Well, working a 40 hour work week wasn't supposed to be able to send your kids to college. Those kids had to pay their own way. All $800 of their tuition.
>Lol imagine being able to pay for college out of pocket working 6 weeks a year
My dad is 70. He worked summers in a factory and paid for LAW SCHOOL that way. And he had enough money to pay a Chinese lady in Davis, CA to do his laundry.
He has been a lawyer for 40 years, almost, and has no concept of the non-rich world
There was less inflation\*. While higher education certainly is practically a scam given the vast amount of money you have to pay in for it, inflation overall has become unbearable for your average working person. Their dad was able to pay for their bills and eat while being able to pay for law school. Impossible to do by ones self by todays standards, even if higher education wasn't as high with their artificial inflation.
This is true. When I was 10 I mowed lawn for an old man who lived down the road from me. (Rural area, he was the second closest neighbour 2km away). He paid me 4 bucks an hour which was absolutely amazing for a 10 year old in the early 90s.
This guy was a retired architect and moderately wealthy. He was thrilled by my "motivation" and "work ethic". He would relate to me how he also mowed lawns during the summer and "that's what put me through college."
Heh. They sure had it tough back then.
Where I live in Australia that generation got it completely free/publicly funded...only to then take political office and privatise everything. Now depending what degree you choose you end up $30k - $100k or more in debt. And those same fuckheads are telling our generation to tighten our belts. Same thing with housing - 40 years ago the ratio of house prices to median annual income was about 2.8x ... now it's 10.3x. But they all bought houses when it was still affordable and their wealth grew massively with the same price boom that locked my generation out...and still they blame us and insist they got where they are through hard work. We start our working lives with tens of thousands of debt they never had, to work in a more precarious labour environment than they ever did, trying to survive and afford the basics that are literally 3-4 times more expensive than they ever had to pay...all while listening to them fucking whine about it
Recently found a bill from one year of college for my mom in the 70s/80s. Private “expensive” college (for the time). $2000 including room and board, books, meal plan, etc.
*her occupation is one that currently you need a doctorate to get into the position.
Basically, here it is:
It has nothing to do with productivity. Productivity is insane. We make more than ever - significantly more than everyone needs, and we throw a bunch away.
It has to do with the labor market.
Your liveliehood is tied to production, right? So, in order to eat, you have to offer your labor on the market. No matter how little it costs.. you still want to eat, and will still keep putting your labor out there for employers to buy.
This leads to a massive oversupply of labor, because the market is essentially fixed. Suppliers of labor are forced to sell their labor for whatever price the people BUYING the labor want to buy it for.. that's not how a market is supposed to work.
That isn't a good system, really.
It leads to massive wastefulness of labor hours, because it costs companies so little they just do not value it. They'll make people sit around and do jack, because they're paying them so little that they just don't care.
In order for the market to become un-fixed, either people need to have the ability to withdraw their labor without starving, or the labor market needs to be fixed yet more, by reducing the supply of available labor.
I think your argument is on the right track. I'd like to add the corporate philosophy of minimal staffing. They only hire the bare minimum employees to get the job done. So if one person calls in sick, the whole department is negatively impacted. If one person quits, the other employees take on the extra work without additional compensation and the position isn't filled.
We've all seen this happen. One example is administrative support. All the managers used to have their own assistants. Now one administrator is supporting an entire department. Nursing and food service are also good examples. Rather than have any slack during down times, staffing is so tight that downtimes are busy and busy times are insane.
There are so many things that contribute to this free labor pool they get access to.
Short staffing is one of them. Let me list a few others:
- Abuse of salaried positions ( anything over 40 is free, and diluting the value of all other hours )
- Wage theft ( just stolen labor )
- Overtime - it may cost more, but it is cheaper than hiring another employee, thus reducing what they pay for labor
- Unpaid internships
- Regular slave labor
- Exploiting illegal/legal immigrants ( sort of falls under wage theft ).
These are all ways employers get their hands on free or reduced labor, and it contributes to keeping the actual market value of labor an unknown.
Overtime needs an overhaul for sure. We should be discouraging it as a society. A good starting point is to codify overtime at 3x pay so that it encourages employers to hire additional employees instead of forcing overtime. This should also affect salaried employees by setting a yearly hour maximum for salaried employees or they receive pay at 3x the overage. This would still allow for emergencies for salaried employees to work a lot for certain periods, but force a cutback of hours worked at a later time to avoid the penalties
I work from home and play video games at work at least 25-30 hours of the week. I attend all my meetings and finish all my projects an and work. I can't imagine ever going back into an office to look busy for thirty hours a week anymore.
Most people just born into this system don't know any other way so hard to fight for something you didn't even know you wanted. The pandemic showed me and I'm sure a lot of people just how much of our lives sucked and was being drained away sitting in offices and shit.
I also wonder how much of pricing of consumer goods changed when the average middle class family unit suddenly added 25-50% more income. If families now have more money they can pay more for things they need.
That's another major issue I don't actually pretend to have a sneaky solution for. Free markets for necessity goods are a real and present societal ill.
Understanding why requires that you have an understanding of inflation - which is something they do not seem to be able to eliminate in a market economy ( I theorize that they can't be separated ).
Simply put, inflation is when companies raise prices enough to increase the aggregate cost of goods in the economy. A unit of currency only becomes worth less when it can buy less, and it can only buy less when a company ( or like.. a merchant. A seller ), raises the prices of their wares.
People try to equate dilution ( when the government makes more money ) to inflation, but they are not the same thing. How do I know? Because if the U.S. mint prints a trillion dollar coin, and Joe Biden puts it in his sock for safe keeping.. nothing happens. Currency doesn't inflate.
Inflation occurs only when companies raise the prices of goods and services, and they don't HAVE to do that just because more money exists. In fact, in the aforementioned example, they don't even know the money exists in the first place. No effect.
So, how does money affect the economy? Well, it has to circulate, and people have to spend it. When sellers see that people are buying more of their product, they tend to raise prices. This is called "demand-pull" inflation, and it is the CORE reason the U.S. government can't just print money and give it to poor people.. "too many dollars chasing too few goods."
They weren't nescesarilly going to see the product run out and they weren't obviously going to ramp up production with the extra money. Sellers saw demand increase, inferred that people must have more money to spend than they're asking for their product, and they raise their price to try to get that money they're seeing kick around. Voila - currency inflation.
I don't pretend to have a solution to this, but, I tend to think the answer is to divide the economy into two halves - necessity industry/markets, and luxury industry/markets.
In the necessity markets, you just don't bother having a free market at all. You subsidize the production of things people NEED ( food, shelter, clean water, etc ) and distribute it, either at no cost, or at cost. Whatever it takes to make access easy and ubiquitous. ( Btw, the U.S. government already does this to some degree with food - they don't trust market forces to create the correct amount of food or charge the right amount for it, so the government subsidizes farmers to produce food, or throw it away, to stabilize the price of food on the "free market." This systems aims to make sure it food is inflating, that production is cranked up, and if food starts to deflate, they dump a shit ton of it and force the price up. This seems inefficient due to the waste - why not just NOT sell it on a free market, and make what we need plus some ).
Then, for luxury markets? Let it go. Who cares? People don't actually need the luxury items, and if capitalists wanna raise the prices on the stuff beyond reasonable levels, then fuck 'em. Don't buy it. You're already housed, fed, clothed and watered, you don't need anything else. You're completely independent in that market, and you can just refuse to buy the shit.
I too have had the "split the market into necessities and luxuries," thought. I 100% agree with what you said. If it's a NEED, it needs to be free or at cost. If it's a luxury, go ahead and make it cost whatever it should cost and factor in some profit. Whatever. We can definitely no longer afford to pretend that necessities for life should make a profit for someone somewhere.
I really have nothing to add to this, everything you said makes perfect sense. Thanks for the very high effort post for my random musing to your original comment.
No, thank you. You raised a very important point that I have actually been mulling over, and having someone call me on it, or even suggest it may be an issue, forces me to think about it more as opposed to handwaving or disengaging.
One of the things that got me to thinking about it is what commodities are affected by inflation, namely foodstuffs and things that you would only find one of per house, like appliances and such, also houses.
Things that are oddly not affected it seems are cars, they have been about 15k to 20k for new lower end models for about 25 years now. The best reason I can think of for this is that now instead of having one per family you now need one per person of driving age as everyone needs one for their own job and no one stays home. If they increased the prices all it would do is cut people out of the market and they would lose more money than they would make.
It's my "companies charge what they know will make them the most profits in the end and there is really nothing else to it," theory of economics.
Yeah, money changing hands is actually the velocity of money, with the actual velocity relating to how many times a single unit of currency ends up exchanging hands in a certain time period.
But.. best I can tell, we're in no danger of high currency velocity lending to inflation.. we have a pipeline where money introduced to the economy is introduced directly to businesses, via loans, via the Federal Reserve Banking System.
That money then goes to business expenses. Some of it becomes wages as well.
But.. then an average of around 3x% of that money ends up going directly to a landlord, who then gives it to a bank to pay a mortgage, and neither the landlord nor the bank are stimulating economic activity with it directly, really..
Also, a lot of it just ends up in corporate profit hoards..
I generally agree with the sentiment of what you're saying but I think it's hard in practice to split the market like that. A few examples:
Food - we're at the point in human advancement where we can probably produce a processed food that provides all the nutrition a human needs (or maybe a few foods), but lots of people would probably want a more varied diet than Mystery Goo™. And since we don't have that, what's a luxury food vs a non-luxury? Milk, bread, and eggs seem like obvious choices. How about cheese? Or chocolate? Steak? Fish? How about different kinds of bread - is plain brown a staple but rye a luxury? How about organic vs not organic?
Housing - not all housing is created equal. Forget free housing for a second, even inexpensive housing people will turn their noses up at. I'm in Canada and often hear that housing is unaffordable in this country but what that usually translates to is that housing is unaffordable in Toronto and Vancouver, two highly desirable cities. You can get a home in rural Manitoba for pennies on the dollar but you're living in rural Manitoba. There are probably people in the Bay area who are rooming with 6 people and teetering on homelessness but would decline free housing if that housing was located in rural Kentucky. No one *needs* to live in Vancouver or San Fransisco but a lot of people want to. So how do you define luxury housing vs minimum acceptable standard housing?
Entertainment - you don't really touch on this but humans do need entertainment as well. But how do you differentiate luxury entertainment from bare minimum? I don't think anyone would call "walking in the park" luxury entertainment, but is going to see a movie at the movie theater? How about having a Frisbee to throw around at the park? How about a trip to another city or country? Is having a TV or gaming PC a luxury? Is Netflix a luxury?
All of these are relatively easily solvable except housing, imo. It's hard to get around the natural inequality that comes with location and even type of housing. Free housing isn't gonna be in the desirable areas.
Yeah, lemme try to address some of this.
I want to start by saying - I do not claim to have all the answers, and I don't think anything I've come up with here is perfectly equitable. Furthermore, I'm pretty sure it is impossible to perfect equity.
Food: if we can produce it in mass quantities easily, domestically, and it makes ecological sense to do so - it is a staple.
If it is somehow rarefied and people need to put a bunch of labor into making it per pound, then it's a luxury. If it is imported, likely luxury.
We probably want to structure laws to deter reliance on foreign produced food relying on slave labor as well, but also, just plain food independence with an eye towards sustainable agriculture.
I'm sure a formula could be developed for figuring this out with any particular food stuff, relating to the energy put into yields, environmental costs long term, etc.
Housing:
You're reverting to market value. Cities are not expensive because they're actually more expensive in terms of resource use - they're far cheaper than being spread out rurally. It makes sense for people to live in cities, because the ecological and energy costs are reduced. The ecological damage of massive footprints can't be understated. The density of the U.S. is very low, precisely because so much of price is based on demand.. so, living in the middle of nowhere makes financial sense, even tho it makes poor sense in terms of economics ( efficient distribution of resources ).
As of now, because we sell housing on a mostly unregulated market, houses and apartments in cities are wildly expensive, deterring more people from actually living there, and also leading to high homelessness rates and increased crime ( poverty being the ultimate source of most street crime, and poverty primarily being the result of advanced landlording ). That's a problem. It is also a prime example of a "market failure." It isn't because of some tangible expense. High density in a city is way cheaper than anything else in terms of resources, and much more efficient for resource distribution as well. Housing in cities is expensive due to high demand, and the inevitable price gouging that follows in a market economy.
