whitey wrote:This makes me LOL. Perhaps it's your ignorance for what I do but, please explain to me how I'm being exploited?
Is there somebody making more money off of what you make than they put into it? Are you producing more value for someone than you receive in pay? Then you're being exploited. But wait, you say, I have a choice in whether or not I take this job. I can't be getting exploited if I have a choice. I agree to work at this rate, it is what the market will support. Well, yes, you have a choice to do that job. You do not have a choice to do no job. And you do more work at your job then you would have to do simply to support yourself because so much of your work, your produced value, goes to the pocket of somebody above you.
If you're a truck driver working for a trucking company, this is especially true. It is much less the case if you're an independent trucker. Generally, self-employed people have escaped the exploitation of the system, which is why I think it's ideal that people be self-employed if they can manage it, or part of a company collectively owned by the workers. However, the exploitation still exists, and every time that self-employed people participate in the economy they are participating in that exploitation.
Using my job as an example, I get paid a truly embarrassing amount of money, particularly for the comparatively level of work I have to do. The company manager for our location gets paid even more, but this is commensurate with his responsibilities. However, the people who really make bank are the high level executives back in the US, and they have little to nothing to do with the overall effectiveness of our day to day operations. Certainly not to such an extant as to justify the pay difference. If we weren't sending the lion's share of the contract money back to them, we could not only be paid more here, but we could charge the American taxpayers less for the whole process. The practice of hiring contractors for non-combat positions that were previously filled by members of the military would actually reap the savings it was originally supposed to have.
gendoikari87 wrote:whitey wrote:Actually I don't care to read more about it. This is where I'll differ from the socialist movement, I think it's a bunch of hogwash. Why shouldn't they keep some of money? We both put an effort into keeping the company progressing. The owner put up the initial capital to start the business
Yes, management is entitled to their share, not yours. And the investment part is bullshit. In any other form you take out a loan, you pay it back with interest, your done, but with stock? nope, you've got to keep paying the owning class.
Yep. They deserve to make a profit from it. They don't deserve eternal ownership of their workers' labor. If and when I start a business, it will be a collectively owned one and once I make back my initial investment, I'll be paid the same as anybody else there. I've got an idea I've been knocking around for a while to open a collectively owned hookah bar. I figure if I become a lawyer I'll probably have das kapital for that.
whitey wrote:Well seeing as the company I work with isn't publicly traded, I guess it doesn't fall into this category.
I used to work for a privately owned company. They were just as exploitative as any publicly owned company. With them, it was all about getting the maximum amount of work out of the fewest number of workers for the lowest amount of pay, and pocketing for themselves our prodigious profits. When I personally was the reason we were able to sell and support a specific product to a customer, and that one sale accounts for over a hundred grand in income for the company, and I'm only getting paid $15/hr, and this is just one customer of many, you can't tell me I wasn't being exploited. Same for my coworkers, my boss, the programmers downstairs from us (who were paid barely any more), the people maintaining the data center and operations (who were paid significantly
less), and so on.
I'm not a socialist because I'm some wide-eyed foolish young college student who has never seen the real business world and who just needs some more life experience in order to become another jaded and cynical wage slave, angry at anybody who points out the jingling of the chains. I'm a socialist
because of business world experiences, not because of a lack of them.