[twa927]

> just because capitalist are competing for labor doesn't mean that management switches from being agents of capital to agents of labor. Valuable, contested human resources are still resources, not owners.

Yes, I generally agree, but it goes as follows:

1. The business owners care only about achieving their business goals.

2. To achieve the business goals the owners need to have good employees.

3. To hire and retain good employees some business decisions should take into cosiderations the needs of the employees.

So even from the purely economical point of view there should be some balance between 1. and 3.

And overall your purely economical point of view seems too rigid to me. One example that comes to my mind is the cultural shift happening at Microsoft. The company made many decisions with little business sense like open sourcing many projects and providing free developer tools. But the effect is that developers like the company more. This has measurable effects like Azure success or hiring better employees. I think this is an example of a bottom-up-built success which doesn't fit your top-down viewpoint.