11 ms·

Work, Work, Work – So a Few Can Be Rich

81 points by robtherobber 4y ago

NoblePublius 4y ago
Laughing at the thought of engineers making $400k reading this and identifying with it.
- pwinnski 4y ago
  It's been a while since I dug into the French Revolution, but I think many software developers today would be considered "petite bourgeoisie."
janandonly 4y ago
> Since Taylor, management gurus, led by the Toyota Corporation, devised “lean production,” with its systematic hiring, work teams, cross-training, just-in-time inventories, and kaizen. This last, Japanese for “constant improvement,” is an insidious form of continuous speed-up. Management stresses the production system—by, for example, taking away a team member or speeding up an assembly line—and work teams are pressured to keep production running smoothly. Autoworker Ben Hamper, author of Rivethead, described modern auto factories as gulags. And no wonder. Workers must labor 57 seconds of every minute.
- hef19898 4y ago
  This is propably the biggest missrepresentation of TPS I have read in a while.
OrangeMonkey 4y ago
> Only a radical change in how work is done and who controls this can make labor once again an integral part of life, one through which we can fully develop our capacities as thinking, acting human beings. uhh. The article appears to suggest that we change who controls our labor... #1 - we do, we can quit anytime we want and find another place to work for. #2 - I assume they are railing against private individuals and private companies. Sorry, no. I've seen how government control of the workforce ends. The books been written. I'll pass, I never liked the horror genre.
- 5350-uiop-1130 4y ago
  > #1 - we do, we can quit anytime we want and find another place to work for. speak for yourself, i sure as hell can't.
  - OrangeMonkey 4y ago
    I believe that the point of life is to become more than we are. My friend - grow to where you can. I wish you the best.
    - badcppdev 4y ago
      Your wishes are worth zero. - Would you be willing to oppose corporations controlling the government with bribes/campaign contributions? - Support a judicial system where poorer people can access justice? - Tell your representatives that wage theft should be punished as seriously as theft and fraud?
      - OrangeMonkey 4y ago
        I don’t think this vitriol is warranted or reasonable. * I would support completely disbanding corporations who bribe officials, and jailing its officers * I think the biggest problem with our judicial system is the prevalence of plea deals leading to a lifetime of regret for those who ignorantly take them. Fix it. * I believe wage theft is theft and would like to see jail time for those involved. I imagine I’ve a harsher view than you on these elements. But, more to the point, even if I wasn’t this opinionated I dont think this hate is warranted.
        badcppdev 4y ago
        Apologies for my misunderstanding. I meant zero hate or vitriol. I categorised 'wish you the best' the same as 'thoughts and prayers' but you probably didn't mean it like that. I wanted to draw a contrast between actions that only effect an individual, like your example of quitting a bad job, and actions that effect society, i.e. changing the rules to close the loopholes that businesses use to exploit their workers. I think we both agree that systematic societal change would be a good thing. Cool.
onlyrealcuzzo 4y ago
If you took all the income from the billionaires and distributed it evenly, the average person wouldn't even get a 2% raise. If you took all the wealth and distributed it evenly, the a average person wouldn't even get $500. In the US - Billionaires have $1.3T: https://americansfortaxfairness.org/billionaires/ https://americansfortaxfairness.org/billionaires/ That's ~$3880 per US person. Globally, there's a lot more people, and countries aren't as rich as the US. Even if you count their entire change in net wealth in good years as income - their best year ever - during the pandemic - Billionaire wealth increased $240B. That's not even $900 per person in the US. Median salary was almost $43k: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_income_in_the_United_States#:~:text=The%20U.S.%20Census%20Bureau%20estimated,full%2Dtime%2C%20year%20round https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_income_in_the_Unite.... That's ~2%. This is counting billionaire income and realized and unrealized capital gains - cherry picked to the best year ever. It's a massive overstatement. Even if you cherry pick the best 11-year bull run ever - from 2010-2021 - Billionaire wealth increased $2.57T. That's $697 per year per person. Barely a 1.5% increase. Even if you try to get exclusionary - let's only include workers - not children, retirees, or the disabled or the poor - you get ~$1400 per person per year - a ~3.3% increase. And it's a ridiculous idea. If you took all their capital gains starting in 2010 - they wouldn't have compounded. Most of the gains wouldn't have occurred. You'd end up with an even smaller number less than 1% for everyone, less than 2% for workers. It's not the reason people who work at Google and Intel aren't mega rich. And even in the US, Billionaires are definitely not the reason that people who work minimum wage or don't work at all are poor. Billionaires are concentrated disproportionately in rich places like the US and the EU. Globally the true picture disputes this article much more. There's 5x more people on the planet than in just the US and the EU - but the billionaires there have almost 70% of billionaire wealth. Do billionaires have enough money that it's creating systematic problems and we should do something about it? That's a different question. They don't have so much money that they're causing everyone else to be poor.
