14 ms·

The 4 AM Army

147 points by w1ntermute 13y ago

deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
eliben 13y ago
An interesting case study in modern journalism. This article has an interesting story to tell, but the author seems unaware of it, so he tries really hard to use every trick in the book to extract hyperbolic statements suitable for headlines. Authors should realize that a good article stands on its own merits, and tabloid-driven drama just lowers its value.
Stranger2013 13y ago
"I’ve always dreamed of having a little house, a really small little house" the thing is that it's not economically possible for everyone to have those.
- onli 13y ago
  What? Why? Economically possible would mean that our society is not productive enough, that it doesn't have the capacity, to produce small little houses for everyone who wishes one. I doubt that is true in any modern economical system.
  - jinx_xnij 13y ago
    It isn't about the demand not being there, nor the supply lacking. The issue is the distribution of wealth and how much the poorest workers in America get paid and the insane cost of living associated with the "American Dream"
    - ctdonath 13y ago
      Living a dream can be very expensive. America is a big place. There are a lot of places suitable for living out different dreams. Some (many?) dreams are just not conducive to some (many?) situations/locations, others are. Buying into dreams promoted by the wealthy are expensive. A lot of what we consider normal, even vital, is the result of accepting advertising's message; wasn't long ago such was considered luxurious, even impossible. Living [sub]urban lifestyles requires reliance upon others for pretty much everything, with many layers of middlemen taking a cut for profit & raising prices; that's not a condemnation, just observation of reality. Shorten the distance & layers between source & use.
    - astrodust 13y ago
      Owning a small house in a marginal neighborhood is not an impossible dream.
  - ubernostrum 13y ago
    Economics is subject to the Pauli Exclusion Principle.
    - bennyg 13y ago
      Clint Eastwood's Pauli Exclusion Principle: This energy state ain't big enough for the both of us.
    - treerock 13y ago
      Okay, call me dumb, but I don't get it. I looked up wikipedia, and I still don't get it. What, in economics, is analogous to fermions and quantum state?
      - ubernostrum 13y ago
        Assertion: In any modern economical system, capacity exists to produce small houses for "everyone who wishes one". Disproof: For certain possible values of "everyone", the Pauli Exclusion Principle prevents the simultaneous existence of a sufficient number of distinct small houses.
    - homeomorphic 13y ago
      Tell me, what in economics plays the role of identical particles?
      - randallsquared 13y ago
        Relative economic position of actors? Not sure if that's what ubernostrum was referring to.
      - VLM 13y ago
        Read grimtrigger's story in the HN comments. You'll get the idea rather quickly.
    - wavefunction 13y ago
      This is only true because classical economics are predicated on scarcity, much of which is artificial and shared inequally and inequitably.
  - enko 13y ago
    It is not true, of course. Just once I would like the authors of these "it's just not economically possible for X to have Y" to be referring to themselves in group X.
- astrodust 13y ago
  1950s America, with its living wages, disagrees.
  - twoodfin 13y ago
    "Living wages" supported by the only major industrialized economy not to be smashed by the two World Wars. And a labor market that actively limited its participants for many of its most rewarding roles to almost exclusively white men. I don't get this nostalgia for the 1950's. Things have gotten radically better in essentially all aspects of life since then.
    - sseveran 13y ago
      And even if they weren't radically better there is very little that is easy to do other than destroying other countries investments that would allow a return to such a state.
    - astrodust 13y ago
      Certainly things were far from ideal in the 1950s, but pay equity was still a thing then. The CEO of the biggest corporation weren't be making thousands of times more than the people in the factories assembling the products. Until around 1980 when things started to get a little crazy, or 1990 when they started to get intensely crazy, CEO pay was around 20-40 times that of the average worker. Now, given that a lot of manufacturing is out-sourced to countries where dollars per day is the norm and a CEO's salary of $50M a year is not abnormal, it may be that the disparity is as high as 50,000x. It's not that the money isn't out there, it's just being concentrated to a dangerous degree.
      - wnewman 13y ago
        Remember that it's not a good idea to equate "didn't have thousands of times the taxable income [in the 1950s]" with "didn't make thousands of times more" except for the purpose of misleading people. Comparing taxable income then to taxable income now is a mistake, because it was a time of 90% tax rates and not coincidentally a time of people moving heaven and earth to get their compensation in any form other than taxable income.
- king_jester 13y ago
  What nonsense. On any given night in the US, there are more unoccupied residential spaces (homes, apartments, etc) than there are homeless people. The problem is entirely political and structural.
- epsylon 13y ago
  Of course it's possible, wealth just needs to be redistributed fairly. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QPKKQnijnsM http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QPKKQnijnsM
speeder 13y ago
