- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
Don’t worry because you are free to exploit people as well! Oh, you’re not exploiting, fucking over, and scamming literally every human being you meet? What’s wrong with you. Maybe you’re just not smart enough to screw people over. /$
Wow, that “/$” is art. Congratulations.
/Fully sincere.
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Our current population has emotional breakdowns when told they have to wear a mask to keep old people from dying. I am not at all confident that we will ever reach the same level of energy that led to organized, cohesive revolution and war unless some outside power starts taking away people’s internet and pizza rolls.
Not when more than a third are too apathetic and disengaged to care, and another third are beholden to the robber baron cause through blind consumption of propaganda disguised as ‘fair and balanced’ news.
In 1776 Americans went to war with England to preserve slavery in the colonies … fixed that for you.
To be fair, who the fuck goes up against the American army‽
Canada. There are other wars the U.S. has lost, but I don’t know how involved the U.S. Army was in them.
Two words:
Record Profits
Yeah baby!!
Line goes up, grandpa and kiddo can just go to the crappier nursing home and daycare and you can work a little harder can’t you!?
Now if you’ll excuse me, but I’ve got some senators dicks to suck
Now if you’ll excuse me, but I’ve got some senators dicks to suck
You got it backwards…
Line must go up.
One word: Unionize.
You have been permanently banned from c/Conservative.
LOL you totally had me with that message. Thanks for the laugh!
Don’t ask how I know what that message looks like! 😄
Username checks out
Can’t imagine how. LOL.
Can I pls?
Guillotine
The shareholders are the real victims here. Despite being willing to pay their new CEO more than their competitors, the rate at which the company’s profits are increasing is 0.8% less than their competitor’s! Their stock price just took a massive nose dive of $0.08 overnight! Better give the CEO a better incentive package. I’m sure he can replace our QA team with Elon’s new Optimus robots. That might increase our margins and keep us competitive!
Private equity, shareholders. No publicly traded business is in the business of providing service and goods of value.
I used to work as a building superintendent in a condo. I did the math and the corporation brought in around half a million a month in maintenance fees and the operating costs aren’t anywhere that high. I used to get paid minimum wage. I did the math on the amount of units in comparison to my paycheck. It was something like a dollar per unit was going towards my pay. So whenever anyone acted like I should bend over backwards for them, I remembered that their particular issues and complaints were only worth $1 to me
In the condo and building maintenance industry, the less you do the more you make, the super and cleaners do everything and get paid shit, the manager and offsite manager’s boss make a fortune
So whenever anyone acted like I should bend over backwards for them
In theory, there should have been a dozen of you with what they were paying. That’s something they failed to understand (or refused to understand) as tenants. It is - at some level - something they needed to be made more aware of.
Renters can and do unionize. And when both renters and apartment workers realize they share economic interests, they can exert a ton of leverage over a building that has effectively been abandoned by its official title holder.
the super and cleaners do everything and get paid shit, the manager and offsite manager’s boss make a fortune
It’s all a pyramid scheme.
It’s beyond immoral that anyone could be employed to provide labor to an apartment complex without being paid enough to live in one of the very units they maintain. Having maintenance live on-site is a win/win for the maintenance person and for the tenants. But it would result in ever so slightly less wealth being stolen by the owners, so it’s not allowed.
This is generating the typical anti-capitalist hate, but we should also consider that this is also a reflection on the kinds of unpaid work that women have been doing for generations. The problem isn’t necessarily profits or middle-men, it’s just that some things are always going to be expensive if people are actually paid for the work they do.
Take daycare. In the US the government says that one adult should care for no more than 3 infants, no more than 4 toddlers and no more than 7 preschoolers.
Take someone working at the US poverty line at about $15,000 per year. That’s $1250 per month. For 3 infants that’s $415 per month each, for 4 toddlers that’s $312 each, for 7 preschoolers that’s $180 each. That’s the absolute cheapest you could possibly go, where a worker is at the poverty line, and there are no costs for rent, supplies, and also zero profit.
