[stego-tech]

Gotta love the knock-on effect of these systems.

- Don't want to pay labor enough to live (for whatever reason)

- Outsource, offshore, automate, etc

- Margins and revenue go up

- Two to Three Years go by

- Refusal to pay local living wages results in decline of product sales at local prices, feeding the cycle of further cuts rather than pay labor

- Cities decline as secondary and tertiary businesses dry up due to lack of income/revenue from prior customers who got outsourced/offshored

- Executives parachute out successfully

- New leadership comes in with radical idea to onshore/insource, i.e. pay labor to survive

- Company thrives because all that income goes into local businesses who in turn support the company by buying its products to support their city/country

- Leader heralded by press as "great savior of city/nation" when all they did was take slightly less than the prior asshole to ensure workers were paid enough to consume, thus increasing business, thus increasing tax flows, thus breaking the prior negative-feedback cycle and charging the positive-feedback loop for a bit

- Leader parachutes out successfully

- New leadership comes in to repeat the cycle, but faster this time

The irony being that these "business cycles" could be far more manageable and less harmful with sufficient incentives against them (like minimum wage laws or worker protections).

None of this exists in a vacuum, and this outcome was wholly predictable even by the anti-H1B camps (like myself). The problem for the past half-century has been a stalwart refusal to pay labor to survive as asset prices rise by those in command of Capital, and simply toggling H1B visas without addressing the ability to outsource and offshore was always going to end this way.

Current government incentives (at-will employment, appalling minimum wage, lack of social safety nets, copious tax loopholes, lack of regulation, anti-Union legislation, preserving housing values, tax breaks for the wealthy) all but guarantee this outcome over, and over, and over again. Attacking one of those points by itself just means the rest will be exploited that much more. Comprehensive legislation that re-orients the whole of the economy back towards equilibrium is what's needed, not piecemeal hackjobs like this H1B stunt.

[irishcoffee]

Ever hear of the court case involving the Dodge brothers and Ford? Maybe we fucked up there, and a century later, we finally arrived at this current state.

> In the landmark 1919 case Dodge v. Ford Motor Co., the Michigan Supreme Court ruled in favor of minority shareholders John and Horace Dodge, holding that a corporation’s primary purpose is to maximize profit for its shareholders. The court ordered Ford to pay out significant accumulated dividends, limiting Henry Ford's ability to prioritize employee wages and consumer prices over shareholder returns.

[stego-tech]

We absolutely fucked up there. There definitely needs to be protections for shareholders to reduce the chance of exploitation and fraud, but part of the “free market” as it were is for shareholders to fuck off to other companies if they don’t like how one is run.

The “shareholder value” mandate is one of the greatest perversions of the “free market” out there, miles above any discourse about minimum wages or worker protection laws. Undo that decision along with the Reagan-era ruling permitting share buybacks, and you’d substantially weaken the Boardroom and C-Suite while turning off the two single biggest incentives to the current system of exploitation.

[skeledrew]

Almost sounds like there's a deep flaw in the very core of the system...