Everyone these days is looking for recession indicators. Things like the price of Arizona Iced Tea, inverted yield curves, and the death of any and all hope for a better tomorrow have got investors and consumers alike all shaken up. I recently came to realize that there was one bigger issue at hand.
I was doing the math the other day, and I realized something: without the labor I was doing, my company couldn’t make any money! I figured that parts+labor=cost of the service being provided. Except that the amount charged in total was more than what I was paid in labor. Parts won’t change in price, though, which means there was only one way to create more profit, by underpaying me for my labor!
Why hasn’t anyone pointed this out before? Or better yet, why does everyone put up with this? I mean, those billionaires didn’t make all that money on their own, but for some reason, they get to keep all of it. Everyone’s talking about the recession, but I’d have plenty of money if it hadn’t all been taken away by my boss.
What makes it even worse is that because I’m an hourly employee, it means that working harder doesn’t mean any increase in pay for me. I get paid the same no matter how hard I work. Yet my boss keeps demanding more out of me. It’s almost like he’s been aware of this the whole time. Have other bosses figured this out as well? I’m no conspiracy theorist, but I’m slowly beginning to suspect that business leaders collaborate in order to make sure their employees get as little of the profits as possible.
That’s why I’m suggesting a new idea in which workers come together in order to take those profits and control the businesses themselves. It’d be like worker-controlled capitalism but run as part of a communal system. We could call it “communalism,” or “commpitalism” or something, still workshopping the name. I just can’t believe I’m the first one to think of this! There are a lot of bugs to work out, but it can’t be worse than what we have going now.