Nonsense. Just because the rest of the industrialized world can do it doesn’t mean the US can. America is exceptional. 
Are there no prisons?
And the union work houses, are they still in operation? From what you said at first I was afraid that something had happened to stop them in their useful course.
Got bad news for you Dallas Jones. Something happened to stop the union workhouses. It’s unclear exactly what that was (probably a number of factors were involved).
Yes, I recognized the Dickens/Scrooge reference.
Shit, I thought it was Pete Seegar. Where’s Marley, be the go-to on this…
Damn… I can’t tell if that summarization of the previous episode is literal or exaggerated. Says a lot, doesn’t it?
But the problem is that, due to amazing advances in technology, fewer and fewer jobs are actually important. Production is up, up, up! As time goes by, larger and larger percentages of the population move into “non-important” employment. It is society’s duty to ensure that as we need fewer and fewer people to run essential and vital services, those people who are modernized out of that important work are still able to live happy, secure, healthy, and relatively comfortable lives.
If we fail at that, we end up with an ever-growing population of poor and angry, and an ever-shrinking population of elites. Viva la revolution!
Yes. To America, and the way America operates, yes. To Rwanda, Nepal, or Afghanistan, probably not.
It was even a big time buzz phrase not too long ago: service economy.
How soon (some of) us forget.
If you think “service” is not so important in a “service economy”, you’ve got a fundamental irrationality that no amount of electric shocks is going to cure.
My thoughts are this;
The Randian/Darwinian Right has long proclaimed that workers need to keep up their skills and make themselves worthy of being paid well, or suffer the logical consequences of their failure to compete in the modern world.
In response, I am holding them responsible for the same with their Businesses. Every time new regulations are discussed, the minimum wage is increased, new laws are passed, we are treated to a conga line of businessmen screaming about how this will completely destroy the economy and put them out of business.
BULLSHIT.
All of these things, minimum wage, regulations, safety, PPACA, etcetera affect all businesses in any given field equally. It’s a level playing field. Burger King is under the same rules as McDonalds as is Subway. Likewise, as long as there is a demand for a given service, there will be businesses who can make money providing that service. If one particular business cannot compete, then it is a result of incompetence. If they fail, since there remains an ongoing need for those services, someone else more competent will fill their place.
Well, fair is fair : the competition issue is not domestic, else it would indeed be a wash. The argument is “if you force minimum wage/regulations/safety/health care/yadda/yadda upon us, we can’t compete with Euro/Russian/Chinese corporations providing the same service”.
It’s still a gigantic pile of horseshit of course, since European companies unilaterally face higher minimum wages, regulations, taxes etc… than US-based ones yet somehow still manage to make a few billions of pure profit here and there. It all adds up to real money, eventually.
In the case of Walmart, Subway, etc, that line is total horseshit, since “China” isn’t going to suddenly march millions of it’s citizens in and set up stores and restaurants which are somehow totally immune to American laws.
If you make labor more expensive, businesses are going to look for ways to reduce the amount of labor needed. That’s not evil, it’s just common sense. Whether that means reducing hours, raising prices or introducing more automation, it’s likely that something is going to happen. Expecting businesses to just absorb the added cost is naive at best.
As for fast food joints, ultimately they are competing with you cooking your own food in your own kitchen, or making your own sandwich to take to work.
Excuse, but aren’t they “going to look for ways to reduce the amount of labor needed” anyway?
Except the cost of labor is often much smaller than is usually portrayed.
At my last job there were six drivers, each going out with $10-15,000 worth of product(daily). Even a raise of two dollars an hour would mean an increase in labor cost of only 96 dollars per day.
Not in the case of healthcare specifically, no.
But if you think about it from a CEO point of view, if local profits decrease ever so marginally for Wal-Mart (located and operated in the US) while those of Leader Price (located and operating in Europe) stay the same, then you get fucked, right ?
I mean, if you can’t show up at the shared Ibiza golf junket in a bigger, more gold plated Maserati, what’s even the fucking point ?
Reducing the individual hours of a worker is not really reducing the overall hours needed by that business. It merely means that they need more workers (with attendant overhead) to cover the same amount of work. A restaurant may try to reduce the number of waiters or cooks it has on-hand in order to reduce overhead, but it does so at the risk of affecting it’s service levels, and ultimately, the amount of business it does, as customer satisfaction closely follows revenue. Similarly, as Walmart is finding out, not having enough staff on hand is severely impacting their ability to do business and it’s customer experience.
So essentially, reducing the hours available to any given employee in a service environment really only means one of two things: 1> They need more employees to cover the gap, or 2> Their service levels suffer. It’s really poor management.
Of course. But the more the cost of labor rises, the more opportunities there are to reduce it since automation is the main tool for doing so, and it often comes with some hefty up-front costs. And I don’t think we’ve even seen the beginning of what smart phone apps are going to do that that calculus. It’s pretty easy to have a smart kiosk text you: Would you like fries with that?
Perhaps. And if it is, then those companies will go out of business, and others, with better management, will take their place. Creative destruction. It’s the American way.
Unless they get bailed out. Or subsidies.
I won’t eat there. I don’t patronize companies that pull this stuff, if I can help it. If more people did the same, maybe they would get the message.