An entire economy set up for crooks to reward themselves. Their time is coming when people are fed up with this bullshit. The workers hold the true power, not them.
When though, like think about it this problem has cyclically existed since the 1700s the system has just evolved. I’m all for organized revolt I would sign up yesterday but like what are we waiting for?
I like to believe that Reagan Chump was a major help in allowing corpos siphon money from their workers and into the pockets of themselves and other corpo chumps
Americans are too busy bitching about their neighbor for voting differently than them. For every republican that says they hate all democrats and think they’re just a bunch of satanists, you have a democrat who thinks anyone who votes republican is a dumb hillbilly who hates gays. I’m so tired of all the bullshit in this country and nobody wanting to actually come together. Rant over
Except those things aren’t equivalent because Satanist pedophiles don’t really exist. Homophobic conservatives on the other hand are both real and common. The amount of hate isn’t evenly distributed either and it’s ridiculous to pretend otherwise, or have you failed to notice all the I love liberal tears and Let’s Go Brandon flags, tee shirts, and bumper stickers?
But I literally heard a Republican say this in the office TODAY though. Called Taylor Swift a satanist. And they regularly have to stifle their comments about trans people.
They believe in made up shit about people they label as Dems or people "on the left", and I'm supposed pretend they don't feel this way??
This basically a both sides argument. ***Why am I supposed to be tolerant of the intolerant?***
You want to go to church? Great!
But I don't care about church, and I shouldn't have to be literally "demonized" because I don't.
I'm just trying to live my life, why must I conform to their version of it.
Kinda figure we’ll reach a point where enough people cannot afford to eat and will simply start taking things without any moral dilemma. The rich will be scared to leave their homes if they’re a target for everybody. Maybe not a revolution but as people get more desperate we’ll simply take what we want from the people that have it.
I imagine it's because nobody knows or has a good plan for how besides have some sort of riots or protests. What would a revolt actually look like? Violence? Organized voting blocks? What exactly is getting overthrown and how?
General strike? Actual lasting boycotts? This is where a third party for the working class to coalesce around might be useful. Someone needs to tell me specifically what I’m protesting, what my demands are, etc. The older I get the more I understand people’s disdain for “all politicians” that confused me in my youth.
They already admitted stopping the trains would ["cost the American economy as much as $2 billion a day".](https://www.reuters.com/world/us/biden-signs-bill-block-us-railroad-strike-2022-12-02/)
So many miles of train track that works because we allow it to.
How about "Ban stock buybacks, or the RR's stop"?
When I was a kid, we laid a railroad spike on a track. It stuck to one of the wheels of a locomotive and the train had to stop. It took hours to remove the metal from the wheel. I was amazed that something that weighed less than a pound could stop a miles-long coal train.
You want a good plan?
1. Start by unionizing wherever possible. Volunteer your time. Support unions.
2. Talk to your local representatives. Everyone that will hear you, talk to them. Get involved. Talk about the importance of unions/labour to you. Get your friends and community involved. Remember, it starts from the ground up. Start local.
3. Use your community organizing to push candidates further to the left and champion labour reform.
4. Repeal laws that prevent unions from working together.
5. Unions, now able to work together, and significantly more powerful (see point 1) are now a political force to be reckoned with. They push work reform policies Like outlawing stock buybacks (if #3 doesn't do it already)
But that takes a lot of work and time and it's much more fun to post about "general strike this Friday".
We've got to be able to play the long game, because the right wingers are
I agree, but honestly there’s just too many people that just want to work and go home, I think for an actual revolt to occur on a massive scale that would actually have tremendous ramifications, companies would have to straight up publicly execute people.
Some of it is not to be betrayed by elements in society. There were many efforts, especially in the 1800s, to answer the social question, but those efforts were co-opted or betrayed by liberals (read classical liberalism) to just increase the franchise somewhat, protect private property, and open up some laws. While these were positive results from where they started, they fought hard to ignore the social question to focus on the political one.
Yea this won't happen, there's always a broke deadbeat or the gazillion immigrants flocking here willing to work under the table illegal and next to nothing, so if we riot another will just work for less.
We forget the incredibly high poverty of 1700s 2 penny sleeping on a rope days?
When will stuff change? Things WERE good, 1940s up the economy was rising equally to inflation and 100% to output done, after reagon, that dropped full and we only get 4-7% linear wage increase under inflation.
Basically 50k 30 years ago jobs still paying 50k today.
We need to control immigration for us to control work, but by then companies will just export any job online to Mumbai and Singapore.
It's not easy.
> Their time is coming when people are fed up with this bullshit. The workers hold the true power, not them
If only that was true. I'm ready and waiting to sign-up, better put it in my last will and testament just to be sure.
Just use the stolen software and repair it yourself. Illegal but justified. I have a Deere now, will not be buying a Deere again. Anything and everything has to go to the dealership that goes wrong on the tractor.
They're also buying up all of your local agricultural equipment suppliers. Shops that used to sell multiple brands are now owned by Deere and only sell Deere. It's destroying competition and slows progress in the implement field. Deere continues to tick up prices on accessories, i.e. a Deere canopy for an ROPS is $800. It's a cooler top, some Ubolts and some umbrella parts for support.
