this post was submitted on 06 Nov 2023
801 points (98.0% liked)
unions
1655 readers
114 users here now
a community focused on union news, info, discussion, etc
Friends:
- https://lemmy.ml/c/labor
- https://sh.itjust.works/c/unions
- https://lemmy.ml/c/coops
- https://lemmy.ml/c/antitrust
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
This is such a dumb assumption. My dad owns a small business and quite frankly says and does a lot of shit that drives me nuts. He unironically has said "nobody wants to work", and has never seemed too sympathetic to his employees despite him becoming wealthy and most of them living paycheck to paycheck.
All of that said, he has worked extremely hard his entire life. He worked 14 hour days for years to build his company and I have a lot of respect for his work ethic, despite not really respecting the way he treats his employees.
Tl:dr: CEOs may often be massive pos' but assuming they are incompetent or have a bad work ethic is reductive and pretty fucking stupid. IMO
No one says CEOs and thinks of the self employed plumber or drywaller. Or even the guy who owns 3 carwashes. Small business isnt, and has never been, in the crosshairs here.
But beyond that, we need to normalize rating companies, large and small, by how many of their employees bought houses each year and what percentage of their staff is on track for retirement.
Stop giving companies a free pass, they have a social obligation and they're breaking it.
We all have seen video of people watching a tragedy unfold and everyone just has their phones out recording, no one even calling for help, and then [STRAWMAN] dies. Everyone is horrified watching it, and rightly so, when anyone one of them could've helped.
It's the exact same thing with business. If ~ looks around ~ yep, ALL of us are falling behind, we have to hold business' feet to the fire. The C-Suite needs to remember that just cuz the law might protect them from liability due to corporate privilege, that doesn't mean that the people will.
Same with share-holders. Especially with shareholders.
Cuz sooner rather than later, some cleaners gonna come round and take out the trash, if ya feel me.
Incredibly well said. I find it hilarious when people talk about “company loyalty” when things like pensions are few and far gone, and companies are gutting benefits, fighting against raises, and generally treating all employees as expendable, then getting surprised when people don’t want to work for their pittances.
Once you stop working at a company, you get nothing from said company. Sure, some companies will match things like 401(k) contributions to an extent, but that’s purely only supporting you while you are employed there, and even that’s becoming less and less common.
Nowadays the only thing that can help employees are unions. But it’s sort of always been that way. Weekends? Unions. Annual cost of living raises? Unions. Not getting shot for walking off the job because you aren’t getting fairly compensated? Unions.
The hyper-capitalism that has permeated every single aspect of our daily lives from (ironically pension funded corporations) buying up swathes of houses before anyone is lucky enough to own them, to measuring every single market activity to ensure everything is priced to the extreme before they lose a drop of profit while every able bodied person is trying to provide for themselves or their families or even get a glimpse at something decent in an already bleak future is despicable.
We’re on a doomsday fast track, and the ones in charge of where we’re headed don’t give a shit, because they’re already planning on how they’ll make their escape, or at least ride it out in comfort and safety.
I have 0 Company loyalty. I like my work rn just fine and I am getting paid okayish, but if anything better comes up, I'll be gone in a heartbeat. Idgaf the company or my bosses.
Same on company loyalty.
I'm quite loyal to my employer, but my employer treats me like gold. When we all took a pay cut in June 2020 even the folks at the top did, and their cut was a larger percentage than mine. Then, when we did better than expected in Q3, they gave us the pay cut back in the form of a bonus.
I know I'm lucky.
My point is that assuming CEO's have a shitty work ethic is a bad assumption and also irrelevant to reforming work culture.
Yes CEOs and small business owners are quite different, but the kinds of people who become CEOs of billion dollar companies are not the kinds of people who have a bad work ethic. They get there by being good at their job which presumably means working hard at it.
I'm not trying to defend CEOs, I just don't think it's productive to misrepresent them.
Imo CEOs have their jobs because they know rich people, that's it, which is why CEO of makebelieveMapCompany can effectively get forced out and wind up as CEO of makebelieveDogFoodCompany a month later. They don't need skill as much as they need access to capital. And imagine that. Access to capital being the most important thing in capitalism?! It offends the global meritocracy mythos we've all been raised on. And meritocracy is just another shade of the Great Neo-liberal Trickle-Down Grift, or how to privatize the rubes retirements and then steal it back, legally, undoing the gains of the Enlightenment.
In general, CEOs are hired to be the fallguy for shareholders. Usually by being the ringleaders of the hatchetmen. They are the Ticketmaster, there to absorb all the bullshit while the financiers fleece the rest of us, now guilt™ free! Same logic applies to rental agencies landlords use. It's worth rememberimg that these "financiers" make up about 5 families who have their hands in and own like 95% of everything. That's slightly hyperbolic, but only so slightly that i don't even care to Google for the actual numbers, the same point will be made the exact same way
This is all hostile takeover/wall street merc shit. Efficiency experts and other nüage workplace mumbojumbo.
We're only talking about publically traded companies here. Private companies are whatever. But public firms, with corporate personhood, generally don't have visionary founders at the head. They have resource extraction at the heart of it, be that capital resources or human resources - extracting all value they possibly can, thru every lie imaginable (because morality is how HUMANS interact with other HUMANS), to make sure that the 0.01% never have to work a day in their lives
CEOs are the highest evolutionarily expression of the infamous 'bootlicker' job class.
You gotta learn context. Unions are fighting the big guys, they aren't trying to crush the little guys. I have a small business too and my CEO works non stop like your dad and we pay everyone at least 30% over market rate. Many businesses care about their employees. GM, Tesla, Amazon are all examples of companies with CEOs who don't.
Really? I think you're ignoring the context of my post within the thread. The image in discussion doesn't assert unions are good, or CEOs are bad, or small business are good or anything you bring up in your post. The image in discussion asserts CEOs have a bad work ethic, which is factually incorrect and completely unproductive in terms of advancing work reform.
I was using my father as a comparison to say: People can be hard workers and still treat their employees badly.
Anyone who calls a small business owner a CEO has air for a brain, sure they might technically be one but everyone and the grandma is only referring to the CEO of large fortune 500 style business when they talk about ceos. No one gives a fuck about the 2 man shop your pops is running in butt fuck nowhere.
Thank you for continuously ignoring my point.
Good talk.
Quite a lot of CEOs didn't build the business they just got brought in years later.
I think the truth lies in the middle ground. I'm sure that many CEO's work insanely hard, especially at smaller firms. With that being said, the difference is often that a CEO can work immensely hard for themselves, whereas many find it harder to work hard for a salary.
Any CEO's that say "people don't want to work" should run a simple experiment: change to hourly pay, and pay people for how many hours they work, with no limit on hours. I'm sure they'll see a lot of people that aren't afraid to "work".
I'm sure many of them mean that they don't want to deal with bullshit in order to get to a management role, though. In some cases this can be true, but for many industries getting above a certain level is just unattainable for most, and few people realise that their position is one of privilege and luck, alongside a lot of effort on their end.
I agree with everything in your comment. My only point is that I don't think painting CEOs as incompetent people with poor work ethics serves any purpose except that of making some people feel good about themselves.
Misrepresenting or misunderstanding your "adversaries" serves only to distract from the real problem and maybe provide some entertainment. OPs post about "CEOs not hustling" is likely factually incorrect and more importantly completely irrelevant to the problems we face as a society. It's inflammatory and makes people mad but for the wrong reasons and at the wrong people.
A CEO is paid to make money for their company, they are not paid to make their employees happy. You pay your government to represent you and your needs, get mad at them for allowing CEOs to run businesses at the expensive of their employees.