Isn't it kind of a matter of business integrity when the advantages of being a stakeholder are adjusted in response to differing overall prosperity conditions?
I'm having a hard time figuring out what the connection is supposed to be between having a big profit and laying off employees.
My first thought is that the writer is suggesting that companies should only lay off employees when the employees 1) are financial drains and 2) are such bad financial drains that the company would otherwise go broke. A lot of people do think that way, but it doesn't actually make any sense.
In good times the worker bees' are told 'we need to be cautious for going forward, sorry, we're tightening the belt'. In bad times they are told 'we need to tighten the belt'. This didn't use to be the case. Large bonuses on good years were the norm in the USA. Businesses are exploiting employees' believing in the previous system that no longer exists in order to squeeze out a little more productivity today. But business doesn't realize they are harming their future dynamic with employees. People are catching on that the system has changed to 'heads the company wins, tails the employees lose'. Labor relations are going to go back to early 1900s adversarial style from the 1950s/60s 'the tide is raising everyone's boat' and EVERYONE will end up the poorer from it.
Stock buybacks are an illegal manipulation of the stock market and should be made illegal again. They encourage this horrible destructive to the country/economy/workers/and ultimately companies policy.
To clarify, instead of building a strong company with a strong workforce as was the historical norm in the USA during it's prosperous times, companies 'invest' in stock buybacks, which do NOTHING to strengthen the company, their sole purpose is to manipulate the company's stock in the short term.
Forget workers rights, we all need to 'unionize' (work in union) to eliminate stock buybacks and get them reclassified as stock manipulation like there were prior to Ronald Reagan's presidency. If companies want to 'give money away' with respect to stocks, they can issue dividends, which changes to dynamics of the stock market (Prosperous pre-1980s America's 'I buy a company because it will be strong long term and pay me dividends' versus enshitified 2024 American stock market's 'I buy stocks for short term one time capital gains at the expense of all else').
Imagine yourself as an employee at amazon who sees people being laid off due to "unfavorable macroeconomic conditions" just to then see the company report massive profits while you saw no pay increase (so a reduction with inflation), benefits made slightly worse, and expectations to increase productivity to makeup for those people that were laid off.
Are you going to stand in front of that employee and say, "You are being nonsensical for connecting these things."?
And if you want to say the situation I've come up is contrived and isn't perfectly representative for all workers, you are correct. But for the percentage it is accurate for, that it does represent, do you really expect them not to connect things?
While keeping around employees with a consistent negative value is not a smart business move, over the long term those employees might have an overall positive value. Companies like Amazon love to whine and complain, along with demanding political solutions, to their labor acquisition issues that often are due to a desire to put short term finances ahead of long-term planning. It's also a sign of refusing to invest in people, demanding that the labor market magically conjure up any desired type of labor at the moment the company wants it.
I dunno. I get plenty of upvotes for articles about people organizing unions.
Oddly the anti-politics stance in HN focuses around “culture war” issues, I don’t get articles flagged on topics like “Was Trotsky Right About the Theory Of Permanent Revolution?”. The axis of economics from Marx to Van Mises is pretty safe but say anything about gender and you are [dead].
Readit News
My first thought is that the writer is suggesting that companies should only lay off employees when the employees 1) are financial drains and 2) are such bad financial drains that the company would otherwise go broke. A lot of people do think that way, but it doesn't actually make any sense.
Stock buybacks are an illegal manipulation of the stock market and should be made illegal again. They encourage this horrible destructive to the country/economy/workers/and ultimately companies policy.
Forget workers rights, we all need to 'unionize' (work in union) to eliminate stock buybacks and get them reclassified as stock manipulation like there were prior to Ronald Reagan's presidency. If companies want to 'give money away' with respect to stocks, they can issue dividends, which changes to dynamics of the stock market (Prosperous pre-1980s America's 'I buy a company because it will be strong long term and pay me dividends' versus enshitified 2024 American stock market's 'I buy stocks for short term one time capital gains at the expense of all else').
https://mavenroundtable.io/theintellectualist/news/stock-buy...
Are you going to stand in front of that employee and say, "You are being nonsensical for connecting these things."?
And if you want to say the situation I've come up is contrived and isn't perfectly representative for all workers, you are correct. But for the percentage it is accurate for, that it does represent, do you really expect them not to connect things?
It should've said:
Amazon made record breaking profit because (among other things) they laid off more than 18000 employees (2023)
Why are these two completely different metrics being put into the same title as if they correlate in some rational way?
The answer is they don’t, but it incites irrational reactions. Which, in my mind, is what Reddit is for; not HN.
Some deep insight from DanPriceSeattle here?
Some more discussion at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34253478
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Oddly the anti-politics stance in HN focuses around “culture war” issues, I don’t get articles flagged on topics like “Was Trotsky Right About the Theory Of Permanent Revolution?”. The axis of economics from Marx to Van Mises is pretty safe but say anything about gender and you are [dead].