But of course, that's a subject for another thread.

/ End

Health and safety regulations and the ability to unionize and protections against hours and wage cuts are another way to protect workers. If every company had to operate in such an environment, it would make every company compete on a level field.

This is the fundamental truth of the business environment in an exchange economy and why guardrails are so essential. The people involved do NOT have to be fundamentally evil in order to act in a way that erodes humanity. Protections for workers that provide basic health services for example.

And even if she PERSONALLY says she sees them as human beings, the actions of her company say otherwise. Every action relative to its employees is always balanced against an Income Statement. Every decision is reviewed in light of the effect to Profit and Loss.

That original Plumber never saw herself as a titan of industry or a Robber Baron. But incrementally, the incentives to drive out cost and maintain revenue made her constantly see employees as nothing more than a cost center rather than fellow human beings.

A few managers will monitor the whole operation to keep costs down across her fleet of plumbing vehicles and fight against unions and other organizations. They will help make sure that things like health care and child care are always just used as incentives to drive productivity.

The answer is to create a special class of worker who is paid enough to remove any fear of hourly fluctuation and give them responsibilities as her agents to run the business. They will be Management. It will cost her less to pay a few people very high salaries than everyone more.

As her business grows, the business owner is the one who directly controls who gets hired and fired and the overall business. But her success begins to make the whole thing too cumbersome. She needs help. But who can she trust to run the business the way she would want it? Be her agent?

But what about the worker? The worker realizes that what they want is income stability. They need to cover basic costs of living - food, shelter, medical care, etc. But only a few classes of job offer "salary". So they have to find the highest hourly wage they can and hope they get enough hours.

So she hits on an idea. She won't guarantee the worker a certain amount of money per year because she can't know how business will be. Instead, she offers an hourly wage and then will add or cut hours as needed. This effectively allows her to use hours to cut her labor costs.

But as her small business grows, she begins to think about taking on some help to cover the calls. But if she does so, she knows it may hurt the profits that put food on the table for her family and that's not an exaggeration. The balance of productivity and profit is real.

In an Exchange-based (Capitalist) economy, the owner of a business has every incentive to minimize cost and maximize revenue to EXTRACT the maximum profit from a business. This is neither good or evil. Think of the self-employed plumber. Keeping costs down and revenue up feeds her family.

Welcome to the smear...

Sorry. Also a professional economist with a specialty in Historical Econ. Sort of my cup of tea.