Require employees be paid and treated fairly. Require companies pay their taxes. Tax employees on those fair wages. Use those taxes to pay for community needs. That's the goal. That's our responsibility as citizens of a democracy. Relinquishing these responsibilities to others because it seems easier is how we got where we are. Benevolent companies are just a precursor to abusive ones, so take away their ability to be abusive.

If you relinquish your power to another, you should expect to be unhappy when their goals conflict with your own. Don't relinquish your power.

1) Nobody pretends that business skills are especially hereditary. It is common for people to enter and exit the 'class' of business owner.

2) Success as as a business owner requires steady economic activity where people get what they want. Success as a noble ruling a fiefdom requires kneecapping anyone who challenges your god-given right to rule.

One big observations:

This is what US government spending has done in the last 2 centuries: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/00/Governme...

That is a pretty solid contender for why people are less generous. I too would be investing more money in my community if I had more control of it. There is a pretty simple correlation between growth in government spending and a reduced ability of businesses to have a positive impact in their community.

It isn't like people were relying on business then business owners got greedy. People took control away from businesses and the businesses stopped being in control.

Do you actually believe that? That all these business owners were running their factories out of the goodness of their hearts and that they only stopped because the government took all the money they had to give out as charity?

If that is the case why do we see ultra profitable businesses returning to this form instead of trying to carve out any section of their work base that they can, ex. The FAANGs turning most job positions into contractor filled roles like the janitorial staff?

I think it is quite possible that you were more likely to find a benevolent feudal lord (partially because incentives were more directly, and forcibly, aligned) than find a corporation willing to put profits as anything other than first.

Business greed has capped out since approximately the first 48 hours after the establishment of the first business back in Mesopotamia or wherever.

Possibly you haven't taken a literal enough read of what is being said here, but businesses don't ever get "more greedy". The greed capped out centuries ago. It cannot increase. It is impossible for it to get worse. It is at the human limit, and has been basically forever.

It is like the madness of people who think inflation is because businessesmen suddenly got extra greedy. If they could raise prices to that level they'd have done it in 22AD, not 2022AD. Prices are always as high as businesses can charge, if they go up something that isn't greed has to have changed. We can argue about what.

I don’t agree with this premise, at least not in the context of the United States. You can even see in recent history where the greed amplified in the 80’s with the phrase “greed is good” becoming popular or that myth about how businesses have a legal requirement to pursue profit over everything got into the American psyche after that case against Henry Ford.

Fuck, charging interest on loans used to be considered a sin in western culture. We explicitly have seen greed change in magnitude.

I also think greed, or perhaps better described as flaunted greedy behavior, has increased over the past several decades. While capitalism has of course always been greed driven, different periods of time and different cultures have set guardrails up as to what level of greedy behavior is and isn't acceptable.

In the US the culture during the prime time of the industrial revolution, capitalism had technology progress propping its greedy appetite up. Those gains have been largely consumed and greed shifted over more and more towards optimizing on labor. We live in an environment now where we no longer assume your employer has your interests at heart and everyone listens to HR and leadership propoganda selling pictures of families and care for their employees while everyone rolls their eyes. We assume our employer will try the pay the least for us and get us to do the most for the least. We assume that they'll replace us the second they have a quantifiable cheaper alternative. Many decades ago these practices weren't as accepted, they certainly occurred, but they came with bad image and cultural rejection that harmed businesses. That isn't the case anymore. Businesses can basically do whatever isn't explicitly restricted by law or more profitable than penalties law sets and its just the accepted state of affairs. After all, it's legal, what are you going to do? Meanwhile through aggressive lobbying businesses are basically writing the law as they see fit.

If I need to give 40% of my profits (and your salary) to the government and there is an avenue for getting some of that money back when you're in trouble, then go and ask for the government for help.

The mistake is in allowing the government to gather more resources and in turn making people dependant on them.

Welfare also destroyed the family unit (especially in the black community).

Indirect democracy is a fancy name for "electing" with your 1/100M vote an elite which gets to decide how to spend half of your salary.

You sure it wasn't selective enforcement of the War on Drugs (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_the_war_on_drugs) and the criminal justice system in general (https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2015/08/racial-dispariti...), and redlining (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redlining)?

All I needed to read to dismiss this

The statistics show significantly lower marriage rates among black families (moreso correlated to poor families, in which black folks over-represent). The thing not shown in the statistics is the number of families where parents are together, but unmarried (and oftentimes reporting different addresses) because they get SIGNIFICANTLY more benefits that way. So...the family unit is there, but just not formalized. And people are just responding to the incentives in front of them.

