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Controversial Opinion: After a certain point, if your business can’t survive without severe abuse of your workforce, then you shouldn’t be in business imo. Very few jobs are worth the level of harm inflicted by burning out employees.
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Another Controversial Opinion:
We probably should be paying higher prices rather than subsidizing slave wages at places like Walmart. Walmart literally hires HR people to help their employees apply for social programs; bc it’s net cheaper than paying them a non-poverty wage.
I mean, that's literally the reason we don't let companies use slavery or dump nuclear waste in playgrounds. Causing harm is always suspect.
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Yeah, I'd rather have the customers of Walmart pay an extra couple dollars than shove the cost onto the taxpayer. If you're worried about people not being able to afford things, then subsidize those people instead of a specific retailer (through their underpaid employees). For some reason people are often more comfortable with less direct subsidies, like they can pretend there's no subsidy that way or something?
Problem is, it's never one blip.
It rolls from one to the next.
If you want to actually get to the heart of it, we should be incentivizing companies to actually keep our economy inside our borders instead of hiring overseas workers working actual slave wages. Beyond that it's a net positive for humanity, it would give us an actual competitive job market that you wouldn't have to scrape by and couldn't afford to risk your security on
The problem is, a ton of those goods are considered essential to the conditions we are accustomed to living in and would become substantially less affordable if not produced overseas at sweatshops. It would still be better for the country to keep production domestic.
That's a myopic solution, that can only work locally. Everyone everywhere would do better if we could all just agree to a few basic guidelines. We need to raise standards everywhere, and encourage businesses to consider not just the local economy, but the global economy in their drive for profit.
In the end, capitalism is just not an efficient system.