Torri Estes
In any profit-based system we can identify primary incentives, including expediency and convenience. We can see how greed makes capitalism not only unsustainable, but indifferent to human and nonhuman life.
We can see this in the way we allow fossil fuel companies to buy our land and resources, how the cycle of poverty allows for a never-ending sea of people willing to except dirt wages with no other option, how we are more concerned with “the economy” than the future of our planet, how we colonized Indigenous people to steal their land and strip them of their culture, how we allow for the people of Yemen to starve while bombing the civilians in the Middle East to “protect them,” and even how we enslaved people so that we could produce crops for our financial gain.
We have stripped global citizens of their value so that we do not have to see them as people — only mechanisms of profit. I say “we” because we all participate in this system and perpetuate it through compliance — forced compliance.
While capitalism is a greedy and exploitative system, it has always relied on laborers for its function, but with new technology in a new phase of domination, our necessary place in this system will no longer exist. We will no longer be the cheapest or fastest source of labor — something that does not need sick time, or a worker’s permit, or legal protections for working hours and breaks, or even a salary, will replace us.
This issue is here and now. Not in a dystopian novel, not in the future. It’s happening now.
As one of the most renowned capitalists in the United States, Jeff Bezos, explains about Amazon, “There are two kinds of companies, those that work to try to charge more and those that work to charge less. We will be the second.”
While this may sound like a motivational quote for entrepreneurs, its consequences are painful and can be seen in the management quotas for Amazon. According to Business Insider, Amazon managers are required to fill quotas in regard to firing their employees, with a target of 6% of the workforce in a certain amount of time.
Amazon has publicly stated that it intends to replace a large percentage of its employees with technology. According to The United Food and Commercial Workers International Union, Amazon has cut 1,300 warehouse jobs across 55 facilities and replaced them with technology, and is paying employees up to $10,000 to quit their jobs. Amazon claims it will recover its losses from the expenses in under two years.
According to Professor Alex Halavais from Arizona State, “They have probably already replaced more jobs than they have created. The slow recovery in the U.S. is closely tied to our worker productivity, which is in turn related to our use of technology. We are only at the cusp of this, and I suspect it will be far more obvious and pronounced by 2025. I suspect that ATMs and self-checkout are just the starting points. As some kinds of standardized service jobs become more easily addressed by scalable technology, they will go the way of phone operators and bank tellers. Right now, things like food service, travel, and hospitality are being kept human for cultural rather than purely economic reasons, I suspect.”
A common argument advocating technological advancement in the workplace by proponents of capitalism is that it will lead to faster and better quality services. The contradiction of this argument is open for all to see in the United States’ health care system.
The U.S. is one of the very few First World countries without a public or free healthcare system. Instead, we have insurance companies that can run up to thousands of dollars a year for coverage and, whenever they want, require copays and possibly not even cover medical costs. However, the U.S also has some of the most advanced medical technology in the world because of this profit incentive system.
We must ask ourselves, though, who is given access to this? Many lower and middle class families fear the hospital because they know how much they will be indebted, while the costs of health care are nothing to the wealthy. Do you need an ambulance ride? No, that’s $3,000 I don’t have. Need a life-saving surgery? No, I don’t have insurance.
This same concept can be applied to the workforce. If we are to replace jobs with technology because it is faster and cheaper, the people who once possessed those jobs now don’t have the money to buy those services. The wealthy, who own businesses/capital, can pass that down to their children, who can invest and make more.
Capitalism is a system that incentivizes people to go for the quicker and cheaper option, even if that option is the one that takes away our employment and source of income. Am I saying that the world will be taken over by robots and the wealthy? No. What I am saying, however, is that “cheaper and quicker” is not always better.
In the same way that we lost 3.7 million manufacturing jobs to China because companies found a cheaper source of labor, we can lose many more to technology. Along with our humanity.
Torri Estes of Minot is entering her junior year at Poland Regional High School. In addition to writing for her school newspaper, Estes is actively involved in Lincoln-Douglas debate. Her future plans include higher education, which she hopes will lead to law school.
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