The main problem is that people who feel trapped don’t have the financial stability to go without income for any period of time, which greatly limits the ability to find a new job.
It’s also why voter turnout is so low, at least here in the US.
As intended, of course.
Yup, and why we’ll never see a meaningful increase of the minimum wage.
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Not to mention healthcare.
Healthcare is free.
Maybe in an actual civilized country.
Every country I’ve been to has free healthcare. Where do you live? In Syria or something?
Troll or bot. Fuck off.
So you’re telling me you’ve never had to go through hoops to get healthcare? I can’t do sports I liked because I cannot afford getting injured and be in debt
I’ve been to many European countries and lived in a few of them for long periods of time. There are no hoops, something happens - you get fixed. I do mountain biking, I have a long history of broken bones, torn ligaments and concussions (I’m 39, cycling since childhood). Never paid a penny.
It’s really not. Someone has to train the doctors. The doctors have to get the medication- to get the medication it has to be made somewhere. To be made Someone has to research how to make it and what needs to go in it. To get what needs to go in it Someone has to go grow/mix/etc etc etc.
Yes, but the healthcare is free.
Why would finding a new job cause a lapse in income?
Because you never know what’s going to happen at the new job. You might be given circumstances you cannot adhere to or deal with people you simply can’t put up with.
Starting a new job is always a gamble and can fail easily
A lot of places will walk you out the moment you turn in notice.
If you planned a two week notice and the other job won’t be ready for you until then…you’re kind of SOL.
That’s why it’s important to pay close attention to how your job treats others who have left, and plan accordingly.
But beyond that, you’ve also got payroll conflicts. If you get paid every other week at your current job, and your new job is off cycle or does bimonthly, or pays on set days, that can result in some short term gaps in income. If those happen to hit when bills are due and you are paycheck to paycheck, you’ll either have to get a loan or hope there’s an adequate grace period.
If you quit because of bad conditions, like unsafe conditions.
If you get a new job and put in two weeks, your first job might immediately fire you. Teo weeks without pay is a crisis for a lot of people.
If you need to spend time applying and interviewing you might not be able to work your crappy job during that time.
These are US issues for low income earners who are afraid of getting a new job.
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This is such a narrow world view that it becomes really hilarious when you try to say other people aren’t using logic.
What if someone got fired just because of a horrible boss? What if someone quit because of shitty working conditions? What if someone had to go on medical leave for an extended period of time? What if someones house burned down and they have to move away from their job? What if a work place becomes hostile? What if the business just closes?
This could be a literally endless list.
I’ve done (or had done to me) the first two and last two multiple times and his advice still holds. Not sure what you’re aiming at.
How do you have a job lined up in those situations?
You’re just lying.
I’m not lying. It’s how I went from making 36k to just over 100k in 6 years.
A job you had unexpectedly closed and you already had a job lined up?
You’re lying.
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It’s literally not. We’re talking about losing your job and NOT working.
I don’t even know how you could be so wrong.
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Lmfao. K.
You have no time to find a new job when you’re already juggling two just to make ends meet. Let alone interview for it.
I don’t believe you work two jobs and have no time if you have the time to set up and play on private Valheim servers.
I never said I did. I’m lucky. I have a good job that pays well, at a decent company with a decent boss. I really like my job too! Lots of people aren’t that lucky though.
Tell me you are upper middle class without telling me you are upper middle class.
I did this while at my poorest. It’s literally how I climbed out. My ratchet-ass cousin just did this last month, and she is perpetually trying to make a dollar out of 15 cents. My ex-teacher friend is currently doing it too. Anyone at any income level can just keep an eye out for opportunity.
You work one job while looking for better opportunities elsewhere, then quit and go elsewhere, rinse and repeat. Fastest way to increase your earnings, period, and way better in terms of QOL.
I hadn’t considered that your experience is the only valid one and nobody can have a different one than yours. Such a convincing argument you have there.
