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by Laurent Bossavit.
Original Post: Paying for their profits
Feed Title: Incipient(thoughts)
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Feed Description: You're in a maze of twisty little decisions, all alike. You're in a maze of twisty little decisions, all different.
On TV yesterday, a piece about how each year, in a 2000-employee business running a factory that cuts up chicken, fifty to a hundred employees develop such bad RSI (repetitive strain injuries) that they need operations, often suffering permanent damage. This to support ever increasing demands of the corporation on their "productivity" (while lines of the unemployed outside grow longer).
The corporation turns a profit of a few fractions of a cent per poultry cut up into pieces, enabling it to outpace the competition, grow bigger, and negotiate with employees from an ever stronger position.
Meanwhile, "unmeasurable" costs to society-at-large accumulate, first in the shoulders, wrists and elbows of those cutting up chicken ever faster. Then in social security costs when these people need their extremely expensive operations, followed by expensive periods of paid- for leave of absense. Then in further social security costs when these people are fired because of disability, drawing a meager pension for the rest of their lives in a lose-lose situation with the rest of society - no longer contributing much, still a drain on everyone else's resources.
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