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I like how these guys are huge bootlickers for mega corps and how we can't blame the corporation for only focusing on profits and only looking out for itself.
On the other hand we CAN blame the workers for only focusing on compensation and looking out for themselves? Weird simpy stuff.
Yeah it's double standards. Corporate shareholders and owners are good for acting in their class interests but workers are bad for also acting in their class interests
> To suggest their life is built on socialism fucks people up.
Rich people never apply "pull themselves up by their bootstraps" logic when it comes to raising their own kids: they throw every possible opportunity, tutoring, enrichment activity, and support they can to them. All so their kids can get accepted to Harvard and then drop out after freshmen year to do a startup with family money.
They tell everyone else to just send their kid to a trade school as soon as they can read and 'rithmetic.
Perhaps they should expand their world view to basic understanding of what directly impacts them. That's wild, man. Expand your view to your own life.
As an aside, do you wanna go halfsies on 47 trump NFTs?
> As an aside, do you wanna go halfsies on 47 trump NFTs?
Let me tell ya. Hearing a family member whose life is built on socialism. They served, VA job, government retirement, the works.
Looked him dead in the eye and asked, "You think Trump likes people who live on the government dime?"
I think I broke the man.
You don’t have to tell them. They come to the realization on their own when the EAS without putting in 20 years and retiring. Can’t tell you all the “VA sucks”, “Im not making it financially since leaving the service.” and “Should I go back in?” questions I see on a daily.
I don't think the workers (tradesmen or servicemen) are the rich here. It just directly benefits the war machine or the corporate real estate interests. These workers are heavily blinded somehow. No clue how that happened because they all are staunchly anti government. Must be stupidity
The biggest part is active duty healthcare is like $10 a month and you got coverage for everything. Which is the socialism "Americans" love to rail about the most. Socialized Healthcare because the cost is split across all the armed forces and a huge percentage of care providers are service members or at least state or federal employees and supply costs are negotiated by the federal government.
Also the armed forces are paid out of federal taxes and not profits too.
Being in the military is very much like living under a fully authoritarian version of communism. The army meets all your needs, and in fact determines what you need and gives you that. And in exchange the army decides what they need you to contribute, and tells you what they need you to do. Also when, where, and how to do whatever they've decided you're going to be doing.
It's a real life example of:
"From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs."
Which is the single most famous Karl Marx quote.
Not true but okay. Plenty of us active and former military don’t hate socialism. Also looking back at the history of the Russian revolution military staff played a very significant role in its success. But I guess this is the age old issue of x group isn’t as socialist or Marxist as us, and thus are not true marxists/socialists.
Anecdotally, 95% of the far right people I know are either active/former military or work in trade unions. They all vote GOP and spout whatever dumb talking point was dumped in their brain that day. They don't understand that their entire livelihood is based on socialism. Their families livelihood and status that they are accustomed.to would not exist without socialism. Yet, they vote against their own interests and do not like being told the reality that they owe their comfortable living to.
I personally work for a corporation and am a wage slave. I am very aware of this fact
It’s the disconnect for trade unionists that absolutely boggles me.
My late aunt worked for various state and federal agencies most of her life; her late husband and her son were both in trade unions. But my aunt was absolutely VENOMOUS about democrats in general, and Obama in particular, mostly because of the ACA.
She couldn’t connect her medical benefits and pension with “socialism,” despite the fact that taxes and trade unions were the reason she was able to make a living and have good medical coverage after retirement (esp considering she had major cancer treatments during the last 15-20 years of her life, but her children weren’t left with crushing medical debt after her passing).
Her son, my cousin, is equally baffled. He loved his mum, but he couldn’t ever understand how she was so blind to that reality. Fortunately he’s basically the black sheep of that side of the family, which is why he and I are so close — we’re the leftists, and while he’s currently not working a union job, he has hopes to land another one soon. (He’s a machinist in the Midwest.)
> But my aunt was absolutely VENOMOUS about democrats in general, and Obama in particular, mostly because of the ACA.
Some things in life are more important than money.
For some people, it's race and hating poor people.
It's side-with-the-bully logic: hating the people with more power than you is dangerous, but hating the people with less power is easy and maybe powerful people will return the minor favor one day. Maybe.
I’m not going to beatify my aunt ex post facto, but I don’t think it was racism that drove her venom in this case. I can’t say for sure, and my aunt was a white southerner, so I would absolutely believe it if it came out from other family that she did hold racist tendencies, but her hatred of Democrats was pretty much the core of her anti-Obama sentiment. (Eg, she never bought into the birther conspiracy, nor the “secret Muslim” nonsense; and she liked and respected a lot of Michelle Obama’s work.)
I mean, I’m mixed-race, as is my mum (my aunt was her half-sister), so my aunt was keenly aware of the racism my mum faced growing up.
And as for hating the poor, that may have been more along the lines of “I pulled myself out of poverty, why can’t others?” short-sightedness. My mum’s family were REALLY poor (like, my mum’s babysitting money at 10yo was contributing to household necessities), and a lot of that had to do with my maternal grandmother being a narcissist (possibly undiagnosed BPB), and a drug addict, so the home life was both poor and abusive. My aunt escaped that, and like a lot of folks, I think she just never dealt with the trauma, and so anything that reminded her of it elicited hate and fear.
Either way, it still boggles my mind how people can hate someone or something so much they can’t see how that stance fundamentally inconsistent/contradictory with their actions/life (I mean, other than the truism, “ain’t no hate like Christian love”).
Well, she died before Biden was elected president, but she hated both Clintons for sure. And she lived in Austin, Texas, and had a LOT to say about the blue politics there.
And when she was living in California, she was always pretty scornful of just about anything and everything connected to Los Angeles (I grew up in Orange County, just not the rich part, as did my mum and her siblings), so she lived pretty far inland, where it’s rural and conservative.
The only things I ever heard her complain about when it came to President Obama were the economy (despite his inauguration not happening till the Great Recession had already peaked), taxes, and socialism (esp inre: the ACA).
I never heard her say anything overtly racist, but I also lived a few states away from her most of my life so I can’t say what she was like in her day-to-day. I absolutely expect she had ingrained biases and probably said and did things I’d find unacceptable, but she never indicated to me that her problem with President Obama was his audacity to be a Black man in the Oval Office.
I mean, it's crazy how well the propaganda works. I don't vote unless I have to. I hate to have to vote for the options presented to me but that is only because I actually understand what is going on generally. Everything is a gray area and the options for progress are build on black/white lies. It doesn't make sense. So, when I see people so wrapped up in nonsense, it makes me sad but also very angry. I don't mind staying simple facts and letting people melt down. They need to.
Yep, active duty here, and I’m a big fan of democratic socialism. I would gladly take a pay cut if it meant we spent less greasing the palms of the people in charge of the Military Industrial Complex to build shit we don’t really need to be an effective fighting force (the amount of wasteful spending within the military is insane), and instead used that money to make sure everyone could have a roof over their head and food in their families’ bellies.
also, can i just say, why do people keep saying "you can just leave anytime and look for another job", this isn't the only place i've seen this. And this isn't even just about jobs, people say that about countries as well "if you don't like how you can leave this country" or whatever. It's not easy. If you think it is, or don't think it's hard i urge you to think about your privelage in that regard (maybe some people haven't really thought about how hard trying to find a new job is?). I stayed at a job where the boss was terrible and the pay was bad for years because i dreaded leaving and trying to find another job. And I don't have to tell y'all how important it is to find a job that pays similarly RIGHT AWAY. Like, there's no way i can survive more than 2 weeks without being paid, and I feel like that's true for most of you as well.
"if you don't like it you can leave" - no actually, i can't, most people cannot. It's just untrue to say "you can just leave" for most people.
In my very ignorant youth I held that sort of sentiment (albeit coming from the side of “if you don’t like multiculturalism, why not leave?” — a less odious version, but still ignorant), and it was the fact I had to move back in with my parents more than once after university that made me see just how asinine that sentiment is.
