Comment by Lerc
4 days ago
>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?
> 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.
> 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
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?
5 replies →
> 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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