> This decision is unethical to full-time employees seeing the tidy profit they made.
Profit itself is unethical.
Profit itself is unethical.
> Profit itself is unethical.
It's a very strange thing to claim that profit is unethical. In tech companies, profit is an indication that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts — i.e. so much wealth has been created that there's an excess of it.
- people who gave money to enable the activity leading to profit (aka capital)
- people who organize the activity leading to profit (aka management)
- people who actually do the work
Obviously, each of these groups has some legitimate claim to the added value, but it's also pretty obvious that over the last 50 years or so, the balance in the economy as a whole has tilted towards capital and upper management in a way that can't really be justified on an ethical basis. (Just look at how the correlation between wages and productivity disappeared in the 1970s.)
> Just look at how the correlation between wages and productivity disappeared in the 1970s.
Isn't this explained by computerization?
The '70s? That's when Stallman was mucking around at MIT, right? Computers were happening!
Say 30 workers' productivity can now be reached by 1 worker at a computer. The company lays off 25, leaving only 5 workers. Those 5 workers are generating 150 workers' productivity for the company. But they're only getting 5 workers' salary (there has been no salary increase). Boom -- wages:productivity used to be 1:1, and now it's 1:30.
Consider how it also makes no sense FOR those 5 workers' salary TO increase significantly. Why should you pay them 30 times more than their pre-computerized peers? Their jobs may actually be easier than before, hours of indexing and searching replaced by filesystems and `grep`.
Is that unethical?
This also attacks the "we thought computers would mean we would get 2 hour workdays" meme. Equivalently to inflating their wages, why would you decrease their work hours?
These are things that, in the name of "ethics", can only be forced by unions or the government, depending on your level of adventurousness toward economic policy. (And your level of confidence in being able to arbitrate ethics. The communists were very hubristic about that one.)
You say that there are things that can only be forced by unions and governments. I agree!
We just need to keep in mind that at least some of the things detrimental to workers that happened 40 to 50 years ago were also forced by lobbyists and governments.