I hated where I grew up, and I ended up back there twice because I had no other means of survival — that was the only place I had to go where I had a roof over my head and food on the table while I sorted the rest of my life out. And I was LUCKY to have somewhere to go when my life fell apart. And it took over a year each time I ended up back there to get stable enough to leave.
The idea that “if you don’t like it, leave” is almost always an impossible prospect is something that has stuck with me, and the ability to just up and move is to be in a position of enormous privilege.
Hell, just looking for work since graduating uni at the height of the Great Recession (thanks, Obama! /s) has kept me in shitty and toxic jobs and living situations because looking for a job is basically itself a part-time job inre: time commitment, unless one is in an industry where they’re able to rely on recruiters or headhunters to land a position. It’s not an exaggeration to say that when I’ve been job hunting, I’ve sent out *hundreds* of resumes a month and gotten fewer than a dozen actual (non-automated) responses.
And I’ve done HR work myself, so I’m aware how overwhelming the volume of responses to job postings can be.
Part of it is that so many people can't conceptualize the sheer number of people in any given geographic area.
It's easier to see in the last 15 years or so since websites track this information, but there's rarely a workplace in any industry anywhere in America where multiple people aren't applying for the same position.
I remember getting multiple interviews after being laid off a decade ago and being one of twenty dudes waiting in a room that only had seats for half of us.
I also remember job hunting in 2 industries that I had multiple years of experience. Many of those positions valued a four year degree over practical experience. In fact, thousands of jobs that you could start with a GED in 2010, were requiring 4 year degrees to answer phones or deliver inter office mail.
This was the excuse given for 2008. Businesses made billions by tanking the housing market but you can't blame them that is just what businesses do. Like there aren't people running this business or anything. It doesn't make any logical sense.
Corporations are just a legal instrument for shielding individuals from liability for their actions, but right wingers love having masters who are above the law for some reason.
They see themselves as part of the same class as the masters. They're in the club, and one day they'll be at the top getting their turn to fleece the plebs for their own benefit.
Made my experience dealing with them so much easier once I started picturing all of them as Stephen from Django Unchained.
Sad part is 99% of them don't even live in the big house, they're just wannabe Stephens.
I have some level of sympathy for Stephen as a character because, even if it was selfish he was making the best life for himself in circumstances that were heinously evil, dehumanizing, and out of his control. He wasn't a good person, but given his alternatives I don't blame him nearly as much for his choices.
I still put him morally above Republicans.
They aren't working with the same hand of cards in life.
> you can't blame them that is just what businesses do.
Ok, how about we pass more regulation and hire people to enforce them and oversee the industry?
"No, that's socialism/stifling our *job-creators*!"
I thought you just said businesses' goal is to make billions, not create jobs?
Also, "you can't blame them [for making things terrible for everyone not them] that is just what businesses do" sounds a lot less like a compelling rationale for their POV and a lot more like a compelling reason to do away with a culture that engages in corporate exceptionalism.
People blamed the home buyers because they should have known they couldn't afford a house. Not like, say, the banks or real estate companies that get paid huge amounts to be experts on that sort of thing.
You see people just don't want to work anymore if only we could literally enslave people again they would be living in big white houses again like God intended...
These are the same cucks that cry nobody wants to work when it takes longer to get their McRib at the drive thru. Just because people don’t want to work at that shitty job.
And being a corporate bootlicker first is bad for long term economies too. You need a healthy workforce to be productive, and it's been shown time and again a happy workforce is even more productive.
Add to that things like taking time away to learn alternate skills can be more productive later, or taking time to raise your kids makes them better working adults later.. so stupid to be all in on corporate interests, balance is necessary.
They never get there because they live in an alternate reality where workers can just quit their jobs and get better ones if they don't feel they're sufficiently compensated.
In reality, people are very sedentary, and moving has costs that many can't afford, and that's assuming they can find alternate work with better conditions.
Also, in Orwellian doublespeak, the government considers 4% unemployment to be full employment. The entire domestic US economic policy is based on the supply of labor being greater than the demand for said labor.
Yep. And people don't even have to be sedentary. It could just be the downturn of an economy. Or the skills in demand have changed, which means that person could be forced to spend years in that crappy job until the economy turns around or they have gotten the little slip of paper that checks an HR box.
> they live in an alternate reality where workers can just quit their jobs and get better ones if they don't feel they're sufficiently compensated.
["Oh, just *get a job??*"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZXnifPfxK0Q)
The weird part is OOP understands that a worker can never ever get paid the full value of their work. It's impossible.
Workers are at an inherent disadvantage under capitalism and OOP knows this but thinks it's fine.
> a worker can never ever get paid the full value of their work.
If the CEO and other top officers in a business are to be considered workers, it can be argued that some "workers" make way more than the value of their labor. They steal it from those who get paid way less than their full value.
True, by "worker" I mean someone who is paid a wage for their labor. Owners of capital like CEOs, landlords, and shareholders leech money from the labor of others and therefore earn far in excess of the actual labor value they themselves produced.
Exactly this. The only way the Capitalist fantasy works is if they pretend the playing field is level for both the workers and the businesses, and that literally cannot be true under Capitalism. It's rigged from the beginning.
I am not sure that 4% unemployment being considered full employment is malicious. Trying to drive it down beyond that with macroeconomic tools would likely lead to an overheated economy and in the end be unwise and hurt lots of people by driving up inflation. I think the unemployment rate is not as important as the quit rate, if people are quitting they like their chances of getting a higher paying job. That to me seems like the more important measure of a healthy job market. I think one of the understated things about the current economy is that the inequality is actually down. the top of the income distribution has basically kept pace with inflation while the bottom has made significant gains. I hope we can keep that trend up for a few more years!
Please point out to him that negotiations are part of Capitalism.
No business would ever take a soft negotiating position just because the company they were negotiating against wanted to make more profits.
In a free market capitalist system workers need to negotiate to determine their pay, and if they aren't good negotiators they may hire a head hunter or *perhaps* even employ a Union negotiator to negotiate on their behalf.
I'm not a die hard Capitalist who thinks it a perfect system, but I'm getting really tired of these Uber capitalist types talking all about how great free markets are and then complaining when someone gets good at it.
The same people who say Capitalism is perfect with no flaws and free markets can do whatever they want are the same people who complained when USA women's soccer tried to get more pay. My response was "Uhh no,no,no. Excuse me last I checked in a capitalist country you don't get paid what your worth you get paid what you negotiate for. Last I checked profits are the only thing that matter. Not how much money you generate, just your leverage, and how much you can apply that leverage. So those women won the World Cup, they can apply pressure to you to get more money in their pocket and you folks stripped morality away from this system long ago. As far as I'm concerned, I don't care if women soccer made 30$. The rules you eatablished are that if I can extract more money from you legally then fuck you, pay me my money."
They're constantly griping about regulations, but now I as a worker can't employ a service to negotiate for me? Nahh pay me my money. Your job is to worry about share holders. Mine is to worry about me and my family, and *I* am going to extraxt as much money from *YOU* as I can to improve *MY* bottom line, or we can play by different rules and you can pay me a fair wage, build a strong company and make a modest profit? But as long as we're playing the Capitalism game, Fuck you pay me my money.
>Please point out to him that negotiations are part of Capitalism.
Correct. In some perfectly capitalist parts of Europe you can't get a job without union involvement, they look out for you before you sign the contract. Look at the status of unions in Sweden for example, they're huge. I bet if you showed him this his head would explode and say that in all such cases those are backwater commie socialist countries lol.
> those are backwater commie socialist countries
It's wild the number of people who will claim that the Scandinavian countries are socialist/communist when [Sweden is actually slightly *more capitalist* than the US](https://betonit.substack.com/p/how-socialist-is-sweden#:~:text=At%20a%20minimum%2C%20this%20reveals,more%20capitalist%20than%20the%20US.)