But, as a parent, you probably don’t want the absolute lowest “bidder” to take care of your kids. You probably want someone who’s good with kids, kind, gentle, patient, etc. So, let’s not even go all the way up to the lowest possible teacher’s salary of $34,041 in Montana. Let’s say the daycare worker is great with kids, but doesn’t have the teaching background to get even the least well paying teaching job available in the country. Let’s say you’d be willing to have someone who makes $24,000 per year for easy math. That’s a wage where the caregiver is going to struggle to make ends meet in most of the country, but maybe it’s worth it for them because they like working with kids. That’s $2000 per month. For infants it’s $667 per month each or $8000 per year, toddlers it’s $500 per month each or $6000 per year. preschoolers it’s $285 per month each or about $3500 per year.
Again, this is before you consider any profits. That’s money straight from the parents to the caregiver’s salary. That’s before you consider rent, before supplies, before snacks, etc. That’s no reading nook, no library, no arts and crafts, that’s presumably just using someone’s living room.
Now, if the daycare worker is going to be able to take sick days or vacations, you’ll need to pay part of another person’s salary who will cover. So instead of 1 person watching 7 preschoolers, you have 10 people watching 70 preschoolers plus 1 who rotates in to cover when the main workers are unavailable, so make that another 10%. We’re up to almost $9k per year for an infant, and we still don’t have cribs, baby food or a cent in profit, and we have a worker who is barely scraping by.
The point is, any job that involves a lot of human supervision is going to be very expensive. Caring for babies and old or sick people involves a lot of human supervision. Much of this work used to be done by women who didn’t work outside the home. Now that women are working outside the home, even when they have young children, we’re realizing how expensive it is. None of what I’ve talked about involves capitalism or profits, it’s just purely paying someone to do child-care work while the woman does other work.
But, this is where the capitalism / socialism aspect comes in. If we want women to be able to work outside the home, and we also want kids to be something that isn’t financially ruinous, society needs to help pay for those things. In a purely capitalist, no socialism, winner-take-all world, having kids is a major liability. Having an option to not have kids is great, but in the long term society is doomed if nobody is willing to have kids anymore.
This is a very interesting thing to point out, but I believe you are not realising how intrinsically tied the generations of women unpaid work is to the economic system.
“mainstream economic theory is obsessed with the productivity of waged labour while skipping right over the unpaid work that makes it all possible, as feminist economists have made clear for decades. That work is known by many names: unpaid caring work, the reproductive economy, the love economy, the second economy.”
“the household provision of care is essential for human well-being, and productivity in the paid economy depends directly upon [the core economy]. It matters because when – in the name of austerity and public-sector savings – governments cut budgets for children’s daycare centres, community services, parental leave and youth clubs, the need for care-giving doesn’t disappear: it just gets pushed back into the home. The pressure, particularly on women’s time, can force them out of work and increase social stress and vulnerability. That undermines both well-being and women’s empowerment, with multiple knock-on effects for society and the economy alike.”
Doughnut economics - Kate Raworth
Capitalism thrived and keeps thriving in concentrating capital because it is able to get away with not accounting for the value it extracts. This is true for this example of unpaid labour as well as for natural resources extraction, ecosystem damage etc(we are beginning to realize this with carbon tax). That’s the cornerstone of the system function, not just a side effect. The unpaid labour may be starting to be dealt with in the West, but this just means it is aggressively outsourced in third world countries. Without these so-called economic externalities there is no profit (or extremely little of it).
Do I detect a little Barbara Laslett and Johanna Brenner in there? Love the post, chef’s kiss!
This is a really good point. Historically communities have always relied on unpaid/underpaid labor in some capacity. Even mowing your neighbors lawn once in a while could be considered a value of a few hundred dollars (fuck lawns btw) - there has always been this invisible layer of communal support that is now becoming commodified.
Marginalized groups being fairly compensated is an objectively good thing, but the financial stress is real. As society continues to grow even more individualistic, we will probably see additional pressures mount until another fundamental shift happens. I have no idea what that will look like, but it is interesting to think about.
The only way it will work is taxes. There’s an irreconcilable gap between what people can afford and what is a fair wage for proper supervision.
A very interesting and well-written post.
It’s almost like there’s greedy fatcats in every industry stuffing all of the profits down their fat gullets while everyone else barely holds off starvation.
Capitalism combined with markets with inelastic demand is a lot of fun. But communism bad because tankies or whatever.
Unchecked greed is bad for society, capitalist or communist.
