On an individual level, the super rich affect all of us. They require us to work around 40 hours per week to earn a wage that is not enough to live on. They own the huge companies that set the standard on everything. Consider Jeff Bezos. Sure, he created Amazon, but does that mean that the profit that the company produces should have gone 95% to him and 5% to the employees? I made up that percentage, but think about how many billions of dollars Jeff Bezos has and then remember that Amazon paid it's shipping people little enough that there were stories of some living in their cars. He created the company so he got to decide, but what he decided is arguably evil. In fact... I'm asserting that Jeff Bezos and every other billionaire is evil.
Let me remind you what a billion is. It's really hard to picture it just based on the word. And the time example is helpful so I'll use it again...
- Thousand: 1,000 seconds = 16.67 minutes
- Million: 1,000,000 seconds = 11.57 days
- Billion: 1,000,000,000 seconds = 31.71 YEARS
... so, when someone has a billion dollars, compared to someone that has one million... they're doing unecessarily well.
Keeping that in mind, the owners of these companies that are deciding where the money goes would have none of that money without the people working for them. Their companies don't function without the employees. The employees are generating that profit. That money is from the labor provided by the employees. The owners and CEO's of companies have tricked us into thinking we're lucky to have a job at all. It's actually that they're lucky we haven't woken up to the financial abuse we're suffering at their hands.
Let's use some more numbers. Last I checked (in May of 2024) the AVERAGE CEO is making 16.7 million dollars per year in the United States. Their average employee is making approximately 61,400 dollars per year. That's a ratio of 272 to 1. Is the CEO worth 272 of the company's employee? If you removed the CEO, would the company have any trouble at all? If you removed 272 of those average employees do you think the company would function differently? I think so. Other employees trying to pick up that slack would mean burnt out employees who are still being paid too little while the company is claiming that it's operating costs are down so their stock goes up.
How many households now require multiple jobs to live paycheck to paycheck? We're not talking about living a comfortable life that affords us vacations and some frivolous spending. We're talking about barely surviving AND having to spend the bulk of our waking hours tending to our jobs or survival needs like eating, buying groceries, and doing chores at home. This situation is not how our lives should be. Wait... that's worth saying bigger...
The only life we know that we get is this one. Through whatever trick of chemistry we are thinking beings that have hope and can feel joy. Life is NOT meant to be spent laboring so that someone else can have billions of dollars while we give too much time and energy for a pittance. We should have money enough to be comfortable for the work we do and we should have enough time left over to spend it with family and friends and traveling to experience more of the world. And it CAN work that way. The billionaires just need to stop being selfish pieces of garbage. Or government needs to step in and protect the people they're supposed to protect instead of the billionaires.
A 24 hour work week for maybe 6 hours per day, 4 days per week would mean more time on those work days to handle the needs of those days, and we get a 3 day weekend every week. The time spent working is less, so perhaps the employer is hiring a second person at the same rate. So, they're paying double what they were before, for the same amount of work completed. That's okay. Let's do a little more math...
- Let's say we have a company where the owners are getting 60 million to split between them; the Chief Level officers are getting 40 million to split between them; and the employees account for 20 million.
- The company is paying out 120 million between 300 people and that puts the revenue per employee at 400,000 which is pretty good according the searching I just did.
- We need to double the number of normal employees to cover the work the company needs, so lets add 270 for a total of 570 employees.
- If we now split the profit evenly... EVERYONE at the company is making 210,526 dollars per year. The people making ~61,000 per year are now appropriately paid and only have to spend 24 hours per week on their jobs.
- We can massage that a little so upper management gets a little more... like 300,000 per year. And the owners can have a little more. Maybe employees end up with 180 to 200 thousand a year instead of 210 thousand. But this way... a company could be genuinely good. And EVERYONE involved has plenty of money. The millionaires and billionaires might be unhappy they don't get to have their ridiculous and unnecessary amounts of wealth, but they would have plenty to live a genuinely good life. And literally hundreds of other people just in their company would get to have good lives too.
Now imagine if all the big companies pulling in millions or billions of dollars ran that way. More people employed and hundreds of millions of people able to afford to live comfortably and happy. Able to spend back into the economy. Able to enjoy this one life we get. How much less crime would there be? How many fewer people would give in to stress and depression? How many fewer people would lash out because they can't take it anymore? How many wars would no longer need to be fought? If we could just smack down those selfish idiot billionaires who run the world, literally EVERYTHING gets better.
What about jobs where you kind of have to work 40 or more hours per week? What job are you thinking of? Doctors? Nurses? What if the healthcare system was fixed so that it wasn't dependent on you having a job to have coverage? Healthcare costs go down. Pharmaceutical companies get severely limited so they can't charge stupid prices for the medicines and costs go down. Operating costs for hospitals go down and the owners aren't allowed to try to make millions off of healthcare. The staff of the hospital gets paid more and there are twice as many to cover the time. Medical professionals get to be less stressed and have more time to recover.
Teachers? What if teachers only had to work 4 days a week, and there were twice as many of them? Smaller class sizes mean less time outside of school hours they have to spend grading student work and preparing for the next day. Higher pay means teachers don't have to take second jobs to survive. Seems like this should work for Teachers.
Why isn't this happening? Why can't we make this happen? Everyone's lives would be better.
