I feel like you're implying we should. But people having to work is a cost, both to the company and to society as a whole. It's like suggesting we measure the effectiveness of an engine by how much smoke it emits. The measure of an engine is the power it's generating, and the measure of a company is whether it can produce something that's more highly valued than the sum of costs, an attribute that is pretty tightly knit to shareholder value (certain modern era tech companies notwithstanding...).
Where you land on how that conflict should resolve is going to depend on your views.
I disagree, at least if democracy is also a goal. Full employment gives individual citizens economic power to go with their political power. Merely "ensur[ing] people have access to goods and services" turns them into economically disempowered dependents.
The older group were workers. They earned income. They invested it, and now are attempting to maintain control of their investments with the last power they have, voting.
Those same young people that have jobs now, that put it in retirement, will be the old people investing in the future.
I believe the same cost also applies to companies. There can be (and almost always is) an environmental, societal, etc cost.
The problem is that we haven't come up with a way to properly pay people in a system where productivity has increased past the point that "full employment" - in the traditional sense - is no longer needed, or possible.
If companies had to maximize employment they would need to automate fewer things, which would lower productivity and result in less wealth being produced. The entire society would end up being poorer.
This happened in the Communist bloc within living memory and we don't need to make the same mistake again. It's not a coincidence that the countries with the best quality of life are the ones that allow corporations to pursue wealth creation over other goals and then redistribute the wealth through taxation and social benefits. If you want to redistribute wealth it's good to actually have some wealth.
Even if that were true, that's not a factor that just suddenly started to have force in the last couple of decades.
While it is certainly true that nothing legally changed (edit: this isn't true: there is a full on attack on collective bargaining ongoing) in the more recent 30-40 years to allow for the massive accumulation of wealth and corporate practices that make the 'FULL STOP' in the original comment more accurate than before, the modification of tax law certainly has had a major impact.
> On August 12, 1981, Jack Welch made a speech at The Pierre in New York City called ‘Growing fast in a slow-growth economy’. This is often acknowledged as the "dawn" of the obsession with shareholder value. [0]
Milton Friedman's 1970 op ed in the NYT [1] arguing that profit is the primary social responsibility of a corporation has also been influential on executive thinking in this regard.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shareholder_value
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/1970/09/13/archives/a-friedman-doctr...
The grimmer reality is that companies compete with one another, and customers - be them consumers, businesses, non-profits, or administrations. They all mind things like cost and quality to a degree, so you need to constantly improve your processes, and indeed automate, to stay in business.
Unfortunately, this is where the perverse incentives start coming into play. Eventually, you hit that point of diminishing returns as an actor in the market.
One of a few things then has to happen.
A) Downsizing, hyper-optimization, and automation to create the illusion of growth and ROI to keep the investment bucks rolling in. This leads to decreased employment, and if unchecked creates value deserts at a certain point of optimization. You end up setting the bar so high to break into an area, that smaller endeavors without some massively disruptive edge being managed by people not interested in being bought out stand a chance at being able to survive.
B) You fail due to investors selling off your stock to reinvest elsewhere. Given enough sell off, you'll likely start seeing stock price go down. No one wants money in a company that can't grow anymore.
The situation in B) can lead to
C) Vertical/Horizontal integration. This tends to be risky, because you start bumping heads with regulatory agencies if you aren't careful, and the word 'monopoly' or 'oligopoly' starts getting thrown around. You CAN make incredible growth numbers by merging with the right things, but the network effects of an emphasis on shareholder returns and a minimization in financial payouts to laborers means a steady positive feedback loop is created, siphoning economic power to the people with shares, which is increasingly NOT the people working jobs. Eventually, there may be wealth transfer via inheritance from shareholding parents, but wages have been minimized for discouraging a large portion of the working population from buying stock.
This can be exacerbated as new goods price starts to take into account that there are generally at least enough well off enough people to the not+well-off people where prices will stabilize on the higher end of the scale over time. Leaving people looking for cheaper lower quality goods they can afford now.
This leads to a manufacturing race to the bottom. See current status quo with manufacturing moving to Asia. This can hold out only until some other metric starts to significantly raise the bar in terms of minimum cost to produce or transport goods. Which coincidentally, environmental concerns are starting to do. Once things start getting more expensive to produce, and the cost gets offloaded to the customer...
Well... You'll have a bunch of pissed off people who can't afford stuff, hired or not.
It'll take a long while. Heck, it's been what, 100, 200ish years, for our population to start getting to the scale technologically where we can even get a non-trivial number of people to even CONTEMPLATE theatre planet's capability to absorb our economic externalities is limited to within a few human lifespans.
It isn't an easy problem. A lotta moving pieces.
I mean it's definitely a contributing factor, but only because of the axioms that drive our definition of a good company.
The ideal company is seen as an investment vehicle that creates shareholder value. Full stop.
We don't measure well performance of a company in terms of hiring people. Nor do we even measure it in how well they do what they are there to do. It always getsmeasured in value returned to investors. Investors are generally not laborers in this day and age. And any company that can make more long term by automating and dumping the need for laborers will.
You can blame Automation all you want, but it's something far more basic that makes automation a worthy goal in the first place.
And no, neither automation nor the incentives that make it desirable are "easy" problems to fix.