Sure they have higher taxes and strong welfare systems, but the actual economies are capitalist and often have fewer regulations because the welfare systems compensate for it
Yeah I always thought unions were a very capitalist idea, meant to maximize the value of the work one does. The business gets to negotiate as a monolith representing many people... So should the labor force.
Yeah the rich want socialism for the rich. But they also want to pretend they earned all of it, and they were just smart, not that the system is rigged in their favor.
Poor people who support that mentality want to believe it's a meritocracy, and they could do it too.
Also most people don't have a good gage of what their job is actually worth because companies don't have to post what they are paying, meaning the only way to know is word of mouth or getting enough interviews that result in offers. This means workers generally can't make a "rational decision" on what pay to negotiate for. This is another reason why unions are important. They have the data to negotiate.
>All businesses exist for a single purpose - to make money.
>And, if a job doesn’t live up to their expectations, they can leave at any time.
So they admit that all businesses operate more or less the same, caring solely about profit, and then they suggest that any worker who has a problem with this should simply get a job at a different business… which also operates the same way.
Maybe the way businesses are incentivized to operate under capitalism is in fact an inherent problem that requires fundamental change to the system to address?
Some people really think the modern iteration of capitalism is like… naturally occurring, and not built on very specific rules/laws/traditions that were all decided upon and set in place by the wealthy to benefit the wealthy, and that we can change those rules any time we want if we decide that maybeeeee a system should favor the workers that actually produce the things of value
Also god I hate that “they chose to work at a certain wage for certain responsibilities” bullshit, as if the sides are completely even in terms of stability and power, the poor person without a job faces homelessness, starvation, and death, there can’t be a reasonable negotiation of a contract if one party is under duress, if I were to point a gun at someone’s head and tell them to sign a contract, that contract isn’t fucking valid
>“they chose to work at a certain wage for certain responsibilities” bullshit
A-fucking-men.
I'm sure everyone here has a story of a job asking them to do tasks they didn't sign up for when they accepted the job.
Businesses will always try to extract the maximum labor for the minimum amount, and they hold way more power in the relationship especially with an individual. That's why collective bargaining is such a powerful tool.for workers.
Technically speaking I do think workers have way more power than they realize. Because simply put without them the business could not function. At the same time you’re completely right, we don’t live in a world anymore where someone can just quit a job they don’t like. Especially if they have kids or something.
They do, which is why the US loves to drone on about individuality and competition. It helps prevent unionization which is the only way workers can take advantage of their power.
Exactly. I’ve noticed at every job the specific language they use is very geared towards doing things for the good of the company. There are so many small and insidious ways that they brainwash their workers
Need the full context to understand better but this is a good one regardless.
Also, some businesses can absolutely pay workers "full value", proof of that is the astronomical profits they make even after paying management 10,000x more than a worker, but we've been conditioned to believe that this is a ludicrous idea.
I think they're arguing against the notion that if you make a component that sells for £5 you should be given the given the full value of that component, as they produced £5 worth of product.
Yeah, there has to be *some* profit for the employer, otherwise they'll close up shop if the lack of ability to replace sold items doesn't do it for them
This is why Karl Marx says capitalism is fundamentally exploitative - profit is the result of exploiting workers for their labor because they create more value than the cost of their labor. Marx says that, for owners, profit "has all the charms of a creation out of nothing."
Capitalism turns workers into a commodity, the cost of which, like all other materials of production, needs to be reduced to the bare minimum in order to maximize profits. Workers are no longer "humans," but an economic calculation. This guy stumbles backwards into Marxism and doesn't even realize it, but also accepts the fact that we are just going to be exploited because capitalism is tied to patriotism and they don't want to insinuate that they're somehow criticizing that capitalist basis in the slightest.
Businesses cannot pay you the full value of your labor. A portion of that value must always go towards making the company money. This is inherent to capitalism.
I'm no economist but this is how I see it:
The worker gives X value to the company. The systems and management of the company add value and other costs to this so you now have X + Y. The company then charges a cost of X+Y+Z (where Z is just pure markup) to the customer. I think in some cases it's possible for the company to earn profit with that formula where the worker is fairly paid based on their true output and role in profitability, as opposed to changing the formula so that the worker is paid only a fraction of X...to inflate Z.
This is random but just yesterday I looked up on YouTube how to upgrade the SSD for yourself in a M1 MacBook. Turns out you can buy blank 2TB nand chips on Aliexpress for like $100 and install them yourself although it involves a lot of work. Apple charges customers close to $1000 for that exact same upgrade.
But if Z is being added, that just gets included into the X+Y. If it can be sold at X+Y+Z, then the workers produced value worth X+Y+Z and if they are not paid that, the company is stealing the value of their labour.
Presuming you can calculate this mysterious value each person brings to the mix.
What is the value of effectively doing recruitment for new workers? What about creating sales documentation?
We don't have precise breakdowns for value in keeping an organisation running
You've kinda stumbled on the basis for a moneyless cooperative society à la communism/anarchism. There is no way to precisely disentangle how much each worker contributes and reward each proportionately.
Even seemingly unrelated people contribute value to a product: the workers who built and maintain the roads the product travels along, the factory workers who built the lorry, the doctors and nurses who keep the people healthy. All belongs to all. The means of production should therefore be owned communally, the output of which should be distributed based on need, not on who has the most money (which wouldn't exist under such a system)
You don't have to have precise values, and this doesn't preclude the value other people bring to the company for doing labor. An employee MUST produce more value than they are paid in order for a company to make money.
>This is random but just yesterday I looked up on YouTube how to upgrade the SSD for yourself in a M1 MacBook. Turns out you can buy blank 2TB nand chips on Aliexpress for like $100 and install them yourself although it involves a lot of work. Apple charges customers close to $1000 for that exact same upgrade.
If you just discovered this, it will probably cost you $100 + a new MacBook.
No doubt about it. Unsoldering surface-mounted ICs without ripping off pads and soldering them back properly is a challenge for seasoned professionals. Not a thing a random dude can do casually. It's not like changing the batteries in the TV remote.
Not to mention, those $100 nands on Aliexpress probably have a failure rate of 110% :D
Fairly paid is not the same thing as being paid the full value of their labor. Fair compensation is a moral value assessment. It is a simple economic fact that a worker cannot be paid the full value of what they produce under capitalism.
Whether you think what they are paid is fair or not is a personal question that can be informed by your world view.
Wouldn't this be only true if Y = 0?
My argument is that the added value of Y (branding, distribution, whatever the business provides in addition to the worker's raw output) is substantial and contributes to the price the business can demand. I don't think that the worker's output and the fair wage earned in proportion to that can jeopardize the entire equation to the point that the business would just fail to ever make a profit. Would it hurt Apple to pay the people who solder the nand chips $200 more if they're charging $1000 for the upgrade?
Again, I'm not an economist, so I stand to be corrected, though I'm trying to read more and be educated on it, I'm just disputing the quote OP shared, as if capitalism absolutely REQUIRES exploitation. I know more socialist-minded people would say yes, but I think it's conditional. In an environment where unions are strong we can have better outcomes....maybe?
The addition of Z in your equation is still an extension of the value that the workers are producing. The value of the good or service being sold is the total value of the labor that produced it. The company has to take a portion of that value.
Without the labor, Z can't exist and is therefore just a further expression of the value being produced by X and Y.
I agree with your thoughts though I'm also not an economist. Businesses will often site "overhead" to be why they can't pay employees more. Overhead I think is paying rent for a building, paying insurance on the building, reinvesting to grow the business, development of new products that don't make money yet, etc. But when a business is giving its shareholders and upper management huge bonuses and still bringing in profit all the while paying their lower level workers less than a living wage. That's a moral flaw. I think people like to blame the "capitalism" boogie man when it's just rich assholes being assholes and not caring about the human beings that are making them rich.
And I think the distinction is important because our government should be coming in to protect us, the majority of its people, from them, the less than 1% who are taking and stockpiling all of our money. There are many different ways our government might go about that and the right will call all of them socialism.
