Startups, assembly plants and corporations

Eduard Míka

April 20th, 2024

Reflex Capital → Blog → Startups, assembly plants and corporations

We all remember how a certain Prime Minister spent weeks wavering in front of the media lens to get Amazon to create a few hundred jobs for warehouse workers in our country… at a time when agencies were importing labor from Ukraine, Romania, Bulgaria, Mongolia and who knows where else, because no Czech worker was interested in a warehouse job. We can also break our backs so that some other company from Asia will set up an assembly plant for its products here, only to close it down again after a few years when it finds out that labor is cheaper elsewhere. And the excitement when some other big multinational corporation lands here and starts picking off the brightest while they’re still in college so they can plug them into the modern slavery system, wring them out, and kick them out into the job market when they’re 50 (and now you worry about them until retirement, state), because they are worn out and unpromising, and their places are being taken by young blood eager to start climbing the corporate ladder, the highest rungs of which, where they can make a difference, they won’t reach anyway.

And then there are the thousands of young and older enthusiasts who are trying to invent and create something new in startups and succeed globally with it. They work for many years for wages that are much lower than they could get elsewhere, and share the risk of failure with startup founders. But we are not willing to do anything for them. Not even employee stock, so that in the tiny percentage of cases where success does eventually come, their income from the sale of stock is not taxed as wages. And if we do anything, it is in a way that is completely useless because it does not solve the problem. An unnamed minister commented to the media, “If we do it, other companies could use it, not just startups”. Yes, Minister. Of course, Minister. That’s a good one! We couldn’t have had better proof of the lack of understanding of the problem. Especially so that those start-ups that are turning over every penny to survive and are unable to pay competitive wages continue to have no means by which to reach and retain a quality workforce. Lest the whole creative and innovative sphere accidentally grow so large that it starts to make the future of this country dependent on those assembly plants and corporations. Somehow – I don’t know why – the memory of the movie Even Bigger Idiot Than We Hoped for popped into my mind.

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