Yes, companies spend money on social events to make the employees feel good about the company.

But they won't spend any significant amount of money to keep valued employees, which of course makes said employees look elsewhere.

As an employee you are nearly always better off switching jobs every 18 months, as staying in the same job loses you money.

I wish companies would be more focused on this.

Isn't it rather the other way round: you should be very careful to invest too much money into employees who are willing to quit?

But what if we don't train them and they stay?

Given that this has already occurred, why would any employee agree to a system where now they have a financial obligation to their employer if they leave?

I get your sentiment but the employers already cut all the benefits out of the system when it comes to skill development. They’ll need to start adding back in investments to employee’s skills without any sort of guaranteed payback for a while before the average employee would extend them any trust

Not particularly common. Social mobility is low even in developed countries, and getting lower.

I'm grateful to entrepreneurs and companies for innovating so much, while the USA is turning into the largest employer in the world (bigger than China).

Yes, that's what I said. ;p

From gp: > There is a pretty simple correlation between growth in government spending and a reduced ability of businesses to have a positive impact in their community.

Oh really? I'm somewhat familiar with German companies and the extreme regulation and worker-focused rules they endure as a good comparison to American businesses which I am intimately familiar with. My takeaway is that while it's much much harder to operate and innovate in Germany, the citizens are better off in immeasurable ways. Spectra, pendula, all that...

take out lobbying and id agree

The problem is this isn't well defined. Somewhere maybe in the 1980s greed became good and the responsibilities of corporations shifted from being a fictional person that could benefit society to a thing that was in it for shareholders only. This is a cultural shift borne by MBAs and thinktanks, not something that can be pinned down to a specific incident.

As usual sunlight is the best disinfectant. It needs to be clear who owns what and who did what, and journalists need to go and look at cases where things are not in the interest of the community. There need to be records of whose interests are represented, who owns what, and who knows who.

This is not entirely untrue, but it's not particularly supported by the rest of your post.

Even if it's hard to completely define what "paid and treated fairly" mean, it's crystal clear that a very large percentage of employers today don't meet even the lowest possible bar—that being a living wage and not actively abusing the employees.

Forgive me for being sentimentalist a bit, but I think that nowadays we underestimate the weight that feelings of duty, loyalty, and trust had on rulers of times past. They were raised from the day they were born to be leaders, to care deeply about their family honor, to feel obliged to their subjects. Certainly, they were ultimately fallen men like the rest of us, and hereditary succession is not great at picking the best of each generation.

There will be good companies and bad companies. There will be good politicians and bad politicians. One is easier to steer than the other.

Duty, loyalty and trust are good to have. What do you do if the large local company that has outsized influence on the community is lacking those? What do you do if the local elected officials are lacking those? Neither is easy to deal with, but I think one is a far more manageable problem.

That's not an even trade.

Democracy, as has been said, is the worst political system, except for all the others, but let's not lie to ourselves and ignore that in some contexts it is, in fact, strictly worse. The classic example, of course, is an army led by direct democracy. When a thing must get done, and damn the consequences, then there really is no substitute for autocracy. It's just unfortunate that the people who eventually end up as autocrats are rarely there to benefit the community. Building systems of accountability and responsibility through culture and non-systemic factors may better this (see, for example, the 85 terms of Roman dictators who did not try to seize any more power than they had been given by the Senate and in fact often returned their powers before their term was over), but culture-crafting to accomplish that is unfortunately beyond us at the moment.

Often, it is layers of government, way over you, who have no clue of the local needs, and it gets much worse.

Not only does it not know the local needs, it has no expertise in the subject area itself, and so an unelected unnamed bureaucracy rules the roost, and over time, gathers so much power, that regardless of which government comes to power, the true power rests with these bureacrats.

Who the hell wanted either trump or biden in the last election?

There is simply no choice because the political elites offered us this and we need to vote our guy not to let the other guy win.

The game is rigged and your vote is not worth much.

When you're buying a product instead you're effecting real change and telling society you want more of that. If only we could control law making in the same way we would have a decentralised society which better approximates what people want.

Let's just dismiss the millions of votes cast in 2020, then?

Ranked choice would show a lot more nuance in people's beliefs that US politics would have to address. I haven't looked into it in some time, though. It seemed to work where implemented in Europe.

I estimated the PP was getting at a more conspiratorial notion of "other preferences" in the sense of both parties being equally bought out, etc.

