Political Memes

So, I believe it's a thing in rail, that workers are explicitly not blamed for things that go wrong. Called a 'no fault' system. Presumably deliberate malice still falls back on them, but for a mistake, it's considered that The System is deficient: that appropriate training/oversight/checks weren't in place. This encourages employees to speak up when something goes wrong and be honest and detailed about what happened to cause it.

I certainly don't think that model should be used everywhere, and perhaps taken to its fullest shouldn't be anywhere. (But, conversely, some of that thinking should be in most places!) But I think it's an example of a legitimate separation of workers and responsibility.

I don't know if you're meaning responsibility in the sense of when there's bad effects (e.g. a worker participates in making a baby milk formula with potential heavy metal contamination) or in the sense of deserving to reap the benefits (i.e. the full profit). Either way I think I still agree there's an imbalance, but not a true separation in the way you mean: where workers receive part (of result and responsibility) and irrelevant non-workers receive part.

Managers, consultants, lenders, advertisers, are all part of the process of making a product and making it useful to people. (Okay, some are superfluous, and some are bad; but so are some physical workers.) Even the person who inspires everyone else to get together and work, is a (valuable) part of the process. And the person who helps them not squabble and not abandon each other. If this were not true, then in a land where workers have legal and physical freedom to work together, communal working groups would be more common, would they not?

The imbalance comes down to greed, a lack of wisdom, and greed. ("You said, 'greed,' twice!" "That's because...") A big tower of greed and unwise choices, of which the largest part appears to me that the people with power/wealth are able to make the decisions so that more of the wealth comes to them. If I 'own' a company, that's a legitimate work I did facilitating a place and entity where workers can come together and produce; but now I can control that I get a larger portion of the collective profits. And I can twist every decision into that favour, by an ever-growing tower of means invented by the rich and powerful, and my ever-growing leverage from my ever-growing wealth.

Once again, you've given me interesting cues to think on. Apologies if my response is over-wordy; I blame it on recovering from 'flu.