Process
Status Items Output None Questions None Claims None Highlights Done See section below
Highlights
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objection that profitability will be threatened inadvertently reveals a profound truth about the nature of wages and labor. The protest is a reminder that these companies’ revenues are produced by the working class — and their profits come from squeezing workers dry.
✏️ In general, I’m always offended by the corporate complaint that a particular action would hurt their profits. Fuck your profits, especially when it comes at the expense of the people you’re affecting with your inhumane decisions. Somehow we’re supposed to actually feel bad that a company might make 2% less obscene riches, in return for a single barely basic human right, or worse to return a human right that they excised in the past. 🔗 View Highlight
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Canada’s economy, like all capitalist economies, is dominated by monopolies and oligopolies that average steady profits and work to ensure maximal returns.
✏️ All highlights below provide a base understanding of capitalism and its processes 🔗 View Highlight
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According to data from Statistics Canada, multinational companies, which make up roughly 6 percent of all Canadian enterprises, control about 15 trillion in assets worldwide and roughly 67 percent of the total assets in the [Canadian economy](https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/11-621-m/11-621-m2019001-eng.htm#a2). Between 2015 and 2019, the most recent year for which data is available, total corporate profits rose from 239 billion to $409 billion — with profit margins rising from 9.2 percent in 2015 to 9.5 percent in 2016, 10.5 percent in 2017, and 11 percent in 2018, before dropping slightly to 9.6 percent in 2019.
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Over the same period, Canadian finance and insurance firms had a net operating profit averaging up to 35 percent, while food and beverage stores are thought, despite data limitations, to have had net profits averaging closer to 6 percent. All told, these firms and multinationals command an enormous share of social wealth, divided further up and down the supply chain between the owners of retail stores, mines, car plants, and the country’s financiers and speculators.
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Martin Pelletier, a portfolio manager at TriVest Wealth Counsel, candidly described Canada as a “nation of oligopolies” that are “not good for consumers but great for investors.” He showed how every key sector of the Canadian economy — banking, telecommunications, energy, and the like — is dominated by a tiny handful of firms, who have ruled their respective roosts with little competition for decades. These companies consistently enjoy steady and high returns, despite providing increasingly limited services and, in many instances, implementing job cuts, reduced wages, and diminished benefits for their employees
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Globalive CEO Anthony Lacavera and the journalist Kate Fillion make a similar observation when they write:
Six companies dominate the Canadian banking industry. Four companies dominate the internet-service-provider market. Three companies dominate English-language television broadcasting, the supermarket industry, and wireless telecommunications. A duopoly dominates the airline industry. And so on.
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In the world of capitalism, it is not an exaggeration to say that all firms work together to keep wages low
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The reason behind this is that the firms’ income is directly linked to the labor of the working class. Tools, facilities, and raw materials, when put into action by workers, create value, which is built upon the efforts of past workers. The connection between wages and profits is one of subtraction.
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In the productive sectors of the economy, workers produce the revenues and profits that are split between their employer and the financiers backing them. Beyond the workplace, a similar dynamic exists, where international and domestic capital continues to exploit the working class through practices such as offering high-interest loans and engaging in price gouging
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Wage fixing helps ensure that workers keep less of the value they produce in the direct production process
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The desire for profit incentivizes Canadian bosses to collaborate, share information, and conspire to prevent workers from demanding higher wages. By the lights of the free market, this is rational behavior. It is what enables them, as capital owners, to take a larger portion of the value created by their workers. Regardless of whether their wealth is acquired through legal or illegal means, it is all unjustly obtained. This is the reality of workaday capitalist exploitation