I really want capitalism to give you a wage to do all those things. I understand it's been cronified and monopoloies have fucked over a whole lot of people.
The real fix is to fix capitalism, not write you a check every month for being born. We need to enforce fair markets, fair wages etc.
For those at the very bottom, I want dignity, a free education, and if still unsuccessful access to a low skill job that can pay basic bills.
Fantastic article, we've truly been seeing a bifurcation of the workforce, and the development of a plutonomy. The interests of capital and labor are inherently opposed because the incentive of the employer is to reduce costs, and capital has been winning out.
I think there's a false tendency to blame Apple for this predicament. It's not Apple's responsibility to provide for the welfare of our country's citizens, it's our responsibility - and it's only through our government that we can really change things. No vacation, benefits, and 80% of one's paycheck going to rent is our government's responsibility to fix, not Apple's.
The most obvious policy here would be some sort of universal basic income. This would naturally prop up wages for the low-paying jobs like janitor that nobody wants to do.
Having to work under those precarious conditions for such lousy pay (relative to cost of living) and no prospects for advancement must be a downright miserable experience, the literal definition of wage slavery. 6pm-2am shift means she probably never even sees her kids during the week. All for a meager $600/month in disposable income after rent is paid (which when you're a contractor without vacation and benefits isn't much). And she'd never be allowed to complain about it because she'd be told that she should be grateful to have a job, there are people in Africa starving, she should've studied harder in school, and she shouldn't have had kids. What a world we live in.
Many oppose universal basic income on ideological grounds, but enough with this ideologically-driven bullshit that ignores the unnecessary suffering of the wage slaves at the bottom. Nobody in a first world country should have to live a lowly life like that janitor.
That doesn't solve anything. So what if those particular people don't make as much? Something that benefits everyone equally, while also allowing capitalistic endeavors to continue, is more reasonable. Like a living wage.
I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but all of those problems could be alleviated by gasp paying workers a living wage, with schedules that allow one to have a life outside of work.
What's laughable is the absolute privilege of treating the worker class like the slaves they are and demanding they take what is offered.
Coincidentally the income inequality is the highest ever as well- but of course that couldn't be part of the problem.
This wont change in a capitalist society. The only ways to fix this that have a chance to actually work that I can think off is 1) Americans work for as low wages as workers in China to compete or 2) non-capitalism. I would love to learn of any other ways but this has been discussed by people way smarter than me for ages and I have seen no other solutions that wouldn't sink the US economy or cause a revolution.
Along these lines, it doesn't fit to equate unpaid internships to serfdom. Serfdom involves effectively permanent, near total servitude to a landowner for most aspects of life.
Uh, wage slavery? How much of a person's salary is spent just on the basics such as food and clothing and gas and education?
The minimum wage is a horrible stain on a free society. It traps people with low skills out of work and cements them into an underclass that's much more difficult to break out of. It prevents business that are operating on the edge from continuing to operate. It's a classic example of do-gooders riding in and creating damage.
This is how the system is structured; there is a permanent underclass that will accept any wages. Even more educated people will lower their wage expectations when the economy appears bad. This means that companies can get cheaper labour at any time to pick up slack or as replacements if their current workers get too uppity and demand a living wage.
it locks out people who are in a worse situation - unempployed.
Unemployed is only bad if it means starvation or homelessness. In a socialist, communist, or anarchist society unemployment would be okay. Unemployed workers wouldn't starve, they would still be allowed to live, and they could take part-time jobs/unpaid internships and learn new skills without worrying about making ends meet.
There are much better avenues that would be cheaper and have more positive effect on people: basic risk, valuation and business skills being taught in early high-school, television campaigns that encourage people to think about how their labour is used, what they could do to make themselves marketable. Mechanisms to get people speaking English more effectively. Lower taxation. Effective technical colleges.
So your solution is to train people to become effective human resources for businesses to consume? That doesn't help. We already do that.
