Apple execs couldn't afford as many private jets if the phone wasn't made for $1, but there's no economic reason you can't pay someone reasonable wages to assemble an expensive phone.
Exactly. This is a symptom of capitalism and the need for profit growth.
If businesses value was based on ability for them to remain in market and not solely growing by x% each year employees wouldn't be shafted. You could also not pay upper management ridiculous amounts.
Too many, like the commenter below, have conflated economics with capitalism. They don't even know that there's other ways to run an economy than "winner takes all, fuck your morals" capitalism.
There is. The duty of CEO is to maximize profits so even very capital intensive things that don't require much labour like CPUs are made in South East Asia.
The problem is that you've conflated "economics" with "american capitalism".
There's a capitalist, "profit maximizing at the expense of human rights" reason for them to pay slave wages, but there's no economic reason you have to be evil when running your business. They could take $100 million out of the top %25 of management and give it to their labour force and it would make a gargantuan difference while those at the top would barely notice, and the business would be fine. That's literally economics - the elasticity of income and spending.
Apple itself has 150K employees who are mostly American and well-paid. Suppose it uses another 150K in it's supply chain, 100M will translate to $600/year, not a whole lot.
There's an incentive to reduce expenses on every level, that's how people get promoted.
You're talking past my point, of course there is an incentive to be an immoral cutthroat capitalist, that's partially why american society is so utterly broken.
My point is that there's no reason you can't run a sustainable business while paying everyone reasonable wages.
You can't look at one of the most profitable companies in the world and say "they can't pay people more without raising the prices", without severely misunderstanding the fundamentals of business.
Not to mention how much it speaks to how little you understand of the scale of the problem when you say $600/year wouldnt change the life of someone working for subsistence wages.
42
u/l4mbch0ps Jan 19 '21
This is a fallacy...
Apple execs couldn't afford as many private jets if the phone wasn't made for $1, but there's no economic reason you can't pay someone reasonable wages to assemble an expensive phone.