Heh, the power of words are interesting. People will happily say that those people (like the illegals working as temps and cannot complain or get deported) are free. And that slavery is always evil. Yet, when you try to look at situations without using your pre-judgement of words, it become something else entirely. For example, in Brazil, the laws for commerce workers was that the commerce owners needed to house the workers on their own home, give them food, take good care of them, and abusing them was illegal. Also, it was common for commerce workers get tips, and the law allowed them to keep those (and the commerce owners frequently gave them more too). Some cities reached a point, where most of the city business were ran by ex-workers, that earned enough to start their own. This all, were slavery. When slavery was abolished, all that people were dumped into the streets, and the money they already got from their employers now became wage, slighly higher, but not enough to cover the stuff they lost. Who is truly, a slave? The one that works in crap conditions because if he don't he will get deported, or the one that although he could not quit (unless he was abused, the law allowed it in those cases) he had anything he might need because the law said so? It is easy to label a word as evil, or good, but words are used to label and describe things, you should not use words to label other words. I would describe the situations that those people face as evil, having almost no money, and forced to work, because although they can quit, the only result from that will be starvation. I also think that student debt is evil, I am one, of countless people, that struggles to make ends meet without even having a family, people that when the debt is paid, will be far behind non-indebted peers, I think it is funny that during the high-point of my career in money terms, I earned more than some family chefs that I know, and ended with LESS money, purely because good part of my money was in studies expenses (paying student debt and other university related costs). Free, is a friend of mine, that refused to go to university, searched for a low paying but permanent job as manual worker at night, and slowly built his career, debt free, while he still has a blue collar job, he has a motorbike, surplus money, enough money to start a family, and his job is stable. It pains other people that went with school with him, that they got into college, and are now forced to work in "well paying" jobs but with no chance of career improvement or stability to pay their debts, while the "dumb" guy that decided to ignore college and take his time to choose his first job, is the one well off. Slavery == evil? I don't think so... it is a word, that describe many things, some of those evil, some not. College == success? I don't think so... it is a word, that describe a institution, the context, the process, and many other things, define what happens to you. Now why I am writing all that? I have no idea. I just felt like writing this after reading the article. EDIT: I hate how HN wrecks formatting.
beachstartup 13y ago
> Walmart, Nike, PepsiCo’s Frito-Lay division—but they are not paid by them; instead they work for temp agencies large companies hire (generally second-rate) computer programmers the same way. except instead of temps they're called 'contractors'.
- gadders 13y ago
  Er, no. Contractors are generally more skilled at the resident staff.
  - beachstartup 13y ago
    you're thinking of consultants, i'm thinking of contractors.
    - gadders 13y ago
      Nope, I'm thinking of contractors - self-employed developers, business analysts, project managers that are hired for a fixed length of time. They generally are more highly skilled as they need to be productive in new environments in a short period of time.
      - potatolicious 13y ago
        You're both right. There is no hard line between a contractor and a consultant - and you have highly-paid, highly-skilled people who are called either, or both. This is part of how bad actors in our industry get away with the shenanigans they do. Companies that provide third-rate warm-body programmers at starvation wages call themselves consultancies, call their wage-slaves consultants, and try to blend in with the rest who are benign or good actors in the system. Sometimes you bring in talent via contract because you don't have the ability internally, or you don't have enough of a need to justify a full-time hire. Other times you bring them in because they're cheap, abusive, but give you arms-length deniability.
        13y ago
grimtrigger 13y ago
I very briefly worked a job like this when I was in college. I would work the concession stands at a huge football stadium with around 1,000 temporary workers on a given game day. The wage and hours were terrible, but it was the absolute dehumanization that stuck with me. No body knew your name or particularly cared. You would walk in during the morning, flash your badge and get assigned to a particular stand. Every day it was brand new people who you've never met before with a brand new manager. There was obviously no room to move up, because you never had a chance to build a track record with anyone. There was also just plain disrespect on the part of the company towards its workers. We would spend 2-3 hours after the game just waiting for permission to go home. I can't imagine spending much of my life in a job like that, it was just horrible. But clearly there were enough people who had to do it, because there were many 40 year olds I worked with. People who've never worked these jobs tend to read this article and assume that these articles have a hidden agenda: raising the minimum wage or some kind of socialist initiative. I read it differently, as a reminder of the depressing underside of the US economy.
- smacktoward 13y ago
  > The wage and hours were terrible, but it was the absolute dehumanization that stuck with me. No body knew your name or particularly cared. You would walk in during the morning, flash your badge and get assigned to a particular stand. Every day it was brand new people who you've never met before with a brand new manager. It's worth remembering that when CEOs talk about flexibility, this is what they are talking about: interchangeable workers, who can be swapped in and out (and thrown in the bin) like interchangeable parts.
  - Hovertruck 13y ago
    That might be true sometimes, but it depends on the expectation. If I have a team of great developers, I'd expect to be able to put any of them on anything and walk away with something great in the end knowing that they brought their expertise and best ideas.
    - rayiner 13y ago
Udo 13y ago
Maybe this market is ready for disruption. What if a new kind of temp agency came in, a company that treated workers like real employees with training, benefits, and dignity? Would it really cost that much more to run? How about after factoring in all the costs that current temp agencies like to offload on society at large, such as health care and basic infrastructure? Could WalMart afford to keep propping up slave agencies if more sustainable resources were available?