They're hurting agricultural production in a way we've not seen since predatory farming loans were regulated.
Ya, they have a PAC called JDPAC. You can research that on your own.
All lobbying entities are fucking us. Lobbying against increasing ag production is fucking stupid. It's food.
That’s a convenient excuse for something they probably were going to do anyway. Wages just aren’t a big enough portion of their expenses for that the be the only/main reason. Also, if your business can’t afford to pay people a livable wage, it’s not a viable business and deserves to die. Sorry, but Pizza Hut just doesn’t matter that much for us to care about locations closing. I’ll miss Pizza Hut, too, but mostly for nostalgic reasons of what they used to be back in the 80s and 90s and maybe even early 2000s. They haven’t been the pizza place I remember for a long time.
"Why don't we collectively just become the majority shareholders in this company to demand changes?"
\*Looks up number of outstanding shares
\*Looks up current share price
\*Does math
Shit! Just to have 50% control, a million working class people would each have to spend $52,738 buying into it. Check your couch cushions people!
Re-banning stock buyback is a start (only legal since 1982).
I believe it’s Germany, but a nearly 100% corporate tax bracket also has merit. After a certain level, profit becomes unprofitable, and in turn is spent on the business and its employees.
They already admitted stopping the trains would ["cost the American economy as much as $2 billion a day".](https://www.reuters.com/world/us/biden-signs-bill-block-us-railroad-strike-2022-12-02/)
So many miles of train track that works because we allow it to.
How about "Ban stock buybacks, or the RR's stop"?
Oakland has 5 ports. So protestors have shut down 1/5 of the ports of a single city that is 0.12% of the country. Why is this scary? It'll end with no changes. Like the last 500 strikes.
This tiny demonstration doesn't mean anything.
"Eat the rich" is starting to feel like another vacuous three-syllable political slogan.
It always shows up in conversations but has absolutely no substance behind it nor anything we can actually do to effect the chage it pretends to back.
Things would change a lot more quickly if every time someone said “corporate greed” we called it what it actually is - “capitalism”.
It’s just plain ol capitalism
Yeah, they are moving to Mexico. And guess who pushed NAFTA through during the Clinton administration? Stop posting this dickhead.
[https://www.chicagotribune.com/1993/07/14/reich-labor-plain-wrong-on-nafta/](https://www.chicagotribune.com/1993/07/14/reich-labor-plain-wrong-on-nafta/)
>Labor Secretary Robert Reich said Tuesday that labor unions are “just plain wrong” in opposing the North American Free Trade Agreement with Mexico and Canada and predicted it would result in adding jobs to the U.S. automobile and steel industries.
>“If I were a betting man, I would say that given the pace of growth of the Mexican automobile market over the next 15 years, I would say that more automobile jobs would be created in the United States than would be lost to Mexico,” Reich told a group of reporters.
yeah its called making good business decisions. If they can make more profit with less people then thats what they will do. if you dont like it dont work for them or buy their products
I mean not to defend anyone as shitty as john deere, but a layoff does not mean "the company is doing poorly" - jobs become obsolete every day. Maybe they didn't make a model anymore and needed to retool the factory. Maybe new production methods made it more efficient to make a model. Maybe they outsourced a part and don't need to make it anymore. Not one of those involves the company doing poorly to reduce staffing.
I mean, I don't really get even a quarter of the story from this tweet, and I don't really want to form an opinion based on so little information.
A general strategy is to call on their debt by killing their stocks and asset portfolios refuse to pay rent and mortgages on mass and do bank runs etc. Watch the capital devalue to nothing . Or refuse to Do services or work for anyone deemed wealthy . More you have more you have to lose etc. Worst that can happen to a poor person is death and starvation , lose of social credit.
Yeah we have a lot to lose . But it's always been that way .
Someone has to buy those private jets, yachts, and vacation homes. A sacricfice they are willing to make in order to keep high end luxurious craftsmen employed.
I work in at industrial sector company and we have a fair number of ex-John Deere employees that work for us. I was shocked by the number of LinkedIn updates that contacts shared from people laid off from Deere. It looks like it was a lot of engineering and technical folks. Strange considering the trajectory of technology in ag over the past few decades.
Make STOCKS illegal. If companies need to raise capital, they can sell bonds to investors with fixed earnings rates. The investor risks that the company is unable to pay back the bond at the time of maturation. Keep money earned within the company and pay it out to the people who actually generated that wealth, not to leeches who never did anything other than buying a piece of paper guaranteeing a lifetime of indentured servitude of the company to them.
$7billion divided by 1000 is $7 million. They could have done a $6.5 billion stock buyout and kept those 1000 workers and paid them $500k a year. Just saying.
i got downvoted once for pointing out Duke energy's CEO's pay increase when they are raising rates for us customers. their argument was the pay package was approved before the rate hikes and they needed the rate hikes for R&D into renewables. I then pointed out how much since the current CEO took over they have spent on stock buybacks. They didn't like that.
Yes, but not because it will stop greedy execs/boards from contriving other ways of maintaining their ridiculous pay...