It’s not an argument, but an anecdote. I assure you that anything I can do, another person can do.
What I don’t understand is why you seem vested in being hopeless about your own future.
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Some assholes think that it’s very easy for every human being to just go out and find a new job. Just like that.
Not every human, just the ones with economic value.
We should seriously discuss how our society should treat the rest.
That’s easy. According to most people “die” is good enough. Oh they won’t say it out loud but their actions speak loud as fuck.
Well it is the default state.
It’s always been hard for me to find a job
:( I know the feeling
I am a fucking janitor and it feels like the big time given the shit this town been given me.
If an economy’s working correctly, it certainly should be. The demand for goods/services and willingness to work for them is one of the few things that’s basically fundamental to human nature. Of course we have all kinds of problems that make that inaccessible in an economy, or that artificially skew the ratio of one to the other (for better or for worse, depending on the person). First and foremost, that across the public/private spheres, a few people at the top have the entire economy by the throat.
It’s definitely intentionally made difficult. It’s not to say you can’t just move around at jobs and stuff, but it definitely requires some tough measures and occasional high risks.
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Yes, it’s that easy.
Maybe make a little more effort with your comments if you actually have something you want to add.
Maybe make a little effort when searching for a job.
That has nothing to do with what I’m talking to you about. You have a shit attitude, get it adjusted.
I don’t like losers who can’t make the smallest effort to improve their lives. If you think that’s shit attitude, then you’re destined to suffer. Enjoy your choices in life!
I like “just start your own business!” I had a small business that did well enough that I was able to run it for 10 years and only stopped out of choice. I now have a relatively low-paying job with someone else and I am more financially secure now than I was during any of those 10 years.
Nobody said it’s easy to be independent. Stability is definitely not guaranteed when you have a small business
When “just start your own business” is presented as a real viable alternative to a job with someone else, they are saying it’s easy. There’s nothing easy about it. And they don’t tell you very important things like the tax penalty you have to pay if you don’t file quarterly.
Life is not naturally easy- it is only because of the labor of others that life is anywhere near as comfortable as it is now.
We have the means to make a fair and equitable society with minimal crime and no hunger. We, as a society, choose not to. We choose the hard life for the sake of getting everything we worked for to ourselves at the risk of losing it all with one bad day. That’s not comfortable. The labour of all should benefit all so that everyone can have an easy and comfortable life.
What do you mean by “we chaosem the hard life”? What do you think should be done to achive easy life for everyone?
We choose to continue to live in a pro-capitalist society, therefore we choose the hard life. Pure and true socialism is the easy way out my friend. Comfort for all.
But how?
life can be easy for everyone if we all chip in a little, it’s the whole basis of society, we just can’t afford the hoarding aristocracy
Serious question: do you think the “aristocracy” has like, vaults full of money? Like you think Jeff Bezos has billions of dollars sitting in his bank account? Or a literal vault?
Because that is definitely not how rich people actually live. As a rule, they have very little liquidity as a percent of their net worth.
What does that have to do with anything? Just because the wealth is on paper doesn’t make it any less real.
It matters because people suggest that Bezos et al “hoard wealth” which is both untrue and impossible with the way their wealth is calculated.
Starting a business is very easy. Much easier than searching for a job. Sustaining your business is a different matter.
I mean, it definitely is an alternative, but it’s not easy at all
Dude, stop. They don’t want to run a business, they want a guarantee of security, and by rights they are entitled to that. If you don’t agree, that’s your problem, but don’t come up on here thinking their complaints are a threat to your society thinking you have to change their way of thinking to quell it.
We’re abandoning you whether you like it or not :P
Jesse wtf are you talking about?
You’re defending a shitty evil economic system by defending the notion of small business as a meaningful alternative to work while ignoring the motivations of who you’re talking to. Doing that belies your motivations: you see him complaining as a threat to capitalism which you support, which is why you’re trying to convince him in the first place.
