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I don’t want to make assumptions about your specific work, so let’s talk about tech workers in general. As an example, Facebook made over $9 billion in profit

I don’t want to make assumptions about your specific work, so let’s talk about tech workers in general. As an example, Facebook made over $9 billion in profit in 2021. If you work for facebook, you were exploited to the tune of around 9bil/63k employees, so an average of 142k and change. If you distributed that according to current salaries, most tech workers at fb would probably be due a few 100k more per year. Without the labour of their workers, facebook does not exist. From the people who serve lunch to the accountants to the coders. Yet that 9bil did not go to them, it went to the shareholders. That’s exploitation, pure and simple. You can support it, if you think it’s a good system, but it is exploitation. Tech companies know that their workers are underpaid for their value - they wouldn’t have had to collude to fix wages if it wasn’t the case. Just because you think you’re very well paid, doesn’t mean you’re not being exploited. All that is setting aside the very obvious reason you should have solidarity with amazon warehouse workers: they are human beings and they provide a service you enjoy, you should not want them to suffer.

chii 5y ago
> most tech workers at fb would probably be due a few 100k more per year. so what happened to the providers of the capital that facebook was built with? How come they don't get anything from those profits? I think your ideology is clouding your judgement on what counts as "fair", and this is making you think that workers who don't get 100% of the profit of the work they produce, must be underpaid or somehow is being exploited. The idea that capital provided upfront (to pay those workers, as well as plant and equipment) isn't in your line of argument at all. > Without the labour of their workers, facebook does not exist. without the upfront capital paid by the shareholders, facebook would not exist as well. It's both, together, that makes it work. The deal the workers accepted was to be paid upfront, at a fixed amount, for a fixed amount of work (counted by time, usually). Then, the shareholders gets the profit from the difference in sale price of the work. They take on the risk that the work is worthless in a changing world, a risk that the workers do not take (unless the worker chooses to accept payments in shares). I don't see this as exploitation.
- kennywinker 5y ago
  > without the upfront capital paid by the shareholders, facebook would not exist It’s pretty debatable how much of the money they raised was critical. They needed a bit of seed money, no question - and without regular injections of cash they would have had a much slower growth curve, for sure. They might not have been able to buy out instagram and whatsapp - but that didn’t create much value - those things existed without facebook. We might even need to account for the value that facebook’s rise took away from other firms, if we’re trying to calculate how much net value facebook’s investors have created - rather than just how much value has been enveloped into the firm - but let’s stay on point. Overall, giving money to someone starting a business, well that sounds like you’re describing a loan. A loan entitles you to get paid back, with interest. The interest is there to cover the risk that you might not get paid back. What we have instead is “ownership”, which seems to entitle you to the profits of a company’s workers in perpetuity. Numbers are a little thin, but it seems like facebook took on something like $1bil in various investments before their ipo, and raised about 16bil with their ipo (tho unclear if that 16bil went to the company, or investors + the company). Facebook has posted profits in the billions for years now. If you only count earnings since their ipo, about $173bil cumulative going to investors. At what point is the loan paid back? How much interest are they entitled to? At 9 years post investment they’ve paid back 10x what was given to them - that’s well over a 100% interest rate - and that is set to never end.
  - chii 5y ago
    > Overall, giving money to someone starting a business, well that sounds like you’re describing a loan. There are many ways to obtain capital - loans being one. A loan is guaranteed, often having a need for collateral. I highly doubt anyone would loan Facebook money without collateral at the early stage. Equity ownership is not a loan, and it is indeed a perpetual entitlement to all profits. It's pretty much the only form of "loan" for a new business. You still have not made any arguments as to why ownership is wrong, other than merely asserting it.
    - kennywinker 5y ago
      If tomorrow all of amazon’s stock disappeared from the ledgers, would anything change about the company? The warehouses would still be there, drivers would still do their rounds. It’d be a chaotic next board meeting, but that’s about it. Ownership contributes nothing to the equation, and demands a massive cut of what the real productive work produces. That’s why ownership is parasitic. As a general rule, why would we allow parasites? But even if you don’t want to see ownership that way, it still has undeniably and repeatedly lead to extreme concentration of wealth - which means poverty and starvation for the masses and superyachts for the few.
kcplate 5y ago
So you must feel then that tech workers at a company that doesn’t show a profit for many years or operates in the red during their start up phase should payback a portion of the the salary they collected during the time they were not profitable when they become profitable? Those tech workers would have never have received a wage were it not for the investors taking a risk and providing the patience to the reward. The tech worker who drew a salary during that time took zero risk and totally exploited the investor.
- kennywinker 5y ago
  Ideally, the workers would be the investors. If we were being paid for the full profits of our labour we wouldn’t have these ultra rich investors - since they all got rich off profits created by workers in the first place - and we as workers would have plenty of money to put into new ventures. Instead of raising $x mil from softbank, you hire people who bring seed money from their previous job with them, and are willing to work for no pay for a few years on the promise of building something useful that gets them paid back and paid well going forward. The idea that startup workers aren’t already taking on risk is weird. There’s clearly direct risk, and opportunity cost style risk already baked into jobs at new companies. A fee bad turns and late paychecks and you could end up homeless. Investors risk… Not homelessness. Not poverty. They risk losing money they never earned in the first place.
  - kcplate 5y ago
    > never earned in the first place. Wow. Good luck with…all that.
    - kennywinker 5y ago
      Thanks, I’m looking to implement this understanding if the world in the company I’m starting - i appreciate the well wishing. Have a good one!
      - kcplate 5y ago

