If you buy stock in a company during an IPO, enabling it to buy equipment, make things, and sell them at a profit, you get some of that profit back forever. If the company invests some of its profits to keep growing, you get even more profit back over time.
If you work for a company, making things that the company sells at a profit, you get your day's wages. If the company invests some of its profits to keep growing, you get the same day's wages as before. If you find a process improvement that increases profits even more, you get the same day's wages as before, plus maybe a one-time bonus or fixed raise.
A company with money and equipment but no workers can't do anything and won't make a profit. So why aren't the workers entitled to a share of that profit for investing their time and effort (and opportunity cost) just like the people who invest money? Even the equipment makers get a share of the profit or revenue sometimes.
“The American economy runs on poverty, or at least the constant threat of it,” New York Times columnist Ezra Klein wrote in 2021. “The barest glimmer of worker power is treated as a policy emergency, and the whip of poverty, not the lure of higher wages, is the appropriate response.”
Yes. See current UAW strike news.
It's striking how anything in the US that looks like a pro-worker movement gets diverted. Occupy Wall Street never came up with a workable political agenda. Black Lives Matter turned from an focused anti police brutality movement into a "wokeness" initiative so diffuse as to become a joke. Populism turned into Trumpism, centered around a leader who is a landlord. About the only real success is Fight for $15, to increase the minimum wage.
If you work for a company, making things that the company sells at a profit, you get your day's wages. If the company invests some of its profits to keep growing, you get the same day's wages as before. If you find a process improvement that increases profits even more, you get the same day's wages as before, plus maybe a one-time bonus or fixed raise.
A company with money and equipment but no workers can't do anything and won't make a profit. So why aren't the workers entitled to a share of that profit for investing their time and effort (and opportunity cost) just like the people who invest money? Even the equipment makers get a share of the profit or revenue sometimes.