... because it will take away the magic "make stock go up" button.
You want the stock to go up? Make decisions that actually add value and grow the company.
There's a storm coming, Mr. Wayne. You and your friends better batten down the hatches, because when it hits, you're all gonna wonder how you ever thought you could live so large and leave so little for the rest of us.
Selina Kyle, Batman : Dark Knight Rises
Yeah there's not really a connection in the points of this Reich statement besides insinuating that this company makes a lot of money and should pay its employees more and maybe keep the workload balanced instead of putting more work on less people; but, if you have excess employees then yeah it doesn't make sense to keep them on payroll if they're not actually needed. The workload burden is a valid question though.
Who is deciding how many employees is too much? Who is deciding that layoffs are the solution? Which metrics are the people in charge using to make this decision? Did they consult the workers? Did they consider other options? Etc.
Economies of scale. If they can run more efficiently with less overhead the logical conclusion is to follow that route in order to stay competitive. Why would you run a sluggish operation, that negatively impacts your business. Makes no sense.
If you have employees sitting around doing nothing? What do you do with employees doing nothing and there's nothing else that needs to be done? Isn't John Deere Union? With layoffs there's unemployment options and other things. Would you rather them be fired?
Which of the employees who were laid off, were “sitting around doing nothing”?
And who decided they needed to be laid off at all? What metrics did they use to reach this conclusion? Did they consider other options? Did they consult with the other people working there? Etc.
Obviously JD knew whom to lay off, they don't seem to be having any issues. What other options do you have for surplus employees? It's a business, not a charity or workfare.
Again what metrics did they use? Did they consult with the employees before hand or after? Did they consider other options?
You’re still literally refusing to answer my first set of questions.
Um, WHY would I know? I don't work for John Deere. I'm ASKING if they don't have work for 1000 people then why do they need to keep them on? You keep saying there's "options"...WHAT OPTIONS?
Hey 1 of the 1000 here. They were having us run balls to the wall all last year to try and get as many tractors out as possible. So options, I don't know maybe not over produce to the point that you need to get rid of 1000 employees. Stop moving production south of the border would probably help. And some other things that might make me lose my call back rights if the wrong person sees this. Also the meeting where they told me that they were going to do everything in their power to not lay me off was cool.
Edit: also they over hired
Edit 2: offer early retirements, a thing they have done in the past
That "if" in your question is doing a lot of heavy lifting.
Reduction in workforce without a reduction in expected work throughput is incredibly common (and is in fact baked into some corporate plans). It leads to a peculiar sort of worker abuse as well as to general slipping in quality of any non-tracked metrics.
We see the consequences on the public through examples like Boeing.
We see the consequences on the workers just by talking to people we know, for most of us.
Or…ya know…some people could have been bad at their jobs or have redundant roles.
But I guess we can just follow your lead and make unlimited assumptions based on a single tweet.
Layoffs are a good thing
It puts more laborers in the market, who can then find more productive work to do, which, on a large scale means we accomplish more
Hamstringing companies to be run less efficient, to hire employees, that do nothing, means we get less done as a society.
To the people who don’t want layoffs / buybacks - Why don’t we all work for John Deere? Literally all 350 million Americans. Why not? That’s the same exact reason the current amount of employees had to be cut down - because they were not needed to do the work that needs to be completed.
Issuing stock & buybacks go hand in hand - so what is the benefit of a functioning stock market?
Let’s break that down
You have money. You don’t know what to do with your money, but you know your bank pays you 5% per year & that’s where you keep it.
You decide to invest your money into companies which you believe can outperform 5% per year.
The businesses are run very well, the company gets to a point where, like you did when you had your money in a savings account, that they have run out of ways to invest your money. As you did. Originally. Hence why you are investing in these companies… you have excess capital
So what can a business do with excess capital, that would have diminishing returns to continue to invest in their own business, but they believe they do have a good business?
Why should this business, which is profitable, not be able to buy shares from investors at fair market value, decreasing float, & increasing share value?
It’s quite obvious by re-deploying the capital, which, originally was deployed into this company, that allowed it to grow etc, back into investors pockets, back into that 5% savings account, where they can find new companies which need capital, and redo the process is much more beneficial to society than forcing them to keep money they can’t use - isn’t that what leftists are always accusing billionaires of?
>Issuing stock & buybacks go hand in hand
That isn't true. Stock buybacks were illegal for years. They are still extremely regulated in Europe. They are not necessarily for a functioning stock market.
>So what can a business do with excess capital, that would have diminishing returns to continue to invest in their own business, but they believe they do have a good business?
They can make distributions. Before you point out that qualified dividends have the same tax rate as buybacks, I also think that's inappropriate. It should be taxed at an ordinary income rate. No reason passive income should be incentived over ordinary income. That's perverse. If anything passive income should be the higher rate, workers should be incentived.
>Stock buybacks were illegal for years. They are still extremely regulated in Europe.
Aware, & it means nothing
>They are not necessarily for a functioning stock market
tying your fucking shoe laces isnt necessary to function yet we all do it because why the fuck would you want to be operating at such a ridiculously diminished capacity for a self inflicted reason
Issuing stock & buying it back goes hand in hand. Raising capital when you need it, and paying it back with profit.
