Don’t Blame Workers for Price Rises – Blame the Profiteers: The establishment wants you to blame workers for price rises, but wages have flatlined for a decade – the real cause of inflation is the profiteering of big corporations and the super-rich.
Don’t Blame Workers for Price Rises – Blame the Profiteers: The establishment wants you to blame workers for price rises, but wages have flatlined for a decade – the real cause of inflation is the profiteering of big corporations and the super-rich.
37 comments
Gotta protect that bottom line. The shareholders demand it.
Russell brand made a decent video on this two nights ago, highly recommend
The real question is how much profit does a company need to stay operating year by year.
Why do companies need to make billions in profit? Who’s the greedy ones in the corp world?
“but we have to buy everything at a higher price!11!”
“By the way, RECORD BREAKING PROFITS!!”
“Oh, no no no. We can’t afford to give you a pay rise at this time.”
Companies are [literally being advised by consultancies](https://web.archive.org/web/20220610122845/https://www.bain.com/insights/forget-the-standard-inflation-playbook/) to profiteer just now.
My work made a 4billion profit during covid and gave us a 2% payrise to then see about 4.5% rise this February, they then took the extra off the table and now wonder why our union has gone full scale national grievance considering cost of living has increased by around 12% in the last year are they surprised. 4billion profit for the company in this country alone with under 1k workers.
The real cause of inflation is a fundamental lack of competition
You can’t put prices up if the consumer can just go next door to a firm with a lower price.
Quantity adjusting firms will always outcompete price adjusting firms.
Inflation is always, everywhere a lack of competition. Price rises will only stop when firms are genuinely scared for their market share.
So why are the competition authorities not taking action?
> Profits are driving inflation, not wages. The left should be repeating this line until we are blue in the face.
Not a strong opening sentence… Rising costs are driving inflation.
Energy is currently ~3x more expensive than a few years back and that impacts **everything** from refining materials through transportation, processing, even the electricity to run web servers.
A shortage of grain thanks to the war in Ukraine is also driving up food prices, and Brexit has handicapped our businesses meaning _even more_ costs for them.
Record fuel prices, Record profits,Record fuel tax dollars. Those at the top say how hard trading conditions are and how greedy works are wanting a living wage
>a decade
Lol
How about twenty years
Companies are always greedy, and they always want to increase their profits. We don’t always see high inflation. So it seems pretty obvious that corporate greed is at the very least an incomplete explanation for what is driving this current change (stupid to blame workers though)
The govt pissed away loads during covid whilst lining their pockets and are now clawing it back from the workers.
Well, yeah, we all know the current situation and how we got here over the past 40 years, it certainly can’t be blamed on the people at the bottom, those with the least control over anything.
Are there people actually blaming…..the workers? 😂
That would be ridiculous. Surely nobody believes such nonsense, unless it pushes some narrative that they stand to cash out from?
You’d have to look at operating profits, cost of sales etc.
Many companies won’t be profiting with increased costs.
The world’s biggest corporations have been riding a three-decade wave of profit growth, market expansion, and declining costs.
meanwhile
Amazon, eBay, Adobe, Google, Cisco, Facebook, Microsoft, and Apple faced UK corporation tax liabilities of £297 million in 2019. That puts the total amount of tax avoided by the companies in the UK at an estimated £1.5bn in 2019, the latest year where figures exist. 2 Jun 2021
We when a company increases its prices due to inflation causing things they buy to be more expensive we all just have to accept it.
But when the workforce tries to do the same they can’t as it’ll cause inflation?
Rampant money printing!
40% of all US dollars in circulation were printed in the last 12months. With the Bank of England printing nearly 1Trillion GBP since COVID.
Things are not necessarily *going up* in price, the units of measurement are *going down* in value.
For example if we woke up tomorrow and a Foot was 14inches, would we claim everyone was now shorter?!
They print money, hand it to big corporations that don’t need it and keep interest rates artificially low to promote borrowing. This squeezes the working & middle classes as they get paid less (in real terms) and their savings reduce in value.
It’s not just greedy corporations.
