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Originally Posted by Masorovka
I don't know how much you make a year, but $75 an hour is a very very good wage for a job that requires no education. Comparing the CEO with the unskilled worker is a silly comparison, one will probably at least have a masters degree from a prestigious university.
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It may be a great wage, but it's nowhere near the ammount that the trust-fund babies and inheritors of the factory make for doing almost nothing in comprison to the labor put into the product by the workers.
To get into a "prestigious university" you have to have money in the first place. Why should they get payed more because they started life out on the better end of an uneven playing field? It's not as though these auto workers have always been payed $75 an hour- the unions had to fight to get there. That's CLASS WARFARE.
The end result of forming a union is to collectivise the factory. The workers should be able to make decisions regarding production, rather than answering to the demands of a boss who is only there to make a profit off of their labor.
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It is not exploitation because the workers don't make any profit. They merely provide a service which is paid with a wage. The owners provide the capital, the factory and take all the risk on. There are employee-owned companies as well so that doesn't necessarily defeat the purpose of capitalism.
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Ok, so I guess I just shouldn't complain when my boss is racking in the bucks from MY labor, but he pays the guy who yells at me to work harder a higher salary and 10% of all of the profits I make for doing nothing but making me work harder for less wages, and then the boss sits on his profits... worrying that he can't feed his kids or pay the electric bill?
As for the argument of worker-owned buisinesses, the point of capitalism is to make as much money as possible regardless of who you step on to get to the top. Wal-mart started out as something kind of great. It was a local buisiness that was lucky enough to branch out, and until a point it advertised everything as being made in America. Then all of a sudden, Ronald Reagan comes along right when Walton's kids inherit the chain, and there's tons of cheap labor overseas. It's not the fault of the labor in America being more expensive becuase of labor unions and at least a feigned attempt at caring about American citizens' human rights- it's a fault in capitalism, especially globalized, corporate capitalism. You said that you think the problems in capitalism are caused by government intervention? You haven't been paying attention.
If worker-owned buisinesses are collectivised, that's great. Everyone has a democratic say in what happens in production, and the distibution of wages is also discussed and voted on by the workers. But if the point of the whole operation is to create as much money as possible for one or two owners, at the expense of the workers who have little to no control over their situation, it is, by nature, exploitational.