The Curse of Capitalism

To what extent do powerful corporations and wealthy business owners exploit working class citizens?

In nature, stronger animals often take advantage of those that are weaker. A hierarchy exists in which apex predators such as tigers and crocodiles prey upon smaller animals such as deer and fish in order to survive. Human society is no different. Those at the top are the ones who have the money and power to influence and control those below them. However, unlike in nature, these powerful corporations and wealthy business owners oftentimes take advantage of working class citizens out of sheer greed rather than a necessity to survive. They utilize a variety of methods to squeeze the most money out of their workers that they can while providing the least amount possible in return. Corporations and business owners exploit the working class by utilizing cheap, low-skill labor and advertising false opportunities for workers as a ploy to scam them out of their hard-earned money.

During the Gilded Age, wealthy businesses such as Standard Oil and Carnegie Steel took advantage of their workers by forcing them to work long hours with little pay. At the time, the economy was booming due to industrialization and the arrival of new European immigrants from Eastern and Southern europe who provided a readily-available labor supply for urban manufacturing jobs. However, rather than leading to an improvement in the living conditions of workers, this increase in capital went directly into the hands of greedy industrialists who exploited the workers for their own personal gain. Business owners sought to employ the cheapest labor possible by hiring children and women laborers and implementing techniques such as Taylorism, which sought to maximize efficiency by forcing workers to perform monotonous, low-skill tasks over and over again. Although they attempted to justify these practices through ideologies such as social darwinism which claimed that the rich deserved to be rich because they possessed certain desirable traits such as hard work and intelligence which gave them an advantage over those below them, it was clear that they were unfairly exploiting the working class for their own selfish purposes. By keeping most of the profit made through the hard work of laborers in a period of massive economic growth, wealthy business owners and corporations contributed to the rise of huge inequalities in society and exemplified the concept of the rich exploiting the poor. Even today, such economic exploitation continues, although not as obvious as it was in the Gilded Age. Popular companies such as H&M and Snapple have been involved in numerous controversies regarding their use of sweatshop labor in which they use cheap offshore labor to manufacture their products. Such companies are able to profit off of workers by paying them much less than they sell the products they make for, causing it to be difficult for these workers to earn a living and support their families.

Capitalizing off of this financial desperation caused by giving workers such small salaries, powerful corporations and wealthy business owners are able to exploit workers even farther by advertising false opportunities for them to improve their quality of life. Such a scenario is portrayed in John Steinbeck’s novel The Grapes of Wrath, which describes the plight of the Joad’s, a rural family forced to migrate to California in the hopes of seeking a better life during the Great Depression. After their crops are destroyed during the Dust Bowl, the Joad’s receive a brochure from their landlord advertising the wide availability of jobs in California and the opportunities available to start a new life. However, the Joad’s soon find out that the brochure is yet another ploy by the elite to further exploit the already desperate working class. When the family encounters a rugged man at a squatter settlement who claims to have been to California and then came back, they are met with their first bitter taste of reality. The man reveals that the same brochure was given to tens of thousands of farmers just like the Joad’s, and yet the brochure states that only two-thousand jobs were available. He goes on to describe how many migrants were therefore unable to find a job when they finally arrived in California, and those who did were paid barely enough to even survive on. Rather than improving their lives, many of the migrants were left worse off than they had to begin with. Having little to no money left over from making the long, hazardous journey to California, and then being unable to find a job, thousands of migrants starved to death even as abundant amounts of fruits were being produced for commercial purposes. Instead of giving this surplus to the multitude of hungry families who desperately needed it, however, landowners and companies chose instead to destroy it rather than see store prices drop. Indeed, the true victors within the story are the business owners and elites themselves, who make massive amounts of profit by selling overpriced goods to working class migrants as they travel to California and then exploiting the cheap, abundant labor supply once the migrants arrive. The hardships endured by the Joad family in the face of vast injustices committed by the wealthy elite throughout the story continue to resonate today as stark reminders of the horrors of working class exploitation.

When economic growth and opportunity exists, so too will exploitation and inequality. It is necessary to find a balance between these two factors so that a society can both progress and innovate while also providing for the well-being of its citizens. Issues such as welfare and minimum wage, which are widely discussed in our modern-day society, must be carefully addressed in order to ensure the future well-being of our country.