I learned about the hard edge of capitalism many years ago when I worked for a large multinational corporation. This company would have been a Fortune 500 company except that it was a wholly owned subsidiary of an even larger corporation. Its headquarters was in Manhattan, and most of us peons who worked there commuted to work from all over New York and Long Island.
Then one day the company announced that the headquarters would be moved to a town in New Jersey that none of us had ever heard of. We immediately wondered two things: 1) Why is this being done, and 2) How the Hell are we supposed to get to work?
We quickly learned the answer to Question #1: two of the top three executives at the company lived in that New Jersey town, and they didn't like the commute into New York, and they were moving the company so they wouldn't have to commute any more. Question #2 had an even worse answer: they would arrange to have vans take us from Manhattan to New Jersey. That promised to be a nightmare of a commute for all of us. A young woman in the accounting department used all of her money to buy a condo in that town so she could keep her job.
When they polled all of us to find out how many people would make the move, I told them I wasn't interested. I took a civil service exam, scored well on it, got a job with the Federal government, and moved across the country to the other coast. I became a civil servant; no more capitalism for me.
This story wouldn't be so interesting if it was just a case of the company moving the work somewhere else, and to Hell with the employees. But what happened next was even worse. I kept in touch with some of my friends from work, and I found out that the company announced a leveraged buyout. The parent company was selling them, and the senior executives were getting 20% of the equity in the company, while its largest supplier would acquire the other 80% of the equity.
Where would the executives get the money to buy 20% of the company? They borrowed it; that's why it's called a leveraged buyout. Since the company was now loaded with debt, they had to do some cost-cutting. Headquarters salaries were frozen, lunch hours became 30-minute lunch breaks, and oh, they decided to lay off fully 1/3 of the corporate staff. Including the young accountant who now owned a condo in New jersey. She lost her job, and now had to look for something in New York.
Why was the LBO done? So that a handful of senior executives who were making “only” $2-3 million/year had a chance to make $100 million. That's why a few hundred staffers had to lose their jobs. And that, my friends, is the stuff revolutions are made of.