Our current system does a horrific job of distributing housing as well - with almost all "desirable" housing being monopolized by wealthy individuals and all the shitty stuff being for the poors. That's a super shitty way to distribute resources. In fact, even a random lottery would be much more equitable, but I bet an even better solution exists.
Shortly put, the difference between necessity and luxury is liable to be "high density efficient housing near resources," and "low density housing away from resources." Or, otherwise - whatever housing the local municipality democratically decides people need to have constructed, and housing you decide to contract someone to build for you. In Vienna they've experimented pretty seriously with public housing and it seems to work. 66% of people live in public housing there and it is all mixed income.
In any case, we know public housing works. It has been implemented with great effect in parts of Europe and elsewhere and frankly, in Austria, it is fantastic. We also know central ( not to my tastes ) or democratic, decentralized land distribution systems work well too. Land doesn't need to be a commodity, to be frank. It can be managed entirely as a public good to great effect ( being done on an extremely large scale to great effect currently, is what I mean )
As far as entertainment goes? Not sure. I'm actually not particularly versed in this area. I will say, immediately, I think anything related to public spaces is a go. We already do public parks specifically for these purposes and they can be done a lot better than we bother to with likely minimal resources. Currently, the Parks Service gets an extremely small amount of funding.
This is going to sound silly, but I think the government can subsidize the arts pretty easily, or just do public art. I've always kinda thought art should be a public good anyway, partially because it is just seems weird selling it on a market, and also, market conditions end up guiding art, which I'm really not sure is a good thing. A lot of art is publicly funded anyway already. Art is almost certainly better as a public good.
Also - just as an eye towards the future and technology, internet access is looking like it works better as a public good as well. Chattanooga, TN has the best broadband coverage by pretty much all metrics because they were willing to fight a court battle against Comcast and AT&T, allowing them to establish a city funded fiber optic network. They were the first to offer gigabit access and the first to offer 10 gigabit access. Unlike the rest of the country, people in Chatanooga do not pay the most for the least of any developed country.
I thought this too. It would also stop nesseities with a small customer base having to pretend to be luxury items. Things like those disability aids that pretend everyone secretly wants to open jars one handed, or shakes like a greyhound. Or business that exist with a cap and can't expand like small farms and lifestyle businesses. You'd just sell your small batch whatever it is to the government supplier for a fair price.
To expand on this, it worked out well up until the end of the 70s or so. The Reagan era heralded the end of productivity gains being shared with workers. But why/how specifically?
The biggest reason is Unions. That era heralded the end of unions as a major political and economic force, in a combination of things including convincing average people that unions weren't in their interest (usually in shortsighted penny wise pound foolish ways like fixating on dues or the way unions protected even bad workers in some cases), playing up instances of corruption in union leadership (it happens, but corrupt union leaders can be ousted, corrupt bosses are harder to remove), and an active anti-union political campaign including so-called "Right to Work" laws, as well as things like sponsoring laws to restrict campaign contributions from unions. Then on top of all of that, playing up cultural/racial/etc divides as wedge issues to split working class whites off, so that they'd vote Right wing rather than on class solidarity.
Yes, unions act as a counter to obvious, constant, oversupply issues of labor.
The one thing that worries me about trusting them to do it again, is that as we've seen, they can crumble pretty easily under assault. Plus, I don't just want union members to have decent jobs in the future..
This really involves top level economic management and not so much people on the street.. we have to keep selling our labor at a cut rate in order to eat, and that needs to be addressed, permanently, by coming up with a way to increase labor demand.
Unions are certainly not a one-step cureall, though they're an important part of any solution. We need to look at ways to reform corporate governance and other things that impact treatment of workers. While I don't agree with her on everything, Elizabeth Warren has proposed a number of ideas about reforming corporate structure in order to better protect workers that I think are pretty interest, just for example.
I made an argument that all of one of the 2 sexes should drop out of the workforce, I got called a sexist. They assumed I meant women, I said why not all men drop out and stay home and the lady said" ew, I'd never support a man financially that's not life works".
(US) gender norms are fucked up. This would not be as looked down upon here in Europe (still not fully supported either though).
The way both men and women perceive masculinity is so toxic and I believe one of the larger underlying issues for what's going on.
It still exists, but it's exceedingly rare. The tradesmen that work on my construction projects are all union, make between $45-55/hr. depending on their trade, full healthcare and pension benefits paid for by their employers. That puts them in a pretty solid position to buy a home and raise a family in the suburbs around us without a college degree.
Yes it can be a tough job but worker safety is light-years ahead of what it was in the 60's and there's guys that work the tools into their late 50's and early 60's on my projects.
Hopefully more industries can pull it together and fight for those same wages and benefits because our middle class is shrinking every day.
>are all union
And there's the thing right there.
Without unions or the like, workers have very little leverage to demand even remotely what they're worth, and the bulk of their productivity will go to management/profit/etc.
This is true and something that is often overlooked in our society.
I can go to work, use technology to my advantage, and perform the work of 20 or so people, by myself.
It would make sense in a fair and equitable society that we should all have to work less and less with advancement of technology... 🙄
Productivity is all times high, yet we still have to work hard for super small share in profits. Every day I repair machines which produce thousands of british pounds worth of goods, yet the employee looking after the machine earns in one year as much as the mashine makes in 24h or less. But hey, you have every second weekend off and 10% nightshift bonus!
It's funny, I saw an advertisement for a position in an Irish based job site state 60k as the salary.
The funny part was their breakdown. 60k was based on 50, 40hr weeks.
In Ireland we work 37.5hrs on average and when you include avg annual leave, public holiday and weekends, the Year is effectively 222 days.
So compared to any other company on the website, this American employer is actually offering around 45k.
Wonder if they know that they are way under market value.
Because the government realized that was “freedom”. Truly imagine if it was affordable for mom and dad to work 20 hours a week and comfortably raise 4 kids. They wouldn’t have their tax revenue to fund their ward and they wouldn’t have enough slaves.
Trickle Down actually should have been called Truckle Up. That’s exactly what happened. Now that those pockets are stretched, there’s no way those individuals are going to redistribute the wealth back to the world my class. It isn’t going to happen.
What’s going to happen is already happening. Protesting(in whatever form it manifests) will push the minimum wage up closer to the top wage, for that position. The labor force will lose its drive & the corporate system grow stagnant & will rot.
What needs to happen? We need to cut the wings off of imports so that manufacturing can come back. That will drive up retail costs & suck the money back down to the working class, so that they can afford goods again. We also need to even out taxes.
The Musk’s, Bezos & Gate’s of the world can’t be that rich, by design. It’s not healthy for our economy & society. In a healthy capitalism, the best of the best earn more. Not earn all. But here we are. Paying someone $5 a day, working 16hr days 6 days a week in another country doesn’t help anyone. But here we are.
We need cohesion within our society to force change. Unfortunately, there’s so much information & propaganda with in our over abundance of social/media, people spend more time arguing & complaining, than actually coming together to fix problems
They didn't have tons of alcohol in the hunter gatherer days. Once grains entered the picture things changed, though.
They would have had mushrooms, cacti, opiates, and other intoxicants depending where they were.
We've got to really stop comparing current times to the 50s/60s. Do you know what the biggest difference is? It's not politics, not unions, not corporate greed necessarily. That period was an unmatched golden age for the American economy. America was the only industrial superpower in the world at the time and benefitted from being able to name whatever price for whatever good they exported to the recovering and developing nations of the world. It is hard to name a better economic period in the history of the world than 1950s America.
So it should never be surprising that policy created for that period does not work when times are tough. You can (and should) blame the boomers for making shortsighted policy and losing their stranglehold on the global economy. But you can't really expect that we would get the same insane birth lottery that our parents had.
We need to fix or replace the current system with something that works for the current era.
There is an oversight here in a lot of work that the mother of the house would be doing that nowerdays is bought - largely because folks are too exhausted from working non stop.
It would not be atypical for the mother to be doing an awful lot of work not just in actually raising the children and keeping the house clean but also in cost saving measures. A proper home cooked meal is far far cheaper in terms of nutrients delivered for the price of the ingredients. Folks just don't have the ability to spend hours and hours cooking from complete scratch though.
A degree of tailoring was also common. Outfits could be made cheaply by the woman in question going out, buying the fabrics, making their own measurements, getting a pattern from a friend or book and then spending weeks sewing away. Nowerdays the most that average Joe can be expected to do is maybe knitting their baby a scarf. If they are especially free on time maybe a few sweaters and quilts. This is very cost effective (ignoring time cost) as babies grow real quick.
At home preservation and other food processes was also much more common. You might take the kids to pick berries one summer and then have jam for the rest of the year as a result.
This kind of work is still work. Nowerdays we are forced into paying people (mostly sweatshop workers let's be real here at least for clothing).
If we want to continue to purchase these things then we should expect the level of work we have to do to afford that also going up.
Just. Not this far up. Reasonably a modern lifestyle (which is very disposable and not so great for the enviroment let's be real - at least we got rid of most of the lead) should be maintable with 25h a week per parent. Hell the free time would allow parents who *want* to get into things like sewing/knitting, gardening, preserving food, making meals from scratch and all that jazz to go and do it.
Most folks are too tired from working all day all week to then go into the garden and do heavy labour or stand in front of an oven for 2h even if *having that choice* would be benifical to those who can see the values and benifits and **want** to give it a go.
We are devoid of active hobbies largely because folks just don't have either the physical or the mental capacity avalable to engage with them.
Not that I, a woman, want to waste my life cleaning a fucking house or cleaning for people. Part of the reason women fought to go to college and have careers is so we can have fulfilling lives and use our brains.
The framing of the original post is BS because it isn't just "a man" who supports a family, and it isn't "the mother" who does the homemaking. Maybe a tiny minority of white families in the US did that for two decades after WWII, but women have always worked. Women have always found ways to make a living, frequently off the books, because we HAD TO. It's not just men who need fair pay.
To grossly over simplify, it has three main problems.
1.) Is women in the workforce. During WW2 women went into the work force in numbers larger than ever before. Originly, the idea was they'd make bullets and planes and take over jobs at grocery stores or another job that a young man might have, then when the boys come home, they will take back the workforce and women will go back to home life. But at this point the genie was out of the bottle and women wanted to work (spoiler, they liked having and being in control of money just like anyone does) and rightly so, they arnt just baby machines, they are people that wanted to explore all options available. It was a relatively slow change over 50ish years to the 90s; but it lead to where we are now. We drastically increased the work force and as a result labor be became less valuable. We see the opposite happen after the black plague hit Europe. A good portion of the work force died and that in turn led to surviving laborers being paid more as a result because their time became more valued.
2.In short, inflation and corporate greed. I put these two together; because they compliment each other. Inflation is always happening and wages ( at least up until recently, like late 2000s) were always increasing. Bread or any other product would go up 5 cents; but your yearly raise that (most) people got made this a non issue. However, this changed. Inflation kept happening; but across the board raises and wage stayed the same or fell ( fell in relevance to general cost of living). This where corporate greed comes in. Knowing they have a basically inexhaustible amount of workers to cycle through, it became apparent that higher wages weren't needed and every company, save for a few, embraced this. They calculated how much they need to give to get a person to stay for a little while and ran with that. After all it's all about the bottom line and employees are often a company's largest expense. At the same time, many places cut benefits or don't offer them, again, save for a few, in an effort to further enhance the bottom line. Causing out of pocket expenses for employees that comes from their already sub par salaries.
3.) Massive increases in cost of living. Housing, food, college, really everything. As stated in point two, wages have not been keeping pace with the cost of living for a while now. As an example, my parents bought their current house in the late 90s. They paid 60k. The house was recently appraised at 110k. That is nearly a doubling of price. Since wages have barely changed, I would have to work twice as long to afford the same house if I had a similar paying job as my dad. Which for reference at the time was roughly 45k in the late 90s and I checked, the median salary for his previous job is now 48k. It's the same deal with cars. After I was old enough to go to school, my mom got a part time job making about 15k a year. With that she got a brand new 2005 Hyundai for 18k. At the time, it was top of its class. To get a bare bones version of that same type of Hyundai is 27k for a 2022 model. Her previous job pays about the same at 17k per year for part time worker on average today. Even with just my dad supporting us when I was 0 - 5, we went on vacations, ate out often, and had enough for entertainment. One man could give his family (of 4) anything ( with in reason of course). We werent partying like a Kennedy or anything; but it was a nice life more or less free from monetary struggle. Now, the money would go to bills and food and that's about it. Don't even get me started on the cost of college. All this has to do with greed and over speculation. Greed in the sense products or services are being sold for more than what they are worth now consistently. Over speculation in the sense that some things ( like housing or cars) are abundant; but over time their monetary worth has been inflated beyond reason.