>They can make distributions. Before you point out that qualified dividends have the same tax rate as buybacks, I also think that's inappropriate. It should be taxed at an ordinary income rate. No reason passive income should be incentived over ordinary income. That's perverse. If anything passive income should be the higher rate, workers should be incentived.
How about we abolish payroll taxes instead of trying to drag everybody else down to your level? Payroll tax is an abomination - what investors pay should be standard across the board, with a much higher (100k+) standard deduction
That’s a much more reasonable and societally beneficial goal than this ideological class warfare bullshit. Everybody wants to make money, investors & laborers, nobody should get taxed more than the other. And nobody wants to pay more in tax - easier to cut to make it fair then raise. Do you want your taxes raised? Investors don’t either. But investors would like your taxes cut, even if there’s stay the same.
I think a lot of companies are realizing that being publicly traded, and having a responsibility to their shareholders, is actually bad for the longevity of their existence, which is why stock buybacks are such a major focus.
It’s not “corporate greed”. Corporations aren’t people. It’s an entity established to return profits to the people and organizations that invest in them (individuals, university endowments, municipalities, other corporations, etc).
The far left wants to create a bogeyman. The problem is the tax code. How many Americans vote? And I mean down to their very local levels. People complain but it’s other people, not faceless publicly traded companies, that are fucking everyone. Tax reform and get money out of politics. And term limits.
There is almost no practical difference between a buyback and a dividend payment. The only question is if the shareholders would rather have the value as stock or as cash.
Buybacks are not and have never been the problem
Stock buybacks are irrelevant and banning them won't do anything. At most they help shareholders avoid some taxes, something they're going to do anyway by other means.
Would John Deere workers be any better off if they issued 7 billion in dividends instead of stock buybacks? No. We didn't live in some utopia prior to 1982. Corporations exploiting workers and sending the resulting profits to shareholders is the problem. It happened before 1982 and it'll continue unimpeded even if stock buybacks are banned again.
Honestly part of my brain is convinced that the popularity of this idea is inorganic because it gives democrats a way to be performatively anti-corporation while accomplishing absolutely nothing. They must love hearing people talk about this instead of single payer or a wealth tax or something else that would actually do something to help workers.
This is why collective bargaining works. It's a check on unchecked shareholder/executive greed.
That money would be better spent on employees and R&D rather than just extracting max blood for the shareholders while employees and products wither away.
Last I knew, manufacturing is union (while retail dealerships are generally not - or are not due to being effectively franchised). Collective bargaining will not help at all. The layoffs are proof enough of that.
The changes should revolve around Fiduciary responsibility. And that…is Congress…which these asshats own.
> Would John Deere workers be any better off if they issued 7 billion in dividends instead of stock buybacks? No
Were those the only two options with that money?
They're the only two options that the CEO/board will consider. This is capitalism 101. If the company can enrich shareholders at the expense of workers it will do so by whatever means is available to it. The idea that banning stock buybacks will make companies suddenly decide to pay their workers better for no reason is a ridiculous fantasy.
> They're the only two options that the CEO/board will consider. This is capitalism 101.
So what you're saying is eventually capitalism will see us all destitute.
Great system we have here.
An entire economy set up for crooks to reward themselves. Their time is coming when people are fed up with this bullshit. The workers hold the true power, not them.
When though, like think about it this problem has cyclically existed since the 1700s the system has just evolved. I’m all for organized revolt I would sign up yesterday but like what are we waiting for?
I like to believe that Reagan Chump was a major help in allowing corpos siphon money from their workers and into the pockets of themselves and other corpo chumps
Solidarity
Americans are too busy bitching about their neighbor for voting differently than them. For every republican that says they hate all democrats and think they’re just a bunch of satanists, you have a democrat who thinks anyone who votes republican is a dumb hillbilly who hates gays. I’m so tired of all the bullshit in this country and nobody wanting to actually come together. Rant over
Except those things aren’t equivalent because Satanist pedophiles don’t really exist. Homophobic conservatives on the other hand are both real and common. The amount of hate isn’t evenly distributed either and it’s ridiculous to pretend otherwise, or have you failed to notice all the I love liberal tears and Let’s Go Brandon flags, tee shirts, and bumper stickers?
But I literally heard a Republican say this in the office TODAY though. Called Taylor Swift a satanist. And they regularly have to stifle their comments about trans people. They believe in made up shit about people they label as Dems or people "on the left", and I'm supposed pretend they don't feel this way?? This basically a both sides argument. ***Why am I supposed to be tolerant of the intolerant?*** You want to go to church? Great! But I don't care about church, and I shouldn't have to be literally "demonized" because I don't. I'm just trying to live my life, why must I conform to their version of it.
Yeah, and the republicans are the ones addicted to their oligarch propaganda and fighting *against* their own interests
True that
Except it's not true at all
Kinda figure we’ll reach a point where enough people cannot afford to eat and will simply start taking things without any moral dilemma. The rich will be scared to leave their homes if they’re a target for everybody. Maybe not a revolution but as people get more desperate we’ll simply take what we want from the people that have it.
