Quote:
Originally Posted by dobbles
I guess that's what baffles me about our obsession with capitalism. We have a company making record breaking profits, and yet they fight tooth and nail to prevent sharing those profits with the very workers that made them possible. Instead, we reward the stockholders, who at this point did nothing to particularly help the company make money. And so now as you allude to, because the workers will get a little more of the reward, instead of the capital class getting less of the reward, they just jack up prices so they don't miss out on a few precious pennies.
I don't have a solution. And I get the adage of "capitalism is the worst except for all the others". But boy is it nauseating to see this play out all the time.
The father of my best friend from childhood works at Deere (about to retire) and feels this was a good deal for the workers. Hopefully it will embolden labor to keep pushing back.
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I think even if you remove greed from the picture which obviously plays a role, I think you should at least the understand the deep seeded fears that permeate these decisions, fears about giving raises you can't take back if this boom is fleeting, about setting bonus expectations to a level that can't be maintained, about being unable to keep up with competition without proper investment capital. There are a lot of good reasons to want to be protective of a companies capital, and even if you are firmly in the other camp it's important to understand and empathize with what the other side is looking for.
I generally don't like the idea of unions, because I feel they only exist in the absence of a government doing their duty to the people properly (the one exception might be public sector unions were a conflict of interest exists). Proper labour regulations and standards setting a level playing field for all business is the standard we aspire to. Unfortunately this whole thing is a little too idealistic and unions are only able to fight for a portion of it. But we work with what we have.
All of that said, the proper capitalist thing for labor to be doing right now in this place and this time is to push for more, so I get what the JD union is doing.