Its more of a remark about the overall world. Your employees are somebody's customers, your customers are somebody's employees, You are somebody's customer. If nobody in the world makes enough to be a consumer, nobody consumes, and thus you have no customers.
Great example is fast food as well. If you are offering the "lowest cost" food option, and providing the minimum wage, you've got product/purchasing power that are both at the bottom of the food chain. And if employees can't afford to buy your food... then who is going to? Your product doesn't match the market you'd supposedly be selling to.
This is why Ford is considered the creator of the middle class. He took automation and used it as a way to set a different standard for society, one that inherently helped his own product succeed in the long run.
Why is Bezos doing this? Because Amazon succeeds when people have more disposable income. And it starts with his company. sure he might get regulated to do it anyways, but now he is pushing the needle. Regulators might push an overall minimum wage hike to $15 because "if amazon can do it, why cant you?" The merits of that hike aside, know who stands to benefit from people having more money to spend? Amazon.
But sure, a high-productivity business can lead the way on wage increases. Other businesses might have to raise prices to keep up.
I'd like to read more about Ford's effect on wages outside Detroit. This "creator of the middle class" sounds like it might be exaggerated?
FWIW productivity has literally exploded in the last few decades.
workers organised
organise, workers!
Small buisness will go out of business... So amazon is preparing its Monopol. Really smart.
The showmanship and publicity causes pressure on other manufacturers to pay that much. Otherwise, anybody working at a competitor will just be thinking to themselves "I'm just working here to get experience so I can have an edge on other applicants at Ford." Competitors that pay less will be dealing with high turnover unless they match Ford's wages.
And it's not just car companies that have to match wages. Other industries will have to keep up. And once everybody is making decent money, you have more customers.
This would be like claiming that high salaries in Silicon Valley are somehow going to fix inequality nationwide. There is some spillover but it only goes so far.
The wages elsewhere aren't going to go up as high but it should have some upward drag
http://archive.is/QX6kB == https://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2012/03/04/the-stor...
Ford was paying above-par wages to have a more-stable workforce, because his production line was more sensitive to bad/absent workers than the typical factory of his time.
It also came with a fair dose of patronage, like inspections of workers houses to make sure they weren't drinking, and were teaching their kids english.
Source: tech worker in Seattle.
The moment we stop investing, borrowing and loaning, it will all come tumbling down. This is sort of what caused the panic of 2008 and why the governments had to step in with QE.
>Aging populations pose a challenge to the fiscal and macroeconomic stability of many societies
Entitlements, leveraged risk-taking, investment. All these things depend on the next generation.
If the greedy people at the top take too much money for themselves, then the machine stops, no one buys cars, and there company sinks.
With our means of production, couldn't we achieve self sustainability amongst ourselves, or is there always someone slaving away?
So true. But I wonder if locking in a steady “home base” to the overall market of price-conscious general consumers makes it worthwhile strategically.
Selling to employees isn’t sustainable long-term, but as a strategy for bootstrapping/sustaining word-of-mouth among your customers it might be very smart.
In reality it shows that Ford understood that all of us are in this together (“The owner, the employees, and the buying public are all one and the same”) – and we take it that Ford was not only referring to his own employees but to all employees. So if you want the public to be able to by your goods then we ought to recognise that the public must be able to afford those goods. By extension, even though a capitalist might want to increase profits by keeping wages low he must realise that he decreases the market for his own goods – if enough owners think this way – (“and unless an industry can so manage itself as to keep wages high and prices low it destroys itself, for otherwise it limits the number of its customers”). To sum it up, (“One’s own employees ought to be one’s own best customers.”) doesn't mean that every single one of your employees will buy your product – rather it's an aspirational statement encouraging all owners to pay their employees a living wage and not to myopically fixate on margins and the bottom line.
It would be showmanship if Ford said this and then turned around and paid his employees crap and worked them to the bone, but
“In 1914, Henry Ford made a big announcement that shocked the country. It caused the financial editor at The New York Times to stagger into the newsroom and ask his staff in a stunned whisper, “He’s crazy, isn’t he? Don’t you think he’s crazy?”
That morning, Ford would begin paying his employees $5.00 a day, over twice the average wage for automakers in 1914.
