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Whether the average Big Tech job is better than the average job overall has no real relationship to whether Big Tech workers are being exploited. I think we ca
by slg 5mo ago
Whether the average Big Tech job is better than the average job overall has no real relationship to whether Big Tech workers are being exploited. I think we can simply look at the number of billionaires that Big Tech has created as evidence that even those workers making relatively high salaries are being underpaid compared to the value they are actually creating.
- scottyah 5mo agoOr because the logistics behind scaling are much much much easier than any physical product.
- slg 5mo agoWhy do the benefits of logistics go to people at the top of the food chain rather than being spread out evenly among everyone? That type of democratization of the benefits is the exact type of thing unions are meant to achieve.
- scottyah 4mo agoThat's how scaling works- more product and distribution with less people. As proven by Amazon, it's what consumers want. Unions only function by taking a share of money and giving it to less people- it's the only way each person makes more. You're saying that we should have more people get paid by artificially paying less people more...
- fragmede 4mo ago> Unions only function by taking a share of money and giving it to less people Isn't that backwards? Don't they take money that previously would be going to the CEO/C-suite; (aka profit), and give it to the union and it's members? The corporation certainly isn't sharing it with the public (aka lower prices) for the fun off it.
- scottyah 4mo agoWell at some level it is taking away from the larger group of shareholders, but at the end of the day Unions are pretty ineffective at redistributing money from C-Suite to a larger group of people. I haven't seen a union that was all workers vs. C-Suite, it's more like the factory workers take away from accounting or engineering departments. That usually doesn't work out for company morale, leading to worse running and everyone makes less. Totally dependent on the company though, not all unions are bad it's just not a one-size-fits-all and in my experience they've done more harm than good. You end up just having to cover slackers who choose the life of working less and making less money, but at a company where others want to work harder.
- wilg 5mo agoThe obvious rebuttal to that framing would be that if those workers are not able to create that value on their own (such as by starting their own business or bringing their expertise to a firm with more favorable terms) then they aren't actually contributing that outsized value, the company itself is. And if they are able to do so but choose not to, then they are not being exploited.
- slg 5mo agoThere is no such thing as exploitation with that mindset. That sweatshop worker isn't being exploited, they just need to pull themselves up by their bootstraps and open their own sweatshop.