Home > Political Ranting, Right-Wing Lies > Not Through Conservative Glasses: Employment is Not Charity

Not Through Conservative Glasses: Employment is Not Charity

August 15th, 2009

There is a conservative mindset that jobs are manna from the corporate heavens, and that we workers should be grateful for the lavish and philanthropic beneficence of businesses to grace us with jobs, as if it were a special favor they were doing us.

Let’s get this straight: employment is a two-way bargain which benefits both sides, hopefully equally–but all too often more to the benefit of the corporation. A company does no more a favor to a person by hiring them than the person does to the company by doing work for them. It is an exchange of currency for labor, plain and simple.

A company needs people working for it just as much as the workers need the jobs. Neither can survive without the other. But because there are usually more workers than there are jobs, businesses tend to be at an advantage and demand obeisance from the worker (who calls whom “sir”?), and often abuses that power. A company is rarely cowed by an employee’s threat to quit, but employers commonly cow workers with threats of firings. More than once I have been thoroughly rogered by an employer which understood very well that I would suffer a great deal before surrendering my job, and used that to steal from me (no exaggeration–I once had an employer literally steal $700 from me, and another I had to sue to get them to cough up more than $500 in unpaid wages). In the first case, I was threatened with termination if I complained too much; in the second, I had already quit. (This is why I like where I work presently; I am well taken care of by my employer back in the U.S., a not-for-profit institution.)

When a business hires an employee, it is by no means an act of munificence. For-profit employers, as a rule, try to get as much as they can from an employee for as little as they can get away with paying. They do their hardest to hire the best talent they can manage, and pay only what they know they have to, by law or by the standard minimally expected to attract the required talent.

But generous? Forget it. The laws requiring a minimum wage, labor laws about working hours and conditions, rules and regulations protecting employees from fraud or abuse are there for an excellent reason: left unchecked, businesses will abuse their employees. If businesses were so kind to their workers, none of these checks would be necessary. This is simply the nature of a corporation: it wants money, its chief goal and reason for existence. A few liberal corporations will treat their workers well under the philosophy of enlightened self-interest, knowing that if they treat their workers well, their workers will perform well. But Wall Street frowns on this, castigating firms which it feels are too generous to the worker at the immediate cost of the almighty shareholder in their never-ending quest to wring every last dollar of short-term profit out of a business.

So let’s abandon the conservative myth that somehow corporations are gracing us with their altruistic, magnanimous charity by allowing us the great privilege of working for them so they can collect a profit from our labor.

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  1. Tim Kane
    August 15th, 2009 at 23:25 | #1

    During the Bush administration, there was nothing that Corporations wanted that he didn’t give them. Everything they asked for, he gave them. He never once said no to corporations.

    Basically, what you earn is a function of your bargaining power. During the Bush years, bargaining power was so decisively shifted to corporations, employers and the uber-wealthy. In the first 4 years, median family income declined 5% while the top .01% had gone up 500%.

    This was not an accident. It was by design.

    Those policies made the collapse of the American economy inevitable because consumers could not sustain demand with wages collapsing. The amount of wealth and power has become so concentrated that, despite controlling every branch of government, save the judiciary, the Democrats can’t reverse the situation, despite knowing, at a fundamental level what can be done.

  2. Tim Kane
    August 16th, 2009 at 00:53 | #2

    In short: you can’t drain the pond of water and expect the fish to thrive.

    By shifting trillions of dollars out of the commercial economy to the supply-side/investing-rich the Bush administration drained the economy of its livelihood.

    France and Germany’s economies are already coming back because they have functioning democracies that give the masses bargaining power, and so haven’t drained the pond to the extent that we have in America.

    Until the political will emerges to refill the pond, America will suffer and become increasingly like Mexico.

    Viva la plantation.

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