Amazon's tactics in response to unionizing efforts been extremely revealing. Even if unionizing fails, I'm happy that it forced Amazon to show us all the level of contempt they have for their workforce.
Not because some corporations are moral, but because happy workers are a good long-term strategy and many corporations are stuck with rolling short-term-ism. They reward the top tier on a three-ish year cycle, so executives only need to make the numbers go up for three years before exiting with a higher paying job and compensation via stock sales.
The US has a massive issue in general with rolling corporate pump & dump. The whole stock market basically encourages it. That's why we see things like customer retention strategies that actually reduce re-subscriptions and hurt the long term reputations remaining popular (because the short term matters more to executives than the long term, even if the company burns down after they leave).
However a corporation which has a large amount of jobs which require little skill or job-specific training but a lot of effort may actually find the opposite is a good long-term strategy: they have a vast supply of potential employees and hiring and firing is cheap so they can work their employees hard to the point of burn-out and then fire and rehire the next batch. These workers have basically no power over their employer individually. Unions are effectively a way for these workers to exercise some power over their employer as a collective, to get what some workers essentially have automatically due to the labour market in which they work.
I always see this cited as a reason but it so rarely happens that it might as well be a Horatio Alger fable. It's not instructive or useful in our current reality and it would be like taking lessons from the workplace successes of Santa's elves.
Of course it is not necessarily the case that what works here in Norway would work in the US even if the legal framework were changed to support it.
>As of February 2021 Costco has a market cap of $148.54 B
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/american-airlines-stock-si...
>“We are troubled by [American’s] wealth transfer of nearly $1 billion to its labor groups,” Baker wrote in a note to clients.
Treating employees well is punished by the market and neither Costco or American Airlines treat them particularly well, just less terribly than their competitors. A company necessarily has to treat its employees like shit in order to succeed.
Steve Yegge's accidentally-published blog post isn't the whole story, but it has a ring of truth to it.
It's not just businesses though who are employers. If you've ever hired someone to do a contract job for you, say a plumber, electrician or some other small construction project, you probably thought about and devised all sorts of ways to reduce the time and material costs of their efforts to save you money. I see this happen with a lot of people. Our culture has a deep seated disregard for other humans when money is involved. For those who can easily afford the cost, I don't understand. For those who have to pay someone out of necessity but can't really afford the costs, I understand.
Successful businesses fall into the former category. They are not charities, they have a profit motive and margin so they can afford it otherwise they have a failing business model. It all becomes a matter of how much success of that model they want to share with those who make their model possible and how entitled they feel in deserving of reward for their models success. To me, a lot of it is sheer coincidence and luck. I say you should contribute back to those who enable and make you successful. It's all about balance though, again, a business (well, most) isn't a charity and its reasonable to expect them to garner rewards for their efforts and success, whether it be luck or innovation and hard work based. A business also shouldn't be on the other extreme operating as a sweat shop driving down others rights to benefit those in charge.
There's a healthy balance somewhere in between and many captains of industry or investors holding the purse strings seem to have forgotten this. In addition, hyper competitive markets have forced these sort of optimizations. If you take two identical businesses with identical cost structures, products, etc and one decides to better compete and lower costs to consumers, they can reduce their labor costs, then other participants in the market will have to follow suit to remain competitive or fail in a low cost driven society. So even if you understand the value of people and want to share the wealth, it would be quite difficult.
The way to protect against this is through baseline legislation like minimum wage, overtime limits, etc. When all competitors in a market have to comply or be fined a cost with too high of risk (the punishments for violation need to be high to dissuade abuse), it's not possible to undercut your competitors in these aspects because you can't optimize beyond these constraints. We need more robust labor laws and enforcement to fix this issue, IMO. Let businesses optimize outside of labor because labor is already incredibly optimized as is and will only reduce quality of life for most if it continues the ongoing trend.