People are the problem. If we could only get rid of the people. /sarcasm
I’m surprised to see such a well rounded, logical view here. Kinda feels rare on this platform these days.
Hey, hey, we’re working on getting rid of the people. Just give environmental destruction a chance to do its thing.
Worker and Consumer Cooperatives should be the only way to form a business. Fuck external and unequal capital ownership by shareholders.
Germany has the right idea with their co-determination laws
What are they?
There is an entire wiki page about it if you literally just copy and paste my comment into Google, goddamn
If you went 100 years back in time and told people that school teachers would be dead broke despite making the best financial decisions possible and be nearly homeless despite working long hours they would be fucking shocked.
Being a school teacher, even one for elementary school kids, in the late 19th century was not only a respectable profession, but also decently paid. I think Horrible Histories said that the average school teacher in the 1880s and 1890s in the UK made around 60 pounds sterling a year, which was a fairly decent wage at the time.
Holy moly! According to this website that’s over £9000 today! And teachers are risking their physical, mental health and lives, today.
Wait, why are you impressed by £9k per year? That is below minimum range in all western society.
Oops, my brain must have autoconverted “year” to month. That’s… Not good.
At that time it was considered better, and they sure as hell wouldn’t be homeless.
The problem is there’s not a good historical context for the high cost of daycare and nursing homes. Just 60 years ago it was considered normal and good parenting for kids to be left unattended for most of the time. We’re taking 3 year olds wandering around town unattended. This is where some of the outdated expectations of children come from is teaching kids to survive in a world where they’re expected to be on their own for such a huge amount of their childhood
And on the flip side of the spectrum people are living far longer than they ever have so end of life care has become a decades long investment. Social security was first implemented because people who didn’t expect to live long enough to need to think about retirement suddenly found themselves too old to work but needing to make ends meet
The only window of historic context we have for the sheer cost of daycare and nursing care would be from about 1970 and later, since that would be after civil rights protections had been passed (meaning you couldn’t just pay a minority person a pittance to do the work) at a time when women really started entering the workforce in earnest, and expectations had largely become that children were not left unmonitored
Like someone else said, £60 in today’s money is £9k. Per year. What am I missing because that does not sound like a decent wage.
At that time it was.
Hospitals will ruin your life but most of the staff lives paycheck to paycheck.
Not just the staff either, providers are making significantly less every year.
I work in orthopedics and rehabilitation, and even though the cost of school, licensing, and insurance has skyrocketed. My field is basically being paid the same amount they were 30 years ago, and that’s not even accounting for inflation.
In some ways it’s nice, as medicine doesn’t attract people who are just in it for the money any longer. But, hospital organizations now know that providers are basically locked in a sunk cost fallacy to pay back their loans, and on top of that they have a calling for it.
That is the main reason my wife and I are moving to a different state. As a nurse, she has seen her income decrease with her 1.5% raise with inflation going up 3-5% year over year.
Hope she cashed in during COVID. Our hospital administration was trying to get everyone to turn on all the nurses making bank during lock down, but pretty much every provider I know was just happy there were people hitting the administration where it hurts.
But, hospital organizations now know that providers are basically locked in a sunk cost fallacy to pay back their loans, and on top of that they have a calling for it.
Sounds like slavery with extra steps.
Sounds like slavery with extra steps.
Aka a residency
Closer to indentured servitude but yeah
Fewer steps actually, as the slaves aren’t being provided with housing and food.
Admin and c-suite taking huge salaries and sucking companies, schools and agencies dry.
Oh my, reminds me of a saying we used to have back under soviet occupation. Translated it would be “If you aren’t stealing, you’re stealing from your family.”. Americans are at the point where that’s the world they live in, but they haven’t yet developed the depressing worldview of the average soviet citizen. Oof…
Stock Markets getting those record highs tho. If only people could get paid in shares of the companies that own their labor, but if that happened they’d actually have to answer to the workers and we simply can’t have that in muh free markets
Honestly, i don’t want to get paid in share of the company, i’d prefer cash directly bank into my account so it’s available immediately for me to use on the needs and wants. With share, i need to liquidate it, that took time in negotiation. And if no one want to buy it in a bad year, i’m stuck with shrinking money that i can’t use.
Different story if you work in those big tech of course.
Right because if that happened investors would dump their shares and invest in companies that use slave labor.
We need to rethink economy