Yay, class warfare, it's awesome. We've basically conquered scarcity, and yet, we still expect people to work 60-70 hours a week minimum wage jobs or starve to death.
this post was submitted on 22 Dec 2024
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My workplace sometimes has a slow day and the bosses will give workers two options: Go home unpaid, or stay at work for your entire shift and get paid. If you stay, you don't have to do any work, since there is no work to be done. People mostly sit in the cafeteria on their phones for 8 hours.
I asked why we can't choose to go home and get paid and they said it's because then we'd be getting paid for nothing...but we're all sitting in the cafeteria on our phones. We're not working. We are literally being paid for nothing. Why can't we go home with pay? What's the difference?
The difference is that labourers must trade their time for pay. You are selling an hour of your time to the company. That hour doesn't need to be productive, but you can't use it freely. It's the company that makes money by selling a product or service, not its workers. A worker who produces $10,000 of product in an hour is paid for the hour, not for the product. The owner is paid for the product.
A worker who produces $10,000 of product in an hour is paid for the hour, not for the product. The owner is paid for the product.
I think that's a problem in itself.
Correct!
And some people's time is inherently more valuable than others - this makes sense in a deeply twisted way. A emergency brain surgeon for example, would be exceedingly difficult to find, and even more valuable to have, let alone utilize. I think a lot of us can agree that the surgeon being able to save a life in ways almost all of us cannot is valuable.
But some people's time isn't valuable at all. Any middleman - salesman of every type, healthcare insurance, stock brokers. They have been made artificially valuable because they are significantly better at producing income for the already wealthy.
No broker, salesman, or healthcare insurance provider (or hell manager even) is going to help 95% of the country make more money.
Now, if we got compensated based on the finished product we deliver - that would make the hardest workers a lot more fucking money. But corporate America would never allow that - the employee didn't purchase the parts before assembling it, or the ingredients, or the network infrastructure, etc.
The problem, at its core, is that it all ends up tying a price to a human life. Until we can separate cash value from life, we will be stuck with this system.
It's possible to do on a small scale, but inevitably it ends up recreating itself as the community doing it grows.
But if I give them some, I have less!
You dont want to have less. Then CEOs wouldn't be able to get a bigger boat.
Let's see if Americans will do something about it this time.
Narrator: they won't
I'll name two things Americans love more than big daddy warbux dick.
- punishing minorities
- shooting people
PSA: If you're hoping someone with real integrity and ethics is going to show up next round and push for real change -- that person is you.
Let's be straight. The civil court system was created to manage interactions between people. At the lowest level you had the town judge who referees disputes between people in the town. That expended to be things between towns, then states, then countries. Most interactions between people that need an official third party is commerce. Which means corporations these days as they are the majority of commerce.
And the reason for having someone referee disputes was because commerce was so important to the sucsess of any town, state, or country that without commerce everyone in that entity would suffer significantly and the entity would eventually cease to exist.
So that system isn't designed to be fair, or even look out for people. It is designed to protect commerce, and since corporations are the majority of that, they are what it protects.
The root of the problem is that commerce is so critical. That won't change for a long time. But people often wish it would.
Commerce is not what people are critical of. It's the fruits of commerce and how they are distributed. Those who have almost nothing to do with commerce reap all the rewards from it. It's those profit-takers who are protected by the courts. The business entity itself is just a convenient way for them to obfuscate the process. They're run by people who get better treatment because they have money and they only have money because for some reason we've collectively agreed that the people doing the actual work don't deserve the fruits of their labor.
Well, they would argue that they fronted the money and thus took all the risk. And maybe at one point that was actually true. But since the gov worked for them... over time it worked to reduce the risk. I agree the result is disliked, but I was talking about how it got to where it was, why it came into being, and that we shouldn't expect it to be anything but what it is. We just need a balancing force to counter it.
That's generally the function of any state. I mean, it might be written down as something else, but that's what all states become once they gain their monopoly on violence.
The US are an oligarchy after all.
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Corporate executives and politicians.