> My ambition is to employ still more men, to spread the benefits of this industrial system to the greatest possible number, to help them build up their lives and their homes. To do this we are putting the greatest share of our profits back in the business.
> The Dodge brothers owned 10% of Ford and opposed this and took Ford to court because they wanted the payments to be able to start their own company. They won and Ford was not allowed to lower prices or raise salaries at the company thus enshrining maximising shareholder value into law.
> At its heart this is a problem about unrestrained capitalism.
I was making this argument yesterday on the post about blizzard firing the employee critical of the stack ranking policy: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34498473
These companies are having record profits, and doing layoffs anyway. I think they can get away with this because everyone's talking about recession and inflation. Thus they can increase pressure on current employees to work harder for the same or less money, and add further "proof" of their fears by doing layoffs and saying recession forced them. That's the wind around explanation I have but the article says it as simply as I think leadership is thinking about it: they probably aren't doing holistic class analysis and nefariously thinking about new and exciting ways to extract more labor for less money, they probably straight up are just trying to increase profit by reducing cost overhead.
But I agree with the article that this is in the end just then problem with unfettered capitalism. Incredibly, I had no idea the Ford story about the origins of "fiduciary responsibility to shareholders." Is that an oversimplification? Is that truly the first step down the stairs away from intelligently leveraged capitalism? I assumed the usa was the way it is because of a natural result of what happens when capital accumulates and is allowed to function as a analogue for political power: corporations will accumulate and then wield political power towards the goal of further accumulation. I had no idea the progress made on this front was already enshrined in law in Ford's time.
To me this seems inevitable. Corporations are like little AIs with a "never stop growing" directive. When society lets them get away with extracting more labor for less money by framing against recession, what means of protection do employees have, especially in the usa with comparatively minor unemployment benefits and layoff protections. It seems to me the only path forward, if we want then situation to improve for ourselves, is unionization. If we try to change the company from within by working with leadership, we're "activist employees" and a threat to shareholder profit, and get fired. If we wait, we get laid off when they can get away with it.
This is all predicated on the idea that the layoffs aren't necessary. The company won't die if the layoffs don't happen. It won't go bankrupt. It will simply be less profitable. And? So what? Does the value of the product change? Does the fact that google.com route basically all internet traffic change? In fact, if they leaned into reducing profit to share among employees, they'd be looking at being a co-op, which are provably more stable than traditional corporations and by some studies, more profitable... Just not for shareholders that don't actually do anything to contribute to that profitability.
Edit: reading more into it, the Ford thing doesn't necessarily make it federal law to seek shareholder profit above all other concerns. I don't believe that changes much about my comment: they're still doing this for the shareholders, not the employees.