Tuesday, November 01, 2011

Slave Nation

If you ran a multinational corporation and needed to increase profits, how would you go about doing it? What could you do to increase profits?

Let's take a look at how a company does this starting out.

So, you have an idea for a product that has the potential to make you millions. You borrow money from investors or a bank (or maybe you have the money yourself) to fund your startup. You need an office or some other building to occupy in order to make this product or design it. You will need employees to handle the business end of the company. You will need somebody to market/sell the product and so on.

Skipping ahead, now your business is doing well. You have a few employees and business is growing. Now you want to expand in order to tap into different markets and to get a wider share of the market you're in. You have to attract quality personnel to to make it work. You offer some benefits and so on. Eventually, you end up with a management team and a dozen employees or so.

At some point your business will plateau. You have 50-100 employees with great benefits in order to attract quality personnel and retain them and their talents. But you can't seem to grow the business anymore. You've hit that plateau and can't seem to get through it, but you still need to increase profit.

Skipping ahead even more, you've started making your employees pay for half of the increases in health insurance, reduced the cost of materials by buying in larger quantities an by buying from China. You've reduced your 401k contribution matching. You've laid off some employees and told the rest of the employees that they will have to pick up the slack. Eventually you do other things as well, such as donating to political campaigns to gain favor over other businesses, outsourcing jobs overseas because the cheaper labor saves you more money than what shipping from China costs you, sponsored politicians that continue pushing for lower taxes for you and your business, lobbied the politicians you sponsor to overturn EPA and OSHA regulations to help reduce production costs eventually get rid of them all together, lobbied your sponsored politicians to strip unions of negotiating power in the public sector to force them into taking pay cuts and cuts in benefits, and so on.

What do they want to do now? Flat taxes. Repeal of the minimum wage. Healthcare vouchers. Eliminate corporate tax. Expand PRIVATE prisons. Give inmates in private prisons jobs. There is more they are trying to do.

At what point is it impossible for a corporation to increase profits? More importantly, what has to happen before YOU to do something about it before all the wealth in the nation has been sucked out and America becomes a Slave Nation?

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