[altairprime]

This is useful for corporations that want to reduce their workforce’s mean skill level in order to lower wages without impacting growth in revenue growth year-over-year. Such firms are the majority of Microsoft’s revenue, I expect.

[Eisenstein]

It amazes me that corporations think that employees making a decent wage and revenue are not correlated. What happens when everyone is making subsistence wages? Who is buying consumer goods at that point?

[altairprime]

That’s why payment of wages in company scrip was made illegal! Previously, the next step was to pay people in a made-up currency that had no market value outside of the company store, so that workers could be effectively held prisoner at the destitution line by disabling their ability to save up money to leave. The corporation can buy the goods at a heavy discount in bulk from another corporation and no profits need be paid out to workers, nor to retention efforts.

This cycle, gig work and part-time hours are exploiting the health care gap to ensure that people are paid just barely enough money to show up to work the next day, but not enough money or hours so that they can afford to voluntarily quit being exploited. Universal healthcare and basic income at a national level would crater involuntary employment numbers and likely cause a banking crash when consumers default en masse on their credit debt balances.

“Chattel slavery is dead, but industrial slavery remains.” (1886)