that reality can swing widely in either direction. It's an average, of sorts.
If you think the prevailing best guess is wrong and that a restaurant will easily make enough to give you back $100,000 as a server, you can defer your payout until that quantity is known. This arrangement does happen, but is usually eschewed as the worker would usually rather have the guaranteed known quantity, based on the best guess of their contribution in the profitability, even if removed from the final earnings, for their work. It reduces their risk.
As an aside, servers at restaurants are an interesting example as they do commonly play both sides. They lock in some of their income on the future's market, but also capture a share of the profit when it is made. There is a lot of flexibility in your options. Typically, most workers prefer to stay within the futures market entirely, though, as they want the security of a known quantity for their income, rather than making millions one year and loosing millions the next.
If so, what you describe isn't what happens for the vast majority of people. We need income to pay for rent (or mortgage), food, utilities, and other essentials. With a bit saved over, where we can. There's no scope for estimating the profitability of the business or anything like that, we just need money to live. I'm sure it's the same for Apple's factory workers in the article.
I think they're desperate for jobs in a way that precludes estimating profitability and negotiating for pie.