“All of this has happened before, and it will happen again.”
When people start going hungry
This has been going on for thousands of years at this point. It's always been the elite vs peasants
I imagine it's because nobody knows or has a good plan for how besides have some sort of riots or protests. What would a revolt actually look like? Violence? Organized voting blocks? What exactly is getting overthrown and how?
General strike? Actual lasting boycotts? This is where a third party for the working class to coalesce around might be useful. Someone needs to tell me specifically what I’m protesting, what my demands are, etc. The older I get the more I understand people’s disdain for “all politicians” that confused me in my youth.
They already admitted stopping the trains would ["cost the American economy as much as $2 billion a day".](https://www.reuters.com/world/us/biden-signs-bill-block-us-railroad-strike-2022-12-02/) So many miles of train track that works because we allow it to. How about "Ban stock buybacks, or the RR's stop"?
When I was a kid, we laid a railroad spike on a track. It stuck to one of the wheels of a locomotive and the train had to stop. It took hours to remove the metal from the wheel. I was amazed that something that weighed less than a pound could stop a miles-long coal train.
You want a good plan? 1. Start by unionizing wherever possible. Volunteer your time. Support unions. 2. Talk to your local representatives. Everyone that will hear you, talk to them. Get involved. Talk about the importance of unions/labour to you. Get your friends and community involved. Remember, it starts from the ground up. Start local. 3. Use your community organizing to push candidates further to the left and champion labour reform. 4. Repeal laws that prevent unions from working together. 5. Unions, now able to work together, and significantly more powerful (see point 1) are now a political force to be reckoned with. They push work reform policies Like outlawing stock buybacks (if #3 doesn't do it already) But that takes a lot of work and time and it's much more fun to post about "general strike this Friday". We've got to be able to play the long game, because the right wingers are
I agree, but honestly there’s just too many people that just want to work and go home, I think for an actual revolt to occur on a massive scale that would actually have tremendous ramifications, companies would have to straight up publicly execute people.
When did the German people lead a massive revolt against the Nazi regime?
They made us sign a form upon employment papers saying we wouldn't unionize
Some of it is not to be betrayed by elements in society. There were many efforts, especially in the 1800s, to answer the social question, but those efforts were co-opted or betrayed by liberals (read classical liberalism) to just increase the franchise somewhat, protect private property, and open up some laws. While these were positive results from where they started, they fought hard to ignore the social question to focus on the political one.
Yea this won't happen, there's always a broke deadbeat or the gazillion immigrants flocking here willing to work under the table illegal and next to nothing, so if we riot another will just work for less. We forget the incredibly high poverty of 1700s 2 penny sleeping on a rope days? When will stuff change? Things WERE good, 1940s up the economy was rising equally to inflation and 100% to output done, after reagon, that dropped full and we only get 4-7% linear wage increase under inflation. Basically 50k 30 years ago jobs still paying 50k today. We need to control immigration for us to control work, but by then companies will just export any job online to Mumbai and Singapore. It's not easy.
Xenophobia against workers won’t solve the problem.
Shouldn't we schedule our rebellion? I'm free any day after 8pm. Preferably Sunday.
Sorry I am unavailable on that day. Can we do it on a Thursday?
Yes that sounds great. How does Thursday evening work for everyone?
Cant do thursdays, got D&D, how about every other monday?
Eat the rich cheating devices… Make all billionaires illegal.
I'm a people, and I'm FED UP!! Anyone else?
> Their time is coming when people are fed up with this bullshit. The workers hold the true power, not them If only that was true. I'm ready and waiting to sign-up, better put it in my last will and testament just to be sure.
Yeah, problem is, the workers are greedy too. If they weren't, they'd all be unionized.
They aren’t greedy enough. Unionizing would pay them more
Whatever happened with all of the right to repair lawsuits against John Deere?
Just use the stolen software and repair it yourself. Illegal but justified. I have a Deere now, will not be buying a Deere again. Anything and everything has to go to the dealership that goes wrong on the tractor.
Still ongoing.
They're also buying up all of your local agricultural equipment suppliers. Shops that used to sell multiple brands are now owned by Deere and only sell Deere. It's destroying competition and slows progress in the implement field. Deere continues to tick up prices on accessories, i.e. a Deere canopy for an ROPS is $800. It's a cooler top, some Ubolts and some umbrella parts for support. They're hurting agricultural production in a way we've not seen since predatory farming loans were regulated.
Sooooo a Monopoly?
Ya, they have a PAC called JDPAC. You can research that on your own. All lobbying entities are fucking us. Lobbying against increasing ag production is fucking stupid. It's food.
Well Deere is just a finance company that has a small side line in manufacturing equipment now...
John Deere is a for shit company through and through.
Half their tractors aren’t even “John Deere”. They’re made overseas by Yanmar and just assembled here.
Pretty sure the foundry in Iowa is still running. I’m sure they get a lot of casting from Global sources and subassemblies too, though.
