5 ms·

You won't see the big, "respectable" unions get involved because under the Taft-Hartley Act general strikes are pretty much illegal. https://web.archive.org/we

• TeeMassive 5y ago
  > https://octoberstrike.com/ https://octoberstrike.com/ Too bad they mixed political ideology in what would have been otherwise a unifying populist movement. Remember, most socialists are upper middle class and above. > Our Goals: 25% corporate tax rate (No loopholes) Free Healthcare for all 12 weeks paid paternity and maternity leave $20 minimum wage 4 day work week Stricter Environmental Regulations on Corporations (Bans on single use and micro plastics, and limited emissions) For some reasons every socialist I talk to actually think a 15-25 hours week of work is sufficient for society to function, I never really got a good explanation how productivity will increase to accommodate such a drastic drop in labor outside of theoretical predictions. Also: Corporations can move, and re-invest their profits. Such high profit taxes are usually counter-productive. Loopholes will always exist. You can't stop them from leaving. There is a reason that most western countries US barely produces anything outside of IP and petrodollar. Free Healthcare for all is a lie. Nothing is free. Positive rights lead to slavery or worker revolts and shortage. We are living this right now in Canada, nurses are tired of doing obligatory overtime. They're just quitting. Hospitals are closing, literally. The US health care system is inefficient due to litigation and regulations pushed by lobbying to maintain private monopolies. High minimum wage will just accelerate automation and the disappearance of low-skills jobs.
  • tehjoker 5y ago
    > For some reasons every socialist I talk to actually think a 15-25 hours week of work is sufficient for society to function A good chunk of that can be improved with full employment. Capitalism also leaves a significant amount of storehouses/factories/etc unused because they're not profitable to operate. We don't have a large enough labor-force to operate at full capacity right now (I think including unemployed), we'd need more immigration for that. Reducing busywork jobs like advertising that suck in more labor in a pointless arms race will free up people for productive labor. Another hope is that a society that has everyone cared for on a fairly even basis will have less crime and so reduce the need for guard labor. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/TCU https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/TCU > Corporations can move, and re-invest their profits. We can take control of the actual physical plants and prevent them from escaping. Money isn't real, physical reality is. > Free Healthcare for all is a lie. Many countries have this, even poorer countries than the US. In any case, even libertarian think tanks found M4A would reduce the cost of healthcare by removing complexity from the administrative side at minimum. Pricing can be negotiated down via monopsony. > High minimum wage will just accelerate automation and the disappearance of low-skills jobs. Not if the workers control the economy. They will not want their jobs to disappear unless they are promised placement and training. If those are provided, you may see even higher levels of automation as there will be reduced resistance to it. Not many people care if a business process changes so long as it won't leave them on the street.
    • TeeMassive 5y ago
      > A good chunk of that can be improved with full employment. Capitalism also leaves a significant amount of storehouses/factories/etc unused because they're not profitable to operate. You obviously do not have a lot of experience in manufacturing and technology. Factories can close for many valid reasons: inefficient process, lack of resources, lack of talents, consolidation with other factories, etc. These are all necessary for any kind of healthy systems. > We don't have a large enough labor-force to operate at full capacity right now (I think including unemployed), we'd need more immigration for that. Immigration is simply moving the problem to another country and is a major problem for developing countries where they people who can keep the lights on are leaving. Mass immigration also leads to lack of integration and social unrest. > Reducing busywork jobs like advertising that suck in more labor in a pointless arms race will free up people for productive labor. I'm not for useless marketing but it has a necessary function. Letting people know of potential better solutions is critical. A lot of problems are not known as problems that can be solved by those experiencing them. Also who gets to decide what is "pointless"? There are no good answer to this question, especially in a technological society. And even if marketing exists purely as a way to get an edge in market competition, removing competition itself always leads to complacency and corruption. > We can take control of the actual physical plants and prevent them from escaping. Money isn't real, physical reality is. Who is "we"? Most likely not you and me. And the idea that the plants and the workers will automatically keep working at "our" command is just pure fantasy. Organization is not tangible, yet you can't ignore them. Even if you remove the collective convention of money you will not eliminate the phenomenon of supply and demand and who gets to decide always lead to conflict, waste and corruption. And your phrasing of "prevent them from escaping" is very telling of what a dystopia that would be. > Many countries have this, even poorer countries than the US Yet Free Health care does not exist. Someone has to get paid, or be forced to stay to work by force, like is happening in Cuba. > In any case, even libertarian think tanks found M4A would reduce the cost of healthcare by removing complexity from the administrative side at minimum. If you think that a multi-trillion industry with very close relationships with those in the government would let that happen then you are very naive. The cost will be moved and renamed as the regulations, over-licensure and over-litigation will remain as the root cause of the problem. I live in a "free" health care system, it's more or less the same BS than in the States, but instead of worrying about money we worry about getting service in the first place after waiting hours or days or nothing at all. > Pricing can be negotiated down via monopsony. Keyword here is "can". I get it that you are unfamiliar with the horrors of the governmental procurement processes? Here's a hint: always taking the lowest bidder rarely leads to actual low prices. > Not if the workers control the economy. In reality only a handful of people can "control" a system. These people rarely tend to be actual workers or never have to work after they "control" others. This is a fantasy at best. > They will not want their jobs to disappear unless they are promised placement and training. If those are provided, you may see even higher levels of automation as there will be reduced resistance to it. Not everyone can "learn to code" or acquire new higher level skills. Not all automation leads to more jobs, and even if free market automation can make life dirt cheap and diminish required labor (which is kind of the case since a poor person probably has higher level of living than a king of a few centuries back).
