One Response to “Farm Cash Money”

1. Mark Gisleson
   7:23 am on March 2nd, 2011

   Who owns the business? Thanks the growth of the stock market ownership is diffuse and it's hard to know who owns what thanks to mutual funds. It's hard not to resent the boss when there's no face to the ownership, just professional managers who've gamed the system to overcompensate themselves.

   Your being OK with worker ownership makes me wonder if you'd be OK with tax incentives to promote worker ownership. Not government money, but tax incentives?

   As for publicly posting pay, I wish you'd give that some more thought. If you have worker ownership, wouldn't public pay sheets be unavoidable since all the “owners” would be entitled to that information?

   This is semantics. Worker ownership is just another term for respecting stakeholders and not just shareholders, most of whom know nothing about the business, let alone who deserves how much compensation.

   As for the janitors, you'd be amazed at how well peer pressure works on the lazy ones. The seniority system allows older workers to bid the easier assignments, and the desire to achieve seniority motivates the younger workers with the crappier assignments. Being a factory janitor isn't about emptying wastebaskets. No factory job is without risk because you're in a hostile environment. At Firestone at least forklift drivers only watched out for other forklift drivers. Everyone else was expected to get the fuck out of the way.

   Family farms went belly up in the '80s at a pace not seen since the Great Depression. The survivors weren't necessarily the best farmers, just the ones with the most manageable debt. Much of the pressure on farmers comes from land values skyrocketing due to proximity to urban areas. Most states keep that land taxed at farm value, leading to abuse by speculators who should be locked out of that market entirely. Farm production is a matter of national defense and shouldn't be impacted by real estate or commodities speculators.

   Engineers are professionals, not workers, not that professionals don't often benefit from group strategies. And engineers will also be impacted by new technologies. What happens when the best designs are done by computers that were built by computers? That's less than twenty years off.

   Is a bank robber successful? How do we justify paying millions to bankers who lost billions? Are their corvettes earned?

   The cost of janitorial services in your tires is microscopic, and it's part of the plant safety as much as anything else. The price of oil has much more impact. Again, tires are extremely complex to manufacture. If you found a good description of the process online you might better appreciate just how cheap your tires really are.

   Your vision of America leads me to wonder if you'd describe yourself as a social Darwinist?

   How do you get around the fact that there are more people than there are jobs, and that that situation will only get worse, not better?