- orlandob 13y ago
  The trend has been the opposite in this market. As labor supply increases (to infinity), wages decreases (to zero).
  - xradionut 13y ago
    Maybe the labor supply/population needs to decrease in the future?
    - toomuchtodo 13y ago
      Labor Force Statistics from the Current Population Survey http://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS11300000 http://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS11300000 As the baby boomers move through the pipeline, you'll see the labor supply drop. Also, structural issues: http://www.businessinsider.com/michelle-meyer-on-the-labor-force-participation-rate-2013-5 http://www.businessinsider.com/michelle-meyer-on-the-labor-f...
rayiner 13y ago
Look carefully, because this is the future of America. This is the plight of the average worker in a world where labor is increasingly replaced by automation capital owned by a select few, gutting the bargaining power of ordinary people in the employment market.
- itsallbs 13y ago
  The future? Pay attention, hombre. This is the fucking present.
- wwwarhawk 13y ago
  Yeah, let's just stop automating things. /sarcasm
  - stdbrouw 13y ago
    Is it not possible to be in favor of automation while also seeing the destructive effects it can have on society?
  - knowaveragejoe 13y ago
    His reference to "automation" here of course does not necessarily mean automation of labor(i.e. assembly line automation), but instead the fact that companies with lots of cash to throw around can gut their workforce and hire in temp agencies. Hence "automation capital". They are "automating" in the sense that a churning workforce consisting of temps can be paid less overall. There will never be a shortage of people to fill those jobs and there is no need to cover expensive benefits.
    - eru 13y ago
      > There will never be a shortage of people to fill those jobs [...] This is wrong. E.g. Germany during the Wirtschaftswunder had to import workers from first Italy and Greece, later from Turkey.
      - knowaveragejoe 13y ago
matt__ring 13y ago
This is very upsetting. I live in Chicago's Logan Square neighborhood & pass by what I suspect is a similar temp agency, while on my way to the gym in the morning. Now I feel even worse for the people in line at its door...
skore 13y ago
> The people here are not day laborers looking for an odd job from a passing contractor. They load the trucks and stock the shelves for some of the U.S.’s largest companies—Walmart, Nike, PepsiCo’s Frito-Lay division > This system insulates companies from workers’-compensation claims, unemployment taxes, union drives and the duty to ensure that their workers are legal immigrants. Meanwhile, the temps suffer high injury rates, and many of them endure hours of unpaid waiting and face fees that depress their pay below the minimum wage. Many get by renting rooms in run-down houses, eating dinners of beans and potatoes and surviving on food banks and taxpayer-funded health care. ----- The willful ignorance for the social implications of this kind of corporate behavior leave me speechless. This is quite literally sucking everything around you dry, poisoning the river and then making a fuss when somebody threatens regulations. The same corporations who complain (mostly through sock puppets) about "the nanny state" getting in their way, who lobby for laws that leave them with fewer and fewer restrictions, who set everything in motion to pay less and less taxes - they are the entities actually taxing the social systems the hardest. What they have found is a way to convert the good will of the social system into profit. All while pushing the agenda of austerity and tough love for the people in our society who need our help the most. They give their workers the bare minimum and let the government fill the increasing amount of gaps. Meanwhile, governments see their costs of the social system rise while their tax revenue goes down. This is profiteering from collateral damage. And if you do threaten to regulate, they will just move to another country like the vultures that they are.
- sbarre 13y ago
  I think you're forgetting someone's role in this, and that would be all of us. If enough of the population was against this type of behaviour, it woud be made illegal (and already-illegal behaviours would be cracked-down upon) but it's not. Corporations have a legal obligation to provide as much value as possible for as little money as possible, and if the laws let them do this in an inhumane way, then that's the law's fault (and by extension the fault of the society that enacted those laws).
  - jiggy2011 13y ago
    Corporations have a legal obligation to provide as much value as possible for as little money as possible. This really isn't true, it is market forces that incentivise this behavior; not laws.
yk 13y ago
One interesting aspect of the plight of the temp workers is, that this is very exactly the kind of market Marx did analyse. The temp agencies distribute highly standardized work assignments to the temp workers, who have no choice. (If they would qualify for McDonalds minimum wage jobs, they would probably prefer them.) In this kind of environment the agencies can only compete on price, since the specific assignment is determined by the customer of the agency, and this means they need to cut their costs. ( Notice the mention of 22 workers in a 17 seat bus, this represents a 29% increase in efficiency of transportation.) And this leads to the situation where the least decent employer sets the working conditions, since he can out compete the other market participants.
michaelburk 13y ago
I was pleasantly surprised to see this wasn't another article about why we should wake up early.
azernik 13y ago
These aren't the only companies finding loopholes to get around labor law (and it does seem like, for the long-term temp workers in this article, that's what it's about). In journalism, the preferred legal fiction is to call your employees "contractors", so that you don't have to give them time off or benefits, pay into workplace compensation, or deal with payroll tax.

