re: #51 Obdicut

And yet when the inverse is pointed out— that a worker is giving the corporation what it needs to be profitable, that worker’s labor, and only asking for a fair wage in return— shock and horror ensue.

This is why strikes are the power of the worker, and it’s why corporations desperately try to quash strikes, which means quashing unions, which are the only things that can effectively organize strikes.

Yet the operative word is “fair,” which is like garlic to a vampire. To a “free market” believer, it’s the corporation that’s doing the giving, not the worker. The worker is just an interchangeable cog in the machine, that even a chimp could be trained to do the work he does. If he’s unhappy with the wages he’s paid, then there’s plenty of other work out there for him to seek out. But the executive, he’s invaluable, because even if he’s done nothing but cost the company money, the “experience” he has is key to profitability. He must be pampered, lest he seek out a bigger honeypot.

Hence why they hate unions and hate the idea of collective bargaining, because it puts a value on labor that is equal to the executives. It forces them to acknowledge that without workers, those executives are useless because you can’t give orders to an empty shop floor. And that just won’t work, because you gotta have a chain of command, and the labor has always gotta be at the bottom of that chain.