Companies are about to find out just how expensive it is to remove front line labour.

They don’t care. The executives that made this decision already got their bonus for it. If they have to retrench, they’ll simply try this again in a few years.

Corporate and stock-market incentive structures are…perverse. They incentivize very short horizons, usually a quarter or at most a year. We’d have a much less sick society if those in charge weren’t allowed to realize gains for at least five to ten years.

And yes, I’m aware that communism worked on the idea of a five- or ten-year plan and it had problems with dealing with short-term supply-chain issues. Market-based solutions work great for things like warehousing, logistics or distribution because the feedback is immediate and the costs aren’t externalized. Where the costs are external and long-term, but the profit in realized in the short term, market solutions fail.