Comment by QuercusMax
Comment by QuercusMax 16 hours ago
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.
Comment by QuercusMax 16 hours ago
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.
Ok so that's 1 guy 100 years ago. How many golden parachutes and layoffs have there been since then? Cmon people put 2+2 together, it's not that hard.