In addition, he was reducing the work day from 9 hours to 8 hours, a significant drop from the 60-hour work week that was the standard in American manufacturing.”
http://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2014/01/03/blogs/post-per...
You're the uncharitable one. You're either a sink-or-swim type or dead cynical because I can't believe you're not intelligent enough to be able to take what Ford said at face value.
I watched a video today about a young American describing his visit (for a sprained foot) to a clinic in the Netherlands and an emergency room in Germany. He recounted his visits because he was so shocked that at how little he had to pay for an X-ray and meds and how little time he waited to get a referral and how little time he spent in the hospital. I honestly think that there's something deeply damaged at the heart of the American psyche. You've no sense that you are “are all one and the same” to use Ford's words. You can't see why collectively paying taxes for healthcare (everyone's family has an illness at some point in time) and collectively bargaining for cheaper medicines from manufacturers might be overall a good thing. You can't see why paying regular folks a living wage benefits all of society, even those who have to do the paying. No man is an island, we're all in the same boat. But hey, I'm all right Jack, I've got mine huh? There's only so much inequity and hardship people will take before something breaks – history shows us this time and time again.
More than half of Americans support single-payer. Some estimates are as high as 70%.
https://www.cnbc.com/2018/08/28/most-americans-now-support-m...
I absolutely support single-payer and so do most of the people I know.
There isn't a HN thread long enough for the discussion of what it might take to actually get single-payer done.
This shows that whereas the majority of the nation support some form of single-payer option the government (no matter who is in charge) resists it. This means that the government works for the few, not the many. This implies an oligarchy which turns out to be verifiable[0]. Out of interest I looked up all the countries that have neither free nor universal healthcare[1] and cross-ranked them according to their human development index[2]. The list is quite small. What we see is that the US is the only country with a _supposedly_ very high human development index (and the only one in the top 70 of countries) that has a healthcare system that is neither free nor fair. 8 out of the 10 least developed countries in the world are on this list. How Americans are not figuratively up in arms over this is beyond me. I think it is fair to say that the US political system is broken in a very real sense. This is worrying because traditionally only catastrophe curbs inequality this bad[3] and I'm not sure incrementalism works in a broken system. Oh well, time will tell.
Country Free? All? Level Rank
United States No No V 13
Saint Kitts and Nevis No No H 72
Grenada No No H 75
Lebanon No No H 80
Dominican Republic No No H 94
Jordan No No H 95
Suriname No No H 100
Dominica No No H 103
Marshall Islands No No H 106
Turkmenistan No No H 108
Indonesia No No M 116
Iraq No No M 120
Tajikistan No No M 127
Micronesia No No M 131
Kenya No No M 142
Cambodia No No M 146
Angola No No M 147
Cameroon No No M 151
Syrian Arab Republic No No L 155
Zimbabwe No No L 156
Nigeria No No L 157
Mauritania No No L 159
Senegal No No L 164
Comoros No No L 165
Sudan No No L 167
Haiti No No L 168
Afghanistan No No L 168
Gambia No No L 174
Guinea No No L 175
Guinea-Bissau No No L 177
Mozambique No No L 180
Liberia No No L 181
Mali No No L 182
Sierra Leone No No L 184
Burundi No No L 185
Chad No No L 186
South Sudan No No L 187
Niger No No L 189
Somalia No No - ---
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_with_univers...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_Human_Dev...
[3] https://www.businessinsider.com/major-study-finds-that-the-u...
Why is it the #1 destination country for immigrants?
Nevertheless, the US is a country that considers guns an inalienable right, but not healthcare, education or a living wage. Most of the rest of the world would consider that a pathologically insane set of priorities.
Of course, not. US became a top destination in a very simple fashion which doesn't involve neither culture, no marketing: your cousin/friend goes to US, and writes back that there are jobs, and food/clothing is relatively cheap, and you think "aha!", and you are the next. And at some moment the whole community comes to the same realization, and now parents prepare their kids for emigration for better life. And it works even in countries where governments are very hostile to Americans, and promote the idea that US is the capitalist hell :-)
But interpreted charitably, it's showmanship. This is a way to show leadership, get a lot of publicity, and hire better workers, so what's not to like?