Yay, class warfare, it's awesome. We've basically conquered scarcity, and yet, we still expect people to work 60-70 hours a week minimum wage jobs or starve to death.
this post was submitted on 22 Dec 2024
629 points (98.6% liked)
politics
19244 readers
1997 users here now
Welcome to the discussion of US Politics!
Rules:
- Post only links to articles, Title must fairly describe link contents. If your title differs from the site’s, it should only be to add context or be more descriptive. Do not post entire articles in the body or in the comments.
Links must be to the original source, not an aggregator like Google Amp, MSN, or Yahoo.
Example:
- Articles must be relevant to politics. Links must be to quality and original content. Articles should be worth reading. Clickbait, stub articles, and rehosted or stolen content are not allowed. Check your source for Reliability and Bias here.
- Be civil, No violations of TOS. It’s OK to say the subject of an article is behaving like a (pejorative, pejorative). It’s NOT OK to say another USER is (pejorative). Strong language is fine, just not directed at other members. Engage in good-faith and with respect! This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban.
- No memes, trolling, or low-effort comments. Reposts, misinformation, off-topic, trolling, or offensive. Similarly, if you see posts along these lines, do not engage. Report them, block them, and live a happier life than they do. We see too many slapfights that boil down to "Mom! He's bugging me!" and "I'm not touching you!" Going forward, slapfights will result in removed comments and temp bans to cool off.
- Vote based on comment quality, not agreement. This community aims to foster discussion; please reward people for putting effort into articulating their viewpoint, even if you disagree with it.
- No hate speech, slurs, celebrating death, advocating violence, or abusive language. This will result in a ban. Usernames containing racist, or inappropriate slurs will be banned without warning
We ask that the users report any comment or post that violate the rules, to use critical thinking when reading, posting or commenting. Users that post off-topic spam, advocate violence, have multiple comments or posts removed, weaponize reports or violate the code of conduct will be banned.
All posts and comments will be reviewed on a case-by-case basis. This means that some content that violates the rules may be allowed, while other content that does not violate the rules may be removed. The moderators retain the right to remove any content and ban users.
That's all the rules!
Civic Links
• Congressional Awards Program
• Library of Congress Legislative Resources
• U.S. House of Representatives
Partnered Communities:
• News
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
My workplace sometimes has a slow day and the bosses will give workers two options: Go home unpaid, or stay at work for your entire shift and get paid. If you stay, you don't have to do any work, since there is no work to be done. People mostly sit in the cafeteria on their phones for 8 hours.
I asked why we can't choose to go home and get paid and they said it's because then we'd be getting paid for nothing...but we're all sitting in the cafeteria on our phones. We're not working. We are literally being paid for nothing. Why can't we go home with pay? What's the difference?
The difference is that labourers must trade their time for pay. You are selling an hour of your time to the company. That hour doesn't need to be productive, but you can't use it freely. It's the company that makes money by selling a product or service, not its workers. A worker who produces $10,000 of product in an hour is paid for the hour, not for the product. The owner is paid for the product.
On-call pay needs to be more of a thing. At a certain point workers are selling their availability instead of their time and labor.
A worker who produces $10,000 of product in an hour is paid for the hour, not for the product. The owner is paid for the product.
I think that's a problem in itself.
Correct!
And some people's time is inherently more valuable than others - this makes sense in a deeply twisted way. A emergency brain surgeon for example, would be exceedingly difficult to find, and even more valuable to have, let alone utilize. I think a lot of us can agree that the surgeon being able to save a life in ways almost all of us cannot is valuable.
But some people's time isn't valuable at all. Any middleman - salesman of every type, healthcare insurance, stock brokers. They have been made artificially valuable because they are significantly better at producing income for the already wealthy.
No broker, salesman, or healthcare insurance provider (or hell manager even) is going to help 95% of the country make more money.
Now, if we got compensated based on the finished product we deliver - that would make the hardest workers a lot more fucking money. But corporate America would never allow that - the employee didn't purchase the parts before assembling it, or the ingredients, or the network infrastructure, etc.
The problem, at its core, is that it all ends up tying a price to a human life. Until we can separate cash value from life, we will be stuck with this system.
It's possible to do on a small scale, but inevitably it ends up recreating itself as the community doing it grows.
What about the accountant who keeps track of the finances and ensures compliance with the laws? He doesn't produce anything but still needs to be paid. There are a lot of jobs which are essential for the operation of a company, but aren't producing anything.
Being paid by the hour is fine. What's not fine is upper management and shareholders hoarding all the profits for themselves while the people below are struggling to pay their bills.
But if I give them some, I have less!
You dont want to have less. Then CEOs wouldn't be able to get a bigger boat.
Let's see if Americans will do something about it this time.
Narrator: they won't
I'll name two things Americans love more than big daddy warbux dick.
- punishing minorities
- shooting people
- Being illogical "CEOs are a minority!"
what percentage of the population is a CEO?
.12% from my terrible 30 second research and sloppy math. So like I said a minority.
Ahhh, I did not read your response like that.
I thought you were implying calling CEOs minorities was illogical.
makes sense with intent/context now.
Sorry my friend I'm real bad at engrish.
Some pf them are shot too
PSA: If you're hoping someone with real integrity and ethics is going to show up next round and push for real change -- that person is you.
Oh, police are too
Every gang protects its own.
Let's be straight. The civil court system was created to manage interactions between people. At the lowest level you had the town judge who referees disputes between people in the town. That expended to be things between towns, then states, then countries. Most interactions between people that need an official third party is commerce. Which means corporations these days as they are the majority of commerce.
And the reason for having someone referee disputes was because commerce was so important to the sucsess of any town, state, or country that without commerce everyone in that entity would suffer significantly and the entity would eventually cease to exist.
So that system isn't designed to be fair, or even look out for people. It is designed to protect commerce, and since corporations are the majority of that, they are what it protects.
The root of the problem is that commerce is so critical. That won't change for a long time. But people often wish it would.
Commerce is not what people are critical of. It's the fruits of commerce and how they are distributed. Those who have almost nothing to do with commerce reap all the rewards from it. It's those profit-takers who are protected by the courts. The business entity itself is just a convenient way for them to obfuscate the process. They're run by people who get better treatment because they have money and they only have money because for some reason we've collectively agreed that the people doing the actual work don't deserve the fruits of their labor.
Well, they would argue that they fronted the money and thus took all the risk. And maybe at one point that was actually true. But since the gov worked for them... over time it worked to reduce the risk. I agree the result is disliked, but I was talking about how it got to where it was, why it came into being, and that we shouldn't expect it to be anything but what it is. We just need a balancing force to counter it.
The US are an oligarchy after all.
🌎🧑🚀🔫🧑🚀
That's generally the function of any state. I mean, it might be written down as something else, but that's what all states become once they gain their monopoly on violence.
Should have gone proletariat dictatorship route
Duh? A corporation is purely a legal construct. We've had 150 years of expansion of their legal status and they run the country as a result. A corporation is essentially the functional unit of our society. Individuals really don't matter and have limited rights. If you don't have money, your rights, while still codified, cannot be substantiated in court and therefore effectively don't exist.
Corporate executives and politicians.