We’re the commons

Have any economists modeled the consuming public/workforce as a public good?

It seems to me that corporations are playing a game-theoretic game in which they individually want to pay less money and employ fewer people while simultaneously hoping other corporations will keep employing people and paying them enough to maintain a customer base for their product. In other words, a social contract.

What we’re seeing now is the result of too many corporations defecting over the past 30 years. A tragedy of the commons, where we’re the commons.

The flip side of this chain reaction, of course, is that consumers demand lower and lower prices because they can’t afford what they used to. In order to compete, companies are forced to send manufacturing jobs to countries where labor costs are lower, so even more people can’t afford what they used to.

How do we stop it?