4 ms·

> no incentive to see the business grow and serve & hire more people if it does not lead to higher wages for employees The alternative being lower wages for th

• hnbad 3y ago
  It makes sense if you don't assume any of this has anything to do with the workers benefiting long-term because Friedman doesn't care about that: being able to suppress wages gives a business more room to grow by redirecting surplus to the owners, who can choose to reinvest the money by hiring more workers or buying machines that increase the productivity per worker. Unions on the other hand would use their leverage to redirect some of that surplus back to workers by increasing wages, reducing the overall profit. Unions can also use their leverage to mandate a better and safer working environment and reduce workloads, which reduces the short-term productivity whereas a business owner could otherwise weigh the benefits of these measures reducing churn (i.e. people being too exhausted/injured/maimed/burnt out to continue doing their job and having to be replaced) against the overall increase in productivity. "Growth" means increasing profits. Profit means surplus from income that is not paid out to workers (wages, bonuses, etc) or spent on sustaining the business itself (operating costs, rentals, service contracts, etc). Payroll can easily be one of the biggest cost factors and productivity one of the biggest factors to income, so being able to squeeze both of these liberally makes it much easier to grow a company. This is completely tangential to the interests of the workers.