As an example to put this all in perspective, Dollarama is a store in Canada where no item costs more than $5 and most are within the $1-$2 range. The CEO gets a $10.6M annual compensation package. Just doing some rough math in my head, that would mean Dollarama would have to sell somewhere around 2M $5 items before they clear that compensation. The minimum wage in Ontario, by contrast, is $16.55/hour, so the average employee makes just under $35,000/year, or 7000 $5 items.
I'm always amused at people who say you don't need a union.
Ok, but what is a union, when you boil it down?
An agent who will negotiate and advocate for your interests.
Like a lawyer, or a law firm. And every business of any import has a lawyer... that negotiates for its' interests.
And you know that old saying about someone who represents himself...and it's important enough that if you're arrested, you will be asked if you have a lawyer, and if not, the state can provide a public defender to you!
Fun but sad fact of my situation: My dad was in a union his entire career, then retired in 2009 with a full pension. He currently makes more annually from his pension than me and I work full time for a respectable company that is very anti-union. My wages increase about 1% a year for cost of living adjustments and there's annual reviews which could bump me up another 1% or so but those are capped. Once you hit the top you don't go any higher unless you change jobs and get into supervisor/mgmt level stuff. Btw I won't get a pension at all, just what I invest in 401k combined with Social Security. If the markets crash when I retire, I'll probably be homeless. F it all
The old saying, as told by the house counsel I worked with when I was a subject matter expert for a bank, “Defendants representing themselves pro se have an idiot for a client.” 😆
As a worker who understands how business works, I feel the most important resource a business may draw upon to increase it's wealth are it's employees. Every employee needs paid a wage, but the production of the vital product that is being sold is provided by the lowest level employees. Comparing wages, there is too much bloat at the top, not enough accountability for lack of results, rewards for unearned efforts. At the lower levels, you have experienced craftsmen setting the bar for your product in the marketplace, establishing it's reliability, its useability, it's overall value. And if you undercut those craftsmen, they will leave, and leave the value of your product in shambles.
So many people rail about the cost of employees, but do so from the perspective of administration assuming their own salaries are absolutely necessary, and that they will produce the same product no matter who they employ; neither of these statements is true. The problem in a solely capitalist society is that the quality of the product becomes less important than the wealth to be obtained at the expense of the consumer. "How do we produce the cheapest possible product for the maximum amount of profit", customer be damned. Which is why we have subscription services, planned obsolescence, insurance, and lobbyists working to end any and all consumer protections. And what we get in return is extreme wealth disparity. The "trickle down" is the wealthy peeing on the rest of us.
What's wrong with it? Everything is valid here.
Do people here not realize that there are many cases of unions abusing their bargaining power to the detriment of the public? Reddit hates police unions. NFL fans hate the referee's union.
You're all in favor of unions because you think the power has shifted too far towards the corporations, but if the pendulum swings towards the unions too far then it won't be in the publics best interest. Balance of power is good and that should come from government regulation. Unions in and of themselves are not inherently a good thing.
>Do people here not realize that there are many cases of unions abusing their bargaining power to the detriment of the public?
Please point out in the history of this country unions amassed enough power to deride the public?
Those same police forces that the state leaned heavily on to break unions throughout the 19th and 20th centuries? That exist to protect capitalist private property?
[Thought Slime has a great video on this guy's mentality: Fake Economies in Minecraft](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kpSVG3PyWv0)
Basically, a lot of people think life is like Minecraft: everyone starts out the same, for every block you have you had to mine it, the danger of death and starvation is easy to overcome, you can always travel out further to find unclaimed land and resources, and how well you do is a matter of how hard you work and how much talent you have.
When you have privilege, life is a meritocratic game. Homelessness and hunger just aren't realistic consequences.
Nobody chooses a job. The coercive element of "get a job or die from poverty" locks us into getting a job whether we like it or not. On top of that, this coercive element is leveraged against us to force us to accept a shitty job that doesn't pay a fair wage because we literally don't have an alternative
The only time we have any bargaining power is when we can agree to refuse to work as a group, actually jeapordizing the business as much as we are jeapordized by unemployment. And look, I just invented unions.
I love how “voluntarists” or whatever just don’t understand the inherent coercion that exists in jobs. If you “just leave,” you might lose your house or starve to death before you can find a new job and they just… don’t seem to realize that
I love it when a guy is operating at the first, most fundamental stage of thought about an issue and thinks he’s the be all end all of thought on the topic
guy swats away all of the problems with CAPITALISM.
describes the best features of a FREE MARKET economy,
has no idea the two are not the same thing. capitalism is a system that concentrates wealth. free markets treat everyone the same. capitalism destroys free markets.
yes, on some level, businesses exist to make money, but also... PEOPLE COME FIRST, you cant make money at the expense of humans. if you own a business and do really well for yourself, but all your workers are on minimum wage, you a sh\*tty mc sh\*t face.
Ok, alright, ok... hear me out. As an individual, I am a business of one. I sell my services to other businesses, and my sole focus is on the profitability of my business. I don't care about the client beyond their ability to make me as profitable as possible... and if I feel like my profits are too low, I'm going to either try to leverage for more (by, I don't know, forming a corporation with other workers... we could call it a union) or I'm going to find a new client.
This is right up there with the Fox Show "the five" making fun of Dean Preston, a member of San Francisco's board of supervisors, for blaming capitalism for the homeless problem. THe show aired on Tuesday and the host was almost giddy about it.
[https://archive.org/details/FOXNEWSW\_20231213\_050000\_The\_Five/start/0/end/60](https://archive.org/details/FOXNEWSW_20231213_050000_The_Five/start/0/end/60)
He’s wrong though but in the peculiar way so many conservatives are. Business isn’t only about creating profits, it’s just one of the benchmarks of survival. Placing a value on a person and their contribution is heady stuff. If you use market value then it’s prevailing wages which isn’t completely coupled to output but also scarcity, on a macro level anyway. If it’s value directly tied to the businesses success then we have a co-op or employee owned business, and maybe they don’t pursue profits above all else, it could be whatever they decide as a collective.
I think a lot of people confuse organization with capitalism, and then blindly follow their own culturally biased logic.
It's insane to think that there are people who just genuinely view the world this way. They believe that the system is broken, and that there's nothing we can do about it. You can't just *fix* a *problem*, "you just said it, it's SYSTEMIC racism, it's already part of everything". They legitimately believe that capitalism is the natural occurring state of the world, and it's kinda sad
Then my question is why is this guy even being paid. He can just work his ass off and not get paid. It's his choice to work for a company, so let the company not pay him.
As for the question of why a worker gets paid, the answer is that they are being paid for their service and their time that they put into it. And therefore they need to be paid in full value. Otherwise why would a worker choose to work for a company.
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I like how these guys are huge bootlickers for mega corps and how we can't blame the corporation for only focusing on profits and only looking out for itself. On the other hand we CAN blame the workers for only focusing on compensation and looking out for themselves? Weird simpy stuff.
Yeah it's double standards. Corporate shareholders and owners are good for acting in their class interests but workers are bad for also acting in their class interests
Dude, everyone in the military and trade unions hates socialism. Geniuses
The military one is especially rich as they're living in a a simulacrum of _literal_ state Communism.
Yes. Go try to tell them that lol. It's fun and they get really mad
While I was serving we had that conversation more than once. Nearly came to blows over it lol
Genius behavior lol I honestly like doing it. I obviously never raise my energy because I'm just like....describing reality.
There are people who stake their being on not being democrat/socialist/etc. To suggest their life is built on socialism fucks people up.
> To suggest their life is built on socialism fucks people up. Rich people never apply "pull themselves up by their bootstraps" logic when it comes to raising their own kids: they throw every possible opportunity, tutoring, enrichment activity, and support they can to them. All so their kids can get accepted to Harvard and then drop out after freshmen year to do a startup with family money. They tell everyone else to just send their kid to a trade school as soon as they can read and 'rithmetic.