147 points by w1ntermute 13y ago

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

An interesting case study in modern journalism. This article has an interesting story to tell, but the author seems unaware of it, so he tries really hard to use every trick in the book to extract hyperbolic statements suitable for headlines. Authors should realize that a good article stands on its own merits, and tabloid-driven drama just lowers its value.

Stranger2013 13y ago

"I’ve always dreamed of having a little house, a really small little house" the thing is that it's not economically possible for everyone to have those.

onli 13y ago
What? Why? Economically possible would mean that our society is not productive enough, that it doesn't have the capacity, to produce small little houses for everyone who wishes one. I doubt that is true in any modern economical system.
- jinx_xnij 13y ago
  It isn't about the demand not being there, nor the supply lacking. The issue is the distribution of wealth and how much the poorest workers in America get paid and the insane cost of living associated with the "American Dream"
  - ctdonath 13y ago
    Living a dream can be very expensive. America is a big place. There are a lot of places suitable for living out different dreams. Some (many?) dreams are just not conducive to some (many?) situations/locations, others are. Buying into dreams promoted by the wealthy are expensive. A lot of what we consider normal, even vital, is the result of accepting advertising's message; wasn't long ago such was considered luxurious, even impossible. Living [sub]urban lifestyles requires reliance upon others for pretty much everything, with many layers of middlemen taking a cut for profit & raising prices; that's not a condemnation, just observation of reality. Shorten the distance & layers between source & use.
  - astrodust 13y ago
    Owning a small house in a marginal neighborhood is not an impossible dream.
- ubernostrum 13y ago
  Economics is subject to the Pauli Exclusion Principle.
  - bennyg 13y ago
    Clint Eastwood's Pauli Exclusion Principle: This energy state ain't big enough for the both of us.
  - treerock 13y ago
    Okay, call me dumb, but I don't get it. I looked up wikipedia, and I still don't get it. What, in economics, is analogous to fermions and quantum state?
    - ubernostrum 13y ago
      Assertion: In any modern economical system, capacity exists to produce small houses for "everyone who wishes one". Disproof: For certain possible values of "everyone", the Pauli Exclusion Principle prevents the simultaneous existence of a sufficient number of distinct small houses.
  - homeomorphic 13y ago
    Tell me, what in economics plays the role of identical particles?
    - randallsquared 13y ago
      Relative economic position of actors? Not sure if that's what ubernostrum was referring to.
    - VLM 13y ago
      Read grimtrigger's story in the HN comments. You'll get the idea rather quickly.
  - wavefunction 13y ago
    This is only true because classical economics are predicated on scarcity, much of which is artificial and shared inequally and inequitably.
- enko 13y ago
  It is not true, of course. Just once I would like the authors of these "it's just not economically possible for X to have Y" to be referring to themselves in group X.
astrodust 13y ago
1950s America, with its living wages, disagrees.
- twoodfin 13y ago
  "Living wages" supported by the only major industrialized economy not to be smashed by the two World Wars. And a labor market that actively limited its participants for many of its most rewarding roles to almost exclusively white men. I don't get this nostalgia for the 1950's. Things have gotten radically better in essentially all aspects of life since then.
  - sseveran 13y ago
    And even if they weren't radically better there is very little that is easy to do other than destroying other countries investments that would allow a return to such a state.
  - astrodust 13y ago
    Certainly things were far from ideal in the 1950s, but pay equity was still a thing then. The CEO of the biggest corporation weren't be making thousands of times more than the people in the factories assembling the products. Until around 1980 when things started to get a little crazy, or 1990 when they started to get intensely crazy, CEO pay was around 20-40 times that of the average worker. Now, given that a lot of manufacturing is out-sourced to countries where dollars per day is the norm and a CEO's salary of $50M a year is not abnormal, it may be that the disparity is as high as 50,000x. It's not that the money isn't out there, it's just being concentrated to a dangerous degree.
