Children, children, let Papa Wyrm quote you a quote. But first, drop your 'total dystopia' at the door; it doesn't
actually fit into Shadowrun. Cyberpunk, yes - but this isn't exactly Cyberpunk 2020, now, is it?
The amount of assets the Big Ten claim is almost beyond scale, easily accounting for at least a quarter of the world's wealth (in all likelihood, this figure is much higher, especially if you estimate secret funds and hidden ownership).
If that number hit 40%, it would be obscenely high - and probably just about what Wobbly thinks is low. (Wobbly is, by Captain Chaos' description, a 'retro-anarchist'. In my estimation, his conservative estimates would be about my overestimates, so I'll call that 'about right' for our purposes.) That is functionally 'for any iteration of the Big Ten'. Yes, they've only gotten bigger, but you can only get so big before you
cannot keep absolutely everything you acquire; a monopoly is a very rare beast indeed, and only ever seen locally.
People in the AAAs do not work 13-16 hour shifts (that's your "8 to 9" shift, "plus a couple/three hours overtime to show your loyalty) for 6 days a week, and this isn't because they'd rebel; it's because the human body can't
handle that level of toil without crapping out sooner instead of later. By sooner I mean 'two weeks', not 'two months and you get a new wageslave'. The body
shuts down. People in crap jobs in what was Costa Rica and in the Philippines and Malaysia and the Ivory Coast work 10-12 hours a day five days a week; a lot of manager-sorts in fast food in the US do that, and are 'required' to do it (or are required to be scheduled for it, anyhow). Even
that takes a toll, but it's survivable. 13-16 hour days six days in a row, a day to 'recover' ... the body can't handle it.
(N.B. - yes, I know the stats out of the workhouses in the Industrial Age. They didn't change because management felt sorry for the workers, they changed because workers were getting revenge, and giving them lighter schedules was
less expensive than replacing their Very Expensive machines.)
The AAAs are where everyone wants to
be. The corporate drones work 8-10 hours a day, 5 days a week. The loyal ones put in an extra hour or two and work a half-day on Day 6 to boot. Drones don't want to get the boot (especially if they've been raised in the corp!!) because they don't know how to handle not being in that structure - but
despite that panic, if they get the boot, yeah, they'll be on the street - but they're exactly the sort that A-corp is hunting for, and will get snapped up well ahead of Lug the Trog From West Albania St. in Puyallup.
And y'know what? Drone Z, who's experienced that three weeks of pinching pennies and eating flavorless soy and major, major panic and how am I going to survive the rest of my life, is going to become one of the Loyal Ones because he never never ever wants to risk that again.
How much wealth do the other corporations control? Get down to it, how much wealth do they control today? We can say that 'the top 5% control 95% of the world's wealth', but that's done by way of corporations - and really, that isn't going to have changed much if at all. Damien Knight doesn't have a billion nuyen stuffed under his mattress any more than Oprah Winfrey does; they have it
invested. They're worth billions
on paper, but the paper that represents those billions is invested - in corporations, in control of corporations. Or, from another angle, those corporations control those billions in wealth.
Similarly, wealth that doesn't move isn't wealth - it's money in a piggybank. I pay you $1.00 for NERPS, and I pay $0.09 to move that NERPS down the street, where I sell that NERPS for $1.11. I've just made $0.02 - but I've only done so by paying you $1.00, and the gas and transport people $0.09. I've invested my wealth, recouped my investment, and made a profit. That can't happen unless ... I buy NERPS from you in the first place, and make my wealth
move.
Meanwhile, you got $1.00, and the little guys got $0.09, of which the gas company got $0.05, the transport people got $0.03, and the guy who did the actual transporting got $0.01. His
entire paycheck is only equal to half of my profit ... but, poor sod, that's how I make my living, and that's how he makes his. Be damn sure he'll be back at your docks tomorrow to pick up the NERPS I'm purchasing from you then, because that IS his living, even if it takes him nine hours to get NERPS from Point A to Point B.
And yes, if he quits, we can find another driver - but that disrupts the flow for a bit, and by gum people want their NERPS and they want them now. If I kill Transport Guy off by working him too hard, or if I have to train Street Guy to become Transport Guy, that's going to squeeze the flow of NERPS, and reduce MY opportunity to make profit by selling the public NERPS. (BTW - NERPS on sale, now only $1.10. Buy today!) I want TG to work his ass off to make that $0.01 - but not so hard that he croaks, or gets sick, or gets fed up and blows up either my shop, his truck, or your NERPS production facility.
It's all about profit - or as the Chromed Accountant says, "It's all about dollars and sense." Dead/sick/PO'd employees don't make a profit. Yes, we can tell them how good they have it compared to the people 'out there', but while the Big Ten corporations control 40% of the world's wealth,
they don't control 40% of the world's population. At a general estimate, Renraku had 100,000 citizens in Seattle; we know that there were 90,000 of them inside the Arcology when it blew. 100,000 out of 3,000,000+ = 3.33%. Lower, because that ballpark figure IS a minimum. And Renraku was one of, if not
the, most significant corporate presences in Seattle, all because of that great Arcology experiment.
Yes, they control lots of people; no, it's not going to be equivalent to their control over the world's wealth, because then what the frag's the point? The idea is to gain MORE of the pie, not 'just enough for your slice of the people'...
ImaginalDisc, someone once came up with some interesting ballpark figures about that. This was pre-4th, and might've been pre-3rd, but it boiled down to 60-120 shadowrunning teams: 60 mages and deckers; 120 adepts and riggers; and 300 muscle of various other flavors. Obviously, it's implied that mages and deckers would tend to work for more than one group, or work for one and sometimes 'hire out' to others, but ...