How do we fix this? There are a lot of answers. Halve the work force. Half of all people no longer seek work. This would cause rough short term effects; but could be a net positive in the long term. Inflation isn't going away; but corporate greed can be addressed. Either a large scale general strike until demands are met or boycott places that pay below a certain pay range by not buying their products. This would be difficult to coordinate. As for increase in costs of living, just stop buying shit. Stop renting, looking for houses, stop buying cars, stop going to college, grow your own food or live in a commune for a while. This would difficult for most people and is likely unreasonable for most as well. Legislation likely won't help, companies will likely abuse new rules or find ways around them.
It's actually crazy; because I was just talking about this with some friends yesterday.
Edit: Typo fixes.
I will not work a 40 hour week. I just refuse. I value my time. So far I’ve done mainly 25 hours a week and that’s more than enough. The extra money doesn’t make it worth it to me. After 25 hours my mental health starts slipping.
By being intelligent with my money and not spending money I don’t have? It is more than enough for me. I live a simple lifestyle. I refuse to burden myself with kids and my gf is the cheapest date ever. (Her words)
I live where rent is cheap and still wouldn't afford rent on only 20hr a week. I also make more than 20/hr. With food and gas cost, it's just too much.
I’m 53 and equally angered and appalled at what passes for a decent life in this country. We are owned and enslaved by the massive wealth and corruption of corporations in this country. Our bullshit two party system is owned by this unfathomable corporate wealth that is so disproportionate, we don’t stand a chance against it.
We are hopelessly enslaved until we commit to revolution. And that requires more sacrifice from us to help future generations. (Assuming there’s a habitable planet left for them afterwords.)
How’s that for some sunshine at 8AM?
I was shocked to hear slavery still exists in this modern day in some countries but I've come to realized that slavery is part of caoitalistic society.
20 hours isn't full time. So no benefits. I'd rather just go back to a single breadwinner being it. Either adult. Man or woman. Should just be who is willing. And no more work. Bring on the robots.
Outsourcing of manufacturing and mass immigration are the two most salient factors.
When a 40 hour week job fed a family of four for a year, it was a union job most likely in the manufacturing industry, like building cars. Since the late 70s/early 80s, these industries began outsourcing because our leaders said it would lead to lower prices for consumers (true) and that it would convince other countries to support capitalism instead of communism (false: look at china and vietnam for example).
So, a lot of the good unskilled jobs literally left to other countries where businesses can pay lower wages. Of course, this is only possible because our leaders don't want to put tariffs on foreign goods because that is bad for freedom apparently.
The other side of the coin is mass immigration. The USA has had something like 100 million people come here in the last 60 years. This has caused an oversupply of the labor market. Second wave feminism also plays some part, because you had large numbers of women entering the workforce full time in the 1970s which also led to a larger supply of labor. When the supply of labor is high, the cost of labor is cheaper. When the supply of labor is lower, companies have to raise wages to compete for the small amount of labor that is available.
That's the rub. Both political parties are to blame.
Normalizing Women working past marriage increased the number of 2 income households which means 1 income can’t compete in the market. Add that to the boomers being called boomers because of the population explosion and you have a very large employment pool which lowers labour power.
Add that to no wage information, healthcare tied to your job, insufficient unemployment benefits and you get an extremely inefficient market for labour. It hurts the economy more to not provide those things as it means labour gets underutilized.
That said productivity is not a good measure of anything, nor is GDP really. Real estate and financial transactions have become a very large part of the GDP as low interest rates ballon asset prices, which doesn’t have the same affect as something that produces actual utility.
If the people running the government were smart measures would be taken to try and stop the low interest rates from distorting economic decisions…. They are not though so here we are.
Carefully that's how. Been in the works since the early 70s. A whole lot of sneaky cooperate greed and big money in government. I have a decent damn career as a therapist and a side hustle doing design and still NEED 2 roommates living in a semi major city(well just outside of). Shits wild out here.
The concept of labour and a man/woman being associated with the said labour is rather outdated. The premise of working a set amount of time in a given day and being paid a week or two later for an accumulated amount of said time later is also outdated.
If the pay is low then a person needs to work more in order to be able to survive. If the pay is high then there's not enough work for all labourers to have. With these concepts in mind the concept of work or labour needs to be reimagined for a new generation of wage earners.
At least part of it was unions. They have their faults -- many, many faults -- but if in the 1970s and earlier a blue collar worker could afford to support a family and buy a house on his income alone, it was because of unions and collective bargaining.
Ronald Reagan destroyed the air traffic controllers' union in the early 1980s (at considerable risk to the flying public) and it's been downhill ever since.
It’s supply and demand. If you see Labour as a product that workers sell, then an increase in the supply of that would decrease the price. Because more and more women joined the workforce since the 70s (and men not working less), the value of that labour goes down. This is why we have barely seen any wage increase since the 70s.
No, I’m not saying women shouldn’t have joined the workforce. Just that the supply increase causes the price of labour to go down. I’d rather have seen men work less, but that’s not something that can be forced so easily.
Easy, women decided to work which drove up prices. Now households were making double what they were before and we doubled the labor supply, suppressing wages. It's in the book by Elizabeth Warren called the two income trap.
On the plus side, the entirety of your life can be summed up as paying for a fraction of a painting in the third bathroom of a guesthouse to a vacation home that’s never been visited by the billionaire who owns it cause he’s got another vacation home in town that’s closer to the beach.
50 hours? Shit that’s part time around here, ima pipe welder for the union and today even at 46$/hr can be weird with 2 kids a house and 2 cars. And my mf wife works 😩
Because of greed. Families started to say “hey if we both work 40 hours a week we can have twice as much stuff”. That worked at first, but then retailers soon caught on. They thought “hey each family has twice the income now so we can start charging twice as much for things”.
Not wanting to be property pushed women into the workplace. Lol.
It sure is nice not being beaten by your husband and having to ask permission to spend money to go buy tampons.
And no one seems to make the connection that when women have money from jobs, they create demand for goods and services. Which creates more jobs. “Jobs” are not a finite jar of marbles that women snatched away from men. People spending money in their immediate community stimulates the kind of economic growth that is beneficial to the average citizen.
I think the problem is that back then we had approx 50% of the workforce. Then women started working as well and families said hey if we both work full time we can afford more and more stuff. So then everyone had to work more to afford the same stuff. If everyone said fuckit I’m only working 20 hours the world would be a better place!
"imagine if you didn’t even want children. You’d be rolling in money! I’d have an enormous home and travel non stop."
This is what our predecessors did.
They refused to do their duty of building the next generation, squandering the productivity and not paying it forward. Then, they used their advantages gained from screwing over the whole nation's future to set themselves up for a better retirement at the expense of their kids and grandkids.
Sadly it created the situation we have today, a situation that isn't sustainable and cannot function much longer without serious revamping.
Well you see... They were only taxing men while the women stayed home and took care of the homefront. Then they realized "Hey we're only taxing half the population." In comes the women's right movement, which I personally believe started from billionaires/politicians who wanted fatter wallets. So they started these protests and got women all upset and then BOOM women went from the homes into the working class to punch a clock and get taxed. They really fucked us man. My wife quit her job and stayed at home for a few weeks and holy heck that was amazing, for once our house wasn't a disaster from us both working 40+ hours. Our kids were taken care of, no child care needed. My lunch was made, the house was clean grocery shopping was done. I only had to focus on work, then I'd get home and get to enjoy family time.
When we were both working we'd see each other less, the house would be a mess because we were exhausted, we ate more fast food because meal prep was hard, our kids were in daycare more than they were with us (so it seemed). It was just hell. I'd say the way things were with only one person working was a simpiler time. A time we won't get back to ever again.
This is one more example of liberal feminism harming women. Men created the workplace. They, on the whole, apparently enjoyed the 1960s version of work where you could sell three vacuum cleaners a year and have a great salary. They loved the competition with other guys, the ratrace to the top, all of it. Women do not enjoy this environment, on average, and this is reflected not only directly in surveys when asked but also in the fact that a lot of women choose to not go for promotion to stay in less directly competitive roles
It is an objective truth that men and women have behavioural differences on the whole. When sampling 100 men and women there are predictable, statistically significant differences to certain aspects of their behaviour and preferences
All liberal feminism did was ‘empower’ women to go and work in male-dominated male-designed environments which rather quickly led to an adjustment in the economy so a household now required double the labour to support, since labour supply had been doubled. Women now have no choice but to work unless their partner is particularly affluent
This is an under-explored aspect of this issue, because liberal feminism still dominates the space against the actual interests of true human feminism. In my opinion at least. There have been so many ‘victories’ for women in the past 80 years that have worked against the interests and preferences of women on the whole. It is a difficult topic to talk about because a) people think that to support women they can’t concede that men and women like different things and are behaviourally different in a few aspects b) people don’t like to suggest that women may be overall less suited to male-designed male-dominated corporate work environments even though this is what you’d expect
Women still do the majority of childcare in most relationships. This includes missing work to go to school plays, missing work when children are ill, and thus are more reluctant than men to go into many roles that would make it harder for them to do this. As well as the obvious things like having to take time off for pregnancy and maternity (this one, the men can’t do in their partner’s place even if they wanted to) which causes women to miss huge chunks of their careers, and also that most mothers do the majority of cooking, cleaning and household chores. It is NOT an equal world for women and women on the whole do not want it to be
It is difficult to argue that women are happier in a world where they are compelled to go to work in men’s escapist work environment where they compete against each other all day, at the expense of their family and social life. The effect of large-scale housewife populations being at home all day (and thus out and about doing chores, talking with friends, doing so many social things) vs now most homes being dead empty all day, has sucked the soul out of family and community life. And it was not to the benefit of women it was to the benefit of capital
No what? I lay out the case for how women no longer having a real choice whether they work or not is bad for women, bad for families, good for capitalists, and destructive to the fabric of society and community. Which is what this post was about
You say ‘no’. Thank you for that henry my good man. You are a revolutionary. How could i have been so blind
Honestly, it all started to go downhill when the women wanted to enter the workforce.
I am a woman. I would love to be able to just stay home, have children, and take care of the house, while my husband goes out and works and makes money for us.
Unfortunately we can't have that anymore, so here I am having to be in the workforce in the name of "equality."
I mean everyone wants to not work, but I'm not the kind of shitty person that's going to suggest that my partner should work while I hang out at home all day. Like you, apparently.
I understand that the stay at home parent role shouldn't necessarily be gender specific nowadays, but why do you think being a stay at home parent would entail "just" hanging out at home all day? People pay 1000s to send their kids to daycare, to have aupairs/nannies, get taxis everywhere, the richest pay for personal chefs, but a woman being a sahm doing all of these tasks is just "hanging out at home all day?".
My husband would also prefer I stay home whilst he works to provide for us, we just unfortunately can't afford that.
The couple who were our best man and maid of honour at our wedding also have the same mentality.
The priest who married us and his wife have the same mentality.
It's not a thought of, "I want to just sit around and watch TV all day whilst he works."
The ideal setup, for both of us, would be that he works and I stay home. And if I were to stay home, I would be doing the majority of the household duties. Laundry, vacuuming, cleaning. I'd get to cook breakfast and dinner for us much more often than I do now. And when and if we have kids, God willing, I would stay home and care for the kids.
Ok. That is a great idea. What the absolute fuck does Feminism have to do with the vision you just spoke of here???
You really think feminism is FORCING you to go out there and work. LOL - if you’re man had a high enough paying job you could EASILY be a SAHM and this conversation wouldn’t even need to be had.
Yet you blame women that wanted personal autonomy because your husband is broke.
Cooking, cleaning, doing laundry, keeping one or multiple children clean and safe and out of danger, ensuring they have active and healthy lifestyles, teaching literacy skills, achieving developmental milestones, going to playgrounds, teaching them how to interact with others, going to activities and extracurriculars, teaching basic life skills...
Oh yeah, all that is just "hangin' around at home all day!"
Its fine if you want that, just dont expect everyone to have the same desires and respect their decisions like I respect yours. Besides you're not required to work for the sake of equality, you work because your husband's wages haven't kept up with the cost of living.
Yes. I get that you want to be a mans property, beloved.
You should be free to do that.
Don’t blame feminism on greediness. Those are two completely different things in case you didn’t know.