Which is exactly what happened in their situation! They "hoped" that the company would just remain nice out of the goodness of their hearts, and did not make sure that those benefits were built into the system. Surprise: when ownership changed hands, the gravy train was over and the people had no actual infrastructure to sustain themselves.

The point of OP is about a time where local communities mattered more than global output. When those in power were close enough to the common folk to the point where they could face consequences of their abuse. A time where societies had much higher levels of trust.

OP is not talking about "relinquishing the responsibilities to others". Quite the opposite. It's much easier to effectively exercise your rights and responsibilities on a smaller sphere of influence and power.

You never have to lay anyone off, pay raises come regularly, no huge pressure to perform, management gets big bonuses and shareholders watch the stock rise.

See the big US automakers in their hay day.

But when competition heats up, other companies take you business and profit growth has to be fought for, anything and everything is on the table.

The companies back then were never really loyal, they just never had the need to be ruthless, but they certainly would have been.

Correction, a time when companies didn't have an easy and clear path to global output.

> When those in power were close enough to the common folk to the point where they could face consequences of their abuse.

I'm not sure that's ever been the norm anywhere in the world throughout history. I definitely don't think it was the reality in the Norman Rockwell like idea of what you think it was like.

We just view the past with rose-tinted glasses. Things were always bad, just in different ways. Those same companies that gave to the community and were the main employers in an area also set the working wage in the area with little market competition, and faced less scrutiny from the local law enforcement (who wants to be the prosecutor or police officer responsible for hurting everyone employed there in the community).

If you want actual evidence of wrongdoing, it's trivially easy to find.[1]

> OP is not talking about "relinquishing the responsibilities to others". Quite the opposite. It's much easier to effectively exercise your rights and responsibilities on a smaller sphere of influence and power.

I wasn't really making a countering the OP, as much as expanding on a point they noted. Those situations that were good or appeared so are unstable and there's little the local community can do to change it. But in a democracy they all have power to elect local representatives, and if they rely on their representatives instead of a mostly unaccountable company, they can exert control the outcome of situations if they don't like where things appear to be going.

1: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/cuyahoga-river-caught...

No, you don't get to change what I said to fit your worldview. The 70's and the 80's had tons of multinational companies that didn't treat their employees like cattle, and that treated each of their branches as its community.

> We just view the past with rose-tinted glasses (...) If you want actual evidence of wrongdoing, it's trivially easy to find.

It's curious why your cynicism doesn't cut both ways...

Just as it is easy to find evidence of corruption at all levels of government.

> But in a democracy they all have power to elect local representatives, and if they rely on their representatives instead of a mostly unaccountable company, they can exert control the outcome of situations if they don't like where things appear to be going.

There are a lot more "ifs" here:

- If the local representatives are not in the pocket of the corporations. - If the local representatives are not part of the elite with different interests from the common folk. - If the local representatives are not just using their current term as a launching pad for a bigger point. - If the community is cohesive enough to not have individuals just thinking for themselves, or (worse) divided into polarized feuds and make them waste all their political energy into hurting each other.

And were those companies acting as stewards of small communities, taking some of the role of local governments? If not I'm not sure how it applies.

> It's curious why your cynicism doesn't cut both ways...

> Just as it is easy to find evidence of corruption at all levels of government.

It does, and I agree. The difference is that with elected officials you have a mechanism to do something about it. How do you change the agenda of a company that controls the economy of the town you live in? You're not on the board, you can't feasibly get enough of the stock (if it's even public) to sway their strategy.

I will lay out my argument very clearly, again, so there's no confusion, and I will make some parts explicit that I left out that people seem to be making assumptions on.

- For any group in power, you cannot control their future actions. Any person that acts in a way you agree with today, may not act that way tomorrow. That extends to all politicians and all management of companies.

- Because of this neither a company, or interest group, or individual, whether elected or not, can be relied on to work in your interest in perpetuity. I do not view a governing body or a company in any way as superior or inferior to each other because both can go bad.

- Having some way to incentivize or change those in power is important because of the above.

- Citizens of a democracy have some power to do this. People that rely on a non-governmental body for this are thus relinquishing some of their control to affect whether those in power if they are working against their interest.

- Therefore in the absence of evidence that a specific governing body is better or worse than some company in meeting the needs of a community if given the resources of that community (e.g. lessened tax burden and favorable treatment by the community and local government), choosing the apparatus that you have more control over is the better choice.

I am not making any claim that an elected government at any specific instance of time is inherently more likely than a company to act beneficially for a community, but I wholeheartedly believe that since the community can change that local government, they are a better choice to have the power.

