Productivity

I watched the new show "Undercover Boss" where the boss goes undercover in his operation to see what his employees work and live like. Most of the time these bosses seem shocked that their employees are treated the way they are, have low morale etc.
This isn't a huge shock to be honest, after working similar jobs as the people on the show, low morale is the least of their problems. I had this job at one point where we were clocked every minute of a 7 hour workday. Breaks were lined up by the minute which is fine, if we had more out time than the allotted breaks we had to fill out a report as to why. Half the workers smoked and yet we had to smoke outside in very cold weather. The tools at our disposal were totally inadequate, we didn't have internet and the about 7 times I got suicide callers I wasn't even allowed to contact them later or to contact the police and send them to the address.
Yes I totally love to know that 7 people out there were desperate and depressed enough to tell a random guy that they were going to kill themselves. Entertain me with their sad stories, how it feels to be 15, pregnant and kicked out by parents, how it feels when your 4 year old son dies and not even know what happened to these people.
Some might be cold enough to ignore this, I am not.

At the end of the show the CEO brings the employees who have been hurt by slaveownerish policies by these companies and presents them with some arbitrary gift without changing the policies. The funny part of this is that it shows the divide in thinking between the CEO and the employee. If the CEO put in place policies that improved how the people felt about the company they work for productivity would go up, slacking off, stealing from the company and not giving a shit would go down.
I don't screw over a company that treats me fairly, and like a person as opposed to employee 281. Of course stock prices have to go up every year, so where does a company that is already streamlined and effective go? They have to push the margins, on the product, on the production of the product and in every line, except well the CEO salaries. You see those also seem to go up, stock options, bonuses, golden parachutes and so on. So with a limited amount of money to cover salaries, benefits, and so on, the company has to make a choice.

You can't really squeeze the top dogs at a company because they are the guys who "keep it running" sure every employee helps a company keep afloat, but the top guys are the people who keeps it afloat the most. They are the guys making the big deals, the faces of the company and so on.
They are also hard to replace, a guy flipping burgers, answering phones, delivering lunch and so on can easily be replaced, especially in todays jobmarket where the unemployment seems to go up every month.

Think about it, like a Donald Duck cartoon. Scrooge has all the money, Donald is in debt to him, so Donald is forced to work at a slave wage doing menial tasks exactly the way Scrooge wants him to. Now you can't fire Scrooge, but you can find someone to do Donald's job of polishing coins.  Scrooge has the money, he has the connections, he makes the big deals happen, Donald shines coins.

So when you have a CEO making 300x as much as a regular worker, there is a slight distribution problem. I'm a capitalist but I also think some things are obscene. Communism can't really work but I do think taxing the shit out of luxury items might.  Let's be honest nobody needs 40 room mansions, nobody needs a huge boat, 20 cars etc. So how about this;

Cars that cost over a certain amount has a high tax, maybe as much as 50% on them.
Mansions have a similar tax, lets make it a % of the sales value, to prevent people just hiking the price of them.
Now these taxes would go towards things like universal health care,  Increasing the minimum wage, and generally improving the standard of living for Lower and middle class. One could even give tax breaks on normal house, home loans and so on.

What this would do is to redistribute wealth from the top to the bottom, yeah sure it may be against what all the people who've recently read and started masturbating to "Atlas Shrugged" by Ayn Rand but it would help. You see I am of the belief that a lot of things are like the high end audio cables most audiophiles orgasm in their pants about. Sure they look pretty and saying how much better they are makes you feel good, but the human ear can't tell the difference.
Sure some things are nice to have but why do they matter? That's the problem, we've moved away from a culture that cares about character, integrity and knowledge and onto what a person owns. We don't need most of the things we want. I don't need a TV in the bedroom, I don't need a fridge that makes ice-cubes, I don't need a coffee maker with a self timer, I don't need a million different knives in my kitchen, or sun-dried tomatoes from the Sicilian cost marinated in extra extra virgin olive oil.

My body doesn't know the difference between a slice of bread and pure sugar, my body can't tell the difference between a prime cut and a crap cut of beef. I still enjoy the nice stuff but I don't need it to live. That's the problem we indulge, and indulge and indulge, until there is nothing left to indulge in. We're a culture of overindulgers, going from one lust to another.
It's not just sex, drugs and food. It's religion, Television, videogames. Religion has gone from spirituality to commence, Television has gone from something you watched once in a while not the whole day. Video-games are made to be as addictive as possible.

We're a world of people who have strayed from our path, we don't get the adrenaline and stimulant rushes from our brains that we used to in our lives so we have to mass produce them. From bungy-jumping to sex addiction to emo's cutting themselves and people pouring pure high fructose corn syrup down their throats. It's all a hunt for rewards from your brain.