chii 5y ago

> most tech workers at fb would probably be due a few 100k more per year. so what happened to the providers of the capital that facebook was built with? How come they don't get anything from those profits? I think your ideology is clouding your judgement on what counts as "fair", and this is making you think that workers who don't get 100% of the profit of the work they produce, must be underpaid or somehow is being exploited. The idea that capital provided upfront (to pay those workers, as well as plant and equipment) isn't in your line of argument at all. > Without the labour of their workers, facebook does not exist. without the upfront capital paid by the shareholders, facebook would not exist as well. It's both, together, that makes it work. The deal the workers accepted was to be paid upfront, at a fixed amount, for a fixed amount of work (counted by time, usually). Then, the shareholders gets the profit from the difference in sale price of the work. They take on the risk that the work is worthless in a changing world, a risk that the workers do not take (unless the worker chooses to accept payments in shares). I don't see this as exploitation.

kennywinker 5y ago
> without the upfront capital paid by the shareholders, facebook would not exist It’s pretty debatable how much of the money they raised was critical. They needed a bit of seed money, no question - and without regular injections of cash they would have had a much slower growth curve, for sure. They might not have been able to buy out instagram and whatsapp - but that didn’t create much value - those things existed without facebook. We might even need to account for the value that facebook’s rise took away from other firms, if we’re trying to calculate how much net value facebook’s investors have created - rather than just how much value has been enveloped into the firm - but let’s stay on point. Overall, giving money to someone starting a business, well that sounds like you’re describing a loan. A loan entitles you to get paid back, with interest. The interest is there to cover the risk that you might not get paid back. What we have instead is “ownership”, which seems to entitle you to the profits of a company’s workers in perpetuity. Numbers are a little thin, but it seems like facebook took on something like $1bil in various investments before their ipo, and raised about 16bil with their ipo (tho unclear if that 16bil went to the company, or investors + the company). Facebook has posted profits in the billions for years now. If you only count earnings since their ipo, about $173bil cumulative going to investors. At what point is the loan paid back? How much interest are they entitled to? At 9 years post investment they’ve paid back 10x what was given to them - that’s well over a 100% interest rate - and that is set to never end.
- chii 5y ago
  > Overall, giving money to someone starting a business, well that sounds like you’re describing a loan. There are many ways to obtain capital - loans being one. A loan is guaranteed, often having a need for collateral. I highly doubt anyone would loan Facebook money without collateral at the early stage. Equity ownership is not a loan, and it is indeed a perpetual entitlement to all profits. It's pretty much the only form of "loan" for a new business. You still have not made any arguments as to why ownership is wrong, other than merely asserting it.
  - kennywinker 5y ago
    If tomorrow all of amazon’s stock disappeared from the ledgers, would anything change about the company? The warehouses would still be there, drivers would still do their rounds. It’d be a chaotic next board meeting, but that’s about it. Ownership contributes nothing to the equation, and demands a massive cut of what the real productive work produces. That’s why ownership is parasitic. As a general rule, why would we allow parasites? But even if you don’t want to see ownership that way, it still has undeniably and repeatedly lead to extreme concentration of wealth - which means poverty and starvation for the masses and superyachts for the few.

kcplate 5y ago

So you must feel then that tech workers at a company that doesn’t show a profit for many years or operates in the red during their start up phase should payback a portion of the the salary they collected during the time they were not profitable when they become profitable? Those tech workers would have never have received a wage were it not for the investors taking a risk and providing the patience to the reward. The tech worker who drew a salary during that time took zero risk and totally exploited the investor.

kennywinker 5y ago
Ideally, the workers would be the investors. If we were being paid for the full profits of our labour we wouldn’t have these ultra rich investors - since they all got rich off profits created by workers in the first place - and we as workers would have plenty of money to put into new ventures. Instead of raising $x mil from softbank, you hire people who bring seed money from their previous job with them, and are willing to work for no pay for a few years on the promise of building something useful that gets them paid back and paid well going forward. The idea that startup workers aren’t already taking on risk is weird. There’s clearly direct risk, and opportunity cost style risk already baked into jobs at new companies. A fee bad turns and late paychecks and you could end up homeless. Investors risk… Not homelessness. Not poverty. They risk losing money they never earned in the first place.
- kcplate 5y ago
  > never earned in the first place. Wow. Good luck with…all that.
  - kennywinker 5y ago
    Thanks, I’m looking to implement this understanding if the world in the company I’m starting - i appreciate the well wishing. Have a good one!
    - kcplate 5y ago