'Good' business does great by downsizing and streamlining, by paying its workers the minimum it can get away with for the maximum amount of work it can squeeze out. This is efficiency, and this is what it's all about. Our economy is founded on principals of cost efficiency and productivity. But does this mean our society should be too?
The idea is that if your company masters efficiency, and is a hard, fast, streamlined hive of productivity your company will succeed and you will become rich. Hooray. And if you don't own a company, but are a hard worker with in-demand skills, you should be alright. Well done.
But there will be a pay off. All the people who didn't cut it; who couldn't be fast enough, flexible enough, skilled enough... They can be streamlined out of your business model, but not out of existence. Just because they don't work for you, doesn't mean they're not going to be your problem. Consequences will result, whether through crime, unemployment, illness, disability, the feel of society or the cohesiveness of communities... We're all inter-related, inter-dependent, and can't all be boiled down to clever market forces. You may make great savings and great profit in your work, but there will be a cost somewhere along the line. It might be financial, which is easily understood in our economy and may provoke action (preferably by someone else). Or it may not be directly financial, which is more difficult. How do you price the human costs of unhappiness, exclusion, fear, loneliness, pain, anger or suffering? What goes around, comes around - in one form or another. Better surely to create a society that takes account of this cycle? That factors in the indirect human costs as well as the direct financial ones?
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