Comments like these tell me how ingrained capitalism is on people's minds now. We seem to forget that without the people that make up the company, it simply does not exist.
Companies are imaginary entities chasing profits for its owners. There's nothing sacred about it and they shouldn't EVER be more important than people.
Ruthless capitalism is the only reason people can even earn the ridiculously high Google wages in the first places.
Google can fire a small town's worth of employees and only lose 6% of their workforce. These companies are ridiculous in size. Really, this was only a matter of time.
I wouldn't like to live in the USA for the extremely weak employee protections there despite the massive amounts of money you can earn compared to Europe. Personally, I'm all for better employee protections to balance out the overpowering employer, but those protections don't come for free. If a company fulfils its social purpose of making people earn their living for a long time, they also need to be ready to pay their current rates (and up) for a long time. More protections means higher risks for companies, higher risks means fewer hires and lower rewards in case you can't get rid of someone in an economic downturn.
I think these protections are worth it, but I reckon the highest earning American programmers and managers wouldn't; the more you earn, the more those protections will cost you. Applying European protections wouldn't immediately drop wages down to European levels (you need a strong welfare state and such for that too) but it would certainly reduce the amount of disposable income these people have.
I sincerely don't think we should put the salaries as the deciding factor here. The crux of the issue is what you said: employee protections.
The only reason they over-hire in the first place is how cheap and easy it is to layoff afterwards. They are allowed to bet with human capital because of it.
I would most definitely take a paycut if it meant everyone would get better protections, higher salaries and stability. Unfortunately this is not a popular view and will likely never happen anyways.
In my country we had above average labor laws and in recent years all we see are new ways to circumvent them or laws removing those rights. It's sad to see but it's what capitalism's end game dictates.
Google plans to lay off employees in every country. US Googlers were fired overnight, while it will take a couple of months in other countries. I'm curious how it will work with every country legislation, e.g. in France and Germany.
It seems to beneficial to the employers, but with every other short-sighted scheme American capitalists come up with there is a downside to their long-term strategy; employees are extremely focused on jumping ship after a year now which ensures lots of projects will fail simply due to the knowledge base constantly shifting. You can’t have it all but it doesn’t stop them from trying.
At a certain level of earnings you just make your own protections. Google employees in US (in tech) literally make 10x compared to EU so all you have to do is be a responsible adult to have all the protection you need.
How is that even possible in a capitalist society? The game is rigged in favor of profits, not people. Of course even if you do create a successful company that values people above profits, odds are you will get undercut by another company that does not sooner or later.
But that doesn't change my original point though. It's still wrong to have companies above people no matter how we frame it.
> Companies are imaginary entities chasing profits for its owners. There's nothing sacred about it and they shouldn't EVER be more important than people.
A company of 50,000 operating at a loss will eventually fire 50,000 people. If it can turn things around by firing 10,000 - why not?
Further, in a company there might be temporary teams that implement a project and then are laid off. Surely it's better to have these positions than to not hire any people at all.
Even further, life is not static and things change. Not adapting to changes eventually would lead to stagnant and disfunctional situations, where a product would be made more expensive for everyone, just so a some company has the capital to continue hiring 10,000 or so people who are not longer doing any work. But, perhaps more importantly, those 10,000 people are stuck in meaningless positions doing empty "work" for the sake of numbers on some accounting sheet.
And even further futher, if these no longer useful jobs are in manufacturing then continuing them would mean wasting natural resources and polluting the environment.
The only reason we find ourselves in this place is because of this hyper-growth mentality that is unsustainable by definition.
As someone else pointed out, this specific point is moot in this case. They are just looking for even more profits. It's not even close to a "struggling company".
But regardless, if this was a case for a struggling company, this is short-sighted in the sense that it assumes that we have to live in a world bound by the current rules. Of course under these conditions companies will always choose to fire people and keep making profits to its owners.
But let's not pretend this would be an effort to help these 50k people in the first place. This is to keep the owner(s) profitable.
Companies are imaginary entities chasing profits for its owners. There's nothing sacred about it and they shouldn't EVER be more important than people.
I don't understand how we can lose sight of that.