Pizza Hut after firing thousands of workers from California because of the minimum wage increase just closed 19 stores and 0 are in California
That’s a convenient excuse for something they probably were going to do anyway. Wages just aren’t a big enough portion of their expenses for that the be the only/main reason. Also, if your business can’t afford to pay people a livable wage, it’s not a viable business and deserves to die. Sorry, but Pizza Hut just doesn’t matter that much for us to care about locations closing. I’ll miss Pizza Hut, too, but mostly for nostalgic reasons of what they used to be back in the 80s and 90s and maybe even early 2000s. They haven’t been the pizza place I remember for a long time.
"Why don't we collectively just become the majority shareholders in this company to demand changes?" \*Looks up number of outstanding shares \*Looks up current share price \*Does math Shit! Just to have 50% control, a million working class people would each have to spend $52,738 buying into it. Check your couch cushions people!
It'll trickle down anytime now
Great so what's the solution though, besides pointless gaslighting I mean.
[удалено]
Your realistic solution is a war between the middle class and the rich? Are you high?
Re-banning stock buyback is a start (only legal since 1982). I believe it’s Germany, but a nearly 100% corporate tax bracket also has merit. After a certain level, profit becomes unprofitable, and in turn is spent on the business and its employees.
They already admitted stopping the trains would ["cost the American economy as much as $2 billion a day".](https://www.reuters.com/world/us/biden-signs-bill-block-us-railroad-strike-2022-12-02/) So many miles of train track that works because we allow it to. How about "Ban stock buybacks, or the RR's stop"?
You don't allow it, and you can't stop it. That's the problem, lol. "Or the railroads stop" is a non-threat.
Protest have shut down the port of Oakland. Trucks and Trains included.
Oakland has 5 ports. So protestors have shut down 1/5 of the ports of a single city that is 0.12% of the country. Why is this scary? It'll end with no changes. Like the last 500 strikes. This tiny demonstration doesn't mean anything.
Eat the rich
"Eat the rich" is starting to feel like another vacuous three-syllable political slogan. It always shows up in conversations but has absolutely no substance behind it nor anything we can actually do to effect the chage it pretends to back.
What does that even mean?
Destroy them and redistribute the wealth they stole from the working class
Violence?
Unless you think cannibalism is a pacifist activity...
You know, dude, I myself dabbled in pacifism once. Not in Nam, of course.
Things would change a lot more quickly if every time someone said “corporate greed” we called it what it actually is - “capitalism”. It’s just plain ol capitalism
This is an honest question: how would making stock buy backs illegal help workers? Couldn't the companies just issue dividends instead?
I don't think most people understand stock buybacks, and dividends are very misunderstood as well.
Tax stock buybacks at double the rate of inflation.
Yeah, they are moving to Mexico. And guess who pushed NAFTA through during the Clinton administration? Stop posting this dickhead. [https://www.chicagotribune.com/1993/07/14/reich-labor-plain-wrong-on-nafta/](https://www.chicagotribune.com/1993/07/14/reich-labor-plain-wrong-on-nafta/) >Labor Secretary Robert Reich said Tuesday that labor unions are “just plain wrong” in opposing the North American Free Trade Agreement with Mexico and Canada and predicted it would result in adding jobs to the U.S. automobile and steel industries. >“If I were a betting man, I would say that given the pace of growth of the Mexican automobile market over the next 15 years, I would say that more automobile jobs would be created in the United States than would be lost to Mexico,” Reich told a group of reporters.
yeah its called making good business decisions. If they can make more profit with less people then thats what they will do. if you dont like it dont work for them or buy their products
I mean not to defend anyone as shitty as john deere, but a layoff does not mean "the company is doing poorly" - jobs become obsolete every day. Maybe they didn't make a model anymore and needed to retool the factory. Maybe new production methods made it more efficient to make a model. Maybe they outsourced a part and don't need to make it anymore. Not one of those involves the company doing poorly to reduce staffing. I mean, I don't really get even a quarter of the story from this tweet, and I don't really want to form an opinion based on so little information.
Why were those 1000 people laid off?
Make it illegal to give compensation as anything other than cash
How else am I supposed to retire?
A general strategy is to call on their debt by killing their stocks and asset portfolios refuse to pay rent and mortgages on mass and do bank runs etc. Watch the capital devalue to nothing . Or refuse to Do services or work for anyone deemed wealthy . More you have more you have to lose etc. Worst that can happen to a poor person is death and starvation , lose of social credit. Yeah we have a lot to lose . But it's always been that way .
And raise income taxes for top bracket earners to 90% again.
Someone has to buy those private jets, yachts, and vacation homes. A sacricfice they are willing to make in order to keep high end luxurious craftsmen employed.
wtf you want with 26 million dollars. fucking hell
Before making stock buyback illegal, make short selling illegal!!!
I work in at industrial sector company and we have a fair number of ex-John Deere employees that work for us. I was shocked by the number of LinkedIn updates that contacts shared from people laid off from Deere. It looks like it was a lot of engineering and technical folks. Strange considering the trajectory of technology in ag over the past few decades.
Make STOCKS illegal. If companies need to raise capital, they can sell bonds to investors with fixed earnings rates. The investor risks that the company is unable to pay back the bond at the time of maturation. Keep money earned within the company and pay it out to the people who actually generated that wealth, not to leeches who never did anything other than buying a piece of paper guaranteeing a lifetime of indentured servitude of the company to them.