I think I got it, but it still seems that you were talking past the point from OP.

You are trying to make some statement about how individuals have more power with functional democratic institutions vs the despotic-like nature of the "town company".

What OP seems to be getting at is the point how communities before had higher levels of inner trust, and how this relates with TFA.

In a time where things were not globalized and people actually knew and interact with their neighbors (instead of getting stuck on Hacker News talking with people on the different side of the planet), the idea of the "town company" as the institution that coordinated the society vs "the government" didn't matter so much, as long as there was some sense of community and high-trust.

It was this local community with insular trust that we lost with globalization, and this why it makes no sense to talk about "company loyalty" anymore.

You cannot expect the current conditions to persist indefinitely. Ceding what power you have to control parts of that, or even just to control tools which themselves affect that (such as politicians), just because right now things are good and you trust your community and the companies in it is a losing strategy.

Even back in the past when people had much more trust that a company would not treat them badly, any actions to make that the status quo (by weakening methods which those people had active input and ways to influence) was a bad choice, but possibly a less understood one.

Additionally, my response to rmason was meant less as a rebuttal, and more as an aside to do with the entire concept that relying on a company was ever a good idea, regardless of whether it often turned out okay for people during a certain time period. Not all replies are counters directly to what was stated, even if we are sometimes primed to view them that way. I didn't view myself as rebutting someone when I wrote that, but instead exploring the idea of why relying on a company was always a bad idea.

I'll also point out that maybe fiefdoms aren't as bad as you think. Don't get me wrong, I think we're way better off now, but I'm sure many rulers were just as generous and caring as these business owners. And it's hard to totally escape any form of hierarchy when you live in a society.

You misunderstand my point, and possibly the discussion. If the company is large enough to be a majority employer in the area and much of the social works of the area are provided by the company, then regardless of whether you work for them you are beholden to them in some way. The local government will not want to upset the local economy by be antagonistic with them, they'll set the local pay scale based on whatever they pay as everything will be in relation to it, and there will be immense social pressure to not cause problems that would be bad for the whole community.

Do the people involved have more options for getting out from under the control of a company like that in an area? Yes, but far less than I think your statement would lead people to believe. To actually get out of control you'd have to completely leave the area. That's far easier now than in the distant past, but it's not easy.

> I'll also point out that maybe fiefdoms aren't as bad as you think. Don't get me wrong, I think we're way better off now, but I'm sure many rulers were just as generous and caring as these business owners.

I'm not saying every one of these companies was horrible, nor that every ruler was horrible. I'm saying that ceding your power to control who governs you to them leaves you at a disadvantage when inevitably a worse ruler or bad management comes into place, because nobody lives forever, and nothing is static.

Put another way, what if you contracted with someone to provide all your meals and you paid them $1000/mo. Maybe you're extremely happy with the quantity and quality of the food provided initially, but eventually, years down the line, the quality has changed to sub-par and the quantity is lower than your got previously as well. You'd want to renegotiate that contract, right? Well what if it was a lifetime contract? That would be a problem, and you'd probably see that as a major red flag initially and be wary of entering a lifetime contract where the future was uncertain.

That's what allowing a company to control the local economy and be the provider of social works is like. By allowing the company to take over the job of the local government, the people have ceded their power to enact change through their elected representatives, and they are stuck with whatever they get down the line. Elected representatives aren't perfect, but at least there's the option to change them or pressure them to change based on the community needs. What pressure can the community honestly exert on the company when if decides that it's so much cheaper to move the factory two states over that they have to do so?

I'm not sure what that adds to your post besides to antagonize. I'd respectfully suggest rethinking that as an opener on future comments.

I don't disagree with most of your post, and I don't think you seem to disagree with mine, preface aside. Yes, it's still difficult, but I think there is a world of difference between being under physical duress versus being very inconvenienced. Keeping the analogy, it's very inconvenient to change even a normal job, and we are held hostage with things like healthcare. That's fief like too. Scale matters.

Then you interpreted my statement as more harsh than I intended, and I'll own up to my side of that, so I apologize. I don't necessarily take it as an insult for someone to say I misunderstood their point (if my statement to them comes across as a non-sequitur, I expect something like that), not that I've misunderstood some of the conversation. Sometimes comments are building on the context of a few prior comments in the chain, and seeing just the last two or three gives a distorted view of the context in which the current argument is being made. I'm not saying that happened here, but it is a reason I generally don't consider that statement to be very aggressive, but honestly it depends on the state of mind of the person hearing it.

