If your business model isn't sustainable without exploiting your workers your business doesn't deserve to be open.
"They don’t provide enough value" - labor is the thing that creates value.
No one said we are exploiting our workers. That's just an assumption being made because it is not possible to pay everyone huge wages.
And I am aware that labor creates value, but not all labor is equal. No one questions if a junior developer should earn as much as a senior/partner/staff engineer, but it's very much the same here. I ask someone to roll some dough into a ball and that I'll pay them $17/hour to do that. Some people will be faster and produce better balls, while others will be slow and produce lumpy round things. They are not producing the same quality and quantity but the cost to me is still $17/hour, therefore on paper one is more valuable than the other. That's not a heartless or mean way of looking at it, that is literally a required part of costs of goods sold. Ingredients and labor dictate how much each ball of dough costs to make.
We try our best to take care of our employees because they are so important, and you won't find a single one of them that says we are exploiting them. But they are not software people, and the dynamic is very different in the world of manual labor.
I would argue wage labor, and capitalism as a whole, are inherently exploitative.
I came from a manual labor background; Ranch hand, construction, metal fab, which is why I'm so passionate about this. I'm used to being paid $~15/hr to do very physically demanding work, knowing that the contracts are often 10-15k for a job a crew of four guys can knock out in a day or two, including labor and materials the expense is ~3-5k plus indirect costs (tools, trucks, taxes etc.), so why shouldn't the remainder of the profit go to the people that generated it? I understand the margins are thinner in most retail and service situations but the same logic can be applied. If you were losing money on an employee, or even just breaking even, would you keep them on they payroll?
> knowing that the contracts are often 10-15k for a job a crew of four guys can knock out in a day or two, including labor and materials the expense is ~3-5k plus indirect costs (tools, trucks, taxes etc.), so why shouldn't the remainder of the profit go to the people that generated it?
Sounds like the crew of 4 should just incorporate...
If they were operating in a true free market, then you’d have a point, but they’re not. They’re are artificial constraints like min wage, unemployment insurance that pays more, etc. those aren’t market forces, they’re state forces. In that context, you’re implying without realizing that you’re ok with living in a world where the only businesses are the Amazons of the world or those that receive state subsidies. That’s not a world I want to live in.
Businesses are only able to grow to the size of amazon because of the exploitation of the working class' labor and government subsidies. Minimum wage and unemployment aren't an artificial constraints, they are things that workers have exercised their collective strength in to win concessions from their employers via labor organizing and collective action. It's the same reason we (generally) have an 8 hour work day, a 5 day work week, holidays off, safety requirements, workman's comp, and child labor laws to name a few things.
And I am aware that labor creates value, but not all labor is equal. No one questions if a junior developer should earn as much as a senior/partner/staff engineer, but it's very much the same here. I ask someone to roll some dough into a ball and that I'll pay them $17/hour to do that. Some people will be faster and produce better balls, while others will be slow and produce lumpy round things. They are not producing the same quality and quantity but the cost to me is still $17/hour, therefore on paper one is more valuable than the other. That's not a heartless or mean way of looking at it, that is literally a required part of costs of goods sold. Ingredients and labor dictate how much each ball of dough costs to make.
We try our best to take care of our employees because they are so important, and you won't find a single one of them that says we are exploiting them. But they are not software people, and the dynamic is very different in the world of manual labor.