When I read this topic, I get the following picture in my head:
It's the early 20th century England. Everyone and their grandmother is poor and looking for labor.
Craig Rothwell is sitting in his office on the roof of his successful skillet factory, and stares out of his sooty office window at the city below. Rain is falling, endlessly beating against the old tin roof, pouring down the outside of the thin stained glass sheet and slowly making its way down to the dirty street below. It is with a heavy sigh that he finally turns away, briefly glancing at a month-old stock chart pinned to the wall, before finally sitting down at his desk again.
It isn't the line on the chart that is bothering him; things had been going well recently. More and more households had finally gotten electrical stoves, and stainless steel skillets were sought after like never before. No, the issue he had was with the factory itself.
Until recently, it had been easy finding workers for the factory. Unemployment rates had been skyrocketing, and every day he had seen hundreds of workers queuing outside of the factory grounds, each one of them desperately looking for something that only Craig had to offer, since every other job opportunity in the area was taken, had salaries below what was humanly reasonable, or required too high qualifications for "common laborers" to be able to apply. This had made Craig confident; he knew that he was the only still reasonable employer around, so for each worker he fired, he'd just be able to grab another one off the street and within days he'd have a working factory again. So he had thought, why should I have any obligations to these people I can replace so easily? If they complain about their salaries, or about the way they were treated in the factory, I should just throw them out; we don't want those kinds of people around.
That's how he had been thinking, and his approach had been working for almost 3 years now. During this time, other factories had been popping up in the surroundings; factories that had labor unions and good salaries, and that offered laborer protection and insurance. Craig still had the highest salaries around, however, so people were still drawn to his factory, but after a few issues with accidents - some workers had came out of the factory one day with only one hand, and some had evolved strange speech deficiencies; they would just stop talking every dozen of minutes, and all the time there was Craig, helping most of the injured, but always being verbally abusive towards them or disrespectful - They were only laborers after all! - the workers started glancing at the other factories in the vicinity.
This had continued to escalate up until about a month ago, when a labor union had been founded for the workers in Craig's factory. There was reason to complain: some workers hadn't gotten their pay for a very long time, and they were growing tired of waiting for it. That's where everything started to go downhill.
Craig claimed that his customers hadn't been paying, and that he was unable to pay the salaries because of that. Most workers believed him - he had been paying salaries for years, after all! - but some were starting to doubt him, and suddenly people started leaving the factory on their own. Interest in the factory soon diminished completely, as the other factories nearby offered better working conditions and started employing more and more workers.
Now, when Craig was staring out of his window, he only saw an empty street below. The water from the rain had pooled into a little lake in the middle of the street - the caretakers of the factory had left a week ago, and nobody had bothered to unclog the cesspool outside of the factory entrance. He once again turned away from the window, not wanting to see the decay evolving before his eyes. He had hopes that he'd at least be able to keep the people currently working in the factory interested - or else he would be facing certain doom.
