A RESPONSE TO GOP PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE SEN. TIM SCOTT AND HIS CONSERVATIVE COLLEAGUES

It should come as no surprise that the Republican Party is solidly on the side of the ownership class at the expense of working people. The only folks who don’t know this is working-class Republicans who seem to think that protecting their churches and fetuses from treacherous liberals is of greater value to them than is their economic well-being.¹

So, Sen. Tim Scott’s response to the UAW strike is right in line with American Conservative philosophy. Asking the so-called “job creators” to pay their workers more and to provide better benefits is a violation of free market principles. Furthermore, unions don’t really stand for their members’ interests in doing so. Apparently, higher pay and better benefits isn’t really in the best interest of the workers. The workers should consider themselves lucky that the job creators have been kind enough to give them jobs in the first place. When it comes to the best interests of the workers, the owners know best.

I especially wanted to respond to Scott’s claim that, “…they want more money working fewer hours. They want more benefits working fewer days…in America, that doesn’t make sense. That’s not common sense.”

In a way he’s right. In the United States, it’s not common sense for workers to ask for more in the face of soaring profits. In the United States, we tend to see profits as the result of the hard work contributed by owners in growing their businesses. Americans do not have a common sense understanding of the labor theory of value. Instead, we have a fiction that companies are owned by individuals who have innovative ideas and bring those ideas to market. It’s those ideas that have value. Workers should just be happy that they get to participate in making these ideas come to fruition.

These ideas are the property of The Entrepreneur. In the United States, The Entrepreneur stands above all others as the driving force of the economy. The Entrepreneur is not just an aspiration in the United States. It’s an archetype.

It’s a false archetype.

The Entrepreneur Archetype is a profound distortion to how ownership works in the United States and the value that ownership brings to any given business.

Let me explain.

I have ten shares in Ford Motor Company. That makes me a part owner of Ford. As part owner, what do I bring to the table with regard to added value for the company. In any real sense…nothing. Not a thing. I have exactly zero ideas for how to make Ford a better product. I have no cool designs. Frankly, I know a little bit about cars, enough to do general repairs, but otherwise…nothing. I own some shares and a few times a year I get a dividend for my ownership.

Am I the exception to the rule? Not at all. There are countless thousands of owners of Ford Motor Company just like me. Just like me, they contribute nothing but ownership. Collectively, they help determine the value of the stock. That’s the beginning and the end of our contribution.

Admittedly, every year the shareholders get together to decided upon the direction of the company. Bill Ford, the heir to the Ford fortune chairs the meeting because he has an outsized vote granted due to his outsized proportion of the stock. But he’s not, strictly speaking, “the owner”. He’s just the largest shareholder. What has he contributed to the Ford product that merits his position? To my knowledge, nothing. He won the birth canal lottery and gets to benefit from his great-grandfather’s innovations.

What about the other owners? Well, many of them aren’t even human beings. The largest stockholder is Vanguard Group, with Blackrock and State Street Global coming in at second and third place respectively.

We can argue that small business owners actively add value to their companies, at least to a certain extent. When we are talking about major, multinational conglomerates like Ford, GM or Stellantis…

…wait!…

…Stellantis?

…what the hell is Stellantis?²

…anyway, as I was saying, when it comes to huge companies like the major auto manufacturers, ownership is so abstract that it contributes nothing meaningful to the value adding process. Some magic force could sweep down and take away all of the owners tomorrow and their companies could still run effectively. In fact, it would probably take some time for anyone to even realize that it had happened. That’s why owners don’t go on strike. Nobody would care.

But workers. When workers go on strike, it matters. It’s workers that add the value to the companies. When we hear that auto manufacturer profits are up by 92% since coming out of restructuring³ that means that the value added by the workers almost doubled during that time. The work done by autoworkers is now almost double what it was in 2009. The real value of the owners is…well…not a thing.

However, those same workers during that same time have experienced a twenty percent decrease in real wages. When you hear that GM has offered the UAW a “sweet” deal of twenty percent increase in wages, you have to understand that they are doing nothing more than raising wages to what they were in 2009.

To really compensate workers for the value they’ve added to auto manufacturing, they should receive that twenty percent plus the ninety-two percent that they added to the company during that time. A one hundred and twelve percent raise would align the workers with the value that they’ve added to their respective companies. That the Union is asking much less than that should be considered a bargain for the owners. That the union is suggesting that workers should have more time with their families makes perfect sense after looking at the value they’ve contributed over the years.

Conservatives do not want Americans to have common sense understanding of the two-hundred and fifty year old notion that workers are the ones who add value to the goods they produce. Presidential aspirants like Tim Scott do not want the American people to ever realize that when profits go up without a corresponding increase in wages, that constitutes a theft by the owners against the workers. When those increases happen in conjunction with wage cuts is even more egregious. Someone like Tim Scott who is unwilling to stand up for workers in the face of theft is not someone who should be the head of state.

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Notes

1. It should go without saying that their churches and fetuses are not being threatened by anyone. It “should” go without saying, but… ↩︎
2. According to the website, Stellantis is “Stellantis is a constellation of 14 iconic automotive brands…” They’re a constellation? What the hell does that mean? It means that it is an umbrella company that owns Chrysler, Ram, Alfa Romeo and other car manufacturers. It’s primary contribution to the process is that it owns. Period. ↩︎
3. Remember, GM and Chrysler were rescued by the taxpayers during the Great Recession. ↩︎