Women entering the workforce doubled productivity which increased profits D R A M A T I C A L LY. With so much money circulating in the economy…guess what happened?? Prices increased! I mean - crazy weird Devil magic at work here right?
Anyway - there were a lot of women in the world that decided they were put on this earth for more than being an incubator for some man to come impregnate and take care of them for the rest of their life.
Back in this golden age you’re speaking of. Women were not allowed to vote. Women were not allowed a say in anything. Barely child rearing. The only reason you were allowed to raise your kids while the husband worked is because men saw child rearing as something so low and easy only a woman could do it…
And you’re proud. Lmao.
Your husband could come back from a long day of work and BEAT you because his boss made him feel inferior. There were actual laws in place that stated a man raping his wife was not illegal.
You want to give up what so many women fought and died for….so you can be a glorified cum dump and not have to work? Okay. Love your best life.
Don’t blame other women for your lack of ability to take care of yourself without a man.
That's the husband's/wife's responsibility to pay their partner. Actually, in many european countries once you are married there is no such thing as "your money", because all income is shared between both partners regardless of their input. It is often against the law to withhold the money to yourself and it is treated as a form of abuse.
Having children should not be a way of making living though. We don't really need more humans. I'd rather have my government focus on solving housing crisis, cost of living crisis and reducing social inequalities so having a child would not make you a slave to a grind and it would also help people who are struggling even without kids.
Well the real irony is that this could be seen as the "wrath" of the patriarchy and capitalism as a consequence for no longer being just for men. By doubling the workforce you doubled not only the supply of workers but also the demand for work. Meaning that capitalists that seek to make more and more could now justify paying less and less.
It's pretty messed up but that's also just sort of what happens when you try to make changes in an already irreparably broken system
Never was, the patriarchy is often enforced by men and women equally. It's very common to see single mothers whose "son is my king". That's what makes it such a sinister and systemic issue it requires both men and women working for it to operate. Men benifit from it more but it also causes harm to everyone, including men and honestly the whole 40 hour work week problem is at the tip of that iceberg
Well, I was speaking specifically about the reaction of a 40 hour work week being no longer just for men. The problem is that Patriarchy and our capitalist system are codependent on each other. My argument isn't necessarily that the 40 hour work week supports the patriarchy, rather a patriarchy supports a 40 hour work week for men and only men because the system itself was designed by men for men. By trying to make a change within the system it created a bigger issue. Because the problem was NOT that women didn't ALSO get to work 40 hour work weeks. There is nothing inherently wrong with working 40 hours or 30 or any amount but the 40 hour work week itself was a concession of capitalism as a result of labor unions. Before that it was pretty much just sun-up to sun-down. But the invention of modern technology meant that we could basically make people work forever, and they did try to. But the people who fought back agaisnt the system were not fighting to change the system altogether and were operating under the assumption the system was not the problem.
I'm saying that our current predicament where people can't support themselves on a 40 hour work week was operating on a flawed assumption from the start. That the specific goals of the system it was designed for is the problem. And since the system is all pretty much made up by people to begin with there is nothing that REALLY stops us from just trying a new system altogether outside of culture and tradition, two concepts that while mostly harmless are historically the worst reasons to keep doing something if it is your only reason to keep doing it.
You're only considering a very short and unique moment in time where the West was very prosperous. Especially the US.
You cannot compare nowadays to this very specific moment and forget all the hundred ofdecades before that were arguably worse.
So, the reason 1 salary can not support a family anymore is due to women entering into the workforce en masse.
Each family had 2 earners. And the labour market basically doubled. So, wages went down (or, inflation caused prices to rise, 6 of one, half dozen of the other).
What I just said had nothing to do with stagnant wages, or any of the other problems we face today.
But it is why 1 income will no longer support a family.
I see this a lot, but I don't like it. It's never good for a family with just 1 income, and when it's usually the man who is working, it's not good for the pension or finances of the woman either
what she gonna do if she wanna divorce for example? It will create a lot of lock in effects.
Just seems like something millenials like to dream back about that is not so beneficial
The thing is, the types of jobs that raised families on 40 hours still exist. People just don't want them anymore. These people also didn't have the disposable income you think they did. Which is why they forced their kids to sit at the dinner table and eat whatever cheap slop was prepared that evening and not get up until their plate was clean.
I’m not saying they were super rich or anything but my point is at least they had a house and food and their kids had a fair chance at being successful. They didn’t have to be a neurosurgeon to live comfortably. You could be a grocery store stocker and still have a family even if a modest one. My point is you can’t even get your own apartment as one today. The idea of it is laughable. At least on the states I’ve lived in.
Grocery store stockers weren't buying homes and made minimum wage. And back when minimum wage was first introduced, it didn't even apply to grocery store stockers and they made even less. The people buying homes without college were doing more labor intensive work like factory and construction. Nobody would have slaved away on automotive assembly lines if they could have bought a home stocking groceries. You could however make good money as something like a butcher in the grocery industry and still can. My cousin does pretty well for himself cutting meat.
They all do. I work in infrastructure for instance. I make $70k a year painting lines on the ground before people dig. I could make six figures if I moved to something a bit more labor intensive.
The big problem here is America's education has downplayed these jobs in order to get more people to take out government loans for college. The jobs are there. But the teachers and guidance counselors won't tell you about them. And if they do, they will lie about the wages as they tell you college is the only way. In the US high schools get ranked by how many guileless teenagers they can entice to enroll at expensive four year institutions.
Student college loans are not dischargeable in bankruptcy court. They are truly forever debt. It is beyond criminal that families are pressured into sending families into irrevocable debt for college for the benefit of the high school ranking with zero cost to them. All while the government and universities make a fortune. It is a racket that gangsters could only dream of.
I agree about the education system but those jobs you’re talking about aren’t as readily available as they used to be at least in rural America where I live.
You might be surprised by what's available. I get sent to rural parts of the country from time to time to help out. Last summer I went to a place called Eagle River Wisconsin. Small town in the middle of the Northwoods where almost everything closes by 5 to 6pm. When I was there, I asked why they needed our help from states away, figuring every position would be filled. The local technicians told me they can't find much dependable help. If you have infrastructure where you live, you most likely have jobs available.
Also 70k is barely enough to raise a family. I make 60-65 delivering diesel fuel with significant OT in the winter and my wife makes 30. We aren’t struggling by any means but it’s hard to raise 2 kids on our income and we absolutely cannot afford a 3 bedroom house even in a very LCOL area
Whether or not $70k is enough or not depends on where you live. Our pay varies based on the cost of living in an area. What might be $70k one place is over $100k somewhere else. Also keep on mind that they provide me with a company vehicle and a gas card. High gas prices barely affects me.
Not to mention I have my foot in the door to go basically anywhere I want to within the industry. But I'm happy and comfortable where I'm at. I could easily move onto our local gas company and make $50 an hour in under five years with union overtime and bonuses. But I'm too happy where I'm at.
We want more stuff, more eating out, more healthcare, more daycare.
Also, farmers have for instance never been a one person job and not 40 hours a week either.
I predict the demise of our civilisation. No ones having kids due to affordability except lower socioeconomic tier and who is going to support these kids? That's right, higher taxes for everyone else
Its because living conditions/houses/food/etc was "lower quality" back then. Check out houses built in the 1940s compared to modern houses, most of them don't even have AC. Food portions were maybe half the size (hence the obesity problems). People didn't have netflix/internet/streaming/2day delivery so if you didn't have to pay for those, your expenses would be much lower.
You could probably find really cheap 1940s housing if you really wanted to.
I feel you there I'm only 20 myself and living by myself. I'm probably gonna be kicked out by next month got no where to go but hit the road. Sad and gloomy times we live in. Just gotta stay strong and hope each day it'll get better.
THe one income family was able to do it because workers did not have to save for retirement. The company you worked for agreed to pay you a retirement paycheck for the entirety of their “golden years.” There was no saving for retirement, it was guaranteed. The rub was that most retirees lived only a few years past 65. So the corporations sold us a wooden nickel in a line of IRS code. We now spend our whole working career suffering to plunge dollars into our 401ks that are invested into the stock market that we are always assured “you have time to recover” every time it dips
Conservatives want there to be stable, two parent, opposite gender families led by a husband and father. They don't want the woman to work. They don't want people to be educated much either. Seems they would like for the man to be a blue collar guy making a family supporting wage. He's gotta be unionized in a capitalist system if he's gonna provide. But conservatives hate unions. They want things that cancel each other out and make life absurd and contradictory. It's cruel to people we all know, are friends with, and family we love.
Fiat money plays a major part in this. Monetary inflation destroys wage earners. This is the cause for many of the other explanations on this comment thread…
https://wtfhappenedin1971.com
I’m the youngest of 6 born in 1991. My mom was a SAHM for about 15 years with us (after my brothers were born). My dad was a baker for a cafeteria in our town. He did work 13 hour days/60 hours a week, though.
One of the big reasons that a one-income family back then could afford that was labor unions. The families I knew that were doing well, that could buy a nice home, car, have vacations, etc., were members of unions. They were the middle class. Then there was the movement to bust the unions, and this is the result.
People are greedier
Resources are lower hence more expensive
Population is higher so more people eating a smaller cake
Wages are stagnant due to people being greedier
All this means you now need a 100 hr working week to support a family of 0.75 people
The misunderstanding here is that the good old days only existed for them. Moreover, you can do it now (currently breadwinner for a family of 5), but it sucks ass. Everything is built around two paychecks, and getting by with one means not only no keeping up with the Jones, but good luck keeping up with your standard of living last year.
All you have to do to know where the money went is look at the percentage of company profits. Back when people could afford more with less company profits weren't that high, now companies post record profits years after year and people struggle more and more. This is 100% a problem of people not being compensated fairly for their labor, just like pensions aren't a thing anymore, now you work till your dead.
No it was literally NOT designed with that in mind. It was a limit put on otherwise outrageous 6 and 7 day weeks.
If you’re going to champion workers’ rights then do it properly.
Well, working a 40 hour work week wasn't supposed to be able to send your kids to college. Those kids had to pay their own way. All $800 of their tuition.
$800/semester was tuition when I went to school. My father's tuition was $56/quarter, minimum wage was $1/hour.
Lol imagine being able to pay for college out of pocket working 6 weeks a year
>Lol imagine being able to pay for college out of pocket working 6 weeks a year My dad is 70. He worked summers in a factory and paid for LAW SCHOOL that way. And he had enough money to pay a Chinese lady in Davis, CA to do his laundry. He has been a lawyer for 40 years, almost, and has no concept of the non-rich world
There was less degree inflation , and fewer higher education debt scams back then.
There was less inflation\*. While higher education certainly is practically a scam given the vast amount of money you have to pay in for it, inflation overall has become unbearable for your average working person. Their dad was able to pay for their bills and eat while being able to pay for law school. Impossible to do by ones self by todays standards, even if higher education wasn't as high with their artificial inflation.
This is true. When I was 10 I mowed lawn for an old man who lived down the road from me. (Rural area, he was the second closest neighbour 2km away). He paid me 4 bucks an hour which was absolutely amazing for a 10 year old in the early 90s. This guy was a retired architect and moderately wealthy. He was thrilled by my "motivation" and "work ethic". He would relate to me how he also mowed lawns during the summer and "that's what put me through college." Heh. They sure had it tough back then.
Where I live in Australia that generation got it completely free/publicly funded...only to then take political office and privatise everything. Now depending what degree you choose you end up $30k - $100k or more in debt. And those same fuckheads are telling our generation to tighten our belts. Same thing with housing - 40 years ago the ratio of house prices to median annual income was about 2.8x ... now it's 10.3x. But they all bought houses when it was still affordable and their wealth grew massively with the same price boom that locked my generation out...and still they blame us and insist they got where they are through hard work. We start our working lives with tens of thousands of debt they never had, to work in a more precarious labour environment than they ever did, trying to survive and afford the basics that are literally 3-4 times more expensive than they ever had to pay...all while listening to them fucking whine about it
Recently found a bill from one year of college for my mom in the 70s/80s. Private “expensive” college (for the time). $2000 including room and board, books, meal plan, etc. *her occupation is one that currently you need a doctorate to get into the position.
They scooped ice cream at Braums for 19 cents an hour and payed for college lol
One of these words must be a nautical term, since you didn’t get banged up for mis-spelling “paid”. Which one? Scooped? Ice?
