Berkshire was a key player in the rail workers strike of 2022 and Warren didn’t seem to want to give an inch to the working man when given the opportunity to do so.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_United_States_railroad_...
It was the temporal global exception, not the rule, as the worldwide norm was working people to death for most of history. Companies would gladly give their workers zero benefits if they could get away with it.
Unions sent a couple of the big car makers into bankruptcy. They've sent all kinds of companies into bankruptcy - the idea that anything they are suggesting is good by nature is about the same as suggesting communism is good by nature. Sounds pleasant, doesn't work.
Communism and Capitalism are actually quite similar in a sense. Neither of them works well in their purest form, both lead to formation of an oligarchy (party elite,billionaires). Most livable countries in the world mix them in form of free market social democracy.
Yet companies have flourished under that model for decades/centuries. Employers and governments have plenty of levers to make sure workers have no choice but to work while being underpaid.
It goes both ways, unfortunately. Industry in general couldn't exist without laborers, and it has a long history of brutal abuse and horrific, dangerous working conditions that killed and maimed many.
I think it's a cultural problem. We aren't far removed from a time when the general business model was to coercively work people to death to extract every penny of value from them, and that mindset hasn't completely been lost. Workers are callously discarded, not at the doorstep of bankruptcy, but at the first hint that profits might not grow as fast as they could.
The unions wanted sick leave, because under the current system, employees were scheduled weeks in advance with zero margin. If the employee was sick, they had to ask for PTO which would get denied because of lack of notice and any margin (other employees to cover the job)
It is important for a company to earn a profit. You'll find companies like google and facebook, who are making fat profits.... pay fat salaries to their workers.
If the company operates in such razor thin margins that it can't provide for sick leave for employees, something is terribly wrong.
> It is important for a company to earn a profit. You'll find companies like google and facebook, who are making fat profits.... pay fat salaries to their workers
And you'll find that most companies pay as little as they can get away with. Google and Meta need to compete to get a limited (until recently) amounts of top talent.
A railway couldn't care less about the employees.
> Get in the real world, not some fantasy land
Get out of a libertrarian's wet dream and look around you, read up a little bit on various companies financials.
Gotta look more than one layer deep financial statement guy. People who actually read a lot of financial statements have looked at a looooot more than the ones of the names on TV.
What's your excuse for them abusing their employees? Why can't they afford to provide sick leave for their employees when not only do they have billions of net profit every year, many other railways around the world in the same type of business manage to do that and be profitable.
Yes, I edited my comment to add more data points when I collected them.
Apple's margins are so high because the margins of their suppliers are so low (used to work for one of them) with some used to have suicide nets at their factories. Apple is an exception worldwide when it comes to HW margins, not the norm.
>They can afford to have a little extra employees to cover fucking sick leave.
Shareholders care more about line going up then about the welfare of the workers.
Every quarter you click on, <70% operating ratio, $1.something billion net income.
I don’t know how much sick leave costs them, but they’re not as wealthy as a company as you claim here.
As long as there is some link between the quality of work you do and the rewards you get, people will in most cases try their best. Allocation of capital is no different, and in my opinion should not be treated differently. Giving capital allocators ownership/percentage of the work others do is too much, and leads to unnecessary centralization of power.
Even if you could say that people truly choose to give a piece of their paycheck to someone simply for being named the owner, it's not a reason not to consider limiting that right to choose. We limit many things that we consider harmful. This system is producing ever increasing inequality of wealth and power. There are now people so wealthy that they're able to break democracies. This will only get worse and worse.
Someone can decide to start a company tomorrow and keep 100% of the outcome (less taxes) if they want to do that instead - it's trivially easy to be 100% owner of a business - a couple hundred bucks online and you can set the legal entity up in minutes. Now, you then have to provide sufficient value to customers so that they make the choice to part with their hard earned dollars - and that's where it all falls down for many. But it has nothing to do with power or lack of it.
A capitalist system would collapse without workers, so not everyone can be a business owner. Someone needs to actually do the work, capital does nothing on its own. I guess you could imagine a world where everyone is a one man business and a subcontractor in someone else's business, but that wouldn't really change the nature of the relationship. The ones with capital would still be in a position power and take a part of what people with no power produce.
A capitalist system would collapse without workers, without capital, without a decent legal system.
Many people do work as one man businesses. It does change the nature of the relationship because the economy isn't a one way river. There are all manner of feedback looks - you mine copper, I buy your copper, make some electrical component, sell it to the manufacturer of a Komatsu, they make mining trucks, sell it to you. It all goes round and round.
What are some notable examples "workers choosing to improve things"?
Competition has a lot of negative effects as well. Competition by definition has losers. Competition leads to resentment and conflict. Competition forces people to do things they might not want to to survive, because the moment someone is willing to do something to get an edge, everyone is forced to.
Ones that choose not to treat their workers with basic dignity are badly managed.
They didn't want to give in on same-day sick days (not the same as prescheduled PTO, which they did have) because it kills what they call precision train scheduling, which is basically running trains with the absolute minimum number of people possible. I'm not saying this was right or wrong, just that it's the reason.
