Billionaires Should Not Exist
Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon, has a net worth of approximately £86 billion. The current minimum wage in Scotland is £8.21. To put that into perspective, if you worked 8 hours a day on the minimum wage, every day, since the Upper Palaeolithic era you would only just be equalling Bezos’ wealth. If you made £1 million each day since 1800, you still wouldn’t have as much money as him. The three richest people in the US own more than the bottom half. This is wrong. No person “earns” this much money. No CEO works that much harder than a factory floor worker that they deserve such gross amounts of wealth. Such accumulation of wealth can only come from the exploitation of thousands of employees, and unsustainable environmental harm. Hoarding at this scale damages the economy, people’s lives, and the future of the planet.
The role of exploitation of the workforce cannot be overstated when it comes to talking about billionaires. Discarding any Marxist critiques about the extraction of surplus labour value, it is a given that any company will do as much as possible to minimise expenditure, which necessarily impacts on the employees’ wages and working conditions. This is no secret – you have probably heard of various major companies’ atrocious working conditions. I imagine that you are aware of Nike’s sweatshops in Asia. You’ve probably heard whisperings of how awful it is to work at Amazon. But do you know how bad? Have you heard about workers hospitalised with panic attacks because of the unfairly high quotas they must reach? Have you heard of employees peeing in bottles for fear of being penalised for “idle time” at the toilet? Have you heard that 82% of employees would not apply for another job at Amazon because of the working conditions? Amazon pays £8 an hour – below what is calculated to be the wage necessary to live.
This is all very obviously bad, of course, but what if corporations just… treated their workers well? What about Bill Gates? He’s a nice guy. And Microsoft doesn’t seem to have a lot of workplace complaints (if you ignore China).
That’s all lovely, and Bill’s a nice guy, I’m sure, but ultimately it comes down to the same issue of distribution. Pay varies in Microsoft, but you will struggle to find anybody paid any more than £200,000 annually. Gates is worth around £82 billion. His worth increased by about £12 billion this year. I refuse to believe that Gates does so much more works than his workers that he deserves £12 billion in a year whilst some of them get only £40,000. He doesn’t even do a fraction of the work in Microsoft anymore. When he has teams and teams of software developers and testers and technicians doing all the work, by what right does he claim a salary that is 60,000 or even 300,000 times theirs? He came up with the company? Other people are contributing just as much now that he employs them. Any profits are as much a fruit of their labour as his. I don’t care that he’s philanthropic; governments should deal with most of the stuff that charities have to do anyway, so they should tax him, and use “his” wealth in a democratic way, rather than letting some old rich dude decide which causes are worth giving to. And since Gates said that he would stop working and start giving money away to charity, he's managed to double his net worth, and overtake Bezos as the richest person in the world, in case you thought billionaires do their whole charity routine for anything other than PR purposes.
And all these examples have been from tech or clothing or sales companies. They are not even the disgusting ones. The healthcare companies who profit off of people’s sickness, the water and electricity companies who hike prices to eke every last penny out of those who just want the bare necessities of life – all have rich men at the top, and all are deserving of the highest disgust. Did you know that Nestlé drained water sources in Pakistan and Nigeria so locals became sick off sludge water, and then tried to sell the very same water back to them in Nestlé bottles. Companies have no scruples when it comes to profit – they will wreck the environment, fund right-wing projects to strip regulations and workers rights, wield massive influence over governments – all for a few extra zeroes in their bank account. This is sick, and must end.
Fortunately, this frustration and horror at the rich and powerful is becoming less and less of a fringe left-wing opinion. Bernie Sanders, a front-runner in the Democratic primary in the US, has used “Billionaires Should Not Exist” as one of his campaign slogans. He advocates for higher taxes, free healthcare and free university for all Americans. Closer to home, Jeremy Corbyn has mainstreamed many left-wing economic ideas, so much so that a drastically higher income tax on billionaires and millionaires seems possible. A pipedream of mine would be to have a tax of 100%, or near enough that it makes no difference, on all wealth over a certain amount – to create a sort of wealth ceiling – to incentivise those who can make such ridiculous money to actually spend it, funnelling it back into the economy, or putting it back into their country’s hands. An even bigger pipedream would be to have an economic system focused on guaranteeing wellbeing for all rather than profit, dominated by worker-owned cooperatives, rather than private companies. These are all a long way in the future, of course. We’re all still stuck with billionaires for now. But that doesn’t mean we can’t fight back. We can still vote for higher taxes for the 1%, for better worker’s rights, and, fundamentally, for a better life for all.