this post was submitted on 20 Apr 2024
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Small business owners are not necessarily scum, but holy shit, they can be. In my experience, they are 1000 times more likely to actively break the law in order to exploit you. These are the people who would have owned slaves, who would have fought against abolition. These are the people who give the government a kill list with your name on it.
The reason I say not all is because there are some people who just own cafes and bake really nice muffins, which doesn't have to mean the same as owning a dry cleaners and exploiting undocumented workers.
It goes without saying that all landlords are evil by definition though.
I kinda have started wondering if there's a difference between somebody wanting to be "self employed" and somebody wanting to "own a business"...
A whole lot of overlap in that vinn diagram, but there's gotta be a chunk of people who just want to do a thing without having a "boss" and the only way to do that is to "start a business".
For sure, I mean the danger zone begins when you start employing people. Just thinking out loud now, I don't know what the solution is to that, to start a co-op instead? I feel like it isn't totally straightforward because say you do just want to run your own cafe and sell your own cakes that you bake, you put down £100k for the property, pay all the bills, get all the ingredients, and do all the work, then you get someone in to do the dishes, how do you renumerate them fairly? I suppose the solution becomes much more obvious if your cafe was born from the result of some kind of community enterprise rather than your own private accumulation of capital.
The different ways you can figure somebody's "pay" makes things weird too.
Do you split the "employee pay" evenly between all the workers each week/month?
Do you pay everybody the same hourly wage but some people work more hours, and get paid more at the end of the pay period?
Do you set hourly wages on whatever the "prevailing wages" are locally for the position?
Each one has justifications and each one can be criticized as not being fair for different reasons. Its a big head scratcher. Does make me have a bit more respect for small places that are mostly staffed/run by family. If the great grand parents started a bakery, and by the time their kids/grand kids took over the original debts are paid off that could give a lot more flexibility in paying people more. "Could" is doing a lot of heavy lifting though...