- vladharbuz 4y ago
  This is true, but I have a slightly different question to ask. Imagine you work at, say, a game development company, along with 99 other developers. The only other member of the company is a CEO and shareholder, who decides how much to keep for himself and how much to pay the employees, but, importantly, does none of the actual work himself. Let's say the game is wildly successful and the employees are collectively paid 60% of the profit, with the remaining 40% going to the sole shareholder. This is not an uncommon arrangement, and it is allowed and encouraged, culturally and legally. Morally and practically speaking, not legally speaking, does this not amount to wage theft?
snidane 4y ago
Another Marxist in a new coat. Good analysis, wrong prescription. Been there, done that, ended up badly. Look into Georgism, that's where the cool kids are now. You don't need a revolution, you need a minor shift in tax code that you haven't thought of yet. It's not the problem of your employer that prices around you increase, so don't make them a villain that you can't pay your rent. Go complain to your slumlord for riding the inflation wave and tak(x)ing away any raise and disposable income your employer gave you. Explanation by a game designer: https://youtu.be/FTZH0Y6OS7g https://youtu.be/FTZH0Y6OS7g
- refurb 4y ago
  You got on the one hand, the Open Free Market System in America, you have on the other hand, the exact opposite, the closed, controlled, command economy of the Soviet Union… The Chinese tried the Communist model, with their own modifications, and it failed! And they have admitted that it failed. The kids today talk as if these things have never happened. They haven’t learned!
  - noughts 4y ago
    I agree that the last thing we should do is to go back to the Soviet Union, but its relationship to many of the alternatives available today is a common misunderstanding. The Soviet Union was described as "socialist" simply to cover up the awful inequality and abuse of power that was at the centre of it. The Soviet Union was basically the opposite of socialism, and this is easy to understand if you compare it to the most basic tenets of socialism, such as socioeconomic inequality. I think that there are a lot of alternatives to both our current Western economic system and the Soviet Union, and I think that if you try to look a bit closer at many of the systems "the kids today" are talking about, in particular the principles and values behind them, without getting caught up in the labels, you'll be pleasantly surprised! Perhaps you would find this list of books I compiled interesting? https://vladh.net/wage-labour-resources https://vladh.net/wage-labour-resources
    - refurb 4y ago
      My response was a bit - tongue in cheek as that's a quote from Singapore's PM during an election campaign. His point was if you remove the competitive aspects - the individualistic ones, the system grinds to a halt. The USSR and China were abusive because you need to be abusive to force people to give over labour for which they don't own the proceeds of. Small time farmers in Vietnam had riots over the collectivization of their land into communes (and the "Communists" there dropped it in favor of capitalism). These are subsistence-level farms who can't read or write - yet they understood the injustice of taking away one's freedom to live of the fruits of your own labour. A far better solution is to separate the economic system with the political one (which communism tries to meld). There is nothing that says you can't have a capitalist system that protects worker rights, or that heavily taxes and redistributes. Rather than killing the goose that lays the golden eggs, figure out how best to use the eggs to the benefit of everyone.
0xy 4y ago
As opposed to communism, which will make everyone work like dogs so that the elite party members can be rich (like Maduro's goons). 100,000,000 dead but let's try it again, because that wasn't real communism.
- vladharbuz 4y ago
  Do you think the only available and conceivable options are two bad systems, and nothing else?
  - tristor 4y ago
    No, I don't think that. However, the site linked that this article is on is using communist imagery, so is no doubt communist. Criticizing an article that implies a call for communism for that call is not a lack of imagination on the part of the reader, but rather recognizing what is being implied.
bjarneh 4y ago
> ...between 1971 and 2018, 3,280 trade unionists were murdered in Colombia. > Is there a solution? Not within this system. No amount of union organizing or progressive legislation will alter the nature of work in it. Why are they killing the union leaders if unionization does not work? The massive push by large industries to get unions out of the mix indicates that unions helps workers massively. Collective bargaining changes everything for the workers as companies are forced to give them a much larger part of the value they produce. A society where people make good money also creates a positive spiral of consumption which makes it much easier for others to create well paying jobs as well - when people actually have money to spend.
