I always tell people that working in a big Corp feels like walking around in Eastern Germany while the wall was still up. Same kind of posters, 5 year plans, top down propaganda that has little resemblance with reality, "rewards" like T-shirts with motivational messages.
Ronald Coase’s paper, “The Nature of the Firm,” compares companies with the alternative of everybody being an independent contractor cooperating with other independent contractors on individual projects. I think it’s an interesting thought experiment, and it focuses on why companies operate in a authoritarian way internally.
Occasionally, companies try to organize with market principles internally, with divisions charging each other for services performed. Sometimes it works. Sometimes it turns into Sears.
For example, the following is from "The Failure of the Working Class" by Anton Pannekoek in 1946:
The workers of the world nowadays have two mighty foes, two hostile and suppressing powers over against them: the monopolistic capitalism of America and England, and Russian state capitalism. The former is drifting toward social dictatorship camouflaged in democratic forms; the latter proclaims dictatorship openly, formerly with the addition "of the proletariat," although nobody believes that any more.
Income inequality is not the issue here or in the Gilded Age. It's monopoly power.
Of course, in the Gilded Age monopoly power was enabled and defended by capital concentration. Not so now: global interest rates are at a historical low, often pushing the negative barrier, and capital is so swamped that its owners are begging any fool with anything that call itself an idea to take it.
The microeconomic issue in each case is increasing returns to scale, which builds huge protective moats around the big industrial players. But now increasing returns to scale are enabled by nearly-free technology - industrial production in the gilded age required expensive and heavily patented machinery, while now every relevant tool is at hand, either for $0 or for peanuts.
It's not "monopoly capital" as made famous by American marxists such as Paul Sweezy. It's quickly drifting away from "capitalism" as defined by K. Marx himself. We need to understand the differences if we're going to protect and improve the lives of those less empowered to escape drudgery and the rat race.
Capitalism doesn't have to cannibalize. Often it works to everyone's benefit.
Unions is also a legitimate force in capitalism. In many ways it could be good for Amazon. If gives them a way to deal evenly with their employees.
Of course, a union has to recognize that it's not blindly serving its members, if it drives companies out of business. Like hindering technological advancement by refusing automation.
> Unions is also a legitimate force in capitalism. In many ways it could be good for Amazon. If gives them a way to deal evenly with their employees.
This. Capitalism is all about freedom of association. Unions only start to become incompatible with capitalism if they start to force themselves as a monopoly to control who may or may not work for a company.
I like to make the distinction between guilds (limiting access to professions and employers and controlling seniority and positions) and unions (collective bargaining). In most western countries the line between the two is heavily blurred, to the detriment of the union movement which has suffered heavily over the last 40 years.