You're saying that workers need to learn how to be better workers so that they can prosper. You're saying that they should make themselves as appealing to businesses as possible and somehow, you're assuming that this will give them higher wages. The only reason people get higher wages is because they demand them either through a union or through an informal agreement with other workers that they won't work for less. This is true in the IT industry and is one of the reasons why IT workers don't see a need for a union. We all have agreed never to work for a shitty wage. We know that we can just take our skills elsewhere or start our own company or whatever because we stand up for ourselves.
I mean, sure, but we gotta start somewhere.
If you want my opinion on big, society-wide changes, "What needs to happen is that the average salary can provide a citizen with a comfortable and simple life (housing/shelter, food, clothing, etc)" isn't enough. The capitalist system needs to be destroyed, and we need a new arrangement of society where workers own the means of production and the value is shared with everyone, not a few arbitrary billionaires. Restructure society to benefit everyone (or at least work towards that goal), rather than a society that unequally benefits the capitalist class.
But until that movement is ready to happen, I think it's fine to acknowledge that the "real" cost of living has risen over the past few decades, while most people's "real" wages have remained stagnant. If it's not salaries, then I think the next thing to look at is the exorbitant housing and rent prices.
The 'free market' should do the right thing per capitalist economics and start paying its employees higher to meet the scarcity. Instead of trying to make government force people to go back to work for dimes. While getting bailed out by trillion dollar bailouts.
But naturally, capitalism is for the people. The corporations keep socialism for themselves.
The only way we can have anything resembling a free market for labour is if those seeking to sell their labour can be assured that failing to do so for a given period of time will not result in homelessness, starvation, and death.
In other words, until and unless we provide everyone with a basic income sufficient to support a modest living.
As it stands, and as you observed, pay for work is based primarily on some very old-fashioned notions of the value of the people who do the work—which is to say, anyone doing menial jobs is obviously a lesser being than those who tell them what to do. Then anyone telling them what to do is a better human being than their subordinates, and so on, until we reach the logical conclusion that CEOs are like unto gods (or at least kings), and must be treated as such.
This is not an indefinitely sustainable model, particularly in the face of increasing automation and increasing income/wealth inequality.
A basic income would result in people only doing the terrible jobs when there's actually sufficient incentive for them to do them, since they're no longer driven by desperation. Thus, assuming other external pressures haven't come into play, the wages for such jobs would rise until they actually compensated for the extra (sometimes literal) crap people have to deal with to do them.
With it, minimum wages could be abolished. Then that flood of low-paying jobs will materialize, not out of thin air, but out of China. It will, likely, also bring back jobs in shoe repair and the like.
Well, that was a weirdly written article... I do think we need the US government to do more for Labor/People in this country. At this point Labor/People are so unrepresented in the political process they are just getting screwed left and right. Unions are a nightmare and keep a lot of bad people in jobs that shouldn't be there, but without them nobody is pushing for fair pay.
Why can't the US government pass a plan to push us slowly to a real living wage instead of a minimum wage?
Why can't we push for a $12 to $15 an hour living wage across the board and tie it to future inflation?
Not enough to be crazy, but enough that people are not stuck in a perpetual trap of poverty.
This is why capitalism is successful. You need an honest feedback mechanism from labor. If a centralized government assigned people jobs of maintaining a shitty php monolith at a standard wage those people would effectively produce nothing, because it is a shitty job and those people would not enjoy it or work hard because it is unfair that other people get better jobs. The unintended consequence is income inequality but that inequality is the only way to get someone to be a garbage man instead of a youtube commentator or beer reviewer.
I'm fully agreed with this. The question is then what are the ways we can improve the working/living conditions of people around the world. The way workers around the world have fought for better conditions is by using their ability to withhold labor and collectively bargain with the capitalist class.
If we can figure out a decent economic system, then there won't be problems giving people a decent wage. Sure, if we keep doing things the way we are now then nobody will get a decent wage, but that's a very fixable problem.
The real fix is to fix capitalism, not write you a check every month for being born. We need to enforce fair markets, fair wages etc.
For those at the very bottom, I want dignity, a free education, and if still unsuccessful access to a low skill job that can pay basic bills.
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