Capitalism requires constant growth in profits. Nobody sees the cost of running a business (and the profits derived from the business) as a fixed price, as something that would remain relatively consistent with upward and downward trends that reflect the market. The two are fixed points that run relatively parallel with one another. A person who maintains a well-oiled machine doesn’t expect the work or care taken to maintain that machine as something that should decrease over time as output increases. The work required to do the maintenance will remain fixed and then increase over time with the wear and tear as the machine gets older.
The idea that someone would actually run a business is foreign to Americans and capitalists. That someone would acknowledge that wages and training and benefits are part of the cost of doing business, of oiling the machine, and be happy with a profit that covers a middle-class income plus a little extra. No, profits must always increase. But if sales can’t continually increase, the way they can never do with a somewhat fixed population of the planet, you must derive those profits from somewhere.
In comes ‘efficiency’. Well, making the business more efficient SOUNDS good, but what you are really doing is asking your machine to do more with less, to run at the maximum of its output capacity while being at the bare minimum for maintenance and down time. Running a machine this way is unsustainable and it will eventually burn out and break down.
Unfortunately, for businesses, this burnout can happen in slow motion with nobody noticing the small cracks that turn into canyons. Depressed wages lead to increased turnover. High turnover will eventually kill off any good managers who know their worth and leave for better companies. Training and safety become slim to non-existent. Hiring processes become excruciatingly slow as you sift through candidates that will do the most with the least. You can’t justify the investment that is required to train qualified candidates so you sift and sift for the unicorns who are over-qualified and will accept shit pay. Positions remain empty for an extended period of time, the work is absorbed by other workers and that salary gets absorbed by the company in the name of efficiency. This can only continue for so long before hold-outs in the high turnover start jumping ship and quality really starts to suffer.
In the midst of this high turnover you look around and realize that your management is under qualified, unprepared, and also on the verge of burnout. They have no idea how to staff a company in a job seekers market, to have to make a position look appealing and also maintain employee morale to avoid turnover. All they know is throw more bodies into the grinder and I’m too busy to care.
This is where your business starts to collapse, where the missing machinery that you insisted on hawking in the name of profits is really starting to cause hitches and stutters in the mechanics. You try to force the remaining mechanisms to bear the load, maybe they do for a beat or two, but you’re only just barely staving off death.
And the funny thing is that ‘efficiency’ is the word that is used to justify gutting your company and selling off pieces for spare parts and expecting the output to keep increasing, when in reality ‘efficiency’ is meant to conserve the machine, to consider the longevity of the machine BEFORE output. Studies show that more work gets done, that productivity increases, when workers are given thriving wages, work less than 32 hour weeks, and have access to benefits. Actually caring for your machine may increase quality and quantity of output. But in a system that values increasing profits over all, these vital costs of running the business are viewed as expendable.
You can either be a capitalist or you can run a well-maintained company, you can’t do both.