Comment by Herring 18 hours ago
What social contract? Companies have always been for shareholders. Do you people have some kind of contract with Tesla that I don't know about?
This entire discussion sounds crazy to me. If you want socialism, vote for socialism. If you want raw unfiltered capitalism, vote for the billionaire. You can't vote for the billionaire and expect safety nets. That's madness.
> For a long time people were able to make a living for themselves by studying hard (usually STEM) and end up with a career which payed off
Recessions like the GFC, the Dot Bomb, the early 90s, the Asian Financial Crisis, the early 80s, Stagflation, and others show otherwise.
The extended bull run that SWEs had from the early 2010s to 2022 was an outlier, and the whiplash being felt today is comparable to what law and finance grads faced in the 2010s, accounting majors in the 2000s, and Aerospace/MechE majors in the 1990s.
Henry Ford for all his faults (and there were MANY) at least understood that you gotta have a customer base for your products, and that paying workers well helps everybody out.
The behavior you’re describing really got big in the 80s with Jack Welch at GE. Which, admittedly, is nearly half a century ago.
Many of our current society's problems can be directly traced back to Reagan-era policies. Anyone who seriously believes in trickle-down Reaganomics is a fool or a liar.
Henry Ford wanted to raise salaries of his employees but the Dodge brothers (who owned only 10% of the company) successfully sued and "As of 2025, in Delaware, the jurisdiction where over half of all U.S. public companies are domiciled, shareholder primacy is still upheld."
Correct, a quote from the linked wiki article: "Dodge is often misread or mistaught as setting a legal rule of shareholder wealth maximization. This was not and is not the law. Shareholder wealth maximization is a standard of conduct for officers and directors, not a legal mandate. The business judgment rule [which was also upheld in this decision] protects many decisions that deviate from this standard. This is one reading of Dodge. If this is all the case is about, however, it isn't that interesting." — M. Todd Henderson
It technically doesn't. But that's what corporate ran away with and how they justify it. So it de facto did. Shaped a century of labor law around it.
It is not socialism to note that in the past, some companies have believed that their optimal relationship with their employees required recognizing their value and awarding them accordingly, thusly allowing them to attract/retain the best employees as well as maximizing the quality of the output from those employees. There has always been such a spectrum, that's not socialism. The trend to notice is that the spectrum is so strongly weighted towards the merciless, cutthroat end of things that may actually not be optimal for long term survivability of those companies whilst also as I noted, be breaking the social contract that workers have assumed for decades, which is also not socialism.
Socialism has a specific meaning, it's not just a label we get to put on behaviors that we - or rather, specifically you in this case - don't like.
There's never been any such contract. You guys must not have studied the Great Depression at school.
Or more to the point, productivity has consistently outpaced pay for most of the US workforce since the mid-1970s. That's ~50 years that companies have been ripping you off. It's only now you notice, because rent/mortgage/school/medical have finally become so much larger than pay.
Well now you get to live through the Great Depression and study it up close.
> That's ~50 years that companies have been ripping you off. It's only now you notice, because rent/mortgage/school/medical have finally become so much larger than pay.
The alternate way of looking at it is that the 50s to mid 70s era saw a period of unprecedented prosperity and now we are just seeing a reversion to the mean.
What do you mean "we"? The rich are much much richer than they've ever been. The stock market is soaring. Companies are seeing record profits. GDP is through the roof.
http://web.archive.org/web/20200428221848/https://www.nytime...
Socialism is when the state (ie: the government) _owns_ industries.
A social contract is an implicit agreement that everyone more or less accepts without anything being necessarily legally binding.
For example, the courtesy of two weeks notice in the US is a social contract: there’s nothing legally requiring it, but there are _social_ consequences (ie: your reference might be less positive) if you don’t follow it.
Everything that’s kind of in an employee’s favor is not socialism. You don’t have to like the idea of “work hard, help the company do well, get rewarded,” but that isn’t socialism. It’s just a thing you don’t like.
There has never been an understanding that rising profits = no layoffs. Zero idea where that came from. Companies will reduce workforce when they dont think those workers are providing value, that has always been the case.
It's not that I don't like it. It's more that I think you're being lied to. Inequality has been going up in the US for a very long time, which means a lot of people are not being rewarded as much as they should. But they still buy into the system that is impoverishing them.
The top 10% of income earners in the US account for 50% of consumer spending. LMK if you think that's part of the contract. https://www.marketplace.org/story/2025/02/24/higher-income-a...
"Inequality has been going up in the US for a very long time, which means a lot of people are not being rewarded as much as they should."
The second part of your sentence is not necessarily true. It might be true in some or even many cases, but it's certainly not something you can just assert & move on, as if it's a physical law.
Inequality going up means the situation is changing and that is what people are complaining about. There definitely has been a culture shift as MBAs took over executive leadership and their compensation packages skyrocketed. Companies were always for the share holders but there used to be more consideration of the longer-term value for the company that amounted to appreciation of and fairer treatment for both employees and customers.
I also think though that individual experiences of this kind are more about specific companies maturing than a widespread culture shift. A lot of people on these forums worked in tech companies that are relatively young and have changed a lot over the past two decades.
>Companies have always been for shareholders.
well we can trace that back to the 1920's, for one example.
>Do you people have some kind of contract with Tesla that I don't know about?
Are you aware of what a "social contract" is? There's nothing wrong with seeking to fill in gaps of knowledge.
>This entire discussion sounds crazy to me. If you want socialism, vote for socialism.
I'd be down for it, but this is almost orthogonal to the main point of the discussion. Social contracts exist in all forms of governing. Even rampant capitism has the bare bones social contract of "don't make your customers TOO angry so you can maximize extraction".
When billionaires own the media companies that influence public opinion and have legal avenues to essentially bribe elected officials, does the public have a meaningful avenue to vote anti-billionaire?
> What social contract? Companies have always been for shareholders.
You are not wrong, but the contract is/was metaphorical. For a long time people were able to make a living for themselves by studying hard (usually STEM) and end up with a career which payed off. That was the invisible "contract". Hell I went to university for things which seem like academic navel gazing, but I still got a good tech job on the other side. That's not the reality for a lot of graduates nowdays who take more practical degrees at masters and phd levels.
Again even if the literal statement is clearly false, it is the sentiment which matters, and this sentiment does not just apply to graduates. I think many just feel like working hard does not work anymore, especially in the face of housing, cost of living, job competition and social media flaunting the wealth of others.
I get the idea from my younger siblings, "Why try if you are already a looser."