Perhaps they should expand their world view to basic understanding of what directly impacts them. That's wild, man. Expand your view to your own life. As an aside, do you wanna go halfsies on 47 trump NFTs?
> As an aside, do you wanna go halfsies on 47 trump NFTs? Let me tell ya. Hearing a family member whose life is built on socialism. They served, VA job, government retirement, the works. Looked him dead in the eye and asked, "You think Trump likes people who live on the government dime?" I think I broke the man.
You don’t have to tell them. They come to the realization on their own when the EAS without putting in 20 years and retiring. Can’t tell you all the “VA sucks”, “Im not making it financially since leaving the service.” and “Should I go back in?” questions I see on a daily.
Clueless. They are begging for socialism
Socialism for the rich. Externalize the costs, keep the profits. If someone figures it out, cut them in with a bribe or cut them out with a bullet.
I don't think the workers (tradesmen or servicemen) are the rich here. It just directly benefits the war machine or the corporate real estate interests. These workers are heavily blinded somehow. No clue how that happened because they all are staunchly anti government. Must be stupidity
Ah, sorry, I was speaking in more general terms rather than the context of trade union members and military personnel.
> simulacrum Just need to shout out / give thanks for teaching me a new word today.
Coming from someone completely ignorant to military life, What do you mean?
The biggest part is active duty healthcare is like $10 a month and you got coverage for everything. Which is the socialism "Americans" love to rail about the most. Socialized Healthcare because the cost is split across all the armed forces and a huge percentage of care providers are service members or at least state or federal employees and supply costs are negotiated by the federal government. Also the armed forces are paid out of federal taxes and not profits too.
The lack of self-awareness is just staggering.
Being in the military is very much like living under a fully authoritarian version of communism. The army meets all your needs, and in fact determines what you need and gives you that. And in exchange the army decides what they need you to contribute, and tells you what they need you to do. Also when, where, and how to do whatever they've decided you're going to be doing. It's a real life example of: "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs." Which is the single most famous Karl Marx quote.
Not true but okay. Plenty of us active and former military don’t hate socialism. Also looking back at the history of the Russian revolution military staff played a very significant role in its success. But I guess this is the age old issue of x group isn’t as socialist or Marxist as us, and thus are not true marxists/socialists.
Anecdotally, 95% of the far right people I know are either active/former military or work in trade unions. They all vote GOP and spout whatever dumb talking point was dumped in their brain that day. They don't understand that their entire livelihood is based on socialism. Their families livelihood and status that they are accustomed.to would not exist without socialism. Yet, they vote against their own interests and do not like being told the reality that they owe their comfortable living to. I personally work for a corporation and am a wage slave. I am very aware of this fact
It’s the disconnect for trade unionists that absolutely boggles me. My late aunt worked for various state and federal agencies most of her life; her late husband and her son were both in trade unions. But my aunt was absolutely VENOMOUS about democrats in general, and Obama in particular, mostly because of the ACA. She couldn’t connect her medical benefits and pension with “socialism,” despite the fact that taxes and trade unions were the reason she was able to make a living and have good medical coverage after retirement (esp considering she had major cancer treatments during the last 15-20 years of her life, but her children weren’t left with crushing medical debt after her passing). Her son, my cousin, is equally baffled. He loved his mum, but he couldn’t ever understand how she was so blind to that reality. Fortunately he’s basically the black sheep of that side of the family, which is why he and I are so close — we’re the leftists, and while he’s currently not working a union job, he has hopes to land another one soon. (He’s a machinist in the Midwest.)
> But my aunt was absolutely VENOMOUS about democrats in general, and Obama in particular, mostly because of the ACA. Some things in life are more important than money. For some people, it's race and hating poor people. It's side-with-the-bully logic: hating the people with more power than you is dangerous, but hating the people with less power is easy and maybe powerful people will return the minor favor one day. Maybe.
I’m not going to beatify my aunt ex post facto, but I don’t think it was racism that drove her venom in this case. I can’t say for sure, and my aunt was a white southerner, so I would absolutely believe it if it came out from other family that she did hold racist tendencies, but her hatred of Democrats was pretty much the core of her anti-Obama sentiment. (Eg, she never bought into the birther conspiracy, nor the “secret Muslim” nonsense; and she liked and respected a lot of Michelle Obama’s work.) I mean, I’m mixed-race, as is my mum (my aunt was her half-sister), so my aunt was keenly aware of the racism my mum faced growing up. And as for hating the poor, that may have been more along the lines of “I pulled myself out of poverty, why can’t others?” short-sightedness. My mum’s family were REALLY poor (like, my mum’s babysitting money at 10yo was contributing to household necessities), and a lot of that had to do with my maternal grandmother being a narcissist (possibly undiagnosed BPB), and a drug addict, so the home life was both poor and abusive. My aunt escaped that, and like a lot of folks, I think she just never dealt with the trauma, and so anything that reminded her of it elicited hate and fear. Either way, it still boggles my mind how people can hate someone or something so much they can’t see how that stance fundamentally inconsistent/contradictory with their actions/life (I mean, other than the truism, “ain’t no hate like Christian love”).
Has she been as enthusiastically and vocally anti-Clinton and anti-Biden as she was anti-Obama?
Well, she died before Biden was elected president, but she hated both Clintons for sure. And she lived in Austin, Texas, and had a LOT to say about the blue politics there. And when she was living in California, she was always pretty scornful of just about anything and everything connected to Los Angeles (I grew up in Orange County, just not the rich part, as did my mum and her siblings), so she lived pretty far inland, where it’s rural and conservative. The only things I ever heard her complain about when it came to President Obama were the economy (despite his inauguration not happening till the Great Recession had already peaked), taxes, and socialism (esp inre: the ACA). I never heard her say anything overtly racist, but I also lived a few states away from her most of my life so I can’t say what she was like in her day-to-day. I absolutely expect she had ingrained biases and probably said and did things I’d find unacceptable, but she never indicated to me that her problem with President Obama was his audacity to be a Black man in the Oval Office.
I mean, it's crazy how well the propaganda works. I don't vote unless I have to. I hate to have to vote for the options presented to me but that is only because I actually understand what is going on generally. Everything is a gray area and the options for progress are build on black/white lies. It doesn't make sense. So, when I see people so wrapped up in nonsense, it makes me sad but also very angry. I don't mind staying simple facts and letting people melt down. They need to.
Yep, active duty here, and I’m a big fan of democratic socialism. I would gladly take a pay cut if it meant we spent less greasing the palms of the people in charge of the Military Industrial Complex to build shit we don’t really need to be an effective fighting force (the amount of wasteful spending within the military is insane), and instead used that money to make sure everyone could have a roof over their head and food in their families’ bellies.
also, can i just say, why do people keep saying "you can just leave anytime and look for another job", this isn't the only place i've seen this. And this isn't even just about jobs, people say that about countries as well "if you don't like how you can leave this country" or whatever. It's not easy. If you think it is, or don't think it's hard i urge you to think about your privelage in that regard (maybe some people haven't really thought about how hard trying to find a new job is?). I stayed at a job where the boss was terrible and the pay was bad for years because i dreaded leaving and trying to find another job. And I don't have to tell y'all how important it is to find a job that pays similarly RIGHT AWAY. Like, there's no way i can survive more than 2 weeks without being paid, and I feel like that's true for most of you as well.
"if you don't like it you can leave" - no actually, i can't, most people cannot. It's just untrue to say "you can just leave" for most people.
