Why is the corporation so hostile to workers?

a reply to: nwtrucker

All too often You see people extolling the virtues of individual effort. If one applies themselves. If one has a better product. If one brings value through their work. Every man is an island controlling their destiny.

This kind of thought is what the big guys really like to hear. They want you to think you are the most important person in the world and have no use for your comrades, (Funny how that word fell out of favor. Comrades, boy that has a real nasty tone to it, don’t it?).

It’s not hard to see how in any negotiation, relationship, or encounter of any kind between the billionaire capitalist and the rugged individual just barely making a living wage, the rugged individual has no standing at all. That’s just the way the big guys like it.

Collectivism. the scourge word of the day. Charles Koch hates it. The downfall of mankind. More likely he understands that unified labor is the only way to limit and take back some of the power and influence that has accrued through the dominance of the rugged individual.

Oh sure everybody wants to earn their way. Everybody wants to be a positive contribution to the effort. But that alone is not going to get you anything, but a paycheck at the end, in an amount that is decided by someone, who not only does not have your best intrest at heart, but is dedicated to crushing any influence you may want to have on the decision of what that amount should. If you don’t like it, It’s really easy to replace one guy. An entire workforce? Something else.

Oh something else. If you don’t think that the billionaire capitalists act collectively. Then your brain conditioning, ( It’s already been washed. Now it’s just being conditioned .) is complete. You’re down to just regular styling jobs.

a reply to: okyouwin

I don't fully disagree with what you are saying, yet you omit market factors-supply and demand. You omit the fact that there is about the same percentile of good and bad people that decide those paychecks as the percentile of people cashing them.

Individual worth is a factor, whether you acknowledge it or not.

There are higher motivations than the size of a paycheck as well. Ask a teacher, a cop, a fireman...a soldier. Purpose, duty, all are factors.

No matter how you look at it. What your personal circumstances are, it falls on YOU to change your condition in life. Not that signer of the paycheck.....

a reply to: MALBOSIA

Did you just watch Zeitgeist? A lot of the terminology you use is straight of out the move, addendum.

OP, employers treat us like garbage for the same exact reason you might leave the water running when you brush your teeth. Because it's cheap and there's plenty of it. True for water and people willing to take your jobs.

The second reason, combined with the first is that management is rewarded for squeezing the most productivity, or dollar, out of everyone they can. What is the result? Cut benefits when possible to make the bottom line look better, and push your workers to the absolute max you can.

Until you can gain skills that are rare and desired, this is what you can expect. Once you gain skills that are sought after only then can you begin to expect to be treated with the respect and given the pay you deserve.

Working hard is really only half of the subscription for success. You really do need to work smart. Choose a career that requires a specific skill set. Since those needs evolve, you need to evolve with them and learn new skills to stay relevant and desired.

However, I see your point that every employee should be treated with respect...it will be to their own benefit in saving money on employee turn over, sick time (because they hate coming to work) and loss prevention (cuz people steal from #ty employers). You would think they would be kinder for those selfish reasons, right?

originally posted by: MALBOSIA
Publicly traded corporations have an obligation to their shareholders to obtain maximum achievable profits. Private companies have to compete with these corporations.

The definition of the business purpose is "To increase shareholder value over the long term." That has been the historical obligation of management, and why there were so many companies with long and storied histories from the turn of the (last) century up until about the 1980s.

In the "Greed is Good" era, management was rewarded not for administering policies and strategies that would increase shareholder value with consistency and low variability over the long haul, but for increasing share price in the short term. This occurred about the same time that individuals were enticed to participate in the casino--the Stock Market--by being inundated with tales of fabulous wealth, easily gained.

If you were to plot the holding time of individual investors over a period from, say, 1900 to 2000 I think you would find that the period between buy and sell grows shorter with every decade, culminating in the day-trading phenomenon of the 1990s and .com boom years. Investors were replaced by gamblers who wanted to get in and get out quickly with big gains. Shareholders, by and large, were no longer interested in long-term strategies. Management, in parallel, were no longer interested in the long-term viability of their organizations, only in how much value could be converted to personal wealth and how quickly they could accomplish this.

Now we have management being rewarded handsomely for performance of non-GAAP measures. Essentially, made up numbers that can be manipulated and spun lead to bigger payouts. Share price is a secondary consideration as long as you can deliver EBITDA, EVA or whatever the measure du jour happens to be. Compounding the problem, Boards of Directors are populated by professional executives who are in on the game. They sit on each others' Boards and ensure that everyone is getting a piece of the action; "you rub my back, I'll rub yours."

If you were to look only at GAAP performance for most large, public companies, the story is far different than what is reported in the financial news by those same corporations' marketing, er, financial staff. The individual investor who fails to grasp that they're not going to win over the long term in a rigged marketplace get steamrolled. The shareholders who are in it for the long term get steamrolled. The employees get steamrolled. The only ones who make out like bandits are the professional management types who cycle through revolving doors at the top of peer companies and institutional investors.

Even the old school institutional investors were getting fleeced for a while by the start up high frequency trade crowds. Now the old school institutions are either running captive HFT arms, or are in cahoots with 'partner firms' who front-run the individual, retail trade.

If you can dedicate the time to actively managing your portfolio, you can still make gains. But you will have to play the short-term share price game and the amount of time invested and stress realized is staggering. The historical business purpose has been relegated to the history bin. And not for the betterment of society at large.

Corporations are not evil or bad. The people who run them can be, though. Just my two cents.

a reply to: kreinhard

Bravo! That sums up my experience with the stock market.

The more you deal with a stock broker, the broker you become.