The economy is better off when each worker is paid according to their true value.
This is only true if workers have some input into determining what that value is and it is not decided by what crumbs accidentally fall from the table after the shareholders, CEO’s and other layers of capitalism have finished feasting. Positioning that share as simply a balance between labor and capital is disingenuous, at best. It also encourages the proliferation of national brands that can absorb more of the supply chain for their own advantage, which is the way WalMart and Amazon have dominated the retail market without adding any value to their products.
These national companies are the first to automate away jobs, as WalMart has with many of its clerks. What they are actually doing, as they are finding out, is narrowing their customer base to those who have the least expendable incomes and must shop by price, such as their employees. Those who can afford a choice will opt out of doing the work they expect the retailer to do, especially when the retailer shovels most of the cost savings up the chain to profits.
A local supermarket chain is trying the automated checkout, seeing that it didn’t result in a wholesale rejection of WalMart. This is an employee-owned chain that is mostly competitive with WalMart pricing but offers much less variety of goods. It is finding that its customers are rejecting the automation in favor of human clerks, even when the lines are somewhat longer. The automated checkouts only get used when the limited item lines are closed.
Their customers aren’t as limited in choices from their incomes and don’t feel they should have to perform labor for the companies they support when they know they won’t actually gain from that labor. It might be different if the automated checkouts gave a percentage off the bottom line pricing for using them, but there is not much room for such discount at the store level without placing regular pricing out of competitive range.
The end result of this “race to the bottom” style capitalism is one choice of each product and retailer, which is exactly what its proponents claim for communism except that the employees of the company will never be able to afford the goods they sell.