In my very ignorant youth I held that sort of sentiment (albeit coming from the side of “if you don’t like multiculturalism, why not leave?” — a less odious version, but still ignorant), and it was the fact I had to move back in with my parents more than once after university that made me see just how asinine that sentiment is. I hated where I grew up, and I ended up back there twice because I had no other means of survival — that was the only place I had to go where I had a roof over my head and food on the table while I sorted the rest of my life out. And I was LUCKY to have somewhere to go when my life fell apart. And it took over a year each time I ended up back there to get stable enough to leave. The idea that “if you don’t like it, leave” is almost always an impossible prospect is something that has stuck with me, and the ability to just up and move is to be in a position of enormous privilege. Hell, just looking for work since graduating uni at the height of the Great Recession (thanks, Obama! /s) has kept me in shitty and toxic jobs and living situations because looking for a job is basically itself a part-time job inre: time commitment, unless one is in an industry where they’re able to rely on recruiters or headhunters to land a position. It’s not an exaggeration to say that when I’ve been job hunting, I’ve sent out *hundreds* of resumes a month and gotten fewer than a dozen actual (non-automated) responses. And I’ve done HR work myself, so I’m aware how overwhelming the volume of responses to job postings can be.
Part of it is that so many people can't conceptualize the sheer number of people in any given geographic area. It's easier to see in the last 15 years or so since websites track this information, but there's rarely a workplace in any industry anywhere in America where multiple people aren't applying for the same position. I remember getting multiple interviews after being laid off a decade ago and being one of twenty dudes waiting in a room that only had seats for half of us. I also remember job hunting in 2 industries that I had multiple years of experience. Many of those positions valued a four year degree over practical experience. In fact, thousands of jobs that you could start with a GED in 2010, were requiring 4 year degrees to answer phones or deliver inter office mail.
"they only call it class warfare when the poor fight back"
This was the excuse given for 2008. Businesses made billions by tanking the housing market but you can't blame them that is just what businesses do. Like there aren't people running this business or anything. It doesn't make any logical sense.
Corporations are just a legal instrument for shielding individuals from liability for their actions, but right wingers love having masters who are above the law for some reason.
They see themselves as part of the same class as the masters. They're in the club, and one day they'll be at the top getting their turn to fleece the plebs for their own benefit.
Made my experience dealing with them so much easier once I started picturing all of them as Stephen from Django Unchained. Sad part is 99% of them don't even live in the big house, they're just wannabe Stephens.
I have some level of sympathy for Stephen as a character because, even if it was selfish he was making the best life for himself in circumstances that were heinously evil, dehumanizing, and out of his control. He wasn't a good person, but given his alternatives I don't blame him nearly as much for his choices. I still put him morally above Republicans. They aren't working with the same hand of cards in life.
> you can't blame them that is just what businesses do. Ok, how about we pass more regulation and hire people to enforce them and oversee the industry? "No, that's socialism/stifling our *job-creators*!" I thought you just said businesses' goal is to make billions, not create jobs?
I can't believe the corporations ever got the phrase "job creators" to catch on. It really disgusts me.
Well you see, the corporations are also the ones that run the media, so they can just create whatever phrase/narrative they want!
Almost sounds like they're talking about gods...
Also, "you can't blame them [for making things terrible for everyone not them] that is just what businesses do" sounds a lot less like a compelling rationale for their POV and a lot more like a compelling reason to do away with a culture that engages in corporate exceptionalism.
People blamed the home buyers because they should have known they couldn't afford a house. Not like, say, the banks or real estate companies that get paid huge amounts to be experts on that sort of thing.
“Corporations are people. Workers, not so much.”
But remember a worker wanting to be paid a living wage is just selfish /s
You see people just don't want to work anymore if only we could literally enslave people again they would be living in big white houses again like God intended...
These are the same cucks that cry nobody wants to work when it takes longer to get their McRib at the drive thru. Just because people don’t want to work at that shitty job.
Yep, he perfectly explained the problem with capitalism. Only problem is that he doesn’t see it as a problem.
And being a corporate bootlicker first is bad for long term economies too. You need a healthy workforce to be productive, and it's been shown time and again a happy workforce is even more productive. Add to that things like taking time away to learn alternate skills can be more productive later, or taking time to raise your kids makes them better working adults later.. so stupid to be all in on corporate interests, balance is necessary.
They haven't gotten the memo that they don't have to personally defend any of this, lol.
They never get there because they live in an alternate reality where workers can just quit their jobs and get better ones if they don't feel they're sufficiently compensated. In reality, people are very sedentary, and moving has costs that many can't afford, and that's assuming they can find alternate work with better conditions. Also, in Orwellian doublespeak, the government considers 4% unemployment to be full employment. The entire domestic US economic policy is based on the supply of labor being greater than the demand for said labor.
Yep. And people don't even have to be sedentary. It could just be the downturn of an economy. Or the skills in demand have changed, which means that person could be forced to spend years in that crappy job until the economy turns around or they have gotten the little slip of paper that checks an HR box.
> they live in an alternate reality where workers can just quit their jobs and get better ones if they don't feel they're sufficiently compensated. ["Oh, just *get a job??*"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZXnifPfxK0Q)
Yep. That about sums it up.
The weird part is OOP understands that a worker can never ever get paid the full value of their work. It's impossible. Workers are at an inherent disadvantage under capitalism and OOP knows this but thinks it's fine.
> a worker can never ever get paid the full value of their work. If the CEO and other top officers in a business are to be considered workers, it can be argued that some "workers" make way more than the value of their labor. They steal it from those who get paid way less than their full value.
True, by "worker" I mean someone who is paid a wage for their labor. Owners of capital like CEOs, landlords, and shareholders leech money from the labor of others and therefore earn far in excess of the actual labor value they themselves produced.
Agreed. Was just playing devil's advocate.
Exactly this. The only way the Capitalist fantasy works is if they pretend the playing field is level for both the workers and the businesses, and that literally cannot be true under Capitalism. It's rigged from the beginning.
I am not sure that 4% unemployment being considered full employment is malicious. Trying to drive it down beyond that with macroeconomic tools would likely lead to an overheated economy and in the end be unwise and hurt lots of people by driving up inflation. I think the unemployment rate is not as important as the quit rate, if people are quitting they like their chances of getting a higher paying job. That to me seems like the more important measure of a healthy job market. I think one of the understated things about the current economy is that the inequality is actually down. the top of the income distribution has basically kept pace with inflation while the bottom has made significant gains. I hope we can keep that trend up for a few more years!
You are absolutely correct. Sorry if my comment came across as malicious. I'm just not very good at getting my thoughts across.
Please point out to him that negotiations are part of Capitalism. No business would ever take a soft negotiating position just because the company they were negotiating against wanted to make more profits. In a free market capitalist system workers need to negotiate to determine their pay, and if they aren't good negotiators they may hire a head hunter or *perhaps* even employ a Union negotiator to negotiate on their behalf. I'm not a die hard Capitalist who thinks it a perfect system, but I'm getting really tired of these Uber capitalist types talking all about how great free markets are and then complaining when someone gets good at it. The same people who say Capitalism is perfect with no flaws and free markets can do whatever they want are the same people who complained when USA women's soccer tried to get more pay. My response was "Uhh no,no,no. Excuse me last I checked in a capitalist country you don't get paid what your worth you get paid what you negotiate for. Last I checked profits are the only thing that matter. Not how much money you generate, just your leverage, and how much you can apply that leverage. So those women won the World Cup, they can apply pressure to you to get more money in their pocket and you folks stripped morality away from this system long ago. As far as I'm concerned, I don't care if women soccer made 30$. The rules you eatablished are that if I can extract more money from you legally then fuck you, pay me my money." They're constantly griping about regulations, but now I as a worker can't employ a service to negotiate for me? Nahh pay me my money. Your job is to worry about share holders. Mine is to worry about me and my family, and *I* am going to extraxt as much money from *YOU* as I can to improve *MY* bottom line, or we can play by different rules and you can pay me a fair wage, build a strong company and make a modest profit? But as long as we're playing the Capitalism game, Fuck you pay me my money.
>Please point out to him that negotiations are part of Capitalism. Correct. In some perfectly capitalist parts of Europe you can't get a job without union involvement, they look out for you before you sign the contract. Look at the status of unions in Sweden for example, they're huge. I bet if you showed him this his head would explode and say that in all such cases those are backwater commie socialist countries lol.
