Capitalism is capitalism is capitalism
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/04/opinion/google-union.html
I guess there are companies that make an exceptional effort to be ecological, just, and egalitarian. Not too many, but some. Among those that get founded with that kind of ethos the market tends to pressure for ultimate priority attention to the bottom line.
Google was cool and Apple was insurgent. Target was a little more woke than Walmart. At one point.
Small firms can be communitarian, but often a “grow or die” dynamic encourages empire building … and large firms tend to get more and more beholden to shareholder interest.
All the large corporations are too large, remote, bureaucratic and impersonal. There’s just so much wealth and power involved! It’s breathtaking.
During the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth there was sympathy for movements for unionization and socialization. The movements won some concessions. By the 1970s wages and benefits were cutting into profits. So the corporations off-shored production. Labor really can’t win.
Inequality and social/ecological irresponsibility are endemic to the system. Google employees might gain some concessions, but the day will come when Alphabet is not profitable enough to satisfy Wall Street and then the mantra will become (as it always does) “we must rein in expenses.” And that will be the truth. Survival in the market will demand that they rein in expenses. Shareholders will demand that they rein in expenses. The growth in wages and benefits during the initial expansionary period will be reversed. It will become all about wage stagnation and benefit give-backs. The union will be decimated.
Do you hear much these days from the auto workers union? steel workers? mine workers? farm workers? The system domesticated them all.
Reforms, “trust busting,” labor rebellions, initiatives for deconcentration, tighter regulation, socialization, nationalization, corporate taxation, etc. come and go. The corporations dominate because they have the wealth and wealth translates into power. The corporations are the institutional form of capital. Capital, technology, and the state constitute an interlocking juggernaut. Facing that, good luck to the Google labor organizers.