I am telling you we’re going to abandon capitalism whether you like it or not, shutting down your primary goal of convincing people not to complain. I’m telling you emphatically we’re going to do a lot more than complain.
It’s that simple
No one is abandoning capitalism lol
Shit, formerly-communist countries embraced capitalism to have any sort of economy at all.
wym hes just trying to cook
Go live in North Korea, no one is stopping you.
It sounds great, but I forget the part where I asked for your opinion
Dude is high on groupthink.
Kind of ironic
There is no financial security. Anyone of you, even higher paid people, could go homeless any second and there is nothing you can do about it.
And they don’t tell you very important things like the tax penalty you have to pay if you don’t file quarterly.
Meh, you find out about that the first year and honestly in the US, it’s not that much.
depends on what bussiness, and what country, in developing countries the salary for white collar and blue collar jobs are insanely low that it is basically slavery and you will earn like triple or more income if you have even the smallest bussiness like selling street food or door dash kind of job
I don’t know where is that, but unless you don’t play by the rules usually being a business owner is worse. Usually developing countries have a myriad of taxes and labour laws that make having a business very difficult. So for you to have a business you either don’t go by the law (which is how successful “business owners” usually get there, by knowing someone or by cutting corners), you have to work an insane amount of hours (my dad used to work Monday to Monday, 10 hrs a day on a median), or you accept that you might need to declare bankruptcy in any given time.
But the same people that think we can simple jack up no-skill job wages to $15, 20, 30/hr think that all business owners are bazillionaires who can easily afford the more expensive wages.
That was also the running theme in subs (on Reddit) when it came to landlords - they were all evil billionaires just looking to screw over their tenants.
Nope. I am one of those people. If you can’t afford to pay employees a livable wage, you shouldn’t be running a business. I had no employees, in part because I couldn’t afford to pay an assistant a wage I felt they deserved. People don’t deserve to suffer just so you can get The Burger Hole off the ground.
No one is talking about “suffering” FFS. But a no-skill job is still a no-skill job. Get a marketable skill and there is plenty of money out there.
Paying someone less money than they can afford to live on is allowing them to suffer at your business’ expense.
So yes, we are talking about suffering.
And there is no such thing as a ‘no-skill job.’
no-skill job
There are plenty of no-skill jobs. If someone off the street can be told what to do in an hour or so then the skill level is 0. If that is the level of work one does, there should be no expectation as to the level of money one deserves. Earn a skill and demand more money, society shouldn’t be funding, let alone encouraging, lazy moochers.
Then why do you need to hire someone else to do it? If anyone can do it, why don’t you fucking do it? Is it because you’re too lazy that you don’t want to do it? Is it because you don’t want to make so little money doing it?
Maybe look up what the term “Opportunity Costs” means. As a high value employee, one should focus their time on - you guessed it - high value roles instead of wasting your limited time on something that can be done by just anyone off the street. But if you want to continue to not understand, then that’s on you.
Good thing we’ll get God-Emperor Trump in there and take care of all those “lazy moochers.” You left out “welfare queens,” by the way.
I can’t even imagine the “some people don’t deserve to be paid enough to survive” mindset.
Riiiiight… asking for people to stand on their own with marketable skills is apparently a huge ask these days from some. Just come out and say you are lazy and want hand-outs.
All jobs are skilled jobs.
Post WW2 a lot of stock was put in scientism in industrial nad manufacturing jobs, which has led to the rise of new public management, cementing the dissolution of the bond between identity and job. The basic principle is that everything can be quantified and measured, and that every step carried out by a master craftsman can be exactly described and distributed. The replacement of actual manufacturing with the menial task of carrying out a single, repeatable step hour after hour after hour, day after day. Like a robot.
