The crazy part is taking the huge salary then demanding your employer take on some social justice cause that they have been neutral on or actually already accommodating on.
They out here saying tech workers are the downtrodden proletariat... they are not. They are firmly within the bourgeoise--top < 5% of wage earners in USA, and top < 0.5% in the world.
Social justice (communism) killed upwards of 100 million last century, by famines, gulags, mass exterminations, etc. and ruined billions of more lives. Fascism killed about 50 million (WWII + Holocaust), give or take. Both are abhorrent, but social justice wins the "Worst Thing Ever" award.
Absolutely ridiculous. Social justice is not communism. Calm down: Treating women and gays and minorities and poor people equally as human beings is not going to destroy civilization. You've been brainwashed and you're parroting fascist propoganda. Take a break from Fox News or cocaine or whatever you're on, because it's making you insane.
Social justice goes far beyond treating women, gays, minorities and poor people as equals. Equal treatment is enshrined in the US constitution, for example.
Social justice means not "equality" but "equity": looking at perceived disparities between social groups and then equalizing them by taking property from perceived "oppressor" groups and transferring to "victim" groups. This is exactly what Stalin, Mao, etc. did.
Why does no one argue that Hitlerism/Mussolini-ism/Francoism wasn't real fascism? "Real" fascism would of course usher in an era of peaceful law and order, harmonious cooperation between govt and business... /s
Don't watch Fox and don't touch coke, neither cola nor powder (debatable which one is worse for you.) I took classes on social justice at Brown. When I actually understood what the profs in the space were saying, looking at what it takes to implement it in the real world, the results have been pretty horrifying every time we humans have tried it. The thing I couldn't get over is the idea of "class guilt" sometimes cast as "class privilege".
Capitalism, free markets, and democracy a.k.a. "liberalism" on balance has created the greatest era of flourishing and peace humanity has ever experienced--we all live twice as long thanks to it. This is not a defense of colonialism and American interventionism, its simply a statement that liberal systems work far better than any other that has ever been tried.
It's not crazy at all. If you are a worker, you are the one actually making the company productive. If the majority of workers want their company to do a thing, that company should listen.
I see the username, but I still want to ask... how would your ideal company deal with a situation where all employees want to run the business in the ground?
I'm a strong believer in workers cooperatives and democratic organization. Usually, people don't want to run their livelihood into the ground, but sometimes they make errors. (Just like executives, if Amazon games and stadia are any indication.)
People are absolutely free to do those things right now. There are tens of millions of people with those sentiments. Why don't we see more attempted co-ops?
So, we have some giant coops out there. Some making billions in revenue.
But in the US it's really not well supported. If you want to found an LLC you click a few buttons on a form online and talk to any lawyer.
If you want to found a co-op, you generally have to file the paperwork in person or via the mail. No one in the municipal government will help, because they don't know anything except LLCs. You'll need to find a lawyer who can draft not only the articles of incorporation, but also can advise on the issuing of shares, democratic operation, and how new members can join.
Because profits are controlled by the workers, capitalistic investors won't know what to do with you, so you'll need to put in extra effort to find investors who are willing to be paid but not be made owners (or not more than any workers).
It's a high, high initial cost. But once it's going it can be incredibly self sustaining. Every dollar of profit ends up back in the pockets of the people working there, equally. Or they can collectively choose to use that profit to expand.
Thanks for the thoughtful response. Sometimes the lack of cooperatives is framed as some sort of Capitalist conspiracy against them. It is much more tractable to point out friction in the system that make starting co-ops hard and then find solutions to solve those over time.
I like the idea in principle, but I can't imagine a situation where a worker cooperative would vote in favor of a risky, but necessary pivot / layoff / long-term investment. Sounds like a recipe for killing intra-company innovation.
Right, the co-op solution is not to fire members, but split the burden of lean times across everyone. I don't think I've ever seen a CEO say, "I'll forgo my income this year to ensure we can keep the people here employed".
I thought higher pay tended to often to together with higher other benefits, like coworkers thinking you're important and management wanting your to think they're you're friend.