> I don't disagree with most of your post, and I don't think you seem to disagree with mine, preface aside. Yes, it's still difficult, but I think there is a world of difference between being under physical duress versus being very inconvenienced.

My point was about control. No simile is going to be perfect. There will obviously be differences to being a fief than being a citizen in a democracy where the local company controls a lot of the resources and services.

That said, perhaps fiefdom wasn't what I was going for. Perhaps a Duchy is more appropriate? I admit to not being confident enough in the structures to know whether colloquially one implies more specific behavior than the other which might confuse the point (whether or not that implication is accurate).

> Keeping the analogy, it's very inconvenient to change even a normal job, and we are held hostage with things like healthcare. That's fief like too. Scale matters.

Yes. And I think adding power to this structure to reinforce those problems rather than a structure you have more control over which might alleviate them is the rational choice. I'm honestly surprised and confused that so many people are against that in this discussion.

You are always going to rely on a few people, to do the right thing, which will become the wrong thing as life goes on, which will require a few more people, to do the right thing again, ad infinitum.

That's just how this human thing works.

Sometimes it's laws, other times it's breaking laws. Other times something else. It varies, there is no right answer forevermore, sorry.

You can't solve hard problems of coordinating, pleasing and doing right by many people with conflicting interests by 'requiring' it.

That's just childish thinking, sorry.

Often that means putting in some safe lower bounds. Laws, as you noted. You put safeguards at the bottom preventing the worst behavior. That's the whole reason there are laws preventing child labor, because people decided that some things should not be tolerated.

Nothing prevents a company from still being a good employer and helping where they can, but that should not be required for our society to function. The goals of a company diverge from what is best for the people (both short term and long term) too often for that to be a good idea.

Your axiom is democracy and what sounds like dozens of other conditions.

My axiom is highly intelligent, capable, compassionate people in power. That's it.

My position is trivially superior, for many reasons, if only because your exact position is just one of many possibilities that highly intelligent, capable, compassionate people in power can choose to implement.

Perhaps having a feasible path to the desired outcome actually matters, rather than just assuming those are unimportant details... otherwise we'd already have off-world colonies and faster than light travel.

That is just your unsupported claim. I don't agree.

The whole point is that larger entities are shielded from some of these repercussions because of their size and power, and in some cases are almost completely untouchable by this system.

The legal system is there to catch extreme cases the social system can't feasible handle well enough. We don't just let murderers go and ostracize them, we incarcerate them and forcibly remove their rights. Some things are too important to allow social norms to be the ultimate arbiter of.

Today its a footnote in a merger, place is closing down.

The companies I know who are still benevolent make money hand over fist. Management, employee, shareholders are all happy as peas in a pod.

It’s when the money stops flowing that hard decisions are made.

Want to import cheaper drugs from Canada, that's illegal! Yeah sure they might have been produced in the US in the first place but it might be dangerous!

Want to get a degree in a country where the price of education is lower? We won't honor it.

Want to hire the services of a Kenyan clinic doctor who has experience in everything from treating runny noses to gunshot wounds? Illegal he's unqualified according the the national doctors union (AMA).

Yeah you can get cheap crap from places that hire children to work in their factories, but the stuff that is really expensive we are 1700's Japan all of the sudden.

Nationalism, something to be avoided, occurs when the underclass is not represented in a political system.

I have no idea where the "companies used to take care of their employees" commenters are coming from. There's plenty of counterexamples.

"The toxicity of concentrated TEL was recognized early on, as lead had been recognized since the 19th century as a dangerous substance that could cause lead poisoning. In 1924, a public controversy arose over the "loony gas", after five[94] workers died, and many others were severely injured, in Standard Oil refineries in New Jersey.[95] There had also been a private controversy for two years prior to this controversy; several public health experts, including Alice Hamilton and Yandell Henderson, engaged Midgley and Kettering with letters warning of the dangers to public health.[17] After the death of the workers, dozens of newspapers reported on the issue.[96] The New York Times editorialized in 1924 that the deaths should not interfere with the production of more powerful fuel.[17]" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetraethyllead#Initial_controv...)

See also radium, polyvinyl chloride, assorted mine disasters, etc.

The problem with these advice columns is that they aren't saying "don't give your all to a company".

They end up saying "your company is the enemy". The original article that this blog refers to was titled "Exit interviews are a trap", which many pointed out was a gross exaggeration. It assumes that every company performing an exit interview is doing something malicious, which is a ridiculous claim.

