[robsinatra]

Executives at a French company couldn't treat people as resources and fire at will because France has employee protection laws (sounds good but only in theory). So, the executives made employees miserable, intending to push them to quit. Instead, employees killed themselves. You want to fire people but you can't, so what do you do? Make them not want to be there anymore.

There is a case to be made that these employees would have killed themselves if they were fired. This is an important distinction because it's the loss of employment, not harassment, that lead to suicide.

It's crazy to think that there are people here who will read this and think that with this given, firing should be illegal and executives charged for manslaughter. You are thinking dangerously and need to study history. Or, you are French and there is no difference.

[Yoric]

Pray tell, what part of history?

[TheNorthman]

It's crazy to to think that people are still suggesting people to "study history", as though history is a homogeneous mass that can even be studied as a whole.

It's crazy to think that history is uniformly in favor of the executive class. That somehow the brutality of the elites can be justified by their understanding of history. That they can't be deferred to some broader concept of morality because they have history on their side. This argument is the same as the one made by Francis Fukuyama in his book The End of History and the Last Man and it is fundamentally flawed in the same way.

Never have violence, inequality, exclusion, famine, and thus economic oppression affected as many human beings in the history of the earth and of humanity. Instead of singing the advent of the ideal of liberal democracy and of the capitalist market in the euphoria of the end of history. Let us never neglect this obvious, macroscopic fact, made up of innumerable, singular sites of suffering: no degree of progress allows one to ignore that never before, in absolute figures, have so many men, women and children been subjugated, starved or exterminated on the earth.

[tome]

> Never have violence, inequality, exclusion, famine, and thus economic oppression affected as many human beings in the history of the earth

And have they ever affected a smaller proportion of human beings in recorded history?

[claudiawerner]

The proportion dosen't seem as morally relevant (though it is a factor) as the sheer number (you can figure it as a trolley problem; the train running over 10k out of 100k is arguably worse than running over 5 out of 10) - and arguably, inequality, exploitation and domination have more to do with relative wealth than absolute wealth. Although the lives of a great many have undeniably improved, that has nothing to do with what social scientists and philosophers of economics mean by inequality, exploitation and domination - which usually focuses on the share of productive capacity by members of society. All the "big names" like Sen and Roemer have those issues on the radar. You can figure the problems of the system in terms of domination[0], exploiters dominating[1], extraction of surplus-value[2], or unequal exchange of labour[3][4].

[0] https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/08854300.2016.12...

[1] https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00346764.2019.1...

[2] http://matsuo-tadasu.ptu.jp/RecentControversyOnFMT.pdf

[3] https://ideas.repec.org/p/kch/wpaper/sdes-2018-10.html

[4] https://scholarworks.umass.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1...

[dnautics]

If it's the sheer number you care about, not the proportion, then the problem is clear: Human reproduction. Eliminate that, and the sheer number of incidents of oppression and suffering will go down.

[mc3]

Eliminate that, and there will be zero people!

[TheNorthman]

The proportion world-view has the same problem. If you kill everyone but one person, they can't be exploited by other people.