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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   1366 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for June 7, 2026

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not paying employees the fair "value" of there labor

You misunderstand. The fact that they are billionaires and their employees are not is proof, in these peoples' views, that the employees are not paid fairly. It's a tautology, or close to it.

I think that’s not quite right. The intuition is that if the billionaire couldn’t be a billionaire without (broadly) your labour, then you should be recognised as a small but vital part of the whole operation and you deserve more than the bare minimum it would take to replace you with the next available economic unit.

It’s the transition from absolute value (the value of your work to the enterprise) to marginal value (the value of your work relative to the next best candidate) that people find confusing and upsetting.

Striking is a power play but it’s also a way of saying, “see? Your company literally can’t function without the work I do, so it’s bullshit that you make billions from it and I make $5 an hour”.

you deserve more than the bare minimum it would take to replace you with the next available economic unit.

Sure, but how much more? To simplify, it's enough more that the billionaire is no longer a billionaire. Alternatively, the argument might be that the billionaire should have been taxed until he's no longer a billionaire (I've seen this put as "every billionaire is a policy failure").

I suspect in practice most people in private would agree to a hierarchy in which, say, in a software company the janitors are important but less important than the eggheads, who are important but less important than the CEO. In the privacy of their own heads, I think a lot of low-level workers envisage a hierarchy where the janitors earn X, the eggheads earn 2X, and the CEO earns 3X.

We're basically talking about the same thing. A company in which the CEO earns 3x more than the janitor means that the CEO isn't a billionaire or the janitor is at least a centimillionaire (simplifying a little bit) which is plainly impossible.

which is plainly impossible

I don't think it's that clear cut. If Amazon would have been set up e.g. like the Mondragon Corporation (a worker coop), a janitor with the company from the very start would have been a worker-owner from the beginning, accumulating dividends in his individual capital account within Amazon. His salary would have been lower than Bezo's by orders of magnitude, but the share of the company both of them held and the size of their dividend accounts would have been the same.

Now, Mondragon isn't nearly as large or successful as Amazon - but they are relatively large and successful.

This is a perfect example. Amazon's market cap is 2.7T. It employs 1.6M people (the true number is even larger due to employee turnover, contractors, etc). That would make Bezos' and the janitor's share worth $1.6M. Even Amazon can't make the janitor a centimillionaire.

In the Mondragon system, the share itself actually has no value, since it is not tradeable by design.

The thing that has value is the capital account, and those typically only vary by how long a worker has been with the company - and it only gets filled with actual profits. So Bezos and janitor #1 have pretty large capital accounts, but the rest of the 1.6M employees have less, since they haven't been with the coop for as long.

I'm not going to bother doing the math on this over the course of Amazon's existence, but last year their net income was $78B which is $50k per employee. Companies usually reinvest much of the income into themselves rather than take it as profit.

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