- einpoklum 4y ago
  > Why are they killing the union leaders if unionization does not work? They're killing union organizers because unionization _does_ work... when the organizers don't die in the middle of setting up a union. (Of course, "works" doesn't mean "works perfectly and always", or that unions don't have their own internal challenges and risk of bureaucratization etc. etc.)
- VictorPath 4y ago
  In 1985, FARC entered a peace process and began working electorally and non-violently. The right never went for this and despite the government agreeing to a peace settlement, the right slaughtered political candidates, trade union leaders, etc. So eventually FARC reformed and began its armed campaign again. Something to think about for complaints about FARC "terrorism" from 1985 on. Actually they began doing so well that the US began having to bankroll the Colombian military with Plan Colombia (not a new thing, Kennedy was doing the same thing on a smaller scale).
NoblePublius 4y ago
“44 years later he died of emphysema”…sounds like he had a long and fruitful life.
kris-nova 4y ago
Very familiar sentiment to thoughts I have been thinking and feeling over the past year or so. Interesting to see more of this stuff popping up. I am starting to think unionizing is going to be the path to start pointing the majority of folks towards. https://medium.com/@kris-nova/why-i-wrote-hacking-capitalism-5094d26d4fef https://medium.com/@kris-nova/why-i-wrote-hacking-capitalism...
anm89 4y ago
Keep writing! We are just one or two more articles from everyone susddenly realizing that capitalism is mean and overthrowing the system. What will we do afterwards? Who cares! That's not nearly as much fun as whining.
- VictorPath 4y ago
  > whining We workers are bombarded consistently with whining about estate taxes, carry interest and that sort of thing. Actually the recent senate bill was held up over the fight over carried interest, a fight which was won by the funds. However when the workers who create all the wealth press for their interests, it is "whining". Insofar as the afterwards, to quote Malcolm X "anywhere is better than here".
  - anm89 4y ago
    Good luck. I'm sure you'll get your revolution any day now.
m0llusk 4y ago
This is missing a lot of history. There was a lot of Anarchist violence in the 30s that led to things like the Inheritance Tax, now repealed. Up until Reagan it was possible to live reasonably well and even raise a family on a minimum wage. Now even middle class people can barely make it and are vulnerable to large medical bills. The past was not impossible. It actually happened. And we should be able to use that experience to craft something better if we really care to. Getting distracted with "Not within this system" talk is useless. The system can be changed and honed so let's do that.
- nunez 4y ago
  > Up until Reagan it was possible to live reasonably well and even raise a family on a minimum wage. Now even middle class people can barely make it and are vulnerable to large medical bills. This feels like an oft-repeated trope to me. Do you have books or stats that back this up?
- eternalban 4y ago
  There is another bit of history that possibly informs the change. ~Up until Reagan, US needed to present an alternative to communist and socialist systems. Post USSR collapse, 'history ended', and that's when the neo-liberal genie was let out of the bottle. This is a somewhat cynical view, but imo not an unreasonable speculation.
- refurb 4y ago
  Up until Reagan it was possible to live reasonably well and even raise a family on a minimum wage At least according my grandparent's that's an absolute falsehood. Unless you assume "live well" in a 600 sq. ft. house doing manual labour in the sun and having your spouse take care of grandma who is dying of cancer for which there is no treatment.
  - m0llusk 4y ago
    That's exactly what I mean. You can't do that on minimum wage anywhere in America now.
- 4y ago
incomingpain 4y ago
The unionization factor is interesting. It's not a zero-sum game. The more everyone does, the better everyone is. Due to egalitarian efforts getting women and others into the workforce it produced a large surplus of labour. There was also very clever work by China in creating very low tax economic zones which created globalization and moved low skilled jobs out of the developed world. Also creating a surplus of labour. Unionization doesnt work well when there's so much surplus of labour. Worse yet, incompetent males were displaced from the workplace by competent others. Which created a net-negative growth on population. Therefore population decline is coming. The thing is with the population pyramid, the decline isnt even coming yet it's a productivity drop relative to the boomers retiring and the boomers are woefully under invested for retirement. So we are going to have a transition quickly from labour surplus to depression level labour shortage. That already started, this is the antiwork movement. They suddenly probably for the first time feel no labour surplus and are excited to be treated properly by shitty employers. The funny thing about severe shortages, unionization is still lame. You dont want to have your salary and benefits limited by union process. You want to job hop for better profits. The really good thing about this productivity drop, the powers that be will put money into tech to boost productivity. Self-checkouts, atms, etc. No humans needed.

