> The people here are not day laborers looking for an odd job from a passing contractor. They load the trucks and stock the shelves for some of the U.S.’s largest companies—Walmart, Nike, PepsiCo’s Frito-Lay division
> This system insulates companies from workers’-compensation claims, unemployment taxes, union drives and the duty to ensure that their workers are legal immigrants. Meanwhile, the temps suffer high injury rates, and many of them endure hours of unpaid waiting and face fees that depress their pay below the minimum wage. Many get by renting rooms in run-down houses, eating dinners of beans and potatoes and surviving on food banks and taxpayer-funded health care.
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The willful ignorance for the social implications of this kind of corporate behavior leave me speechless. This is quite literally sucking everything around you dry, poisoning the river and then making a fuss when somebody threatens regulations.
The same corporations who complain (mostly through sock puppets) about "the nanny state" getting in their way, who lobby for laws that leave them with fewer and fewer restrictions, who set everything in motion to pay less and less taxes - they are the entities actually taxing the social systems the hardest.
What they have found is a way to convert the good will of the social system into profit. All while pushing the agenda of austerity and tough love for the people in our society who need our help the most. They give their workers the bare minimum and let the government fill the increasing amount of gaps. Meanwhile, governments see their costs of the social system rise while their tax revenue goes down.
This is profiteering from collateral damage.
And if you do threaten to regulate, they will just move to another country like the vultures that they are.
I think you're forgetting someone's role in this, and that would be all of us.
If enough of the population was against this type of behaviour, it woud be made illegal (and already-illegal behaviours would be cracked-down upon) but it's not.
Corporations have a legal obligation to provide as much value as possible for as little money as possible, and if the laws let them do this in an inhumane way, then that's the law's fault (and by extension the fault of the society that enacted those laws).
No, it really is true; it is a legal obligation of the corporation to its shareholders that is enforced through legal action -- both corporations as such and their specific duties to shareholders are products of laws, not market forces unmediated by law.
They have obligations to their shareholders in so far as they are not allowed to attempt to defraud or surreptitiously act against them them in some way. They have to be honest.
They have no obligation to minimize costs. A company director cannot be taken to court for not using the cheapest labour source available, the shareholders would have to vote them out in which case they just lose their job.
There are plenty of publicly traded companies that do not cost minimize in all areas.
I think you're splitting hairs here, and you understand what the intent of my statement was, but I'll take your point about my choice of words.
I agree there are certainly exceptions, but most corporations put profit above all else, and if they don't, then as you say, the executives or the board will be fired and replaced with people who will.
"Legal obligation" may have been inaccurate wording, perhaps "structurally obligated" or "internally compelled" then?
> This system insulates companies from workers’-compensation claims, unemployment taxes, union drives and the duty to ensure that their workers are legal immigrants. Meanwhile, the temps suffer high injury rates, and many of them endure hours of unpaid waiting and face fees that depress their pay below the minimum wage. Many get by renting rooms in run-down houses, eating dinners of beans and potatoes and surviving on food banks and taxpayer-funded health care.
-----
The willful ignorance for the social implications of this kind of corporate behavior leave me speechless. This is quite literally sucking everything around you dry, poisoning the river and then making a fuss when somebody threatens regulations.
The same corporations who complain (mostly through sock puppets) about "the nanny state" getting in their way, who lobby for laws that leave them with fewer and fewer restrictions, who set everything in motion to pay less and less taxes - they are the entities actually taxing the social systems the hardest.
What they have found is a way to convert the good will of the social system into profit. All while pushing the agenda of austerity and tough love for the people in our society who need our help the most. They give their workers the bare minimum and let the government fill the increasing amount of gaps. Meanwhile, governments see their costs of the social system rise while their tax revenue goes down.
This is profiteering from collateral damage.
And if you do threaten to regulate, they will just move to another country like the vultures that they are.