That’s the death of skilled jobs, and it’s driving the collapse of the uneducated man, according to Richard Reeves among others. A shift towards cognitive work instead of labor has taken place, and a lot of the jobs that previously carried a large segment of the lower strata has simply moved to asia and lower wage countries.
Even menial tasks required knowledge to accomplish
Fortunately there’s still the skilled trades. What can be automated is, but there’re still a lot of tasks that require journeyman level tradespeople to be actively involved in the work. Get into a good union apprenticeship when you are young and you can make real money with good benefits and retire with a nice pension in addition to SSI. Unfortunately union membership is at around 10 percent of the US workforce.
“skilled” and “unskilled” labor have actual definitions. Unskilled labor is absolutely a thing
You have to learn something to do the job. It literally doesn’t matter what you do, it requires knowledge and effort, that is not no skill.
We know what you mean and in a very literal sense you are right. However, there is both a legal and colloquial definition that basically means “low to very low skill job.”
Low-skilled/unskilled labor” is a term used by the Bureau of Labor Statistics to categorize work that requires little or no experience or training to do or consists of routine tasks.
Most jobs are zero skill jobs.
No, everything requires you to know how to do it and put effort into it. Therefore it is not a zero skill job. Unless you get paid to sit and literally do absolutely nothing all day long, it is not zero skill. Less skill, sure, but not zero
Most jobs require life skills which every adult should have acquired during their childhood. Walking is also a skill which you must train, but no one expects a grown up not to know how to walk. Thus these jobs are zero skill.
That’s completely wrong, but continue to think that.
Regardless of whether the job is classified as a “skilled” job or not (and who’s definition of “skilled” you choose to accept or not)… the work and time your employee puts into the labor is as important to your business as any work you may be doing. Without their labor your business is meaningless. That labor deserves, at minimum, the employee’s ability to be able to live (food, shelter, medical, transportation, and some degree of entertainment). If, as a business owner, you cannot value your employees time and labor in your business with appropriate compensation to allow them to live, then you do not deserve your business.
the work and time your employee puts into the labor is as important to your business as any work you may be doing.
This is comically wrong. No, sorry… a salesperson closing a $1M contract for the purchase of some equipment, and a janitor dumping out some trash is not equivalent. Those jobs are not “as important”. Not even remotely in the same league. That’s why those two aren’t paid the same and why one position can be done by any jamoke off the street with 5 minutes worth of training versus someone who might have a decade of knowledge and training in the industry. Hell if something happened to the janitor for a day or three, work wouldn’t stop. Things would still get done. Jim in accounting could dump his trash into the dumpster in back. It would be a mild inconvenience, but it can still be done. It isn’t the end of the world if a no-skill job gets pushed back a bit. Not closing a deal that keeps the other employees working, the machines humming and the incoming coming in, is a whole different ball of wax.
The whole role of a business owner is based on appropriating the positive and negative fruits of others’ labor. This is a violation of the moral foundation of property rights (getting the fruits of your labor). The workers should get the positive and negative fruits of their labor without any employers and run their company as a worker cooperative.
Landlords are privatizing the products of nature which everyone has an equal claim to. Thus, landlords similarly inherently violate rights
How high are you right now?
The point is that in, for example, a car factory the employer owns the cars (positive) and makes the relevant contracts with the input suppliers (negative). The employees are jointly de facto responsible for using up the inputs to produce the cars. By the moral principle that legal responsibility should be assigned in accordance with de facto responsibility, the workers in the firm should jointly be assigned the legal claim to the produced cars and hold the liabilities to the input suppliers.
Yet when the writer’s guild and sag aftra went on strike they all decided to wait until people started losing their homes.
Ghouls. All of them
Except half the workers are scabbing pieces of shit who are undermining the strike.
I kind of feel like both are true.
The threat of starvation and homelessness is a pretty strong coercion to keep working at all…
…but nobody’s really stopping you from job-hunting if you really hate this particular job rather than the concept of having a job at all.