81 points by robtherobber 4y ago

NoblePublius 4y ago

Laughing at the thought of engineers making $400k reading this and identifying with it.

pwinnski 4y ago
It's been a while since I dug into the French Revolution, but I think many software developers today would be considered "petite bourgeoisie."

janandonly 4y ago

> Since Taylor, management gurus, led by the Toyota Corporation, devised “lean production,” with its systematic hiring, work teams, cross-training, just-in-time inventories, and kaizen. This last, Japanese for “constant improvement,” is an insidious form of continuous speed-up. Management stresses the production system—by, for example, taking away a team member or speeding up an assembly line—and work teams are pressured to keep production running smoothly. Autoworker Ben Hamper, author of Rivethead, described modern auto factories as gulags. And no wonder. Workers must labor 57 seconds of every minute.

hef19898 4y ago
This is propably the biggest missrepresentation of TPS I have read in a while.

OrangeMonkey 4y ago

> Only a radical change in how work is done and who controls this can make labor once again an integral part of life, one through which we can fully develop our capacities as thinking, acting human beings. uhh. The article appears to suggest that we change who controls our labor... #1 - we do, we can quit anytime we want and find another place to work for. #2 - I assume they are railing against private individuals and private companies. Sorry, no. I've seen how government control of the workforce ends. The books been written. I'll pass, I never liked the horror genre.

5350-uiop-1130 4y ago
> #1 - we do, we can quit anytime we want and find another place to work for. speak for yourself, i sure as hell can't.
- OrangeMonkey 4y ago
  I believe that the point of life is to become more than we are. My friend - grow to where you can. I wish you the best.
  - badcppdev 4y ago
    Your wishes are worth zero. - Would you be willing to oppose corporations controlling the government with bribes/campaign contributions? - Support a judicial system where poorer people can access justice? - Tell your representatives that wage theft should be punished as seriously as theft and fraud?
    - OrangeMonkey 4y ago
      I don’t think this vitriol is warranted or reasonable. * I would support completely disbanding corporations who bribe officials, and jailing its officers * I think the biggest problem with our judicial system is the prevalence of plea deals leading to a lifetime of regret for those who ignorantly take them. Fix it. * I believe wage theft is theft and would like to see jail time for those involved. I imagine I’ve a harsher view than you on these elements. But, more to the point, even if I wasn’t this opinionated I dont think this hate is warranted.
      - badcppdev 4y ago
        Apologies for my misunderstanding. I meant zero hate or vitriol. I categorised 'wish you the best' the same as 'thoughts and prayers' but you probably didn't mean it like that. I wanted to draw a contrast between actions that only effect an individual, like your example of quitting a bad job, and actions that effect society, i.e. changing the rules to close the loopholes that businesses use to exploit their workers. I think we both agree that systematic societal change would be a good thing. Cool.

onlyrealcuzzo 4y ago

If you took all the income from the billionaires and distributed it evenly, the average person wouldn't even get a 2% raise. If you took all the wealth and distributed it evenly, the a average person wouldn't even get $500. In the US - Billionaires have $1.3T: https://americansfortaxfairness.org/billionaires/ https://americansfortaxfairness.org/billionaires/ That's ~$3880 per US person. Globally, there's a lot more people, and countries aren't as rich as the US. Even if you count their entire change in net wealth in good years as income - their best year ever - during the pandemic - Billionaire wealth increased $240B. That's not even $900 per person in the US. Median salary was almost $43k: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_income_in_the_United_States#:~:text=The%20U.S.%20Census%20Bureau%20estimated,full%2Dtime%2C%20year%20round https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_income_in_the_Unite.... That's ~2%. This is counting billionaire income and realized and unrealized capital gains - cherry picked to the best year ever. It's a massive overstatement. Even if you cherry pick the best 11-year bull run ever - from 2010-2021 - Billionaire wealth increased $2.57T. That's $697 per year per person. Barely a 1.5% increase. Even if you try to get exclusionary - let's only include workers - not children, retirees, or the disabled or the poor - you get ~$1400 per person per year - a ~3.3% increase. And it's a ridiculous idea. If you took all their capital gains starting in 2010 - they wouldn't have compounded. Most of the gains wouldn't have occurred. You'd end up with an even smaller number less than 1% for everyone, less than 2% for workers. It's not the reason people who work at Google and Intel aren't mega rich. And even in the US, Billionaires are definitely not the reason that people who work minimum wage or don't work at all are poor. Billionaires are concentrated disproportionately in rich places like the US and the EU. Globally the true picture disputes this article much more. There's 5x more people on the planet than in just the US and the EU - but the billionaires there have almost 70% of billionaire wealth. Do billionaires have enough money that it's creating systematic problems and we should do something about it? That's a different question. They don't have so much money that they're causing everyone else to be poor.

