Hardly new, I’ve worked in Software for a couple FAANG-Level ones and the yearly speech by the CEO to all employees was always “Last year was an especially tough one with many hard challenges, and you’ve all done an amazing job! […] This year we will have to work even harder!” Yeah, that might be motivational once, but I’ve heard it ten years in a row… One of the reasons I exited that particular rat-race for good.
Not if the company is a employee-owned cooperative. In any case, it is not so simple in the EC with its labor rights, where a dismissal must have well-founded reasons and cannot be carried out from one day to the next.
While this is true, one of the defining features of coops is that they also tend to ask their workers (themselves) to work more for less pay during economic down-turns (mainly due to the workers also being owners). This tends to make them more resilient and less short term profit oriented, but can sadly also result in drawn out death spirals of self-exploitation.
Any company can go to hell, it depends on many factors, but a cooperative is always a preferable model, since in this case the employees work in their own interest and not only in the interest of the company and its owner. It is they themselves who can determine the needs at eye level and not accept them as subjects.
This is literally one of the pillars of capitalism outlined by people like Karl Marx.
Could you describe or name this pillar? I Want to read more on that
Worker exploitation or wage slavery? It doesn’t have an official specific name but definitely falls under those.