I’m not going to sit here and be like “just go back to school, get certifications, blah blah blah” because seriously fuck that. You and whose fuckin’ Time Turner?
That said, even looking for a less-awful workplace doing the same thing you’re already doing could be an improvement in your overall mental health and life situation. A small step, maybe, but I know from myself and people around me that it can be a step.
You need to be very certain though. What if the new job doesn’t work out and they decide 6 months later they don’t need you after all? Having a job, as shitty as it might be, is stability. Changing a system always comes with risks.
(Never mind that a different job needs to even be available without moving your whole life elsewhere)
Stagnation also comes with risks.
Your current shitty job could do the same thing.
You should always be casually interviewing. Your current employer should be passively fighting to keep you (with the conditions and comp and growth your are experiencing there). If another job offers more, off you should go.
True, it could also happen to my current job. But then I haven’t actively done anything to cause it. I haven’t gone out of my way to change the situation and thus made it worse. That’s a big factor in why people are afraid of change, the risk of actively and inadvertently making it worse, instead of passively enduring.
(Disclaimer: I’m on disability so I don’t have a “current job” and I also live in a place with decently sane labour laws)
This is just accepting the same amount of risk but denying yourself agency in improving your life.
Ask yourself if you would accept that in any other situation - same risk, but no agency. I’d hope the answer is no.
But just enduring the current job also comes with a risk even in a country with strong labor laws. Not changing jobs comes with stagnation of skills and wages. I’ve heard plenty of stories of loyal employees who worked the same job for decades but who now earn less than the new hires and they are now at a point where switching jobs is hard since their skill set hasn’t improved for years. Risk averse people are also often too afraid to even renegotiate their wages. And bosses know that and exploit that.
That feels like a musical chairs approach to this issue, where people who find a good job are lucky and sit in that and the rest shuffle between the shitty job leftovers. I recently found a decent job and it‘s only cause the guy retired after 30 years. Now I can only hope they will keep me on, or else I get to participate in that awful game again. Or maybe it will turn shitty for some other reason, like how there is no raises and my rent keeps going up anyway.
We even got unions in my country, and still we ended up like this where a lot of people switch jobs every few years to try and keep up with inflation. I’m not saying don’t take that step though. Sorry, I got no point I think? Just a rant your comment inspired in me.
Sometimes you need a good rant; no harm done.
but nobody’s really stopping you from job-hunting if you really hate this particular job
Yes and no. It might be extremely difficult to get an interview due to the hours you’re currently working.
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How is it a weak ass excuse? If you’re scheduled to work during the hours that interviews are available, what the hell are you supposed to do?
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Call your boss. Tell them you’re sick. Go to the interview.
You find other interviews that can fit your schedule.
Can you? Are you sure? You really think there aren’t people who have trouble scheduling interviews due to their current job’s schedule?
I think there are people that have trouble with a lot of things, but as far as practical advice for living in society, I think that’s a shit excuse.
For anyone that trapped, you have my sympathies.
I agree with you to an extent. From my personal experience, working at a string of shitty companies, some industries don’t provide better opportunities. In service jobs for example you usually can only choose between being treated like “a piece of shit” or “a human who is also a piece of shit”.
Additionally, working 8 hours as a punching bag, plus 1 hour unpaid overtime, plus 2 hour commute doesn’t leave much energy to write applications.
I also managed to get out of it eventually, but I’ve always been overqualified for the service industry and always had problems with authority, which made it easier for me to question the way I was treated. Still it was way harder than it had to be.
Nobodys stopping you but having a miserable job can take its toll and can affect your job hunt. At least it did for me. After years of failed job hunts and a difficult battle with MDD and alcoholism my Dr signed me off sick until I got a new job. In a short period I had 3 job offers.
3months off with full pay. Spent a couple days a week job hunting. Rest of the time went walking in the national parks with my dog. At the end I had a 60% better paying job, no more commute, no more being voluntold to drive around the country to tasks I had zero training for and much better colleagues. One of my best times of my life.