vladharbuz 4y ago
This is true, but I have a slightly different question to ask. Imagine you work at, say, a game development company, along with 99 other developers. The only other member of the company is a CEO and shareholder, who decides how much to keep for himself and how much to pay the employees, but, importantly, does none of the actual work himself. Let's say the game is wildly successful and the employees are collectively paid 60% of the profit, with the remaining 40% going to the sole shareholder. This is not an uncommon arrangement, and it is allowed and encouraged, culturally and legally. Morally and practically speaking, not legally speaking, does this not amount to wage theft?

snidane 4y ago

Another Marxist in a new coat. Good analysis, wrong prescription. Been there, done that, ended up badly. Look into Georgism, that's where the cool kids are now. You don't need a revolution, you need a minor shift in tax code that you haven't thought of yet. It's not the problem of your employer that prices around you increase, so don't make them a villain that you can't pay your rent. Go complain to your slumlord for riding the inflation wave and tak(x)ing away any raise and disposable income your employer gave you. Explanation by a game designer: https://youtu.be/FTZH0Y6OS7g https://youtu.be/FTZH0Y6OS7g

refurb 4y ago
You got on the one hand, the Open Free Market System in America, you have on the other hand, the exact opposite, the closed, controlled, command economy of the Soviet Union… The Chinese tried the Communist model, with their own modifications, and it failed! And they have admitted that it failed. The kids today talk as if these things have never happened. They haven’t learned!
- noughts 4y ago
  I agree that the last thing we should do is to go back to the Soviet Union, but its relationship to many of the alternatives available today is a common misunderstanding. The Soviet Union was described as "socialist" simply to cover up the awful inequality and abuse of power that was at the centre of it. The Soviet Union was basically the opposite of socialism, and this is easy to understand if you compare it to the most basic tenets of socialism, such as socioeconomic inequality. I think that there are a lot of alternatives to both our current Western economic system and the Soviet Union, and I think that if you try to look a bit closer at many of the systems "the kids today" are talking about, in particular the principles and values behind them, without getting caught up in the labels, you'll be pleasantly surprised! Perhaps you would find this list of books I compiled interesting? https://vladh.net/wage-labour-resources https://vladh.net/wage-labour-resources
  - refurb 4y ago
    My response was a bit - tongue in cheek as that's a quote from Singapore's PM during an election campaign. His point was if you remove the competitive aspects - the individualistic ones, the system grinds to a halt. The USSR and China were abusive because you need to be abusive to force people to give over labour for which they don't own the proceeds of. Small time farmers in Vietnam had riots over the collectivization of their land into communes (and the "Communists" there dropped it in favor of capitalism). These are subsistence-level farms who can't read or write - yet they understood the injustice of taking away one's freedom to live of the fruits of your own labour. A far better solution is to separate the economic system with the political one (which communism tries to meld). There is nothing that says you can't have a capitalist system that protects worker rights, or that heavily taxes and redistributes. Rather than killing the goose that lays the golden eggs, figure out how best to use the eggs to the benefit of everyone.

0xy 4y ago

As opposed to communism, which will make everyone work like dogs so that the elite party members can be rich (like Maduro's goons). 100,000,000 dead but let's try it again, because that wasn't real communism.

vladharbuz 4y ago
Do you think the only available and conceivable options are two bad systems, and nothing else?
- tristor 4y ago
  No, I don't think that. However, the site linked that this article is on is using communist imagery, so is no doubt communist. Criticizing an article that implies a call for communism for that call is not a lack of imagination on the part of the reader, but rather recognizing what is being implied.

bjarneh 4y ago

> ...between 1971 and 2018, 3,280 trade unionists were murdered in Colombia. > Is there a solution? Not within this system. No amount of union organizing or progressive legislation will alter the nature of work in it. Why are they killing the union leaders if unionization does not work? The massive push by large industries to get unions out of the mix indicates that unions helps workers massively. Collective bargaining changes everything for the workers as companies are forced to give them a much larger part of the value they produce. A society where people make good money also creates a positive spiral of consumption which makes it much easier for others to create well paying jobs as well - when people actually have money to spend.