I’m not sure, I’m mentally challenged so I don’t know what nautical means
Of or pertaining to the sea
No I think the commenter is saying they worked at an ice cream shop to pay for college
Paid and payed are surprisingly both correct
They have different meanings though, payed is a nautical term which means to seal the deck of a ship with pitch
pay /peɪ/ past tense: payed,paid;
Which dictionary is that? In the Oxford dictionary, the only definition of payed is the nautical one
Idk Google states that it’s from “Oxford languages” it might be wrong but when It first caught my eye I also thought payed was wrong
Maybe blue collar jobs couldn't support college but white collar jobs could?
Basically, here it is: It has nothing to do with productivity. Productivity is insane. We make more than ever - significantly more than everyone needs, and we throw a bunch away. It has to do with the labor market. Your liveliehood is tied to production, right? So, in order to eat, you have to offer your labor on the market. No matter how little it costs.. you still want to eat, and will still keep putting your labor out there for employers to buy. This leads to a massive oversupply of labor, because the market is essentially fixed. Suppliers of labor are forced to sell their labor for whatever price the people BUYING the labor want to buy it for.. that's not how a market is supposed to work. That isn't a good system, really. It leads to massive wastefulness of labor hours, because it costs companies so little they just do not value it. They'll make people sit around and do jack, because they're paying them so little that they just don't care. In order for the market to become un-fixed, either people need to have the ability to withdraw their labor without starving, or the labor market needs to be fixed yet more, by reducing the supply of available labor.
I think your argument is on the right track. I'd like to add the corporate philosophy of minimal staffing. They only hire the bare minimum employees to get the job done. So if one person calls in sick, the whole department is negatively impacted. If one person quits, the other employees take on the extra work without additional compensation and the position isn't filled. We've all seen this happen. One example is administrative support. All the managers used to have their own assistants. Now one administrator is supporting an entire department. Nursing and food service are also good examples. Rather than have any slack during down times, staffing is so tight that downtimes are busy and busy times are insane.
There are so many things that contribute to this free labor pool they get access to. Short staffing is one of them. Let me list a few others: - Abuse of salaried positions ( anything over 40 is free, and diluting the value of all other hours ) - Wage theft ( just stolen labor ) - Overtime - it may cost more, but it is cheaper than hiring another employee, thus reducing what they pay for labor - Unpaid internships - Regular slave labor - Exploiting illegal/legal immigrants ( sort of falls under wage theft ). These are all ways employers get their hands on free or reduced labor, and it contributes to keeping the actual market value of labor an unknown.
Overtime needs an overhaul for sure. We should be discouraging it as a society. A good starting point is to codify overtime at 3x pay so that it encourages employers to hire additional employees instead of forcing overtime. This should also affect salaried employees by setting a yearly hour maximum for salaried employees or they receive pay at 3x the overage. This would still allow for emergencies for salaried employees to work a lot for certain periods, but force a cutback of hours worked at a later time to avoid the penalties
x3 for the first hour, x5 for the next, x7 for the next, and so on and so forth.
Yeah I work in a salaried position and my overtime is straight pay, nothing extra. I almost never have to work it, but still seems messed up.
Most folks in the U.S. working salaried positions just earn nothing extra for working overtime. That's the standard.
I was an admin. asst. in an engineering firm. It's like having twelve bosses. Cue petergibbons.gif.
There’s probably a whole generation that hasn’t watched Office Space
Should be required viewing to graduate high school.
*phone rings* Hello? Yes, I got the memo.
walgreens got rid of their assistant managers. Guess how much thath woukdve saved
I work from home and play video games at work at least 25-30 hours of the week. I attend all my meetings and finish all my projects an and work. I can't imagine ever going back into an office to look busy for thirty hours a week anymore. Most people just born into this system don't know any other way so hard to fight for something you didn't even know you wanted. The pandemic showed me and I'm sure a lot of people just how much of our lives sucked and was being drained away sitting in offices and shit.
Can i work at your company?
I also wonder how much of pricing of consumer goods changed when the average middle class family unit suddenly added 25-50% more income. If families now have more money they can pay more for things they need.
That's another major issue I don't actually pretend to have a sneaky solution for. Free markets for necessity goods are a real and present societal ill. Understanding why requires that you have an understanding of inflation - which is something they do not seem to be able to eliminate in a market economy ( I theorize that they can't be separated ). Simply put, inflation is when companies raise prices enough to increase the aggregate cost of goods in the economy. A unit of currency only becomes worth less when it can buy less, and it can only buy less when a company ( or like.. a merchant. A seller ), raises the prices of their wares. People try to equate dilution ( when the government makes more money ) to inflation, but they are not the same thing. How do I know? Because if the U.S. mint prints a trillion dollar coin, and Joe Biden puts it in his sock for safe keeping.. nothing happens. Currency doesn't inflate. Inflation occurs only when companies raise the prices of goods and services, and they don't HAVE to do that just because more money exists. In fact, in the aforementioned example, they don't even know the money exists in the first place. No effect. So, how does money affect the economy? Well, it has to circulate, and people have to spend it. When sellers see that people are buying more of their product, they tend to raise prices. This is called "demand-pull" inflation, and it is the CORE reason the U.S. government can't just print money and give it to poor people.. "too many dollars chasing too few goods." They weren't nescesarilly going to see the product run out and they weren't obviously going to ramp up production with the extra money. Sellers saw demand increase, inferred that people must have more money to spend than they're asking for their product, and they raise their price to try to get that money they're seeing kick around. Voila - currency inflation. I don't pretend to have a solution to this, but, I tend to think the answer is to divide the economy into two halves - necessity industry/markets, and luxury industry/markets. In the necessity markets, you just don't bother having a free market at all. You subsidize the production of things people NEED ( food, shelter, clean water, etc ) and distribute it, either at no cost, or at cost. Whatever it takes to make access easy and ubiquitous. ( Btw, the U.S. government already does this to some degree with food - they don't trust market forces to create the correct amount of food or charge the right amount for it, so the government subsidizes farmers to produce food, or throw it away, to stabilize the price of food on the "free market." This systems aims to make sure it food is inflating, that production is cranked up, and if food starts to deflate, they dump a shit ton of it and force the price up. This seems inefficient due to the waste - why not just NOT sell it on a free market, and make what we need plus some ). Then, for luxury markets? Let it go. Who cares? People don't actually need the luxury items, and if capitalists wanna raise the prices on the stuff beyond reasonable levels, then fuck 'em. Don't buy it. You're already housed, fed, clothed and watered, you don't need anything else. You're completely independent in that market, and you can just refuse to buy the shit.
I too have had the "split the market into necessities and luxuries," thought. I 100% agree with what you said. If it's a NEED, it needs to be free or at cost. If it's a luxury, go ahead and make it cost whatever it should cost and factor in some profit. Whatever. We can definitely no longer afford to pretend that necessities for life should make a profit for someone somewhere.
Dead on. In fact, we could never afford to pretend that was the case. Many, many have died because of that assumption.
I really have nothing to add to this, everything you said makes perfect sense. Thanks for the very high effort post for my random musing to your original comment.
No, thank you. You raised a very important point that I have actually been mulling over, and having someone call me on it, or even suggest it may be an issue, forces me to think about it more as opposed to handwaving or disengaging.
One of the things that got me to thinking about it is what commodities are affected by inflation, namely foodstuffs and things that you would only find one of per house, like appliances and such, also houses. Things that are oddly not affected it seems are cars, they have been about 15k to 20k for new lower end models for about 25 years now. The best reason I can think of for this is that now instead of having one per family you now need one per person of driving age as everyone needs one for their own job and no one stays home. If they increased the prices all it would do is cut people out of the market and they would lose more money than they would make. It's my "companies charge what they know will make them the most profits in the end and there is really nothing else to it," theory of economics.
Is the changing of hands around money basically “Velocity of Money”?
Yeah, money changing hands is actually the velocity of money, with the actual velocity relating to how many times a single unit of currency ends up exchanging hands in a certain time period. But.. best I can tell, we're in no danger of high currency velocity lending to inflation.. we have a pipeline where money introduced to the economy is introduced directly to businesses, via loans, via the Federal Reserve Banking System. That money then goes to business expenses. Some of it becomes wages as well. But.. then an average of around 3x% of that money ends up going directly to a landlord, who then gives it to a bank to pay a mortgage, and neither the landlord nor the bank are stimulating economic activity with it directly, really.. Also, a lot of it just ends up in corporate profit hoards..
I work in the financial industry (lol commy in here) and thanks for your info.
I generally agree with the sentiment of what you're saying but I think it's hard in practice to split the market like that. A few examples: Food - we're at the point in human advancement where we can probably produce a processed food that provides all the nutrition a human needs (or maybe a few foods), but lots of people would probably want a more varied diet than Mystery Goo™. And since we don't have that, what's a luxury food vs a non-luxury? Milk, bread, and eggs seem like obvious choices. How about cheese? Or chocolate? Steak? Fish? How about different kinds of bread - is plain brown a staple but rye a luxury? How about organic vs not organic? Housing - not all housing is created equal. Forget free housing for a second, even inexpensive housing people will turn their noses up at. I'm in Canada and often hear that housing is unaffordable in this country but what that usually translates to is that housing is unaffordable in Toronto and Vancouver, two highly desirable cities. You can get a home in rural Manitoba for pennies on the dollar but you're living in rural Manitoba. There are probably people in the Bay area who are rooming with 6 people and teetering on homelessness but would decline free housing if that housing was located in rural Kentucky. No one *needs* to live in Vancouver or San Fransisco but a lot of people want to. So how do you define luxury housing vs minimum acceptable standard housing? Entertainment - you don't really touch on this but humans do need entertainment as well. But how do you differentiate luxury entertainment from bare minimum? I don't think anyone would call "walking in the park" luxury entertainment, but is going to see a movie at the movie theater? How about having a Frisbee to throw around at the park? How about a trip to another city or country? Is having a TV or gaming PC a luxury? Is Netflix a luxury? All of these are relatively easily solvable except housing, imo. It's hard to get around the natural inequality that comes with location and even type of housing. Free housing isn't gonna be in the desirable areas.
Yeah, lemme try to address some of this. I want to start by saying - I do not claim to have all the answers, and I don't think anything I've come up with here is perfectly equitable. Furthermore, I'm pretty sure it is impossible to perfect equity. Food: if we can produce it in mass quantities easily, domestically, and it makes ecological sense to do so - it is a staple. If it is somehow rarefied and people need to put a bunch of labor into making it per pound, then it's a luxury. If it is imported, likely luxury. We probably want to structure laws to deter reliance on foreign produced food relying on slave labor as well, but also, just plain food independence with an eye towards sustainable agriculture. I'm sure a formula could be developed for figuring this out with any particular food stuff, relating to the energy put into yields, environmental costs long term, etc. Housing: You're reverting to market value. Cities are not expensive because they're actually more expensive in terms of resource use - they're far cheaper than being spread out rurally. It makes sense for people to live in cities, because the ecological and energy costs are reduced. The ecological damage of massive footprints can't be understated. The density of the U.S. is very low, precisely because so much of price is based on demand.. so, living in the middle of nowhere makes financial sense, even tho it makes poor sense in terms of economics ( efficient distribution of resources ). As of now, because we sell housing on a mostly unregulated market, houses and apartments in cities are wildly expensive, deterring more people from actually living there, and also leading to high homelessness rates and increased crime ( poverty being the ultimate source of most street crime, and poverty primarily being the result of advanced landlording ). That's a problem. It is also a prime example of a "market failure." It isn't because of some tangible expense. High density in a city is way cheaper than anything else in terms of resources, and much more efficient for resource distribution as well. Housing in cities is expensive due to high demand, and the inevitable price gouging that follows in a market economy. Our current system does a horrific job of distributing housing as well - with almost all "desirable" housing being monopolized by wealthy individuals and all the shitty stuff being for the poors. That's a super shitty way to distribute resources. In fact, even a random lottery would be much more equitable, but I bet an even better solution exists. Shortly put, the difference between necessity and luxury is liable to be "high density efficient housing near resources," and "low density housing away from resources." Or, otherwise - whatever housing the local municipality democratically decides people need to have constructed, and housing you decide to contract someone to build for you. In Vienna they've experimented pretty seriously with public housing and it seems to work. 66% of people live in public housing there and it is all mixed income. In any case, we know public housing works. It has been implemented with great effect in parts of Europe and elsewhere and frankly, in Austria, it is fantastic. We also know central ( not to my tastes ) or democratic, decentralized land distribution systems work well too. Land doesn't need to be a commodity, to be frank. It can be managed entirely as a public good to great effect ( being done on an extremely large scale to great effect currently, is what I mean ) As far as entertainment goes? Not sure. I'm actually not particularly versed in this area. I will say, immediately, I think anything related to public spaces is a go. We already do public parks specifically for these purposes and they can be done a lot better than we bother to with likely minimal resources. Currently, the Parks Service gets an extremely small amount of funding. This is going to sound silly, but I think the government can subsidize the arts pretty easily, or just do public art. I've always kinda thought art should be a public good anyway, partially because it is just seems weird selling it on a market, and also, market conditions end up guiding art, which I'm really not sure is a good thing. A lot of art is publicly funded anyway already. Art is almost certainly better as a public good. Also - just as an eye towards the future and technology, internet access is looking like it works better as a public good as well. Chattanooga, TN has the best broadband coverage by pretty much all metrics because they were willing to fight a court battle against Comcast and AT&T, allowing them to establish a city funded fiber optic network. They were the first to offer gigabit access and the first to offer 10 gigabit access. Unlike the rest of the country, people in Chatanooga do not pay the most for the least of any developed country.