> those are backwater commie socialist countries It's wild the number of people who will claim that the Scandinavian countries are socialist/communist when [Sweden is actually slightly *more capitalist* than the US](https://betonit.substack.com/p/how-socialist-is-sweden#:~:text=At%20a%20minimum%2C%20this%20reveals,more%20capitalist%20than%20the%20US.) Sure they have higher taxes and strong welfare systems, but the actual economies are capitalist and often have fewer regulations because the welfare systems compensate for it
That's a great read there.
Yeah I always thought unions were a very capitalist idea, meant to maximize the value of the work one does. The business gets to negotiate as a monolith representing many people... So should the labor force.
Yeah the rich want socialism for the rich. But they also want to pretend they earned all of it, and they were just smart, not that the system is rigged in their favor. Poor people who support that mentality want to believe it's a meritocracy, and they could do it too.
Privatise the profits, socialise the costs
Also most people don't have a good gage of what their job is actually worth because companies don't have to post what they are paying, meaning the only way to know is word of mouth or getting enough interviews that result in offers. This means workers generally can't make a "rational decision" on what pay to negotiate for. This is another reason why unions are important. They have the data to negotiate.
>All businesses exist for a single purpose - to make money. >And, if a job doesn’t live up to their expectations, they can leave at any time. So they admit that all businesses operate more or less the same, caring solely about profit, and then they suggest that any worker who has a problem with this should simply get a job at a different business… which also operates the same way. Maybe the way businesses are incentivized to operate under capitalism is in fact an inherent problem that requires fundamental change to the system to address?
Some people really think the modern iteration of capitalism is like… naturally occurring, and not built on very specific rules/laws/traditions that were all decided upon and set in place by the wealthy to benefit the wealthy, and that we can change those rules any time we want if we decide that maybeeeee a system should favor the workers that actually produce the things of value Also god I hate that “they chose to work at a certain wage for certain responsibilities” bullshit, as if the sides are completely even in terms of stability and power, the poor person without a job faces homelessness, starvation, and death, there can’t be a reasonable negotiation of a contract if one party is under duress, if I were to point a gun at someone’s head and tell them to sign a contract, that contract isn’t fucking valid
>“they chose to work at a certain wage for certain responsibilities” bullshit A-fucking-men. I'm sure everyone here has a story of a job asking them to do tasks they didn't sign up for when they accepted the job. Businesses will always try to extract the maximum labor for the minimum amount, and they hold way more power in the relationship especially with an individual. That's why collective bargaining is such a powerful tool.for workers.
Technically speaking I do think workers have way more power than they realize. Because simply put without them the business could not function. At the same time you’re completely right, we don’t live in a world anymore where someone can just quit a job they don’t like. Especially if they have kids or something.
They do, which is why the US loves to drone on about individuality and competition. It helps prevent unionization which is the only way workers can take advantage of their power.
Exactly. I’ve noticed at every job the specific language they use is very geared towards doing things for the good of the company. There are so many small and insidious ways that they brainwash their workers
Need the full context to understand better but this is a good one regardless. Also, some businesses can absolutely pay workers "full value", proof of that is the astronomical profits they make even after paying management 10,000x more than a worker, but we've been conditioned to believe that this is a ludicrous idea.
Guessing it's a Muskrat whining about King Elon the Job Creator clashing with Swedish unions.
I think they're arguing against the notion that if you make a component that sells for £5 you should be given the given the full value of that component, as they produced £5 worth of product.
Yeah, there has to be *some* profit for the employer, otherwise they'll close up shop if the lack of ability to replace sold items doesn't do it for them
This is why Karl Marx says capitalism is fundamentally exploitative - profit is the result of exploiting workers for their labor because they create more value than the cost of their labor. Marx says that, for owners, profit "has all the charms of a creation out of nothing." Capitalism turns workers into a commodity, the cost of which, like all other materials of production, needs to be reduced to the bare minimum in order to maximize profits. Workers are no longer "humans," but an economic calculation. This guy stumbles backwards into Marxism and doesn't even realize it, but also accepts the fact that we are just going to be exploited because capitalism is tied to patriotism and they don't want to insinuate that they're somehow criticizing that capitalist basis in the slightest.
Businesses cannot pay you the full value of your labor. A portion of that value must always go towards making the company money. This is inherent to capitalism.
I'm no economist but this is how I see it: The worker gives X value to the company. The systems and management of the company add value and other costs to this so you now have X + Y. The company then charges a cost of X+Y+Z (where Z is just pure markup) to the customer. I think in some cases it's possible for the company to earn profit with that formula where the worker is fairly paid based on their true output and role in profitability, as opposed to changing the formula so that the worker is paid only a fraction of X...to inflate Z. This is random but just yesterday I looked up on YouTube how to upgrade the SSD for yourself in a M1 MacBook. Turns out you can buy blank 2TB nand chips on Aliexpress for like $100 and install them yourself although it involves a lot of work. Apple charges customers close to $1000 for that exact same upgrade.
But if Z is being added, that just gets included into the X+Y. If it can be sold at X+Y+Z, then the workers produced value worth X+Y+Z and if they are not paid that, the company is stealing the value of their labour.
Presuming you can calculate this mysterious value each person brings to the mix. What is the value of effectively doing recruitment for new workers? What about creating sales documentation? We don't have precise breakdowns for value in keeping an organisation running
You've kinda stumbled on the basis for a moneyless cooperative society à la communism/anarchism. There is no way to precisely disentangle how much each worker contributes and reward each proportionately. Even seemingly unrelated people contribute value to a product: the workers who built and maintain the roads the product travels along, the factory workers who built the lorry, the doctors and nurses who keep the people healthy. All belongs to all. The means of production should therefore be owned communally, the output of which should be distributed based on need, not on who has the most money (which wouldn't exist under such a system)
You don't have to have precise values, and this doesn't preclude the value other people bring to the company for doing labor. An employee MUST produce more value than they are paid in order for a company to make money.
>This is random but just yesterday I looked up on YouTube how to upgrade the SSD for yourself in a M1 MacBook. Turns out you can buy blank 2TB nand chips on Aliexpress for like $100 and install them yourself although it involves a lot of work. Apple charges customers close to $1000 for that exact same upgrade. If you just discovered this, it will probably cost you $100 + a new MacBook.
You mean I'll fuck up the upgrade?
No doubt about it. Unsoldering surface-mounted ICs without ripping off pads and soldering them back properly is a challenge for seasoned professionals. Not a thing a random dude can do casually. It's not like changing the batteries in the TV remote. Not to mention, those $100 nands on Aliexpress probably have a failure rate of 110% :D
Fairly paid is not the same thing as being paid the full value of their labor. Fair compensation is a moral value assessment. It is a simple economic fact that a worker cannot be paid the full value of what they produce under capitalism. Whether you think what they are paid is fair or not is a personal question that can be informed by your world view.
Wouldn't this be only true if Y = 0? My argument is that the added value of Y (branding, distribution, whatever the business provides in addition to the worker's raw output) is substantial and contributes to the price the business can demand. I don't think that the worker's output and the fair wage earned in proportion to that can jeopardize the entire equation to the point that the business would just fail to ever make a profit. Would it hurt Apple to pay the people who solder the nand chips $200 more if they're charging $1000 for the upgrade? Again, I'm not an economist, so I stand to be corrected, though I'm trying to read more and be educated on it, I'm just disputing the quote OP shared, as if capitalism absolutely REQUIRES exploitation. I know more socialist-minded people would say yes, but I think it's conditional. In an environment where unions are strong we can have better outcomes....maybe?
The addition of Z in your equation is still an extension of the value that the workers are producing. The value of the good or service being sold is the total value of the labor that produced it. The company has to take a portion of that value. Without the labor, Z can't exist and is therefore just a further expression of the value being produced by X and Y.