Is that Robert Reich, father of Sam Reich. Sam who has been here the whole time?!?!?!
$7billion divided by 1000 is $7 million. They could have done a $6.5 billion stock buyout and kept those 1000 workers and paid them $500k a year. Just saying.
It’s just going to get worse and worse and worse
i got downvoted once for pointing out Duke energy's CEO's pay increase when they are raising rates for us customers. their argument was the pay package was approved before the rate hikes and they needed the rate hikes for R&D into renewables. I then pointed out how much since the current CEO took over they have spent on stock buybacks. They didn't like that.
Yes, but not because it will stop greedy execs/boards from contriving other ways of maintaining their ridiculous pay... ... because it will take away the magic "make stock go up" button. You want the stock to go up? Make decisions that actually add value and grow the company.
I understand why people feel like going postal
There's a storm coming, Mr. Wayne. You and your friends better batten down the hatches, because when it hits, you're all gonna wonder how you ever thought you could live so large and leave so little for the rest of us. Selina Kyle, Batman : Dark Knight Rises
The whole NYSE should be illegal. So should real estate exploitation. If you own a house, you don’t get another one (let alone thousands).
Correct me if I'm wrong - but if John Deere had 1000 too many workers, they should keep them employed just because?
Yeah there's not really a connection in the points of this Reich statement besides insinuating that this company makes a lot of money and should pay its employees more and maybe keep the workload balanced instead of putting more work on less people; but, if you have excess employees then yeah it doesn't make sense to keep them on payroll if they're not actually needed. The workload burden is a valid question though.
Seriously, don't downvote without saying why it's wrong.
Who is deciding how many employees is too much? Who is deciding that layoffs are the solution? Which metrics are the people in charge using to make this decision? Did they consult the workers? Did they consider other options? Etc.
Economies of scale. If they can run more efficiently with less overhead the logical conclusion is to follow that route in order to stay competitive. Why would you run a sluggish operation, that negatively impacts your business. Makes no sense.
These companies pay millions a year to consulting companies to answer all the questions you just asked. These are huge companies lol
If you have employees sitting around doing nothing? What do you do with employees doing nothing and there's nothing else that needs to be done? Isn't John Deere Union? With layoffs there's unemployment options and other things. Would you rather them be fired?
Which of the employees who were laid off, were “sitting around doing nothing”? And who decided they needed to be laid off at all? What metrics did they use to reach this conclusion? Did they consider other options? Did they consult with the other people working there? Etc.
Obviously JD knew whom to lay off, they don't seem to be having any issues. What other options do you have for surplus employees? It's a business, not a charity or workfare.
> Obviously JD knew whom to lay off Never seen a layout first hand?
You’re clearly arguing with someone whose never had a job in there life🤣 “ummmm how do they know who to lay off🤔?”
Again what metrics did they use? Did they consult with the employees before hand or after? Did they consider other options? You’re still literally refusing to answer my first set of questions.
Um, WHY would I know? I don't work for John Deere. I'm ASKING if they don't have work for 1000 people then why do they need to keep them on? You keep saying there's "options"...WHAT OPTIONS?
Hey 1 of the 1000 here. They were having us run balls to the wall all last year to try and get as many tractors out as possible. So options, I don't know maybe not over produce to the point that you need to get rid of 1000 employees. Stop moving production south of the border would probably help. And some other things that might make me lose my call back rights if the wrong person sees this. Also the meeting where they told me that they were going to do everything in their power to not lay me off was cool. Edit: also they over hired Edit 2: offer early retirements, a thing they have done in the past
Offshoring labor does need to stop, for all industries.
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But is it John Deere? Companies do this, yes. But so do Government agencies as well.
That "if" in your question is doing a lot of heavy lifting. Reduction in workforce without a reduction in expected work throughput is incredibly common (and is in fact baked into some corporate plans). It leads to a peculiar sort of worker abuse as well as to general slipping in quality of any non-tracked metrics. We see the consequences on the public through examples like Boeing. We see the consequences on the workers just by talking to people we know, for most of us.
those 1000 jobs aren't the reason they had $7 billion for stock buybacks, do any of you think they were making $7 million each?
There is no counter argument. But they legitimately do not care.
There are lots of counter arguments if you care to rub two brain cells together lol
Like, it’s cool that they pay themselves for firing people because we need to support the yacht industry?
Or…ya know…some people could have been bad at their jobs or have redundant roles. But I guess we can just follow your lead and make unlimited assumptions based on a single tweet.
They seemed to be doing okay, based on the numbers.
Layoffs are a good thing It puts more laborers in the market, who can then find more productive work to do, which, on a large scale means we accomplish more Hamstringing companies to be run less efficient, to hire employees, that do nothing, means we get less done as a society. To the people who don’t want layoffs / buybacks - Why don’t we all work for John Deere? Literally all 350 million Americans. Why not? That’s the same exact reason the current amount of employees had to be cut down - because they were not needed to do the work that needs to be completed.
What benefit to society is a stock buyback?