Come live in France.
You get a little bit of welfare, enough for rent and food. Highly recommended.
I read that to the tune of Mambo No 5
You get a bit of welfare, 'nuf for rent 🎵 A little bit of food, I recommend 🎶 A little bit of health care, for your life 🎵 And a little bit of family time, for your wife 🎶
Go on…
And the bi-annual mass protest!
You also get:
- a population with an increasingly large number of older people
-a relatively higher tax rate
-a pension program which is unsustainable needing a new retirement age of 65 to 67
-A country where mid career change is difficult
-stratospheric chronic unemployment rate
-a lifetime-employment system which translates to a large permanently-jobless population that’s just generally pissed
-and employment being somewhat elite
Not much of this is unique to France
Do you mind citing some sources? Much appreciated!
“If the pickings are slim, they’ll appreciate what little they get.”
A set of doctrines or beliefs that are shared by the members of a social group or that form the basis of a political, economic, or other system.
Edit: this response was part of a chain, but I posted it when lemmy.world was having issues and I think my lemmy client couldn’t find the comment it was responding to, so it just posted it at the top level, here’s the chain for context: https://lemmy.world/comment/1973311
Capitalism is an ideology, you have a very weird relationship with definitions, first denying what scalping is and now denying what an ideology is. I don’t know why you choose to live in a world where you just make up your own definitions, but it makes it harder to communicate.
Demand outstrips supply absolutely, and yeah if we built an infinite number of houses we’d have a fine supply, but also if we didn’t have 16 million vacant homes we’d also have a fine supply. We currently have more vacant housing units than homeless people (by a factor of ~30), and capitalists are purposefully restricting supply to increase cost.
I don’t know why you choose to live in a world where there is only one possible solution to the housing crisis. I’ve already said building more would obviously help supply, I don’t know why you’re so ideologically motivated that you can’t admit that putting literally millions of housing units on the market would also help supply. You seem to have an inability to even consider that capitalism could have any problems. That’s the epitome of an ideologue.
There’s a surplus but they’re restricting supply?
Yup. GPU scalpers do the same thing, they buy up an entire stock, and then restrict supply by only letting a couple units go at a time, which inflates the price.
In housing, capitalists lovingly call this practice “investing”, when you buy up land or housing and don’t rent it out or sell it, you just let it sit and increase in value.
That’s an easy explanation to reach for, but the theory rapidly breaks down without a unified cartel controlling the entire thing, because it’s opportunity cost down the drain to sit on properties to try to drive up prices across the market - each individual participant would make more money breaking with the cartel and just selling/renting their stock. Hence, the sheer number of actual participants in the market disproves it.
There are a ton of reasons why individuals/corporations would scalp housing units and hold onto them without opening them up to use, from laws requiring fair treatment of renters like in NYC (where 90,000 rent controlled apartments remain vacant), to “unified cartels” actually have incredibly large influence over some areas (there are some companies that hold 10s of thousands of housing units, like blackrock, and these corporations purposefully keep some vacant to inflate the price of all units and control supply).
But even if you want to just close your eyes and ignore my last paragraph, you can try to rationalize away the data, but the data will still be there. There are 16 million vacant housing units in the U.S. Even if you can’t fathom any reason why these might exist, they still do, and they still impact supply even if you’d like to believe they don’t.
I’m not pretending they don’t exist. I’ve called the problem out myself. But simple “capitalists are hoarding them to price gouge” is not a plausible explanation as to why.
You didn’t respond to anything I said. You essentially said “I agree and you’re wrong” with some fluff, so uhm okay good talk buddy.
I really don’t know why convos go this way.
Consider more deeply the problem of how competing firms respond to prices. Consider that these firms don’t actually have monopolies over a single geographical area, and also that people would have the option to move somewhere else even if they did. When there is actual competition, the theory immediately breaks down, because sitting on stock without selling/renting it actually just wastes money, and any other competing provider will just slip in below the price you’re trying to sell it at.