Yes, it's possible that some companies somewhere are using exit interviews as some sort of trap to get dirt or leverage over employees, and it's also true that you shouldn't rush in and use it as an opportunity to complain about everyone you hated at the company. However, it's unreasonable to assume that it's a trap and that the company is interested in nothing more than revenge.

That's the problem with these advice blogs. They cater to an idea that managers and HR are "the other", and once someone crosses the line to management or HR, they become evil and incapable of doing anything other than abusing you for no good reason.

We should warn young people about abusive employers, but it's not helpful to teach them that employers are universally malicious.

Loyalty ties are still important, but not something you will find in most employer-employee relationships. Better to have a more "extractive" vision of companies and build loyalty ties somewhere else.

The company, not really. Beyond startup size, every employee is just a number on some spreadsheet.

No one says they're evil. Corporate leadership, like corporations themselves, are amoral, which means they have no compunctions to actions that to them, are without intention, but for translates to the recipient as maliciousness.

I read the article and I disagree. It does not say it either explicitly or implicitly. The article only urges the reader to think of the benefits to themselves first.. like a company would.

I don't think it is an unreasonable approach.

This article is a response to criticisms of a previous article where the author was definitely very mercenary and suggested the only purpose of the exit interview was to “trap” the employee into giving information that their managers could use against them later… somehow.

It seems this article was meant to walk back some of the aggressiveness.

And definately do not go in to air your grievances.

But I generally agree with the mercenary approach, my personal ethos when working for a company is - take as much money from them as possible and provide my best estimate of (money+some reasonable extra) back in value.

The reasonable extra is an investment of time and effort with the goal of paying out as more money later.

I believe the phrasing should be "had to give your all to a company." This is the time period when you would retire from the same company you started at, right? And if you had more than a few jobs on your resume (or the infamous missing time), you would have a hard time being hired because you were unreliable.

You have a very rose-tinted view of the historical business world.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_strikes#Twentieth_cent...

Indeed. We're only a few generations removed from a time when we had companies enlisting private armed security forces and militias to violently break strikes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-union_violence_in_the_Uni...

People in general just aren't community or socially minded in the way they used to be[1], and the bosses of companies or leaders of government are all people too.

[1] To be specific, people are still charitable, but we don't have the same culture/institutions where everyone gives and takes in the same way we used to. Things like working bees, community sport, or even just general behaviours like helping out friends/family/neighbours are all getting rarer by the day.

Long story short, I think it's simply a cultural shift more than an adaptation to any lifestyle changes.

That said, before that happened the place was kind of a "company town" and the big manufacturers with all the money essentially ran the place. Only good news if you were in their favor. Lots of stories about being harassed by police if you were on their bad side. They were the kind of people that would have still been using child labor if it weren't outlawed.

Allow me to remind you the manner in which child labor was outlawed:

Industrialization progressed to a point where it was no longer economically viable except in a few tiny niches. It was then outlawed, to much back patting.

Sure, some people would probably use it if it was viable, but don't pretend like it was some great accomplishment to outlaw it. It was basically a case of writing law after the market had made a decision.

Also, the products they made were kind of crappy and expensive. It's very easy for a company like the one the GP described to stagnate and rot. Especially when unions get thrown into the mix.

You load 16 tons, what do you get?

Another day older and deeper in debt

St. Peter, don't you call me 'cause I can't go

I owe my soul to the company store

The idea that power was only used exploitatively after financialization of industry seems incredibly naive to me, or just an extreme warping of history and reality to fit a rose-tinted, romantic worldview.

Letting that level of power and resources consolidate to a few people at the top and crossing your fingers that they'll be "benevolent" is foolish. Historically speaking the % of times these rulers would graciously cover a health crisis out of pocket, or meaningfully donate to democratically chosen local causes was slim to none. Better to distribute the fruits more equally in the first place, but I'm guessing these kind and benevolent leaders would not have happily allowed their workforces to unionize. That expectation of trust only seems to go one way.

Not that this didn't happen. But I should add that it wasn't any benevolent plan on the part of the owners that made things that way. It was a combination of the presence of New Deal, Unions, the threat of so-called-communism, etc and the lack of hyperdeveloped capital and commodity markets, that pushed things in that direction from the 1930s to the 1970s. And then what you describe pushed things the other way.

The point is that same owner probably supported all the innovations, because they were about the owner having more flexibility. And by the token, you can't get back to this point, probably not ever but certainly not without outside intervention.

I do agree it isn't good to rely on the beneficence of overlords in general though, since they aren't obligated to continue to be beneficent.