The Illusion of Job Creation

By Nick Mullins - The Thoughtful Coal Miner, April 12, 2015

Disclaimer: The views expressed here are not the official position of the IWW (or even the IWW’s EUC) and do not necessarily represent the views of anyone but the author’s.

Many people believe that corporations are out to create jobs–at least that is what most industries use as an excuse to push for decreased regulation and tax cuts.

It’s no surprise that most people who follow along with this idea are terrible critical thinkers, or at least have a similar sense of psychopathic, self-centered greed as the corporations themselves. I’ve heard some people say, “They worked hard and deserve to keep their wealth,” to which it must be assumed that every corporation began and ended with the original founder of said company and nothing was ever been passed down to the next generation. But I digress. Back to why so many people are terribly misled.

Corporations are actually out to make a profit. It is the legal obligation of a public corporation to their stock holders. Legal obligation…that means by law, as in, they can get in deep shit if they don’t make profits for their stock holders.

If that means using less people to get more production, they will do it. If that means lowering wages or decreasing benefits to reduce labor overhead, they will do it. If that means taking cost saving short cuts and lobbying against regulations meant to protect people living near their operations, they will do it. If that means shipping jobs overseas so they can do all of the above, they will do it. If that means designing a system of economics that makes us all utterly dependent upon working their jobs to buy the food they produce and to purchase the medicines we must then take and to buy the vehicles, gas, and auto insurance to allow us to go get all of these things, then you better believe they’ll do it–or rather, they have done all of the above. We are at their mercy.

It’s not a Conservative vs. Liberal issue, its an Everybody vs. Corporate America issue. Corporate America has the money and power to corrupt our political system AND they’ve got plenty left over to spend on media to keep people fighting amongst themselves rather than see what the REAL problem is. For any of the 314,000+ people who have “Liked” Count on Coal’s Facebook page, do a search for Count on Coal and the National Mining Association. Wait, I’ll do the work for you…here click this link….

Its simple. Who sets the prices we pay for the things we need (such as food and shelter)? Corporations. Who sets the wages we are paid? You guessed it. Corporations.  It’s the same thing that used to happen in the coal camps with company scrip, company stores, and company housing. The company sets the wages low while they jack of the cost of living in their camps extremely high. It is slavery, or the more appropriate term, wage slavery.

Today, we just have a much bigger company that is broken up into thousands of subsidiaries to give us all the illusion of a free market when its really all owned by a handful of people at the top. Only 85 people own 50% of the world’s wealth. Think about that. That’s an actual FACT. Did you know that?

I used to hear the term “cost of living” in reference to the small wage increases we might get each year and that was never enough to cover “inflation.”  I never really thought about it, but the entire phrase is ludicrous. Why does it “cost” to “live?” Maybe that’s why the Native Americans fought so damn hard. Maybe that’s why our Appalachian ancestors stayed in the mountains–at least until the corporations came and stole everything and put them to work in their mills and coal mines. But at least they had enough commons sense to do a little critical thinking and realize the companies were there for a profit–not to create jobs.