Exactly. Following bexit there was no more desperate immigrant cheap labour, so many jobs are simply not desirable anymore. Funny that not being able to exploit immigrants is been touted as a bad thing, whereas the obvious solution of paying more money to attract workers is evil. “No British person wants to work these jobs” “why not?” “They’re not nice jobs and the pay is crap” “so pay more money and improve conditions” “we can’t afford to do that and remain obscenely wealthy” “sounds like you have a terrible business plan, if the free market shuts you down someone else will meet the demand, they’ll just not be as wealthy as you are now due to having decent working conditions, whereas you will be broke” “no, we should be able to ship in desperate immigrants and exploit them, or are you a racist?”
Capitalism is slavery
But if it wasn’t for the profiteering, the super rich would only be extremely rich.
I blame Brexit, geopolitical forces, and massive money printing necessitated by a pandemic, but that’s just me
I don’t care about inflation. Just the transfer of wealth from the poor to rich. People can’t just go on earning less every year, with all these economic absolutes inserted by the establishment for the people to swallow like it’s inevitable. The rich are richer than ever, the poor increasingly left with less, that’s it, the end. If there are millionaires and billionaires and companies making billions and millions, give some of it back. Sorry if that’s simple for economists who appear on tv, but I think.in essence things are simple. They’re made complex to confuse people as they’re robbed.
You simply don’t understand.
There’s always another yacht, supercar, mistress, designer watch, artwork, newspaper/TV channel (for spreading misinformation and to divide and rule) or small island to own.
People don’t realise how hard it is to accumulate wealth; there’s taxes to avoid, politicians to pay off, er, “lobby”, taxpayer subsidy schemes to rape, independent journalists to threaten, workers to steal from, wheezes to concoct, etc. Human rights? Food, clean water and healthcare are there to be profited from…
You should have more sympathy for the super rich. They’ve got it tough.
The root cause is the bedrock of our resource allocation system, which is anti-eudiamonistic Randian capitalism. The profit motive in a Darwinian context is awful. When that becomes *virtuous* as exemplified by American culture, the only real barrier to self gain is a slam-dunk indictment for murder.
All of this is given tacit (or actual) approval by the masses. It’s not as if we don’t have 2000+ years of thought and documents available to help educate people about this shit. Everyone should be able to understand how deeply flawed and perhaps fundamentally suicidal it is, even if they can’t see it for themselves.
I blame the predators only slightly more than the prey, as both roles really are *choices*.
Wages aren’t and haven’t gone up so its bleeding obvious its not workers wages driving inflation!
No, it’s the monetary policy.
No inflation is caused by the economic shock of lockdowns.
The blame game helps nobody.
There are more levels to this; for example: companies retaining cash off shore to avoid tax, people borrowing against assets instead of selling them to avoid tax, people holding property offshore to avoid regulation (why are london prices so high?). Etc. Etc.
Who has ever blamed workers exept people who have never been one. Its quite clearly the people who are on a london townhouse a year and have the ability to just add 10% willy nilly.
the top is ALWAYS trying to pit the bottom against eachother instead of looking to the real problem… at the top.
The article makes no sense. It states that “IPPR and Common Wealth found that 90 percent of the increase in profits over the past few years was accounted for by just 25 companies.”
However, the two examples it uses are Watches of Switzerland, which is the largest retailer of Rolex watches, and LVMH, which owns brands like Louis Vuitton and Dior.
Clearly it is not profiteering by these companies which are causing a 16% annual increase in the cost of pasta or a 13% increase in butter.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-61891649
It’s hoarding of riches.. it’s that simple.
When Multimillionaires are becoming billionaires but can’t give inflation beating pay rises to staff… then said staff can’t buy things to enjoy their lives, this then leads to buying on credit which in turn makes somebody richer and makes the poor people poorer furthering the divide.
If they spread the wealth around instead of hoarding it away then we wouldn’t be in this situation.
The question is just how long before EVERYONE opens up their minds to see theyve been fucked over for far too long
It is a huge attack on the common man. The super-rich declared war on all of us; individual entities such as the EZB and others are to a large extent responsible for the insane inflation. (Proof: Compare EU countries with Switzerland’s inflation.)
This can not be maintained. It is time to tax the super-rich as well as Boris and all his entourage that enabled this (and those in other countries too).
Or maybe just maybe it’s the price of oil & gas
The issue with companies making profit has always been when they become publically traded. At that point it isnt enough for a company to just make a slight profit, they need to continually overperform or they risk having their stock price and shareholders “lose confidence”.