A few weeks ago, someone popped into a a comment thread on one of my tweets, claiming that the left side of the political spectrum is intentionally running a campaign to divide people.
I chimed in to say that the division is sown by the top, not the left.
This point had never crossed this person’s mind before. They could not even comprehend why the owning class would do something like this.
So, I responded to point out that the owning class does not create the wealth they own—the working class creates that wealth.
But that just confused them even more. They are convinced that the owning class run and operate the businesses they own.
Which leads to today’s editorial piece.
Billionaires do not run the businesses they own.
Jeff Bezos, the owner of Amazon, isn’t adding products to Amazon’s website. He’s not fulfilling orders in Amazon warehouses. He’s not the one driving Amazon delivery vehicles.
Howard Schultz, former CEO of Starbucks after it merged with his coffee company, wasn’t the one pouring coffee, buying product, and taking drive-thru orders.
Nor was Bill Gates the one coding Windows 95 or Microsoft Office apps.
Likewise, Elon Musk does not launch SpaceX rockets, build Tesla vehicles, or code Twitter’s backend.
Workers do all that.
Billionaires hire workers to build the products and provide the services that the company sells to customers. That much is probably obvious to most people.
However, billionaires also hire workers to run their marketing department, to run their shipping and receiving department, to order materials and inventory, to pay bills, to sell to customers, to handle customer service phone calls and emails, to design new products, to clean their facilities, and so on.
All that labour performed by all those workers generates revenue. However, not all that revenue is used to reimburse the labour that produces it. Some of it is to pay bills (such as utilities, taxes, and suppliers), but after all the expenses are paid, including wages, anything left over is profit.
That profit is either put aside for future use or it is paid out to shareholders, which usually include the billionaires and millionaires who outright own the company, sit on its board of directors, or own shares in the company.
And it is that paid-out profit that I am referring to. Worker labour made that wealth possible, and anyone who pockets it is pocketing unpaid worker labour.
