Most Americans are employed by companies that are part and parcel of our capitalistic system. This thus signifies, that making a profit for those corporations is of upmost importance to them, along also with this being of real meaning and significance to their shareholders, executives, and their Board of Directors. So then, there is many a company that believes, that profit really is the be-all and the end-all of their existence, and because of this mindset, many a company looks upon the labor aspect of their corporation, as being almost exclusively an expense -- which thus creates a fundamental problem or conundrum.
All companies have expenses, of which, those expenses include but are not limited to the outside materials so needed to help manufacture the goods so being sold, the capital equipment required to produce business products, the physical real estate so needed to conduct a given business, in addition to the research and development so necessary in order to stay on top of things so as to advance one’s company vis-à-vis competition of all types. Then there is what is often the biggest expense of them all, which is the labor component of a companies’ workforce, which consists of human beings, that are employed as part of that company.
It certainly makes sense that companies should look at each one of their expenses, and thereby try to derive the best overall utilitarian value from each – such as in the lowering of the expenditures on materials, or by the increase in quality, so of; or in the timeliness of what is so needed, and so on and so forth. It is fair then to say, that lowering expenses, or increasing the efficiency of the materials so required in a given business should always be an important consideration for all companies. The salient problem, though, lies in the fact that when companies picture labor as being just another expense, then there is always going to be a tendency to look at labor as the type of expense that needs to be minimized, by thus, for example, providing less in salary then what could be paid, or less employee benefits overall, or by making it company policy that layoffs and terminations should always be considered as something appropriate to do, in order to thus boost the bottom line as well as also to get rid of accumulated “deadwood.”
In short, the drive for cheap labor, is the reason why so many companies are absolutely fine with not paying a “living wage” and have no desire to ever do so. Their justification for having this type of attitude is often not personal, but rather comes down to the dollars and cents of a business decision that fixates that lower expenses, be it labor or other areas, always contributes to a better bottom line and that bottom line is apparently the only thing that really matters. As long as this is the case, America will continue to have millions of full-time employed people that do not make enough income to have any semblance of the American dream, but rather are suffering from the American nightmare of hopelessness. The only way forward, then, is for the governance of this nation, to make it a point, that a living wage for all should be its national policy; and until this is actuated, we can expect that many companies will continue to extract sizeable profits through their exploitation of labor, because they can.