  • shadilay 5y ago
    >High minimum wage will just accelerate automation and the disappearance of low-skills jobs. Isn't that considered a good thing?
  • tayo42 5y ago
    At a high level 15 25 to hours a week is all that's necessary because the other 15 to 25 hours of work is mostly bull shit filler, and automation can help rest. wwe have ccomputers aand machines doing so much yet we keep working harder and harder, or atleast filling our time up with "work"
  • londgine 5y ago
    > Positive rights leads to slavery Does the positive right for every child to receive 12 years of education result in slavery?
    • eigengrau5150 5y ago
      This is kinda tangential and hella cynical, so feel free to ignore the following. > Does the positive right for every child to receive 12 years of education result in slavery? It isn't slavery. It's just imprisonment. At least, that's how it felt to me and it's how it feels to a lot of kids who haven't lost touch with their own true feelings in order to please the adults around them. I don't think children actually get 12 years of education. They might spend twelve years going to school, but the actual academic education they get is probably something they could pick up with a year of concerted effort. It's a grotesque waste of a child's time to keep them in school for so long just for such a limited academic program, but that seems to be the outer curriculum. The inner curriculum is about habits: obedience, punctuality, constructive obsession (aka "good work habits"). It's not the academics that matter in the real world, but the ability to do what you're told and con yourself into thinking that jumping through hoops is inherently worthwhile. We call the kids who excel at this "college material", and allow them to do more of the same at their own eventual expense via student loans.
      • londgine 5y ago
        > It's just imprisonment I think you misunderstood my comment. I was countering the claim that positive rights (such as the right to healthcare) cause slavery (for the doctor). In the context of TeeMassive's comment, he was implying that doctors would be forced to provide their labor to patients if the government declared a right to healthcare. My comment about how the right to childhood education does not cause slavery was referring to the teachers point of view, ie. that the teachers are not enslaved.
        • eigengrau5150 5y ago
          That's what I get for trolling right-wing trolls at zero-dark-thirty. Sorry.
  • eigengrau5150 5y ago
    > Remember, most socialists are upper middle class and above. I don't buy this. I also think that the size of the middle class in the US is grossly overestimated. IMO, if you get a W2 because your income is based on wages or a salary, you're working class. Middle-class people own small businesses and have no boss besides their customers. Yes, I get that this isn't the standard definition. I don't particularly care. > For some reasons every socialist I talk to actually think a 15-25 hours week of work is sufficient for society to function... This is partly based on predictions made by John Maynard Keynes, an economist of whom you might have heard. https://www.openculture.com/2020/06/when-john-maynard-keynes-predicted-a-15-hour-workweek-in-a-hundred-years-time-1930.html https://www.openculture.com/2020/06/when-john-maynard-keynes... He expected that labor-saving technology would advance to the point where human needs could easily be fulfilled. However, I suspect he rather badly underestimated the human capacity to mistake desires for needs and to create new desires where none previously existed. Also, I don't think he saw neoliberalism coming in the 1970s, which badly eroded the power of workers to organize and claim their rightful share of the wealth their work made possible. > ...I never really got a good explanation how productivity will increase to accommodate such a drastic drop in labor outside of theoretical predictions. Is it really your acquaintances' job to explain this to you? The theory is all published in books, some of which are even in the public domain and should therefore be freely available. > Corporations can move, and re-invest their profits. Corporations are not sovereign. They exist at the pleasure of the governments that issue their papers of incorporation. The state of Delaware giveth, and it can taketh away just as easily (and it should rather more often than it does). Being shielded from personal financial liability so that you can't lose more than you've invested in the business is a privilege, and one our governments give out as if it were candy. This is a policy choice, and one that can (and perhaps should) be changed. Rich people, like governments, exist on sufferance. If they abuse their position in too egregious a fashion, the people will protest. If their protests go unheard, they will eventually remember they have the right of revolution. > Whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute a new government, laying its foundation