My stomach forces me. So does my pride. And my wife.
I’m addicted to healthcare
Nobody is “forcing” me to work (disabled vet, so healthcare is paid and I get a bit to cover living)
But I can’t afford to live if I don’t work at least a few months here and there despite deemed largely unsuitable for work… and I’m way better off than most people in the US, all things considered.
I am all for universal income, universal education, universal healthcare… because I exist with some of these things… they tell me I earned them, but I didn’t do shit anyone else hasn’t. So yeah fuck that, everyone deserves all the safety net.
My stomach and bills force me too. In the mean time I will look for better jobs.
I’m between billionaire CEO positions right now.
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The difference is someone has to do the labor to stop you from being homeless and starving. So, either you will do labor that can compensate them- or you should do the labor to stop yourself from starving. Starvation is the natural state of humanity
Starvation is the natural state of the individual. Society separates us from that. You will find that other things are also fairly natural, such as death, disease, and exposure.
Unfortunately, for the support that manages to feed people, work must be done, and not every job can find enough people that want to do it sincerely to avoid some people hating their job.
That doesn’t mean employers should get away with being exploitative and abusive, or that reform isn’t needed. But the philosophy “no one should ever have to do something they don’t want to do” is unrealistic.
Agreed. Now imagine if the people doing the work they don’t enjoy, do it because the compensation outweighs the hardship. Rather than creating systems that both compensate disproportionately less for some roles in society AND ensure there is enough labour through coercive means.
Lets say everyone gets free college education, and there is no bias in the system for who gets to work where. No one wants to be lets say… a technician for utility lines, or work in maintaining sewage systems because there are easier jobs.
Should we a) increase compensation or b) make it difficult for people who work there transition to other work.
Universal healthcare, unemployment income, free education, universal child care, universal housing etc. all undermine the societal ability to keep people at work that is difficult but underfunded.
I’m on board with the reforms that properly recognize jobs people are inclined to hate as deserving of being some of the highest paid rather than lowest paid. I think health insurance should not be tied to employment (universal ideally, but at least decoupled from employment benefits). Free education to a point. I think universities need to be held more accountable for efficiency, rather than anything resembling a blank check (the well-intended student loan system has caused unintended badness without any accountability for actually managing expense). I’ll accept that universal ‘housing’ can be difficult when you get into the minutia (a fine line to walk between providing universal housing and appearance of just packing away undesirables out of sight, and auditing the living conditions)
You listed power line technician, but Linemen (as they are called) make crazy good money. I believe they deserve more, because the job is insane, but it’s a skilled, union job that pays very well.
Also they commonly only work 4 days per week.
Awesome. Firefighters are also paid quite well and have an on and off schedule. Thanks (sincerely) for the name - Linemen. Couldn’t remember it for the life of me.
All labour requires skill, some more, some less. Unfortunately pay doesn’t always scale with skill and danger/dislike/inconvenience etc.
I agree that there should be rewards for doing undesirable jobs. It would improve coordination.
We could have a society without employers. Everyone could be individually or jointly self-employed as in a worker coop. Such a society would give workers control rights over the fruits of their labor, which employer-employee relationships inherently deny. This denial makes being an employer by itself exploitative and abusive. We need to abolish the property relationships of work not reform
Starvation is the natural state of the individual. Society separates us from that.
How so? Isn’t the point of this meme that you have to work in society (in general) to not starve?
Some societies have figured out how to care for people better than other societies.
That’s awesome!
work in society (in general) to not starve
No. Capitalism requires that we ‘work’. I.e. provide output that is valuable to the capitalists. In a normal society, there are other forms of value that merit the person existing.
But also, we’re human. One of the reasons I want people to not starve is that I’m not a sociopath. So sometimes the value a person provides to society is that they’re not starving in the middle of the street. There’s value in that.