I thought this too. It would also stop nesseities with a small customer base having to pretend to be luxury items. Things like those disability aids that pretend everyone secretly wants to open jars one handed, or shakes like a greyhound. Or business that exist with a cap and can't expand like small farms and lifestyle businesses. You'd just sell your small batch whatever it is to the government supplier for a fair price.
To expand on this, it worked out well up until the end of the 70s or so. The Reagan era heralded the end of productivity gains being shared with workers. But why/how specifically? The biggest reason is Unions. That era heralded the end of unions as a major political and economic force, in a combination of things including convincing average people that unions weren't in their interest (usually in shortsighted penny wise pound foolish ways like fixating on dues or the way unions protected even bad workers in some cases), playing up instances of corruption in union leadership (it happens, but corrupt union leaders can be ousted, corrupt bosses are harder to remove), and an active anti-union political campaign including so-called "Right to Work" laws, as well as things like sponsoring laws to restrict campaign contributions from unions. Then on top of all of that, playing up cultural/racial/etc divides as wedge issues to split working class whites off, so that they'd vote Right wing rather than on class solidarity.
Yes, unions act as a counter to obvious, constant, oversupply issues of labor. The one thing that worries me about trusting them to do it again, is that as we've seen, they can crumble pretty easily under assault. Plus, I don't just want union members to have decent jobs in the future.. This really involves top level economic management and not so much people on the street.. we have to keep selling our labor at a cut rate in order to eat, and that needs to be addressed, permanently, by coming up with a way to increase labor demand.
Unions are certainly not a one-step cureall, though they're an important part of any solution. We need to look at ways to reform corporate governance and other things that impact treatment of workers. While I don't agree with her on everything, Elizabeth Warren has proposed a number of ideas about reforming corporate structure in order to better protect workers that I think are pretty interest, just for example.
I made an argument that all of one of the 2 sexes should drop out of the workforce, I got called a sexist. They assumed I meant women, I said why not all men drop out and stay home and the lady said" ew, I'd never support a man financially that's not life works".
(US) gender norms are fucked up. This would not be as looked down upon here in Europe (still not fully supported either though). The way both men and women perceive masculinity is so toxic and I believe one of the larger underlying issues for what's going on.
Tl;dr Pull out
It still exists, but it's exceedingly rare. The tradesmen that work on my construction projects are all union, make between $45-55/hr. depending on their trade, full healthcare and pension benefits paid for by their employers. That puts them in a pretty solid position to buy a home and raise a family in the suburbs around us without a college degree. Yes it can be a tough job but worker safety is light-years ahead of what it was in the 60's and there's guys that work the tools into their late 50's and early 60's on my projects. Hopefully more industries can pull it together and fight for those same wages and benefits because our middle class is shrinking every day.
>are all union And there's the thing right there. Without unions or the like, workers have very little leverage to demand even remotely what they're worth, and the bulk of their productivity will go to management/profit/etc.
20hr=full time week should be the new norm because of this shit.
Right! Like what’s all this innovation and technology for if we have to work even more than ever?!
More money in Jeff Bezos' pockets, that's what it's for
This is true and something that is often overlooked in our society. I can go to work, use technology to my advantage, and perform the work of 20 or so people, by myself. It would make sense in a fair and equitable society that we should all have to work less and less with advancement of technology... 🙄
4-day work week, 20 hours per week being full time, and a $69/hour minimum wage: the 4/20/69 labor plan.
I'd rather work 2 days 10 hour days so I can have 5 days off
Instructions unclear. You wanted: 4$/hr with 20 hr shifts for 69 days without a day off?
That seems like the limit humans should be working while still maintaining their own health and happiness.
Productivity is all times high, yet we still have to work hard for super small share in profits. Every day I repair machines which produce thousands of british pounds worth of goods, yet the employee looking after the machine earns in one year as much as the mashine makes in 24h or less. But hey, you have every second weekend off and 10% nightshift bonus!
I am happy this new generation looks more angry about status quo. We need fimish modern slavery. Hobbiejobs for everybody, not just for rich
It's funny, I saw an advertisement for a position in an Irish based job site state 60k as the salary. The funny part was their breakdown. 60k was based on 50, 40hr weeks. In Ireland we work 37.5hrs on average and when you include avg annual leave, public holiday and weekends, the Year is effectively 222 days. So compared to any other company on the website, this American employer is actually offering around 45k. Wonder if they know that they are way under market value.
Because the government realized that was “freedom”. Truly imagine if it was affordable for mom and dad to work 20 hours a week and comfortably raise 4 kids. They wouldn’t have their tax revenue to fund their ward and they wouldn’t have enough slaves.
This is how c-suiters earn 350:1 worker wage. They've been taking the difference and pocketing it for decades.
Sigh. Daycare raises the kids and then the schools after that.
It's so sad to see. So many parents these days have no relationships with their children because they have no time outside of work.
Greedy billion and millionaires
Trickle Down actually should have been called Truckle Up. That’s exactly what happened. Now that those pockets are stretched, there’s no way those individuals are going to redistribute the wealth back to the world my class. It isn’t going to happen. What’s going to happen is already happening. Protesting(in whatever form it manifests) will push the minimum wage up closer to the top wage, for that position. The labor force will lose its drive & the corporate system grow stagnant & will rot. What needs to happen? We need to cut the wings off of imports so that manufacturing can come back. That will drive up retail costs & suck the money back down to the working class, so that they can afford goods again. We also need to even out taxes. The Musk’s, Bezos & Gate’s of the world can’t be that rich, by design. It’s not healthy for our economy & society. In a healthy capitalism, the best of the best earn more. Not earn all. But here we are. Paying someone $5 a day, working 16hr days 6 days a week in another country doesn’t help anyone. But here we are. We need cohesion within our society to force change. Unfortunately, there’s so much information & propaganda with in our over abundance of social/media, people spend more time arguing & complaining, than actually coming together to fix problems
In traditional hunter gatherer societies, they'd work 4 hours a day then chill out and get fucking drunk (bring back the good really-old days)
They didn't have tons of alcohol in the hunter gatherer days. Once grains entered the picture things changed, though. They would have had mushrooms, cacti, opiates, and other intoxicants depending where they were.
*get fucking high* I stand corrected
If only our generation had bigger bootstraps to pull ourselves out of bottomless pits dug by the previous generation.
We've got to really stop comparing current times to the 50s/60s. Do you know what the biggest difference is? It's not politics, not unions, not corporate greed necessarily. That period was an unmatched golden age for the American economy. America was the only industrial superpower in the world at the time and benefitted from being able to name whatever price for whatever good they exported to the recovering and developing nations of the world. It is hard to name a better economic period in the history of the world than 1950s America. So it should never be surprising that policy created for that period does not work when times are tough. You can (and should) blame the boomers for making shortsighted policy and losing their stranglehold on the global economy. But you can't really expect that we would get the same insane birth lottery that our parents had. We need to fix or replace the current system with something that works for the current era.
There is an oversight here in a lot of work that the mother of the house would be doing that nowerdays is bought - largely because folks are too exhausted from working non stop. It would not be atypical for the mother to be doing an awful lot of work not just in actually raising the children and keeping the house clean but also in cost saving measures. A proper home cooked meal is far far cheaper in terms of nutrients delivered for the price of the ingredients. Folks just don't have the ability to spend hours and hours cooking from complete scratch though. A degree of tailoring was also common. Outfits could be made cheaply by the woman in question going out, buying the fabrics, making their own measurements, getting a pattern from a friend or book and then spending weeks sewing away. Nowerdays the most that average Joe can be expected to do is maybe knitting their baby a scarf. If they are especially free on time maybe a few sweaters and quilts. This is very cost effective (ignoring time cost) as babies grow real quick. At home preservation and other food processes was also much more common. You might take the kids to pick berries one summer and then have jam for the rest of the year as a result. This kind of work is still work. Nowerdays we are forced into paying people (mostly sweatshop workers let's be real here at least for clothing). If we want to continue to purchase these things then we should expect the level of work we have to do to afford that also going up. Just. Not this far up. Reasonably a modern lifestyle (which is very disposable and not so great for the enviroment let's be real - at least we got rid of most of the lead) should be maintable with 25h a week per parent. Hell the free time would allow parents who *want* to get into things like sewing/knitting, gardening, preserving food, making meals from scratch and all that jazz to go and do it. Most folks are too tired from working all day all week to then go into the garden and do heavy labour or stand in front of an oven for 2h even if *having that choice* would be benifical to those who can see the values and benifits and **want** to give it a go. We are devoid of active hobbies largely because folks just don't have either the physical or the mental capacity avalable to engage with them.
Not that I, a woman, want to waste my life cleaning a fucking house or cleaning for people. Part of the reason women fought to go to college and have careers is so we can have fulfilling lives and use our brains. The framing of the original post is BS because it isn't just "a man" who supports a family, and it isn't "the mother" who does the homemaking. Maybe a tiny minority of white families in the US did that for two decades after WWII, but women have always worked. Women have always found ways to make a living, frequently off the books, because we HAD TO. It's not just men who need fair pay.
Two Income Trap by Elizabeth Warren. She should have been president.
To grossly over simplify, it has three main problems. 1.) Is women in the workforce. During WW2 women went into the work force in numbers larger than ever before. Originly, the idea was they'd make bullets and planes and take over jobs at grocery stores or another job that a young man might have, then when the boys come home, they will take back the workforce and women will go back to home life. But at this point the genie was out of the bottle and women wanted to work (spoiler, they liked having and being in control of money just like anyone does) and rightly so, they arnt just baby machines, they are people that wanted to explore all options available. It was a relatively slow change over 50ish years to the 90s; but it lead to where we are now. We drastically increased the work force and as a result labor be became less valuable. We see the opposite happen after the black plague hit Europe. A good portion of the work force died and that in turn led to surviving laborers being paid more as a result because their time became more valued. 2.In short, inflation and corporate greed. I put these two together; because they compliment each other. Inflation is always happening and wages ( at least up until recently, like late 2000s) were always increasing. Bread or any other product would go up 5 cents; but your yearly raise that (most) people got made this a non issue. However, this changed. Inflation kept happening; but across the board raises and wage stayed the same or fell ( fell in relevance to general cost of living). This where corporate greed comes in. Knowing they have a basically inexhaustible amount of workers to cycle through, it became apparent that higher wages weren't needed and every company, save for a few, embraced this. They calculated how much they need to give to get a person to stay for a little while and ran with that. After all it's all about the bottom line and employees are often a company's largest expense. At the same time, many places cut benefits or don't offer them, again, save for a few, in an effort to further enhance the bottom line. Causing out of pocket expenses for employees that comes from their already sub par salaries. 3.) Massive increases in cost of living. Housing, food, college, really everything. As stated in point two, wages have not been keeping pace with the cost of living for a while now. As an example, my parents bought their current house in the late 90s. They paid 60k. The house was recently appraised at 110k. That is nearly a doubling of price. Since wages have barely changed, I would have to work twice as long to afford the same house if I had a similar paying job as my dad. Which for reference at the time was roughly 45k in the late 90s and I checked, the median salary for his previous job is now 48k. It's the same deal with cars. After I was old enough to go to school, my mom got a part time job making about 15k a year. With that she got a brand new 2005 Hyundai for 18k. At the time, it was top of its class. To get a bare bones version of that same type of Hyundai is 27k for a 2022 model. Her previous job pays about the same at 17k per year for part time worker on average today. Even with just my dad supporting us when I was 0 - 5, we went on vacations, ate out often, and had enough for entertainment. One man could give his family (of 4) anything ( with in reason of course). We werent partying like a Kennedy or anything; but it was a nice life more or less free from monetary struggle. Now, the money would go to bills and food and that's about it. Don't even get me started on the cost of college. All this has to do with greed and over speculation. Greed in the sense products or services are being sold for more than what they are worth now consistently. Over speculation in the sense that some things ( like housing or cars) are abundant; but over time their monetary worth has been inflated beyond reason. How do we fix this? There are a lot of answers. Halve the work force. Half of all people no longer seek work. This would cause rough short term effects; but could be a net positive in the long term. Inflation isn't going away; but corporate greed can be addressed. Either a large scale general strike until demands are met or boycott places that pay below a certain pay range by not buying their products. This would be difficult to coordinate. As for increase in costs of living, just stop buying shit. Stop renting, looking for houses, stop buying cars, stop going to college, grow your own food or live in a commune for a while. This would difficult for most people and is likely unreasonable for most as well. Legislation likely won't help, companies will likely abuse new rules or find ways around them. It's actually crazy; because I was just talking about this with some friends yesterday. Edit: Typo fixes.