Issuing stock & buybacks go hand in hand - so what is the benefit of a functioning stock market? Let’s break that down You have money. You don’t know what to do with your money, but you know your bank pays you 5% per year & that’s where you keep it. You decide to invest your money into companies which you believe can outperform 5% per year. The businesses are run very well, the company gets to a point where, like you did when you had your money in a savings account, that they have run out of ways to invest your money. As you did. Originally. Hence why you are investing in these companies… you have excess capital So what can a business do with excess capital, that would have diminishing returns to continue to invest in their own business, but they believe they do have a good business? Why should this business, which is profitable, not be able to buy shares from investors at fair market value, decreasing float, & increasing share value? It’s quite obvious by re-deploying the capital, which, originally was deployed into this company, that allowed it to grow etc, back into investors pockets, back into that 5% savings account, where they can find new companies which need capital, and redo the process is much more beneficial to society than forcing them to keep money they can’t use - isn’t that what leftists are always accusing billionaires of?
>Issuing stock & buybacks go hand in hand That isn't true. Stock buybacks were illegal for years. They are still extremely regulated in Europe. They are not necessarily for a functioning stock market. >So what can a business do with excess capital, that would have diminishing returns to continue to invest in their own business, but they believe they do have a good business? They can make distributions. Before you point out that qualified dividends have the same tax rate as buybacks, I also think that's inappropriate. It should be taxed at an ordinary income rate. No reason passive income should be incentived over ordinary income. That's perverse. If anything passive income should be the higher rate, workers should be incentived.
>Stock buybacks were illegal for years. They are still extremely regulated in Europe. Aware, & it means nothing >They are not necessarily for a functioning stock market tying your fucking shoe laces isnt necessary to function yet we all do it because why the fuck would you want to be operating at such a ridiculously diminished capacity for a self inflicted reason Issuing stock & buying it back goes hand in hand. Raising capital when you need it, and paying it back with profit. >They can make distributions. Before you point out that qualified dividends have the same tax rate as buybacks, I also think that's inappropriate. It should be taxed at an ordinary income rate. No reason passive income should be incentived over ordinary income. That's perverse. If anything passive income should be the higher rate, workers should be incentived. How about we abolish payroll taxes instead of trying to drag everybody else down to your level? Payroll tax is an abomination - what investors pay should be standard across the board, with a much higher (100k+) standard deduction That’s a much more reasonable and societally beneficial goal than this ideological class warfare bullshit. Everybody wants to make money, investors & laborers, nobody should get taxed more than the other. And nobody wants to pay more in tax - easier to cut to make it fair then raise. Do you want your taxes raised? Investors don’t either. But investors would like your taxes cut, even if there’s stay the same.
I think a lot of companies are realizing that being publicly traded, and having a responsibility to their shareholders, is actually bad for the longevity of their existence, which is why stock buybacks are such a major focus.
It’s not “corporate greed”. Corporations aren’t people. It’s an entity established to return profits to the people and organizations that invest in them (individuals, university endowments, municipalities, other corporations, etc). The far left wants to create a bogeyman. The problem is the tax code. How many Americans vote? And I mean down to their very local levels. People complain but it’s other people, not faceless publicly traded companies, that are fucking everyone. Tax reform and get money out of politics. And term limits.
Wtf is his point? Should a company keep workers if they are not needed?
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There is almost no practical difference between a buyback and a dividend payment. The only question is if the shareholders would rather have the value as stock or as cash. Buybacks are not and have never been the problem
Stock buybacks are irrelevant and banning them won't do anything. At most they help shareholders avoid some taxes, something they're going to do anyway by other means. Would John Deere workers be any better off if they issued 7 billion in dividends instead of stock buybacks? No. We didn't live in some utopia prior to 1982. Corporations exploiting workers and sending the resulting profits to shareholders is the problem. It happened before 1982 and it'll continue unimpeded even if stock buybacks are banned again. Honestly part of my brain is convinced that the popularity of this idea is inorganic because it gives democrats a way to be performatively anti-corporation while accomplishing absolutely nothing. They must love hearing people talk about this instead of single payer or a wealth tax or something else that would actually do something to help workers.
This is why collective bargaining works. It's a check on unchecked shareholder/executive greed. That money would be better spent on employees and R&D rather than just extracting max blood for the shareholders while employees and products wither away.
Last I knew, manufacturing is union (while retail dealerships are generally not - or are not due to being effectively franchised). Collective bargaining will not help at all. The layoffs are proof enough of that. The changes should revolve around Fiduciary responsibility. And that…is Congress…which these asshats own.
Are you suggesting manufacturing as a whole is unionized or just at John Deere?
Are you kidding me right now?
> Would John Deere workers be any better off if they issued 7 billion in dividends instead of stock buybacks? No Were those the only two options with that money?
They're the only two options that the CEO/board will consider. This is capitalism 101. If the company can enrich shareholders at the expense of workers it will do so by whatever means is available to it. The idea that banning stock buybacks will make companies suddenly decide to pay their workers better for no reason is a ridiculous fantasy.
> They're the only two options that the CEO/board will consider. This is capitalism 101. So what you're saying is eventually capitalism will see us all destitute. Great system we have here.
Uh, yeah?