Last issue, I mentioned that the CEO of Amazon makes 6474 times the amount of the average Amazon worker.
In the last couple weeks, Amazon announced they’re laying off another 9000 people, bringing the total layoffs so far this year to 27,000.
To put that in perspective, since January 1, Amazon has put the entire population of the South Peace out of work, and about half of Fort St. John.
Why? Because the company only managed to make $278 million in the last few months.
That’s not total sales ($149.2 Billion), that’s the amount in cash the company had left over after paying off all its expenses.
And yet….
And yet, if you read the New York Times, for instance, the company is on the ropes, making “almost no” profits.
But if the average Amazon worker makes $17.48 (which is not exactly a livable wage, but lets go with it), the company could have kept all those people employed and still made over $200 million in profits.
But they didn’t.
Why not? Because they need to jazz up those profits so that they can pay the shareholders, who are far more important to the company than those factory workers.
I know, I know, I’m supposed to be offering alternatives to neoliberalism, but it’s hard not to sit here and point at the problems wrought by capitalism run amok. Meta has laid off 21,000, Google 12,000 and Microsoft 10,000. Even Salesforce has laid off 8000. All together, just the tech companies have laid off over 100,000 workers.
On the other hand, there’s Apple. Apple is not exactly what one would call a poster child for socialism. They’re the biggest company in the world.
And yet…
And yet, as other companies are slashing jobs and ruining the lives of often the most vulnerable workers, Apple has taken a different approach.
Apple is not immune to the downturn in the economy that has affected these other companies.
But instead of cutting employees, Apple CEO Tim Cook has taken a voluntary pay-cut this year of about $35 million. (Don’t worry about him, though. He is still getting paid about $42 million.)
And rather than firing people, the company is simply not filling positions as people retire, or move on to other jobs.
They’ve deferred paying out bonuses until later in the year when, hopefully, the economy starts to improve, and travel budgets have been reduced.
Of course, it’s not all good news. The company is enforcing rules a lot more strictly now, and some employees think it’s a way to allow them to fire people for violating rules without resorting to mass layoffs.
Still, the company has the appearance of trying to avoid mass layoffs, which would tarnish the company’s image.
The idea of work has bifurcated us into two classes of people. There’s the people who do the work, and there’s the people who profit off their work: the owners, the capitalists, the shareholders.
The people who provide the money make the money, while the people who provide the labour get paid, from a pittance, for an Amazon warehouse worker, to quite well, in the case of a Heavy Duty Mechanic.
But no matter how much the mechanic makes, the person who owns the business always makes more. The person who provided funds to help get the business going? Always makes more.
The trouble is, the concerns of one group and the concerns of the other are not always simpatico. The owner of the business wants to provide for the shareholder. They don’t really care that the mechanic’s wife just had a baby and there’s something wrong and they have to fly down to Children’s hospital and will have to miss a couple months of work and their costs are going up… Too many of these stories are met with “sorry, but because you won’t be able to make it to work, we’re going to have to let you go.”
This bifurcation led to the union movement, as well as legislation to prevent the grossest exploitation of workers.
It has also led to ways of thinking about society that emphasize the individual. The American dream is that everyone has an equal opportunity to become an oligarch. It is the dream of the poor man to be rich, for the powerless to have power.
And I know, this is Canada, but too many Canadians are being lured to this way of thinking.
While we like to think that we don’t need anyone’s help, it is impossible to truly make it without anyone else’s input. Did you make the clothes you are wearing? Did you weave the cloth? Did you grow the cotton? Spin it into thread? I’m going to say probably not. Because—getting back to our opening argument—we have created this thing called money which allows people to specialize, to eke out more than just a sustenance existence by doing one (or two) things really well, and purchasing products or services from other people who specialize in those things.
This is not a bad thing. The question I am proposing is: Can we as a society figure out a way of doing this, of keeping the parts we like, while stepping away from the worst parts of the system we have now? Can we find a way where the person who loves driving a truck can drive, while the person who loves writing or photography or collecting the happenings around town and sharing it in a bi-weekly newspaper can do that, instead of having to drive a truck? Where we can value and celebrate people as individuals, and use each person’s skills to build a better society for all, instead of for the richest one percent? (Who make an estimated $1.7 million for every dollar you make.) Is there a way to share that wealth more equitably? That, of course, is a topic for next time.
Trent is the publisher of Tumbler RidgeLines.