And here I was, under the impression that both Google and Facebook paid their moderators as little as possible.
Ms. Farmer is the CEO of BNSF Railway[1], she is the one “directly running it”.
Moreover, Berkshire/Buffet is notorious for _not_ micro-managing, for letting its subsidiaires enjoy greater autonomy than they would in an usual conglomerate.
Not sarcasm.
If living standards are falling, grocery prices have increased, rents have gone up, wages have stagnated, what does the price of eggs in China have to do with my assessment of the local conditions.
https://ers.usda.gov/sites/default/files/_laserfiche/Charts/...
> I just don’t buy this argument. By global standards, even the poorest Americans (with obvious exceptions like the homeless) are relatively wealthy. Comparison is the theft of joy.
Define wealth. The cheapest option for many foods in other countries is often not only much cheaper, but also of much higher quality than the cheapest option for the same type of item in the US (bread, rice, etc..) in fact their cheap version could easily be pass for the US premium grocery version.
No, they aren't. It's dubious that even the widening relative gap between the working class and the capitalist class plays a major role, though that at least has the virtue of being a real condition and not a fantasy.
In America, at least, workers think tomorrow will be worse than today and they are resorting to populism to try and reverse the trend.
Ironically, it’s often the opposite party that actually pushes for policies that would materially benefit the working class. The real fallacy is equating the current wave of so-called “populism” with a genuine effort to improve conditions for workers. In practice, what’s being called “populism” is frequently just another vehicle for entrenched elites to consolidate power, not a movement to empower ordinary people.
Such as?
Democrats passed ACA, which made insurance even possible to purchase if you weren’t offered it by employer, and the annual out of pocket maximum, ban on pre existing conditions as a criteria for calculating premiums, and ACA premium credits made it more attainable than it was before ACA.
Build Back Better bill a couple years ago would have made paid leave policies nationwide and provided more assistance with childcare.
They also have significantly higher unemployment rates.
> Build Back Better bill a couple years ago
This bill was named after policy advanced by people who want to turn the general population into a class of permanent renters.
> Democrats passed ACA, which made insurance even possible to purchase if you weren’t offered it by employer, and the annual out of pocket maximum, ban on pre existing conditions as a criteria for calculating premiums, and ACA premium credits made it more attainable than it was before ACA.
Have you actually ever purchased a plan from the website? The last time I checked, the costs were the same as if I had a plan on my own. Also you could get policies prior to ACA, but were subject to health exams and non-coverage of preexisting conditions. In fact, one could argue that all ACA accomplished of benefit was forcing coverage of preexisting conditions. But let's also not forget the fine, which was applied to people who did not have health insurance under the assumption that it was a choice. In reality, people don't have health insurance if they can't afford it which made the penalty functionally a tax on the poor.
You speak of ACA like everybody will agree with you. A decade later I'm still mad at Obama and want my $4k back.
Aka giving people access to healthcare.
Health insurance is not real insurance, it’s a facade where we pretend premiums are not taxes.
99% of people could never afford the healthcare they get, they would just die. Which is fine, but there is no situation where healthcare + low taxes (wealth redistribution) exists.
So it’s high taxes + healthcare, but with a flattening and top heavy population age histogram, even that doesn’t work.
The worst is when old people only get healthcare (Medicare, which is all there was before ACA). A country is doomed if it’s just sacrificing the future to eke out a few years its oldest.
Except on immigration.
How about if I let you do that:
> In America, at least, workers think tomorrow will be worse than today and they are resorting to populism to try and reverse the trend.
See, belief about likely future conditions is a very different hypothesis than factually-existing current conditions, and a better one. To the extent that, IMO, its at least part of the actual explanation.
No, perception and reality are different things.
> Its a line trending down
Perception? Sure. Reality? No, it factually wasn't prior to the events that it is being invoked to explain.
Which is why perception of decline is a much more defensible hypothesis as to the cause than actual decline.
I’ve noticed you refuse to put forward your own reasons, why is that?
This description could apply to the French Revolution, Tsarist Russia, the fall of the Weimar Republic, and the Colombian Civil War. Why do you think it is dubious?
I don’t buy this anymore. The evidence is for a simpler hypothesis: 20 to 30% of Americans are stupid. They vote against their own economic interests, which doesn’t make sense if wealth is the problem. My personal hypothesis is lead exposure. But further empowering that segment with wealth strikes me as counterproductive.
Learn to read the signs instead of calling people stupid for not agreeing with you, and then following it up with an attempt to force their alignment.
There there's a lot more that motivates voters besides economics.
My hypothesis is that it is simply broad spectrum culture war. Mass communication and global human mobility have simply raised the stakes or control over social Commons. The same time due to related factors, there is low agreement on shared social rules, vales, and priorities.
In the sense that good fences make good neighbors, there is no clear fence today.
There is no trust in institutional norms to provide protection, so every battle for power seems existential.
I find it hard to argue with this. Real politik and the rule of the jungle have always been in effect. It is just less dramatic when there is consensus on the rules and limitations.