    - wnewman 13y ago
      Remember that it's not a good idea to equate "didn't have thousands of times the taxable income [in the 1950s]" with "didn't make thousands of times more" except for the purpose of misleading people. Comparing taxable income then to taxable income now is a mistake, because it was a time of 90% tax rates and not coincidentally a time of people moving heaven and earth to get their compensation in any form other than taxable income.
king_jester 13y ago
What nonsense. On any given night in the US, there are more unoccupied residential spaces (homes, apartments, etc) than there are homeless people. The problem is entirely political and structural.
epsylon 13y ago
Of course it's possible, wealth just needs to be redistributed fairly. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QPKKQnijnsM http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QPKKQnijnsM

speeder 13y ago

Heh, the power of words are interesting. People will happily say that those people (like the illegals working as temps and cannot complain or get deported) are free. And that slavery is always evil. Yet, when you try to look at situations without using your pre-judgement of words, it become something else entirely. For example, in Brazil, the laws for commerce workers was that the commerce owners needed to house the workers on their own home, give them food, take good care of them, and abusing them was illegal. Also, it was common for commerce workers get tips, and the law allowed them to keep those (and the commerce owners frequently gave them more too). Some cities reached a point, where most of the city business were ran by ex-workers, that earned enough to start their own. This all, were slavery. When slavery was abolished, all that people were dumped into the streets, and the money they already got from their employers now became wage, slighly higher, but not enough to cover the stuff they lost. Who is truly, a slave? The one that works in crap conditions because if he don't he will get deported, or the one that although he could not quit (unless he was abused, the law allowed it in those cases) he had anything he might need because the law said so? It is easy to label a word as evil, or good, but words are used to label and describe things, you should not use words to label other words. I would describe the situations that those people face as evil, having almost no money, and forced to work, because although they can quit, the only result from that will be starvation. I also think that student debt is evil, I am one, of countless people, that struggles to make ends meet without even having a family, people that when the debt is paid, will be far behind non-indebted peers, I think it is funny that during the high-point of my career in money terms, I earned more than some family chefs that I know, and ended with LESS money, purely because good part of my money was in studies expenses (paying student debt and other university related costs). Free, is a friend of mine, that refused to go to university, searched for a low paying but permanent job as manual worker at night, and slowly built his career, debt free, while he still has a blue collar job, he has a motorbike, surplus money, enough money to start a family, and his job is stable. It pains other people that went with school with him, that they got into college, and are now forced to work in "well paying" jobs but with no chance of career improvement or stability to pay their debts, while the "dumb" guy that decided to ignore college and take his time to choose his first job, is the one well off. Slavery == evil? I don't think so... it is a word, that describe many things, some of those evil, some not. College == success? I don't think so... it is a word, that describe a institution, the context, the process, and many other things, define what happens to you. Now why I am writing all that? I have no idea. I just felt like writing this after reading the article. EDIT: I hate how HN wrecks formatting.