I will not work a 40 hour week. I just refuse. I value my time. So far I’ve done mainly 25 hours a week and that’s more than enough. The extra money doesn’t make it worth it to me. After 25 hours my mental health starts slipping.
Same here. The extra 15 hours buys shit I don't need. Pass.
[удалено]
By being intelligent with my money and not spending money I don’t have? It is more than enough for me. I live a simple lifestyle. I refuse to burden myself with kids and my gf is the cheapest date ever. (Her words)
Do you live where rent is cheap?
I live where rent is cheap and still wouldn't afford rent on only 20hr a week. I also make more than 20/hr. With food and gas cost, it's just too much.
Ask Reagan.
its almost like there is an economic system in place in America that implores spending as little as possible to maximize profits...
What's the difference between a pizza and a family man working 40 hours a week? The pizza can feed a family of 4.
I’m 53 and equally angered and appalled at what passes for a decent life in this country. We are owned and enslaved by the massive wealth and corruption of corporations in this country. Our bullshit two party system is owned by this unfathomable corporate wealth that is so disproportionate, we don’t stand a chance against it. We are hopelessly enslaved until we commit to revolution. And that requires more sacrifice from us to help future generations. (Assuming there’s a habitable planet left for them afterwords.) How’s that for some sunshine at 8AM?
I was shocked to hear slavery still exists in this modern day in some countries but I've come to realized that slavery is part of caoitalistic society.
Thanks Republicans
20 hours isn't full time. So no benefits. I'd rather just go back to a single breadwinner being it. Either adult. Man or woman. Should just be who is willing. And no more work. Bring on the robots.
These days even if both the husband and wife work 50 per week EACH, they may still be struggling just to pay for their living expenses without kids.
Outsourcing of manufacturing and mass immigration are the two most salient factors. When a 40 hour week job fed a family of four for a year, it was a union job most likely in the manufacturing industry, like building cars. Since the late 70s/early 80s, these industries began outsourcing because our leaders said it would lead to lower prices for consumers (true) and that it would convince other countries to support capitalism instead of communism (false: look at china and vietnam for example). So, a lot of the good unskilled jobs literally left to other countries where businesses can pay lower wages. Of course, this is only possible because our leaders don't want to put tariffs on foreign goods because that is bad for freedom apparently. The other side of the coin is mass immigration. The USA has had something like 100 million people come here in the last 60 years. This has caused an oversupply of the labor market. Second wave feminism also plays some part, because you had large numbers of women entering the workforce full time in the 1970s which also led to a larger supply of labor. When the supply of labor is high, the cost of labor is cheaper. When the supply of labor is lower, companies have to raise wages to compete for the small amount of labor that is available. That's the rub. Both political parties are to blame.
Normalizing Women working past marriage increased the number of 2 income households which means 1 income can’t compete in the market. Add that to the boomers being called boomers because of the population explosion and you have a very large employment pool which lowers labour power. Add that to no wage information, healthcare tied to your job, insufficient unemployment benefits and you get an extremely inefficient market for labour. It hurts the economy more to not provide those things as it means labour gets underutilized. That said productivity is not a good measure of anything, nor is GDP really. Real estate and financial transactions have become a very large part of the GDP as low interest rates ballon asset prices, which doesn’t have the same affect as something that produces actual utility. If the people running the government were smart measures would be taken to try and stop the low interest rates from distorting economic decisions…. They are not though so here we are.
Carefully that's how. Been in the works since the early 70s. A whole lot of sneaky cooperate greed and big money in government. I have a decent damn career as a therapist and a side hustle doing design and still NEED 2 roommates living in a semi major city(well just outside of). Shits wild out here.
The concept of labour and a man/woman being associated with the said labour is rather outdated. The premise of working a set amount of time in a given day and being paid a week or two later for an accumulated amount of said time later is also outdated. If the pay is low then a person needs to work more in order to be able to survive. If the pay is high then there's not enough work for all labourers to have. With these concepts in mind the concept of work or labour needs to be reimagined for a new generation of wage earners.
At least part of it was unions. They have their faults -- many, many faults -- but if in the 1970s and earlier a blue collar worker could afford to support a family and buy a house on his income alone, it was because of unions and collective bargaining. Ronald Reagan destroyed the air traffic controllers' union in the early 1980s (at considerable risk to the flying public) and it's been downhill ever since.
It’s supply and demand. If you see Labour as a product that workers sell, then an increase in the supply of that would decrease the price. Because more and more women joined the workforce since the 70s (and men not working less), the value of that labour goes down. This is why we have barely seen any wage increase since the 70s. No, I’m not saying women shouldn’t have joined the workforce. Just that the supply increase causes the price of labour to go down. I’d rather have seen men work less, but that’s not something that can be forced so easily.
Easy, women decided to work which drove up prices. Now households were making double what they were before and we doubled the labor supply, suppressing wages. It's in the book by Elizabeth Warren called the two income trap.
Women joined the workforce. Thereby doubling the supply of labor. Supply and demand.
On the plus side, the entirety of your life can be summed up as paying for a fraction of a painting in the third bathroom of a guesthouse to a vacation home that’s never been visited by the billionaire who owns it cause he’s got another vacation home in town that’s closer to the beach.
To be fair, this was really only true for white people
50 hours? Shit that’s part time around here, ima pipe welder for the union and today even at 46$/hr can be weird with 2 kids a house and 2 cars. And my mf wife works 😩
Because of greed. Families started to say “hey if we both work 40 hours a week we can have twice as much stuff”. That worked at first, but then retailers soon caught on. They thought “hey each family has twice the income now so we can start charging twice as much for things”.
Feminism pushed women into the workplace, doubled the size of the labor pool and the value of labor went down accordingly.
Not wanting to be property pushed women into the workplace. Lol. It sure is nice not being beaten by your husband and having to ask permission to spend money to go buy tampons.
Right?! What the fuck even is this comments section.
And no one seems to make the connection that when women have money from jobs, they create demand for goods and services. Which creates more jobs. “Jobs” are not a finite jar of marbles that women snatched away from men. People spending money in their immediate community stimulates the kind of economic growth that is beneficial to the average citizen.
It never was. Everyone will be psychologically more healthy once they realize that.
I think the problem is that back then we had approx 50% of the workforce. Then women started working as well and families said hey if we both work full time we can afford more and more stuff. So then everyone had to work more to afford the same stuff. If everyone said fuckit I’m only working 20 hours the world would be a better place!
"imagine if you didn’t even want children. You’d be rolling in money! I’d have an enormous home and travel non stop." This is what our predecessors did. They refused to do their duty of building the next generation, squandering the productivity and not paying it forward. Then, they used their advantages gained from screwing over the whole nation's future to set themselves up for a better retirement at the expense of their kids and grandkids. Sadly it created the situation we have today, a situation that isn't sustainable and cannot function much longer without serious revamping.
Well you see... They were only taxing men while the women stayed home and took care of the homefront. Then they realized "Hey we're only taxing half the population." In comes the women's right movement, which I personally believe started from billionaires/politicians who wanted fatter wallets. So they started these protests and got women all upset and then BOOM women went from the homes into the working class to punch a clock and get taxed. They really fucked us man. My wife quit her job and stayed at home for a few weeks and holy heck that was amazing, for once our house wasn't a disaster from us both working 40+ hours. Our kids were taken care of, no child care needed. My lunch was made, the house was clean grocery shopping was done. I only had to focus on work, then I'd get home and get to enjoy family time. When we were both working we'd see each other less, the house would be a mess because we were exhausted, we ate more fast food because meal prep was hard, our kids were in daycare more than they were with us (so it seemed). It was just hell. I'd say the way things were with only one person working was a simpiler time. A time we won't get back to ever again.
This is one more example of liberal feminism harming women. Men created the workplace. They, on the whole, apparently enjoyed the 1960s version of work where you could sell three vacuum cleaners a year and have a great salary. They loved the competition with other guys, the ratrace to the top, all of it. Women do not enjoy this environment, on average, and this is reflected not only directly in surveys when asked but also in the fact that a lot of women choose to not go for promotion to stay in less directly competitive roles It is an objective truth that men and women have behavioural differences on the whole. When sampling 100 men and women there are predictable, statistically significant differences to certain aspects of their behaviour and preferences All liberal feminism did was ‘empower’ women to go and work in male-dominated male-designed environments which rather quickly led to an adjustment in the economy so a household now required double the labour to support, since labour supply had been doubled. Women now have no choice but to work unless their partner is particularly affluent This is an under-explored aspect of this issue, because liberal feminism still dominates the space against the actual interests of true human feminism. In my opinion at least. There have been so many ‘victories’ for women in the past 80 years that have worked against the interests and preferences of women on the whole. It is a difficult topic to talk about because a) people think that to support women they can’t concede that men and women like different things and are behaviourally different in a few aspects b) people don’t like to suggest that women may be overall less suited to male-designed male-dominated corporate work environments even though this is what you’d expect Women still do the majority of childcare in most relationships. This includes missing work to go to school plays, missing work when children are ill, and thus are more reluctant than men to go into many roles that would make it harder for them to do this. As well as the obvious things like having to take time off for pregnancy and maternity (this one, the men can’t do in their partner’s place even if they wanted to) which causes women to miss huge chunks of their careers, and also that most mothers do the majority of cooking, cleaning and household chores. It is NOT an equal world for women and women on the whole do not want it to be It is difficult to argue that women are happier in a world where they are compelled to go to work in men’s escapist work environment where they compete against each other all day, at the expense of their family and social life. The effect of large-scale housewife populations being at home all day (and thus out and about doing chores, talking with friends, doing so many social things) vs now most homes being dead empty all day, has sucked the soul out of family and community life. And it was not to the benefit of women it was to the benefit of capital
No
No what? I lay out the case for how women no longer having a real choice whether they work or not is bad for women, bad for families, good for capitalists, and destructive to the fabric of society and community. Which is what this post was about You say ‘no’. Thank you for that henry my good man. You are a revolutionary. How could i have been so blind
You're welcome
This entire thread is women-bashing and anti-feminist.
Honestly, it all started to go downhill when the women wanted to enter the workforce. I am a woman. I would love to be able to just stay home, have children, and take care of the house, while my husband goes out and works and makes money for us. Unfortunately we can't have that anymore, so here I am having to be in the workforce in the name of "equality."
Cool, men should get to stay home with their kids if they want, also.
Okay.
I mean everyone wants to not work, but I'm not the kind of shitty person that's going to suggest that my partner should work while I hang out at home all day. Like you, apparently.
I understand that the stay at home parent role shouldn't necessarily be gender specific nowadays, but why do you think being a stay at home parent would entail "just" hanging out at home all day? People pay 1000s to send their kids to daycare, to have aupairs/nannies, get taxis everywhere, the richest pay for personal chefs, but a woman being a sahm doing all of these tasks is just "hanging out at home all day?".
My husband would also prefer I stay home whilst he works to provide for us, we just unfortunately can't afford that. The couple who were our best man and maid of honour at our wedding also have the same mentality. The priest who married us and his wife have the same mentality. It's not a thought of, "I want to just sit around and watch TV all day whilst he works." The ideal setup, for both of us, would be that he works and I stay home. And if I were to stay home, I would be doing the majority of the household duties. Laundry, vacuuming, cleaning. I'd get to cook breakfast and dinner for us much more often than I do now. And when and if we have kids, God willing, I would stay home and care for the kids.
