Why do people blame "Big Business" for so much when they employ so many?

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   peeplesposted 11 years ago

   Why do people blame "Big Business" for so much when they employ so many?
   
   Do we just need a scape goat?

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   BizGenGirlposted 11 years ago

   Get your "Gene-Rational" t-shirt!  In order to understand the truth about why people blame Big Business for our current economic struggles and corrupt governmental situations - you really have to step back and see the bigger picture. That requires... read more

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3. 69

   TomBlalockposted 11 years ago

   Simple. Lets say in a simplification that, hypothetically, Walmart employed 1 manager, and 20 employees. Lets say that they took up the niche that previously, 5 businesses had taken up. Those five businesses had one owner, who also worked as the store manager, and two employees each. That's roughly 15 people.
   
   Those five managers would be what we called middle class, making between forty and seventy thousand a year. Their employees might make anywhere between twenty and thirty five thousand a year. Taking the lowest quote, that's forty thousand a year, five times, and twenty thousand a year, ten times. That comes out to 200,000 + 200,000, or 400,000 in employee pay.
   
   The theoretical walmart would be at roughly forty thousand for one manager, and 15,000 a year for each employee. That's 40,000 + 300,000 coming to around 340,000 with more employees than those whome they put out of business. Further exacerbating the situation is the fact that Walmart will not hire most people full time, resulting in more people just barely getting by on the amount of money they make
   
   What this translates to, more or less, is an overall impovershing of lower class workers, and lower middle class jobs. That in turn directly translates into less money put back into the economy to buy more products, resulting in still less jobs.
   
   The example I used is very imprecise, but more or less reflects one of the reason big business' can be bad. Not ARE bad, but CAN BE bad. If a business behaved responsibly and concentrated less of the money at the top, but instead used extra money to incentivize improved quality, service, and work ethic, there would be NOTHING wrong with big business at all.

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      peeplesposted 11 years agoin reply to this

      This is a great Example that I feel only left out one thing. Many of the people who work for $15,000 a year don't deserve more. Logically it makes sense to have many places out there willing to hire those with no education or no work history.

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      TomBlalockposted 11 years agoin reply to this

      The notion that any citizen of the United States can work 40 hours a week, doing a job that makes someone else money, and yet not be able to live a decent life is somewhat appalling, to me.

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   Disturbiaposted 11 years ago

   Because they don't see the "business" as an employer of thousands.  They just see the few big shots at the top who make bad choices and big bucks and think of the company as monster.  Imagine if all the large corporations failed, how many would be out of work. Who would employee them?  The government?  Please the government is the biggest business of all and just as or even worse than any large corporation.

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      TomBlalockposted 11 years agoin reply to this

      One of the concepts at the core of capitalism is the idea of competition and free market. If a corporation fails because of bad business policies, one that has made better choices and offers more quality replaces it.

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   Larry Wallposted 11 years ago

   People blame big business, because they need someone to blame. We have a situation in Louisiana, where a former state official, with a PhD, criticized an oil refinery for taking advantage of a legitimate tax break available to any industrial business that opens or expands. They were building a new unit to help meet new environmental laws, but it did not employ a lot of people. He then said the individual business onwers were the backbone of the economy. We came up with the theory that the big company could take the money, hire a bunch of people at minimum wage to manicure the grass each day. Using the critic's formula, that would reduce the company emission footprint since it employed more people.
   
   We need big business to produce the cars, computers, appliances, clothing and other things we use. Our population is of such size that big box department stores, mega size car lots and clinics with 10 doctors and not 1 are absolutely necessary if the people are going to be served.
   
   When big business first started with the Henry Ford's and others of that time period, the same arguments were made. It is called adapting to the growing population, adapting to the demands of the people and adapting to the growing body of regulations and laws that many small individually-owned companies could never afford.
   
   Right now people are complaining about gasoline prices. Imagine how high gasoline would be if the major oil companies did not exist and we were not producing oil and refining it into gasoline. Imagine how many people would be out of work. A study I commissioned with I was a PR spokesman for the oil and gas industry showed that each exploration and production job supported four other jobs and each refinery job supported 11 other jobs. Considering the size of the oil and gas industry, you are talking about a lot of jobs at oil companies, hardware stores, real estate agencies, grocery stores and the like that would be impacted.

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   nightwork4posted 11 years ago

   needing a scape goat is about right. people love to blame others for all their problems, it's one of the things that makes even religion work, you know the devil made me do it. it drives me crazy when i see people saying our economy is terrible and then they go out and buy things made in another country because it is cheaper. the next day they want a raise from work because life is so expensive but if they get a raise and so does everyone else, guess what, life just got more expensive. it's absurd.

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   eternals3ptemberposted 11 years ago

   Most protests aren't complaining about manufactures. It's speculative banking and ALEC that they target. They aren't out their saying "Ford is the reason were here!" or "Down with refrigerator manufacturers!" because that would be idiotic. It's the "Rockefeller 'we-made-a-killing-moving-around-money' Love Canal J. P. Morgan Enron beneath-the-table-campaign-sponsoring job-exporting monopoly" type things that anger people.

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