beachstartup 13y ago

> Walmart, Nike, PepsiCo’s Frito-Lay division—but they are not paid by them; instead they work for temp agencies large companies hire (generally second-rate) computer programmers the same way. except instead of temps they're called 'contractors'.

gadders 13y ago
Er, no. Contractors are generally more skilled at the resident staff.
- beachstartup 13y ago
  you're thinking of consultants, i'm thinking of contractors.
  - gadders 13y ago
    Nope, I'm thinking of contractors - self-employed developers, business analysts, project managers that are hired for a fixed length of time. They generally are more highly skilled as they need to be productive in new environments in a short period of time.
    - potatolicious 13y ago
      You're both right. There is no hard line between a contractor and a consultant - and you have highly-paid, highly-skilled people who are called either, or both. This is part of how bad actors in our industry get away with the shenanigans they do. Companies that provide third-rate warm-body programmers at starvation wages call themselves consultancies, call their wage-slaves consultants, and try to blend in with the rest who are benign or good actors in the system. Sometimes you bring in talent via contract because you don't have the ability internally, or you don't have enough of a need to justify a full-time hire. Other times you bring them in because they're cheap, abusive, but give you arms-length deniability.
      - 13y ago

grimtrigger 13y ago

I very briefly worked a job like this when I was in college. I would work the concession stands at a huge football stadium with around 1,000 temporary workers on a given game day. The wage and hours were terrible, but it was the absolute dehumanization that stuck with me. No body knew your name or particularly cared. You would walk in during the morning, flash your badge and get assigned to a particular stand. Every day it was brand new people who you've never met before with a brand new manager. There was obviously no room to move up, because you never had a chance to build a track record with anyone. There was also just plain disrespect on the part of the company towards its workers. We would spend 2-3 hours after the game just waiting for permission to go home. I can't imagine spending much of my life in a job like that, it was just horrible. But clearly there were enough people who had to do it, because there were many 40 year olds I worked with. People who've never worked these jobs tend to read this article and assume that these articles have a hidden agenda: raising the minimum wage or some kind of socialist initiative. I read it differently, as a reminder of the depressing underside of the US economy.

smacktoward 13y ago
> The wage and hours were terrible, but it was the absolute dehumanization that stuck with me. No body knew your name or particularly cared. You would walk in during the morning, flash your badge and get assigned to a particular stand. Every day it was brand new people who you've never met before with a brand new manager. It's worth remembering that when CEOs talk about flexibility, this is what they are talking about: interchangeable workers, who can be swapped in and out (and thrown in the bin) like interchangeable parts.
- Hovertruck 13y ago
  That might be true sometimes, but it depends on the expectation. If I have a team of great developers, I'd expect to be able to put any of them on anything and walk away with something great in the end knowing that they brought their expertise and best ideas.
  - rayiner 13y ago

Udo 13y ago

Maybe this market is ready for disruption. What if a new kind of temp agency came in, a company that treated workers like real employees with training, benefits, and dignity? Would it really cost that much more to run? How about after factoring in all the costs that current temp agencies like to offload on society at large, such as health care and basic infrastructure? Could WalMart afford to keep propping up slave agencies if more sustainable resources were available?

orlandob 13y ago
The trend has been the opposite in this market. As labor supply increases (to infinity), wages decreases (to zero).
- xradionut 13y ago
  Maybe the labor supply/population needs to decrease in the future?
  - toomuchtodo 13y ago
    Labor Force Statistics from the Current Population Survey http://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS11300000 http://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS11300000 As the baby boomers move through the pipeline, you'll see the labor supply drop. Also, structural issues: http://www.businessinsider.com/michelle-meyer-on-the-labor-force-participation-rate-2013-5 http://www.businessinsider.com/michelle-meyer-on-the-labor-f...