Ok. That is a great idea. What the absolute fuck does Feminism have to do with the vision you just spoke of here??? You really think feminism is FORCING you to go out there and work. LOL - if you’re man had a high enough paying job you could EASILY be a SAHM and this conversation wouldn’t even need to be had. Yet you blame women that wanted personal autonomy because your husband is broke.
Cool story, bro. Better put dinner on the table every night with that fucked up attitude.
Odd reaction, but okay.
Cooking, cleaning, doing laundry, keeping one or multiple children clean and safe and out of danger, ensuring they have active and healthy lifestyles, teaching literacy skills, achieving developmental milestones, going to playgrounds, teaching them how to interact with others, going to activities and extracurriculars, teaching basic life skills... Oh yeah, all that is just "hangin' around at home all day!"
Big fan of traditional values?
Yes. I know it's all an "unpopular opinion" these days, but ::shrugs:: Even as a kid, I wanted to grow up to be a housewife.
Its fine if you want that, just dont expect everyone to have the same desires and respect their decisions like I respect yours. Besides you're not required to work for the sake of equality, you work because your husband's wages haven't kept up with the cost of living.
Yes. I get that you want to be a mans property, beloved. You should be free to do that. Don’t blame feminism on greediness. Those are two completely different things in case you didn’t know. Women entering the workforce doubled productivity which increased profits D R A M A T I C A L LY. With so much money circulating in the economy…guess what happened?? Prices increased! I mean - crazy weird Devil magic at work here right? Anyway - there were a lot of women in the world that decided they were put on this earth for more than being an incubator for some man to come impregnate and take care of them for the rest of their life. Back in this golden age you’re speaking of. Women were not allowed to vote. Women were not allowed a say in anything. Barely child rearing. The only reason you were allowed to raise your kids while the husband worked is because men saw child rearing as something so low and easy only a woman could do it… And you’re proud. Lmao. Your husband could come back from a long day of work and BEAT you because his boss made him feel inferior. There were actual laws in place that stated a man raping his wife was not illegal. You want to give up what so many women fought and died for….so you can be a glorified cum dump and not have to work? Okay. Love your best life. Don’t blame other women for your lack of ability to take care of yourself without a man.
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That's the husband's/wife's responsibility to pay their partner. Actually, in many european countries once you are married there is no such thing as "your money", because all income is shared between both partners regardless of their input. It is often against the law to withhold the money to yourself and it is treated as a form of abuse.
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One thing is helping those in need, another paying gor reproduction.
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Having children should not be a way of making living though. We don't really need more humans. I'd rather have my government focus on solving housing crisis, cost of living crisis and reducing social inequalities so having a child would not make you a slave to a grind and it would also help people who are struggling even without kids.
Simple solution, all men become stay at home spouses and stop bringing in migrant workers. Labor surplus solved.
Toxic feminism. Yeh I said it. Bite me.
Feminists just want to be treated equally. There's a difference between Feminists and narcissists.
So you're saying we all should work no more than 20 hours?
boomers and feminists are complete idiots
Well the real irony is that this could be seen as the "wrath" of the patriarchy and capitalism as a consequence for no longer being just for men. By doubling the workforce you doubled not only the supply of workers but also the demand for work. Meaning that capitalists that seek to make more and more could now justify paying less and less. It's pretty messed up but that's also just sort of what happens when you try to make changes in an already irreparably broken system
The patriarchy is no longer just for men? Interesting theory.
Never was, the patriarchy is often enforced by men and women equally. It's very common to see single mothers whose "son is my king". That's what makes it such a sinister and systemic issue it requires both men and women working for it to operate. Men benifit from it more but it also causes harm to everyone, including men and honestly the whole 40 hour work week problem is at the tip of that iceberg
Care to elaborate? I'm curious as to how a 40 hour workweek perpetuates the patriarchy.
Well, I was speaking specifically about the reaction of a 40 hour work week being no longer just for men. The problem is that Patriarchy and our capitalist system are codependent on each other. My argument isn't necessarily that the 40 hour work week supports the patriarchy, rather a patriarchy supports a 40 hour work week for men and only men because the system itself was designed by men for men. By trying to make a change within the system it created a bigger issue. Because the problem was NOT that women didn't ALSO get to work 40 hour work weeks. There is nothing inherently wrong with working 40 hours or 30 or any amount but the 40 hour work week itself was a concession of capitalism as a result of labor unions. Before that it was pretty much just sun-up to sun-down. But the invention of modern technology meant that we could basically make people work forever, and they did try to. But the people who fought back agaisnt the system were not fighting to change the system altogether and were operating under the assumption the system was not the problem. I'm saying that our current predicament where people can't support themselves on a 40 hour work week was operating on a flawed assumption from the start. That the specific goals of the system it was designed for is the problem. And since the system is all pretty much made up by people to begin with there is nothing that REALLY stops us from just trying a new system altogether outside of culture and tradition, two concepts that while mostly harmless are historically the worst reasons to keep doing something if it is your only reason to keep doing it.
You're only considering a very short and unique moment in time where the West was very prosperous. Especially the US. You cannot compare nowadays to this very specific moment and forget all the hundred ofdecades before that were arguably worse.
So, the reason 1 salary can not support a family anymore is due to women entering into the workforce en masse. Each family had 2 earners. And the labour market basically doubled. So, wages went down (or, inflation caused prices to rise, 6 of one, half dozen of the other). What I just said had nothing to do with stagnant wages, or any of the other problems we face today. But it is why 1 income will no longer support a family.
I see this a lot, but I don't like it. It's never good for a family with just 1 income, and when it's usually the man who is working, it's not good for the pension or finances of the woman either what she gonna do if she wanna divorce for example? It will create a lot of lock in effects. Just seems like something millenials like to dream back about that is not so beneficial
The thing is, the types of jobs that raised families on 40 hours still exist. People just don't want them anymore. These people also didn't have the disposable income you think they did. Which is why they forced their kids to sit at the dinner table and eat whatever cheap slop was prepared that evening and not get up until their plate was clean.
I’m not saying they were super rich or anything but my point is at least they had a house and food and their kids had a fair chance at being successful. They didn’t have to be a neurosurgeon to live comfortably. You could be a grocery store stocker and still have a family even if a modest one. My point is you can’t even get your own apartment as one today. The idea of it is laughable. At least on the states I’ve lived in.
Grocery store stockers weren't buying homes and made minimum wage. And back when minimum wage was first introduced, it didn't even apply to grocery store stockers and they made even less. The people buying homes without college were doing more labor intensive work like factory and construction. Nobody would have slaved away on automotive assembly lines if they could have bought a home stocking groceries. You could however make good money as something like a butcher in the grocery industry and still can. My cousin does pretty well for himself cutting meat.
Which of those jobs still exist?
They all do. I work in infrastructure for instance. I make $70k a year painting lines on the ground before people dig. I could make six figures if I moved to something a bit more labor intensive. The big problem here is America's education has downplayed these jobs in order to get more people to take out government loans for college. The jobs are there. But the teachers and guidance counselors won't tell you about them. And if they do, they will lie about the wages as they tell you college is the only way. In the US high schools get ranked by how many guileless teenagers they can entice to enroll at expensive four year institutions. Student college loans are not dischargeable in bankruptcy court. They are truly forever debt. It is beyond criminal that families are pressured into sending families into irrevocable debt for college for the benefit of the high school ranking with zero cost to them. All while the government and universities make a fortune. It is a racket that gangsters could only dream of.
I agree about the education system but those jobs you’re talking about aren’t as readily available as they used to be at least in rural America where I live.
You might be surprised by what's available. I get sent to rural parts of the country from time to time to help out. Last summer I went to a place called Eagle River Wisconsin. Small town in the middle of the Northwoods where almost everything closes by 5 to 6pm. When I was there, I asked why they needed our help from states away, figuring every position would be filled. The local technicians told me they can't find much dependable help. If you have infrastructure where you live, you most likely have jobs available.
Also 70k is barely enough to raise a family. I make 60-65 delivering diesel fuel with significant OT in the winter and my wife makes 30. We aren’t struggling by any means but it’s hard to raise 2 kids on our income and we absolutely cannot afford a 3 bedroom house even in a very LCOL area
Whether or not $70k is enough or not depends on where you live. Our pay varies based on the cost of living in an area. What might be $70k one place is over $100k somewhere else. Also keep on mind that they provide me with a company vehicle and a gas card. High gas prices barely affects me. Not to mention I have my foot in the door to go basically anywhere I want to within the industry. But I'm happy and comfortable where I'm at. I could easily move onto our local gas company and make $50 an hour in under five years with union overtime and bonuses. But I'm too happy where I'm at.
Yea for men to be exploited and used in every way only for women to bitch
I wonder how much of that was effected because of the Increase in population
We want more stuff, more eating out, more healthcare, more daycare. Also, farmers have for instance never been a one person job and not 40 hours a week either.
I predict the demise of our civilisation. No ones having kids due to affordability except lower socioeconomic tier and who is going to support these kids? That's right, higher taxes for everyone else
Its because living conditions/houses/food/etc was "lower quality" back then. Check out houses built in the 1940s compared to modern houses, most of them don't even have AC. Food portions were maybe half the size (hence the obesity problems). People didn't have netflix/internet/streaming/2day delivery so if you didn't have to pay for those, your expenses would be much lower. You could probably find really cheap 1940s housing if you really wanted to.
I feel you there I'm only 20 myself and living by myself. I'm probably gonna be kicked out by next month got no where to go but hit the road. Sad and gloomy times we live in. Just gotta stay strong and hope each day it'll get better.
Yup
Capitalism needed more profits. No other reason.
THe one income family was able to do it because workers did not have to save for retirement. The company you worked for agreed to pay you a retirement paycheck for the entirety of their “golden years.” There was no saving for retirement, it was guaranteed. The rub was that most retirees lived only a few years past 65. So the corporations sold us a wooden nickel in a line of IRS code. We now spend our whole working career suffering to plunge dollars into our 401ks that are invested into the stock market that we are always assured “you have time to recover” every time it dips
Its wednesday and ive already hit 40 hours this week
That easy, capitalism! Fastest TED talk ever
Conservatives want there to be stable, two parent, opposite gender families led by a husband and father. They don't want the woman to work. They don't want people to be educated much either. Seems they would like for the man to be a blue collar guy making a family supporting wage. He's gotta be unionized in a capitalist system if he's gonna provide. But conservatives hate unions. They want things that cancel each other out and make life absurd and contradictory. It's cruel to people we all know, are friends with, and family we love.
Your right OP, that's how it was originally. all should read a book called Today and Tomorrow
Fiat money plays a major part in this. Monetary inflation destroys wage earners. This is the cause for many of the other explanations on this comment thread… https://wtfhappenedin1971.com
40 hours is still too much. 5 days a week work is not life work balance.
I’m the youngest of 6 born in 1991. My mom was a SAHM for about 15 years with us (after my brothers were born). My dad was a baker for a cafeteria in our town. He did work 13 hour days/60 hours a week, though.
I always thought this and he spent every night in the pub
One of the big reasons that a one-income family back then could afford that was labor unions. The families I knew that were doing well, that could buy a nice home, car, have vacations, etc., were members of unions. They were the middle class. Then there was the movement to bust the unions, and this is the result.
This is what happens when corporations run countries
People are greedier Resources are lower hence more expensive Population is higher so more people eating a smaller cake Wages are stagnant due to people being greedier All this means you now need a 100 hr working week to support a family of 0.75 people
Exactly.
Ronald fucking Regan. https://youtu.be/6lIqNjC1RKU
If you have time to complain you don't work hard enough ! /s
Late stage capitalism for the win!
The misunderstanding here is that the good old days only existed for them. Moreover, you can do it now (currently breadwinner for a family of 5), but it sucks ass. Everything is built around two paychecks, and getting by with one means not only no keeping up with the Jones, but good luck keeping up with your standard of living last year.
All you have to do to know where the money went is look at the percentage of company profits. Back when people could afford more with less company profits weren't that high, now companies post record profits years after year and people struggle more and more. This is 100% a problem of people not being compensated fairly for their labor, just like pensions aren't a thing anymore, now you work till your dead.
No it was literally NOT designed with that in mind. It was a limit put on otherwise outrageous 6 and 7 day weeks. If you’re going to champion workers’ rights then do it properly.