There are always -short term (how did we do this year, the classic everyone gets) -long term (bonus defined today, paid out over a few years if you meet the strategic goals, typically director and exec level, we are easily talking 100k+/year here in bonus money)
bonusses. So, yeah, still a financial letdown for them. But they still got paid quite a lot of money of course. The average swiss person had no stakes or no culpability at all (except maybe choosing them, clients could have walkd away)
Like you can make $5 million a year now, but have things suddenly end on you at some point when things come crashing down, but probably not for several years, or you can make $1 million a year, but play it safe, and in five years get a $7 million long-term bonus.
Might as well get as much out of the company now and trust the government will bail you out (or not, what do they care, they can just move on to the next thing, and even if not, they've already made a shit ton of money, they could just retire, no big deal).
It's just an inevitable effect of capitalism.
The idea that 'the market decides' is a complete myth. In reality the economy is too interlinked for this to ever be allowed to happen.
It's fair to say a capitalist system is based on private ownership and free markets. With the first one really being the key that differentiates it to other systems and particularly socialism.
Now, socialism is a bit more muddy because you can either go the state route or the co-op route. Or of course, a mix of both. In a country like Norway for example a large part of the production is owned by the state (because StatOil is state-owned and it's the largest contributor to the Norwegian economy) the state also manages their wealth fund which as well generates revenue for the people. In Norway there's also a large quantity of co-ops, consumer or worker so all in all, in Norway the economy is to a high degree "socially owned". Of course, it's still a country that has private ownership and there are no particular restrictions to it. So is it a socialist country, is it a capitalist country? It's really hard to say, I think it's probably accurate to call it a mixed economy.
But if we were to simply say "socialism is when the government owns the means of production" then... it would still probably be a mixed economy? But an economy that is entirely run through co-ops, I would hardly call it capitalist even though it would have no more state intervention than current economies do. How a state intervenes is as important as how much it intervenes. I mean, I don't think anyone would call Keynes a socialist yet he argued in favour of state intervention.
A lot of people think that socialism might also be tied to planned economies, but that sort of forgets a whole diverse range of economic thinking like market socialism (Xi recently talked about the Chinese economy in this light).
So it seems to me like you're aggregating things too much and not really looking at the system through the complex lens that this discussion requires.
What? Tucker Carlson said something sensible and actually correct for once in his life?
For real though - remember the saying "If at age 20 you are not a Communist then you have no heart. If at age 30 you are not a Capitalist then you have no brains"?
It's just the same: by age 30, the generations of my parents and before generally had a stable job with one earner earning enough to feed a family, afford to buy a house and a car. Basically, back when that quote was said, people at 30 had actual assets to their name which (at least fundamentalist) Communism would have threatened to take away... but our generation? What do we have that actually belongs to us? Our homes are rented, our cars are beaters barely road-worthy, financed/leased or we don't have cars at all, our computers are often enough simply the machines we get from work, our phones are rented from our phone providers and our "pensions" are a virtual joke - the pensions in the US are a gamble on the stock market (and heaven forbid if there is an actual correction - stocks are fundamentally overvalued by at least 50%, but correcting that downward would wipe out so many people that politicians have no other choice than to feed the beast).
So, why should we defend a capitalist system that doesn't even give us anything in return? Why should we defend the right of rich people to exist when we have to struggle to make rent and food each month? Why should we not take up the pitchforks?!
US citizens are too lazy to consider voting for candidates other than the ones lambasted by their corrupt news sources. Picking up a pitchfork and deciding who to stick it into requires even more effort.
Well, Lenin did say “Study, study and study.”
And even academic degrees per se outside of academic careers aren't a guarantee for higher paying jobs any more, not since large companies started to use having an academic degree as a proxy to legally discriminate against wide swaths of the population, including normally protected classes: it's hard to get academic degrees with a variety of mental health disorders, and many people from socioeconomically disadvantaged castes (immigrants, poor people, people of color) get filtered out by the educational system way before they can even enter university.
So why should one go for an academic degree or otherwise put in unhealthy amounts of effort if you finish at 25-30 and still only get exploitative, underpaid labor? The entire "social contract" framework underpinning our societies is broken at a fundamental level and I don't see the political will to fix any of that unless the boomers are removed from society's high positions.
My father in the 90s was able to afford a SAHM with two children and a car on the salary of a low-level police officer, and by the time he was 30, to buy a large 3BR+kitchen+living room flat in Munich.
I'm as old as he was back when he bought that, and I have absolutely zero in savings, with the combined income of my s/o and me barely keeping up with rent and cost of living despite earning above average in an IT job. I couldn't afford to have a car but thankfully don't need it as public transport in Munich is actually worth the name. No, moving out of Munich is not really an option, as house prices and rents have exploded just the same in the entire area and rural areas are, as I described, absolutely left to rot in terms of infrastructure.
The world back then may indeed have not been as rosy as many of my generation paint it - but it sure was objectively better than today. Our only hope is that we can inherit something from our parents, assuming that there is something left over after elderly care will have robbed them of all their savings and assets.
No, unless you agree with what he said.
I'm in a trade union and here in Sweden we support the Left party because they support trade unions - e.g. in the 80s there were proposals for having union members on the board, having unions own a stake in the companies, etc. - these all would have helped a lot with the current mass layoffs and inflation.
Speaking of the US, the unionised work there is terrible: at 4PM they would drop everything and come back the next day. No overtime, no nothing. You can't do a rush job or anything, they worked at their own pace and they didn't care about our deadlines and stuff. Its like dealing with government employees.
On the other hand, working with non-union people was great. They would put in the hours with no fuss, and obviously get paid for overtime and stuff. But you could actually get them to work as much as possible in a day.
When given a choice, people prefer not to be overworked due to poor management/scheduling/greed. When given a choice, people prefer to have stability in employment. This is demonstrated by the fact that when they have collective power these are two of the common items they negotiate for. Unions are created to promote their members interests. There, now you understand unions :) They represent the interest of their members not the companies interests and not letting workers pay the price for poor management/scheduling/overcommitments (I think this is where you are getting confused).
Unions don't care to 'force companies' anything, They care to represent THEIR members priorities. What you are promoting are a company's priorities which the company already looks out for and would be a strange thing for unions to form to then also promote.
It's like Tucker Carlson said - it's no wonder that the young people support socialism, when they can't afford a house and face massive economic uncertainty even in professional fields, etc.
Everyone knows that the super-rich executives will benefit massively from this (or have already taken huge bonuses and dividends in prior years), and they basically run the government and will face no consequences.
They get rewarded for failure, meanwhile normal working people face mass lay-offs, high interest rates and high inflation.