[Lerc]

>When a company says “AI made everyone more productive, so we need fewer people”,

They are implicitly saying that as a company, they don't want to be more productive. They want the same productivity by paying fewer more productive people.

Why is there an imbalance between what an employer gets paid for a unit of production and what an employee gets paid for a unit of production?

[palmotea]

> Why is there an imbalance between what an employer gets paid for a unit of production and what an employee gets paid for a unit of production?

Because labor gets exploited to make the owners richer. That's the basic fact, even though the owners (as a class) have financed a lot of propaganda to justify and obscure it.

[nlitened]

> Because labor gets exploited to make the owners richer

Only a person who never tried to organize labor into a company could ever have such a couch-sitter opinion

[sebastialonso]

Honestly expanding this point for the joy of debating.

Granted, grandparent comment used _charged_ words. Let's rephrase: labor is used to ultimately provide owners more money than they put in.

Is that not a fair assesment of the real world? Who starts a company to lose money? Who starts a company solely for "creating jobs"?

What exactly is the beef with grandparent comment? Is it just the negatively charged words? It's the rephrased version beef-inducing as well?

[palmotea]

> Let's rephrase: labor is used to ultimately provide owners more money than they put in.

I'd rephrase that: labor is used to provide the owners the maximum amount of money they can manage to extract from the people doing the labor.

A technology 10x's worker productivity? That means 9x more goes to the owners, and 0x (zero) more goes to the workers. Maybe the workers get even less, because now you can fire some.

> Who starts a company to lose money? Who starts a company solely for "creating jobs"?

A more equitable distribution of company profits does not imply the company loses money. It does not imply useless make-work jobs.

[nlitened]

> A more equitable distribution of company profits does not imply the company loses money. It does not imply useless make-work jobs.

I fully agree, and remind you it's completely legal and simple for you to go and start a company that does equitable distribution of company profits. More people should do it instead of complaining that few people do.

[palmotea]

> I...remind you it's completely legal and simple for you to go and start a company that does equitable distribution of company profits. More people should do it instead of complaining that few people do.

No. Instead of doing that, the effort should go into making all companies act that way.

IMHO, what you just did is part-and-parcel of one angle of the "propaganda to justify and obscure it" that I referred to above (e.g. "Don't like it? Then I say your only response should be this ineffective and limited-scope action I specify that strictly adheres to the status-quo").

And it would be ineffective. Building a little oasis in the middle of the status quo would only help a few and is unlikely to resist the tendency of things to eventually revert to the mean. The mean needs to change, and the best path to that is probably through regulation, other kinds of social standards-setting, and increasing the power of the exploited groups (e.g. through unionization).

[no-name-here]

> They want the same productivity by paying fewer more productive people.

I believe you mean same output but fewer people? But by definition that would be higher company productivity, as the definition of productivity at the company and/or national level is the ratio of outputs to inputs. If you have fewer people but are getting the same output, then the productivity of the company (or nation) has improved.

If you had fewer people but the same productivity then there would be no benefit to the company as the outputs would correspondingly be reduced (and it may actually be worse for the company if the company has any fixed costs).

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