In a normal society
What’s a normal society? Is this a no true scottsman argument? It’d be my perspective that in the vast majority of societies people generally have to work to live.
normal society
Good point! Let’s start with a definition that’s something like… a society of humans that are treated like humans, and not treated like ‘human capital’, and go from there.
output that is valuable to capital (owners)
This is false. You need to provide output that is valuable to your consumers
No, the owner needs to do that to stay in business. You need to provide output valuable to the owners. The owner can decide whether you need to provide value to the customers or not.
Example: Nepotism.
example: nepotism
Because unethical acts that are bad business practice are such a great example.
Nepotism isn’t unethical. The owner of the company has every right to do what they want with their capital. There is nothing that says the owner must act in a rational or profit seeking way. A CEO must act in a profit seeking way, but that’s because he is accountable to the owner.
It’s also not necessarily bad business practice. You seem to be suffering under the misconception that the world is a meritocracy, and the ‘best’ person for a job should get it. That’s not how any of this works in the real world.
Regardless, you seem like a creative chap. You can come up with other examples of when a business owner might keep someone on payroll that wasn’t directly to extract value for the customer and instead to provide value for other reasons. I believe you can do it.
This is false. There are many types of work that the market fails to value accurately. An example of this would be economic public goods. A producer of these will not be rewarded anywhere near the social value of what they produce
I didn’t say you’re rewarded commensurate to value brought, but rather that workers produce output valuable to consumers.
In some cases, the valuation of work by the market due to it involving economic public goods can be insufficient, so people producing valuable public goods are forced to take on another job. In the case of public goods, there is nothing for the employer to appropriate and exclude others from to charge consumers for access, so employers don’t value it despite it being valuable to consumers. I don’t believe they were mis-attributing what work is under the current economic system
Starvation is the natural state of the individual.
Thank you for articulating this very important distinction!
Morally, everyone has an equal claim to products of nature and the value they add to production. Today’s economic system denies people their equal claim. If society secured people’s equal right to natural resources and their value, the notion of coercion in the post would be reduced. Therefore, the economic system’s structure causes this coercion not just nature
No sufficiently sophisticated political ideology is against labor (capitalist work is not synonymous with labor). On the contrary, most anti-capitalist ideologies are extremely pro-labor.
The question isn’t whether we need labor, that’s reductive and (currently) we obviously do. The question is how should labor be treated. Right now labor is a commodity to be bought and sold by capitalists. If we instead setup a system that decommodified labor, outlawing renting of humans (just as we have with buying humans), then even in a market-based economy you have far better compensation for labor.
Market-value for labor in a capitalist society is done as a commodity as I’ve previously said, so the goal is to reduce the price of the commodity as far as allowable for the business owners. This means a viable path towards profitability is reducing the labor force, or cutting compensation. This is why layoffs happen when companies are doing incredibly well, to increase immediate profits.
If instead there was a democratic assembly of workers that held their interests in common, there’d be no reason to just layoff a bunch of great workers during times of good business.
In short, we don’t need two different classes with two different relationships to capital. Instead of allowing one class to rent the other, compensate them as little as possible, and pocket the surplus value, outlaw that commodification of humans and allow the market to properly compensate workers.
This isn’t an end all solution, but market socialism is a massive improvement over capitalism, and once we dismantle the parasitic owner class (capitalists, landleeches, cops, etc.) we can focus on more interesting discussions about the merits of markets in certain situations (e.g they’re good at reacting to consumer desires, they’re bad at accounting for externalized costs like climate change, etc.)
With respect to climate change, it has more to do with the property relationships of the current economic system than the market itself. If natural resources were commonly owned and people had a recognized right to their value, polluters and other people harming the environment during production would have to pay citizens collectively proportional to the social costs. Then, prices would accurately represent the social cost of pollution involved in the production of the product
