Ok.
The following link takes you to a story of my father & stepmothers business, Market Distribution Specialists.
The best paying jobs were the ones held by the owners. They would get 65 cents per book in revenue, pay someone on the street 12 cents, collect 6 cents per book in profits on top of the cars, on top of the trips, on top of the subsidized freebies like corporate gas, corporate apartments, corporate trips, corporate weddings (mine, my sisters’), six-figure salaries, more.
And the people doing the work? For 12 cents a book, they got to deliver a 2 pound hunk of recycled paper, and for $60 in total, they get to deliver 500 of them. Use their car, their labor, their time, to earn themselves 12 cents a book and my parents 12 cents per book when all was said and done.
$.12/book doesn’t sound like much, true, but we did this sixty million times in 2006, our peak.
We offered substandard pay… exploitative pay… and made $7.2 million in 2006 profits + benefits + salaries by being the industry leader in being exploitative.
That is what capitalism is about. Margins.