einpoklum 4y ago
> Why are they killing the union leaders if unionization does not work? They're killing union organizers because unionization _does_ work... when the organizers don't die in the middle of setting up a union. (Of course, "works" doesn't mean "works perfectly and always", or that unions don't have their own internal challenges and risk of bureaucratization etc. etc.)
VictorPath 4y ago
In 1985, FARC entered a peace process and began working electorally and non-violently. The right never went for this and despite the government agreeing to a peace settlement, the right slaughtered political candidates, trade union leaders, etc. So eventually FARC reformed and began its armed campaign again. Something to think about for complaints about FARC "terrorism" from 1985 on. Actually they began doing so well that the US began having to bankroll the Colombian military with Plan Colombia (not a new thing, Kennedy was doing the same thing on a smaller scale).

NoblePublius 4y ago

“44 years later he died of emphysema”…sounds like he had a long and fruitful life.

kris-nova 4y ago

Very familiar sentiment to thoughts I have been thinking and feeling over the past year or so. Interesting to see more of this stuff popping up. I am starting to think unionizing is going to be the path to start pointing the majority of folks towards. https://medium.com/@kris-nova/why-i-wrote-hacking-capitalism-5094d26d4fef https://medium.com/@kris-nova/why-i-wrote-hacking-capitalism...

anm89 4y ago

Keep writing! We are just one or two more articles from everyone susddenly realizing that capitalism is mean and overthrowing the system. What will we do afterwards? Who cares! That's not nearly as much fun as whining.

VictorPath 4y ago
> whining We workers are bombarded consistently with whining about estate taxes, carry interest and that sort of thing. Actually the recent senate bill was held up over the fight over carried interest, a fight which was won by the funds. However when the workers who create all the wealth press for their interests, it is "whining". Insofar as the afterwards, to quote Malcolm X "anywhere is better than here".
- anm89 4y ago
  Good luck. I'm sure you'll get your revolution any day now.

m0llusk 4y ago

This is missing a lot of history. There was a lot of Anarchist violence in the 30s that led to things like the Inheritance Tax, now repealed. Up until Reagan it was possible to live reasonably well and even raise a family on a minimum wage. Now even middle class people can barely make it and are vulnerable to large medical bills. The past was not impossible. It actually happened. And we should be able to use that experience to craft something better if we really care to. Getting distracted with "Not within this system" talk is useless. The system can be changed and honed so let's do that.

nunez 4y ago
> Up until Reagan it was possible to live reasonably well and even raise a family on a minimum wage. Now even middle class people can barely make it and are vulnerable to large medical bills. This feels like an oft-repeated trope to me. Do you have books or stats that back this up?
eternalban 4y ago
There is another bit of history that possibly informs the change. ~Up until Reagan, US needed to present an alternative to communist and socialist systems. Post USSR collapse, 'history ended', and that's when the neo-liberal genie was let out of the bottle. This is a somewhat cynical view, but imo not an unreasonable speculation.
refurb 4y ago
Up until Reagan it was possible to live reasonably well and even raise a family on a minimum wage At least according my grandparent's that's an absolute falsehood. Unless you assume "live well" in a 600 sq. ft. house doing manual labour in the sun and having your spouse take care of grandma who is dying of cancer for which there is no treatment.
- m0llusk 4y ago
  That's exactly what I mean. You can't do that on minimum wage anywhere in America now.
4y ago

incomingpain 4y ago

The unionization factor is interesting. It's not a zero-sum game. The more everyone does, the better everyone is. Due to egalitarian efforts getting women and others into the workforce it produced a large surplus of labour. There was also very clever work by China in creating very low tax economic zones which created globalization and moved low skilled jobs out of the developed world. Also creating a surplus of labour. Unionization doesnt work well when there's so much surplus of labour. Worse yet, incompetent males were displaced from the workplace by competent others. Which created a net-negative growth on population. Therefore population decline is coming. The thing is with the population pyramid, the decline isnt even coming yet it's a productivity drop relative to the boomers retiring and the boomers are woefully under invested for retirement. So we are going to have a transition quickly from labour surplus to depression level labour shortage. That already started, this is the antiwork movement. They suddenly probably for the first time feel no labour surplus and are excited to be treated properly by shitty employers. The funny thing about severe shortages, unionization is still lame. You dont want to have your salary and benefits limited by union process. You want to job hop for better profits. The really good thing about this productivity drop, the powers that be will put money into tech to boost productivity. Self-checkouts, atms, etc. No humans needed.