[simias]

>Imagine a company that spent billions to automate every process requiring only a single human to push a button every 10 minutes to produce its output. This company would be making "billions per employee", but it wouldn't make sense to pay that employee billions for that job.

Why not?

Why should it go into the shareholder's pockets instead of the people who actually do the work and create the value? What if the people actually working were to, I dunno, seize the means of production or something?

To be clear while I understand that there are many reasonable objections to socialism it bothers me that your comment presents capitalism as self-evident. Even if you believe that it's the best (or at least least worst) system, you should always question it.

If a company generates billions in profit the question of how this profit is divided among the owners and the workers should forever remain an open question I think.

[jfim]

> Why should it go into the shareholder's pockets instead of the people who actually do the work and create the value?

Proponents of the shareholder value model would argue that the point of a business is to maximize that value, and that it's better to return that value to shareholders instead of giving it to employees.

In the case of the button pressing employee, if they can find someone that would press the same button for minimum wage instead of billions per year, with functionally equivalent output, then from that perspective it would make sense to replace that expensive employee with a cheaper one, as that would maximize shareholder value.

In practice, things aren't as simple, since value maximization can have all kinds of perverse effects (eg. in that model, dumping sewage into a lake is a great idea if the fine is smaller than the resulting shareholder value) and shareholder value is kind of detached nowadays with profitless companies and many companies not electing to pay dividends.

[simias]

Well the original example was obviously flawed because if all that's left for the employee to do is literally just press a button, then it would've been automated as well.

In a company like Google the argument that the workforce is effectively just a commodity that could be replaced easily and at will is obviously not applicable. Most of Google engineers are not button pushers.

[parasubvert]

“Value creation” is not in the labor of pushing a button. It’s in the human capital, management that led to the creation of the system.

This example is nonsensical as a bunch of behind the scenes contractors and management presumably set up the system. Except that as soon as the contractors leaves, you’ve lost your primary factor of production: the knowledge of how the whole thing works. the days where management doubles as knowledge workers are long gone.

As for profit sharing, that is a longer conversation, but most of the largest companies today do profit sharing in the form of stock grants, pension and share purchase programs.