Quote:
Originally Posted by MGlitch
Hardly tilting at windmills. You admit that staffing to avoid granting benefits is an issue in both mega corporations and mom and pop shops. One of these is a bigger problem than the other since one can take advantage of loopholes in tax law, etc. while the other is generally at the mercy of a landlord.
It’s simple triage, you treat the multiple gunshot wound before you treat the stab victim then you treat the stab victim.
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I'd also add that one of the complaints you see about the way big business treat their employees is that they do so while reporting billions of dollars in profit. There are not too many mom & pop businesses earning billions, and there are a significant number where mom & pop struggle to pay themselves an income commensurate with their work.
Not all big business is bad, but their legal obligations to shareholders tends to weight their behaviour toward maximising profits rather than benefiting employees. So the game is fixed to a significant extent.
mom & pop and other small businesses are much more variable because their circumstances vary so much. I don't doubt there are some that treat their employees badly, but there are others that are more than fair. If we broke Amazon up into separate small mom & pop businesses then at least some of the employees would be well treated. (And there would be many more employees due to loss of efficiency!) And this, to me at least, is one reason why we hold large companies to a higher standard. The single entity has a much larger affect across the board than any single mom & pop organisation, and the truly huge organisations have so much influence that they distort the logic on which capitalism is founded. We have seen in the past, and we see now, there are some businesses that have grown so large that their failure would have devastating consequences.
The whole supply and demand thing tends to play out reasonably well while ever no single entity has the ability to sway the entire market. (And just to keep this on an MR keel, think Hari Seldon's
psychohistory.) The earlier suggestion of employees exerting influence by going where the pay is better can be effective when there are many employers in that market - then the employers are truly forced to react to availability of employees - but it is much less effective when mega-corporations effectively dictate the minimum wage. Even if others are in the market, mega-corporations define the level of efficiency required to stay in the market.