on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness. It might be worthwhile to remember that the American revolution in 1776 was as much a revolt against the special privileges granted to the British East India Company as it was against lack of representation in Parliament and the alleged tyranny of King George III, and it was only after non-violent and legal remedies had been exhausted that revolution became a popular cause. > Such high profit taxes are usually counter-productive. You think 25% tax on profit is high? It has been 50% before, and businesspeople should be on their knees thanking Mammon that the tax is levied on profits instead of revenue — that they pay taxes on their net instead of their gross. https://www.epi.org/publication/ib364-corporate-tax-rates-and-economic-growth/ https://www.epi.org/publication/ib364-corporate-tax-rates-an... > Positive rights lead to slavery or worker revolts and shortage. I'm not convinced that positive rights lead to slavery. I know F. A. Hayek made this argument in The Road to Serfdom, but I'm not convinced this is the case. Nor am I convinced that worker revolts are a bad thing. In fact, I think part of the problem is that we've gone without worker revolts for entirely too long, and that resentments and frustrations that could have been aired and resolved have instead gone unaired and unresolved, building up and festering to the point where their release threatens a crisis. That's why I say every day is a good day for a strike. I honestly believe that defiance is what makes us human, and that the reason every toddler seems to count "no" among their first words is that the ability to say "no" is — more than our capacity for creating and using tools — the very quality that makes us human. It's the first step toward individuation and self-actualization. > We are living this right now in Canada, nurses are tired of doing obligatory overtime. And in the US, we have closed drive-thru fast food joints and dollar stores because of workers staging wildcat strikes. That's not because of "free healthcare" in Canada or excessively cushy unemployment benefits in the US. It's because not only are there not enough nurses to handle the load, but the available nurses aren't getting paid enough to deal with the downsides of their job — not least of which is the risk of getting COVID themselves because people won't vaccinate, won't wear masks, and there isn't always enough PPE to go around. When people quit their jobs, they're saying "my life matters". Their life means more to them than your convenience, and why shouldn't it? They only get one life, just like you. Why shouldn't they value their own lives as highly as you value yours? People say "nobody wants to work anymore", but I think the reality is that nobody ever wanted to work. I don't think anybody actually dreams of labor unless they're having a nightmare. We work out of necessity. That's why we expect to get paid for it and why most people react to talk of "intrinsic motivation" with suspicion if not (suppressed with varying degrees of success) hostility. If it were fun we'd call it "play" and do it for the sheer joy of it. > The US health care system is inefficient due to litigation and regulations pushed by lobbying to maintain private monopolies. Not to mention a lack of price transparency and our dependence on employer-provided group health insurance. Health insurance should be for catastrophic events like cancer, not routine preventative care — which ought to be paid for out of taxes as an investment in the people and a public good. We used to understand this, but years of right-wing propaganda financed by billionaires seems to have buried this knowledge. > High minimum wage will just accelerate automation and the disappearance of low-skills jobs. I don't see anything wrong with this. Any work that can be done by machines should be, because work sucks. This is why I think we should be demanding universal basic income as a form of economic suffrage. It's the 21st century; I don't think there's any excuse for anybody to live in poverty. I think Elon Musk not getting his own galaxy-class starship is a fair price to pay for no American to ever have to fear homelessness or hunger.
  • orwin 5y ago
    > High minimum wage will just accelerate automation and the disappearance of low-skills jobs. Isn't this a net positive? Then we can reduce work hours, no?
  • mindslight 5y ago
    > every socialist I talk to actually think a 15-25 hours week of work is sufficient for society to function I'm a libertarian. But I'll point out that full time was 40 hours before women entered the workforce, doubling the amount of workers. Add in technological progress and the gains from offshoring, and 15 hours per week might even be too high. From my perspective, all that surplus has gone to supporting the value of the dollar in the face of extreme monetary inflation (the dynamic that MMT proponents are trying to double down on), creating many make-work jobs centered around the new money fountains - eg Wall Street.