Beyond Wages and Profits in Canada
Published on 2-11-2019
We have seen in previous posts that the system is tilted one way. It serves the employers and much less the employees to be polite. Through their wealth they cement their position in an elite position to continue with the system in perpetuity. They make sure that from 1 tax dollar collected they pay only 25 cents and the employees pay 75 cents. They make sure they accumulate 12% in wealth every year while the employee’s income stagnates. The most prominent form of employer – employee relationship is the capitalist corporation. Let’s have a look at the number of businesses across Canada per number of employees.
We need to treat different sizes of corporations differently. For sake of simplicity, I will only consider businesses employing above 200 people and will suppose that the average number of principal shareholders are 15-20 people, plus another 15-20 people as boards of directors elected by the shareholders. The total number of them in Canada approximately is about 400000. Probably much less since people cross-own and cross-sit on different boards.
They make all the key decisions in what is happening inside a corporation and pretty much in Canada:
- What goods and services to produce
- Where to produce (here locally, outside of province or in Shanghai)
- How to produce (what technology to use)
- What to do with the profits
The employee is excluded from all of this. He or she has to live with the consequences. At the same time, the employees are the ones who produces all at a company, including the profits which the employer appropriates. This is the law. You enter into a contractual agreement with the corporation and it is stipulated in it that all that you produce belongs to the employer.
The capitalist corporation is a fundamentally undemocratic organization. Organized from the top to the bottom hierarchically. I encourage you to watch this video about what Prof. Wolff has to say about the capitalist corporation. I can not imagine political democracy without democracy at the workplace. That is the place where we spend third of our lives.
What is then the alternative to all of this? What kind of alternative there can be to the traditional employer-employee relationship? The alternative is democratically organized workplaces. Owned and operated by the workers. One person, one vote, like in politics, in deciding all key decisions and distribute the fruit of their labour democratically. The employees become their own employers.
The good news is that this type of enterprises already exists. They are called worker coops.