rayiner 13y ago

Look carefully, because this is the future of America. This is the plight of the average worker in a world where labor is increasingly replaced by automation capital owned by a select few, gutting the bargaining power of ordinary people in the employment market.

itsallbs 13y ago
The future? Pay attention, hombre. This is the fucking present.
wwwarhawk 13y ago
Yeah, let's just stop automating things. /sarcasm
- stdbrouw 13y ago
  Is it not possible to be in favor of automation while also seeing the destructive effects it can have on society?
- knowaveragejoe 13y ago
  His reference to "automation" here of course does not necessarily mean automation of labor(i.e. assembly line automation), but instead the fact that companies with lots of cash to throw around can gut their workforce and hire in temp agencies. Hence "automation capital". They are "automating" in the sense that a churning workforce consisting of temps can be paid less overall. There will never be a shortage of people to fill those jobs and there is no need to cover expensive benefits.
  - eru 13y ago
    > There will never be a shortage of people to fill those jobs [...] This is wrong. E.g. Germany during the Wirtschaftswunder had to import workers from first Italy and Greece, later from Turkey.
    - knowaveragejoe 13y ago

matt__ring 13y ago

This is very upsetting. I live in Chicago's Logan Square neighborhood & pass by what I suspect is a similar temp agency, while on my way to the gym in the morning. Now I feel even worse for the people in line at its door...

skore 13y ago

> The people here are not day laborers looking for an odd job from a passing contractor. They load the trucks and stock the shelves for some of the U.S.’s largest companies—Walmart, Nike, PepsiCo’s Frito-Lay division > This system insulates companies from workers’-compensation claims, unemployment taxes, union drives and the duty to ensure that their workers are legal immigrants. Meanwhile, the temps suffer high injury rates, and many of them endure hours of unpaid waiting and face fees that depress their pay below the minimum wage. Many get by renting rooms in run-down houses, eating dinners of beans and potatoes and surviving on food banks and taxpayer-funded health care. ----- The willful ignorance for the social implications of this kind of corporate behavior leave me speechless. This is quite literally sucking everything around you dry, poisoning the river and then making a fuss when somebody threatens regulations. The same corporations who complain (mostly through sock puppets) about "the nanny state" getting in their way, who lobby for laws that leave them with fewer and fewer restrictions, who set everything in motion to pay less and less taxes - they are the entities actually taxing the social systems the hardest. What they have found is a way to convert the good will of the social system into profit. All while pushing the agenda of austerity and tough love for the people in our society who need our help the most. They give their workers the bare minimum and let the government fill the increasing amount of gaps. Meanwhile, governments see their costs of the social system rise while their tax revenue goes down. This is profiteering from collateral damage. And if you do threaten to regulate, they will just move to another country like the vultures that they are.

sbarre 13y ago
I think you're forgetting someone's role in this, and that would be all of us. If enough of the population was against this type of behaviour, it woud be made illegal (and already-illegal behaviours would be cracked-down upon) but it's not. Corporations have a legal obligation to provide as much value as possible for as little money as possible, and if the laws let them do this in an inhumane way, then that's the law's fault (and by extension the fault of the society that enacted those laws).
- jiggy2011 13y ago
  Corporations have a legal obligation to provide as much value as possible for as little money as possible. This really isn't true, it is market forces that incentivise this behavior; not laws.

yk 13y ago

One interesting aspect of the plight of the temp workers is, that this is very exactly the kind of market Marx did analyse. The temp agencies distribute highly standardized work assignments to the temp workers, who have no choice. (If they would qualify for McDonalds minimum wage jobs, they would probably prefer them.) In this kind of environment the agencies can only compete on price, since the specific assignment is determined by the customer of the agency, and this means they need to cut their costs. ( Notice the mention of 22 workers in a 17 seat bus, this represents a 29% increase in efficiency of transportation.) And this leads to the situation where the least decent employer sets the working conditions, since he can out compete the other market participants.

michaelburk 13y ago

I was pleasantly surprised to see this wasn't another article about why we should wake up early.

azernik 13y ago

These aren't the only companies finding loopholes to get around labor law (and it does seem like, for the long-term temp workers in this article, that's what it's about). In journalism, the preferred legal fiction is to call your employees "contractors", so that you don't have to give them time off or benefits, pay into workplace compensation, or deal with payroll tax.