Martin Roger L, Moldoveanu Mihnea C
Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto.
Harv Bus Rev. 2003 Jul;81(7):36-41, 116.
For much of the twentieth century, labor and capital fought bitterly for control of the industrialized economy. The titans of industry ultimately won a resounding victory over the unions, but the story doesn't end there. In today's economy, value is largely the product of knowledge and information. Companies cannot generate profits without the ideas, skills, and leadership capabilities of knowledge workers. It's these factors--not technologies, not factories, and certainly not capital--that give the most successful companies their unique advantages. As knowledge workers come to realize this, and see that the demand for their talent outstrips the supply, they are steadily wresting more and more of the profits from shareholders. This time the battle is between the sources of capital and the producers of value, and how it will end is far from clear. The roots of the current conflict lie in the twentieth-century shift from industrial to managerial capitalism and the creation of a new class of professional talent, the authors explain. Since the arrival of the information-based economy in the past decade, tensions have escalated. The dramatic rise of CEO pay--and the public fire it has drawn--is a telling symptom. With this new battle, we're also witnessing a fundamental change in the political alignment of capital. The Left is now siding with "the common shareholder" against the well-compensated top tier of the labor pool. Shareholders seeing an unprecedented proportion of the return on their investments siphoned off to employees may well ask, is there no end to it? Increasingly, it's human capital that is the basis of value, and financial capital has become far more generic than shareholders would like to believe. The growing tensions between shareholders and managers cannot be ignored, and capitalism is at a crossroads--again.
在20世纪的大部分时间里，劳工与资本为控制工业化经济展开了激烈斗争。工业巨头最终在与工会的较量中取得了巨大胜利，但故事并未就此结束。在当今经济中，价值很大程度上是知识和信息的产物。企业若没有知识型员工的创意、技能和领导能力，就无法创造利润。正是这些因素——而非技术、工厂，当然更不是资本——赋予了最成功的企业独特优势。随着知识型员工逐渐意识到这一点，且发现对其人才的需求超过了供给，他们正稳步从股东手中夺取越来越多的利润。这一次，斗争发生在资本来源与价值创造者之间，而结果如何还远不明朗。作者解释称，当前冲突的根源在于20世纪从工业资本主义向管理资本主义的转变以及新的专业人才阶层的出现。自过去十年信息经济到来以来，紧张局势不断升级。首席执行官薪酬的大幅上涨——以及引发的公众关注——就是一个明显的症状。随着这场新的斗争，我们还见证了资本政治联盟的根本变化。如今，左派站在“普通股东”一边，反对薪酬优厚的顶级劳动力群体。股东们看到他们投资回报中前所未有的比例被抽走用于支付员工薪酬，可能会问，这难道没有尽头吗？越来越多的情况是，人力资本才是价值的基础，而金融资本变得比股东愿意相信的更加普通。股东与管理者之间日益加剧的紧张关系不容忽视，资本主义再次处于十字路口。