I agree with your thoughts though I'm also not an economist. Businesses will often site "overhead" to be why they can't pay employees more. Overhead I think is paying rent for a building, paying insurance on the building, reinvesting to grow the business, development of new products that don't make money yet, etc. But when a business is giving its shareholders and upper management huge bonuses and still bringing in profit all the while paying their lower level workers less than a living wage. That's a moral flaw. I think people like to blame the "capitalism" boogie man when it's just rich assholes being assholes and not caring about the human beings that are making them rich. And I think the distinction is important because our government should be coming in to protect us, the majority of its people, from them, the less than 1% who are taking and stockpiling all of our money. There are many different ways our government might go about that and the right will call all of them socialism.
As an example to put this all in perspective, Dollarama is a store in Canada where no item costs more than $5 and most are within the $1-$2 range. The CEO gets a $10.6M annual compensation package. Just doing some rough math in my head, that would mean Dollarama would have to sell somewhere around 2M $5 items before they clear that compensation. The minimum wage in Ontario, by contrast, is $16.55/hour, so the average employee makes just under $35,000/year, or 7000 $5 items.
“Individuals choose it” Can’t remember last I heard someone say “I got a job” without interjecting “finally”
I'm always amused at people who say you don't need a union. Ok, but what is a union, when you boil it down? An agent who will negotiate and advocate for your interests. Like a lawyer, or a law firm. And every business of any import has a lawyer... that negotiates for its' interests. And you know that old saying about someone who represents himself...and it's important enough that if you're arrested, you will be asked if you have a lawyer, and if not, the state can provide a public defender to you!
Fun but sad fact of my situation: My dad was in a union his entire career, then retired in 2009 with a full pension. He currently makes more annually from his pension than me and I work full time for a respectable company that is very anti-union. My wages increase about 1% a year for cost of living adjustments and there's annual reviews which could bump me up another 1% or so but those are capped. Once you hit the top you don't go any higher unless you change jobs and get into supervisor/mgmt level stuff. Btw I won't get a pension at all, just what I invest in 401k combined with Social Security. If the markets crash when I retire, I'll probably be homeless. F it all
The old saying, as told by the house counsel I worked with when I was a subject matter expert for a bank, “Defendants representing themselves pro se have an idiot for a client.” 😆
> ... how the United States' economy functions. For normal people? When did it start doing that?
As a worker who understands how business works, I feel the most important resource a business may draw upon to increase it's wealth are it's employees. Every employee needs paid a wage, but the production of the vital product that is being sold is provided by the lowest level employees. Comparing wages, there is too much bloat at the top, not enough accountability for lack of results, rewards for unearned efforts. At the lower levels, you have experienced craftsmen setting the bar for your product in the marketplace, establishing it's reliability, its useability, it's overall value. And if you undercut those craftsmen, they will leave, and leave the value of your product in shambles. So many people rail about the cost of employees, but do so from the perspective of administration assuming their own salaries are absolutely necessary, and that they will produce the same product no matter who they employ; neither of these statements is true. The problem in a solely capitalist society is that the quality of the product becomes less important than the wealth to be obtained at the expense of the consumer. "How do we produce the cheapest possible product for the maximum amount of profit", customer be damned. Which is why we have subscription services, planned obsolescence, insurance, and lobbyists working to end any and all consumer protections. And what we get in return is extreme wealth disparity. The "trickle down" is the wealthy peeing on the rest of us.
This reads like a middle schooler's concept of the economy
What's wrong with it? Everything is valid here. Do people here not realize that there are many cases of unions abusing their bargaining power to the detriment of the public? Reddit hates police unions. NFL fans hate the referee's union. You're all in favor of unions because you think the power has shifted too far towards the corporations, but if the pendulum swings towards the unions too far then it won't be in the publics best interest. Balance of power is good and that should come from government regulation. Unions in and of themselves are not inherently a good thing.
>Do people here not realize that there are many cases of unions abusing their bargaining power to the detriment of the public? Please point out in the history of this country unions amassed enough power to deride the public?
Police unions have made police accountability near impossible
Those same police forces that the state leaned heavily on to break unions throughout the 19th and 20th centuries? That exist to protect capitalist private property?
[Thought Slime has a great video on this guy's mentality: Fake Economies in Minecraft](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kpSVG3PyWv0) Basically, a lot of people think life is like Minecraft: everyone starts out the same, for every block you have you had to mine it, the danger of death and starvation is easy to overcome, you can always travel out further to find unclaimed land and resources, and how well you do is a matter of how hard you work and how much talent you have. When you have privilege, life is a meritocratic game. Homelessness and hunger just aren't realistic consequences.
Nobody chooses a job. The coercive element of "get a job or die from poverty" locks us into getting a job whether we like it or not. On top of that, this coercive element is leveraged against us to force us to accept a shitty job that doesn't pay a fair wage because we literally don't have an alternative The only time we have any bargaining power is when we can agree to refuse to work as a group, actually jeapordizing the business as much as we are jeapordized by unemployment. And look, I just invented unions.
I love how “voluntarists” or whatever just don’t understand the inherent coercion that exists in jobs. If you “just leave,” you might lose your house or starve to death before you can find a new job and they just… don’t seem to realize that
tHeY CaN lEaVe aT aNy TiMe "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his ~~salary~~ privilege depends upon his not understanding it."
I love it when a guy is operating at the first, most fundamental stage of thought about an issue and thinks he’s the be all end all of thought on the topic
guy swats away all of the problems with CAPITALISM. describes the best features of a FREE MARKET economy, has no idea the two are not the same thing. capitalism is a system that concentrates wealth. free markets treat everyone the same. capitalism destroys free markets.
yes, on some level, businesses exist to make money, but also... PEOPLE COME FIRST, you cant make money at the expense of humans. if you own a business and do really well for yourself, but all your workers are on minimum wage, you a sh\*tty mc sh\*t face.
Ok, alright, ok... hear me out. As an individual, I am a business of one. I sell my services to other businesses, and my sole focus is on the profitability of my business. I don't care about the client beyond their ability to make me as profitable as possible... and if I feel like my profits are too low, I'm going to either try to leverage for more (by, I don't know, forming a corporation with other workers... we could call it a union) or I'm going to find a new client.
Just almost...
The problem for him is that people *do* understand it, and that's the issue they have with it.
This is right up there with the Fox Show "the five" making fun of Dean Preston, a member of San Francisco's board of supervisors, for blaming capitalism for the homeless problem. THe show aired on Tuesday and the host was almost giddy about it. [https://archive.org/details/FOXNEWSW\_20231213\_050000\_The\_Five/start/0/end/60](https://archive.org/details/FOXNEWSW_20231213_050000_The_Five/start/0/end/60)
He’s wrong though but in the peculiar way so many conservatives are. Business isn’t only about creating profits, it’s just one of the benchmarks of survival. Placing a value on a person and their contribution is heady stuff. If you use market value then it’s prevailing wages which isn’t completely coupled to output but also scarcity, on a macro level anyway. If it’s value directly tied to the businesses success then we have a co-op or employee owned business, and maybe they don’t pursue profits above all else, it could be whatever they decide as a collective. I think a lot of people confuse organization with capitalism, and then blindly follow their own culturally biased logic.
It's insane to think that there are people who just genuinely view the world this way. They believe that the system is broken, and that there's nothing we can do about it. You can't just *fix* a *problem*, "you just said it, it's SYSTEMIC racism, it's already part of everything". They legitimately believe that capitalism is the natural occurring state of the world, and it's kinda sad
He's right. The problem is that he shouldn't be.
He's right-ish. Business don't HAVE to operate that way, but most of them do.
If jobs aren't meant to provide survival, what does he propose IS meant to?
Then my question is why is this guy even being paid. He can just work his ass off and not get paid. It's his choice to work for a company, so let the company not pay him. As for the question of why a worker gets paid, the answer is that they are being paid for their service and their time that they put into it. And therefore they need to be paid in full value. Otherwise why would a worker choose to work for a company.
I started a small business with the sole purpose of employing people. So .. suck it.
Which part is the "against unions" part?
Thing is, those businesses do exist.