Of course, the cost of replacing you is factored into what the company considers your worth. Especially at large companies, much of your job is simply knowing how to get shit done at that company. A friend of mine who worked as an engineer for a large electronics company in Silicon Valley once summed it up very nicely when he said: I don’t really know that much about how to make these products anymore, but I know how to get things done around here, and that’s what makes me valuable.
Yep, that is still looking out for number one… You.
Plenty. Look at charts like this. Get skills that position you for one of these jobs. Profit. Its like the South Park thing with step 2 filled in.
When I was in college I was a writing major briefly. My dad kept showing me similar charts. I eventually switched to computer science because I wanted a job that paid money. It worked.
Yes, I know what “living wage” means. What I don’t know is why you think everyone should get one.
Where did I say we have to deny it to “most” people? And where did I say it was a-ok? It’s a fact of life that if we sit around doing nothing, we’ll starve or freeze. We have to eat. In order to do that, we have to make food. If we don’t make food, we have to trade for it. And making food or tradeable goods is hard.
It unfortunately takes effort to stay alive. I could go on wailing about the unfairness of it all, but noting how solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short life is is just so…1651.
Wow. People are dying out there. They’re dropping dead on the production floors left and right. Starving to death, too. Slaves, I tell ya.
Yes, it’s possible. It’s called “an employee’s market”, and in such conditions, we don’t have people like our OP goon bitching about not being able to quit.
But we all work for an agreed wage because we’d starve otherwise. All animals everywhere do so, in one form or another. Unless you’re going to modify our genes to manufacture food from sunlight, everyone has to work to avoid starvation. So are none of us free? Is this news to anyone?
The minimum wage is not indexed. Every year it doesn’t go up, it effectively goes down. The value of the minimum wage peaked in the late 1960s. I wasn’t around back then, so someone can correct me if I’m wrong, but I’m under the impression that the economy wasn’t tanking back then.
No, that is not me taking responsibility for what others find desirable, that’s me reacting to what others find desirable.
My point is that you seem to think that everyone can be skilled at work others find desirable. But the market won’t bear that. If everyone had those skills, a large proportion of them would still be garbage collectors, despite their skills–because that is what the market will bear.
“Just get desirable skills, and if you don’t, you’re not being responsible” is a terribly short-sighted thing to say.
It works for now.
So why not automate away all ‘unskilled’ work? And then everyone can upskill and we can all be white-collar executives earning great money. Everyone wins. :rolleyes:
There will always be work that is regarded as ‘unskilled’ (or just a less desireable occupation for anyone who has a choice) just as there will always be people on the bottom rung of society with little opportunity to rise, maybe due to lack of ability. But they’re still human beings. And if the people in more powerful positions treat them with contempt and make their lives unbearable they will eventually fight back with whatever means they have available. You’re living in a dream world if you think the poor can be just swept under the carpet or will just go away. It’s called damage limitation. Remember how revolutions start. Remember Karl Marx’s call ‘Workers of the world unite. You have nothing to lose but your chains’. Does that type of scenario strike fear into your heart? Because if it does, and you have the means to prevent it through giving them something more to lose than ‘chains’ then the prudent, pragmatic, sensible and ironically self-serving thing to do is to make sure your society doesn’t become that unequal.
If what you said were true, this wouldn’t prove anything–my reply would simply be “then none of us have liberty.”
But what you’re saying isn’t true. I could be working at a much worse job. I work where I do not because my family would starve otherwise, but because this is the kind of work I enjoy.
I’m privileged. I have liberty.
Most people aren’t (and I could well stop being privileged in that sense one day), and most people don’t.
The relevance of this is completely unclear.
Yes, the inflation adjusted MW was about $10/hour in the mid 60s. Very briefly.
But how many low wage factories were there in China in the 1960s? Do you want to drive more jobs there? Or is it that you prefer putting people out of work with automation.
When you drive up the cost of labor, you make it more desirable to either have that job done somewhere else, or have a machine do it. Hey, I’m all for self-checkout at the stores myself!
Yes, if everyone went out and became a doctor, the pay for doctors would go down. Fortunately, not everyone is doing that. There are more than enough people who don’t bother getting useful skills and just decide to complain about the system. If you aren’t one of those people, you will do fine. I feel very confident about my long-term prospects.
You’re talking about how to take advantage of the system as it is.
The thread, however, is about how to make the system a better one than it is.
As I said upthread, why not take care of those people as a society, instead of making their employers do it. We’re not talking about a large percentage of the workforce here.
I’d say it’s a very long-sighted thing to say. It’s short-sighted to think that you’re going to get ahead by doing nothing.
There are 300 jobs on that list. And many of them are fields of study where you develop transferable skills. No skill set is going to guarantee you a job for life, but continuing to invest in yourself over the course of your life gives you a better chance than working in a retailers distribution warehouse and complaining that you don’t make much more than minimum wage.
I was a Netware engineer. Had a stayed a Netware engineer I’d current be getting paid nothing. Although in 1988 it was one hell of a skill to have.
I don’t care who hates it. It’s still the most efficient way of allocating wages to people.
And I agree: an employer that signs a union contract should suck it up… until the time comes to renegotiate that contract.
I absolutely respect the right of people to band together and bargain collectively. My biggest gripe with unions is when their methods of persuasion go beyond simply saying, “If you don’t agree, we all walk away.”
Unions use two types of methods to encourage compliance with their demands that I don’t like: one’s legal and one isn’t.
When replacement workers are assaulted, have their tires slashed, have eggs thrown on their cars by striking workers, the union has left the realm of sweet reason and I can’t support their tactics.
The second area is protected under law and is thus legal, but I think the law is unwise: when an employer cannot fire striking workers even though they fail to report for duty and perform their jobs, the law has unfairly tied the hands of the employer. Note that when the employer is forbidden from firing striking workers because of a clause in the extant union contract, I have no problem with that.
I have to admit that I’m not certain of your personal opinion of welfare/food stamps/medicaid, despite your generally right-wing/moderate political views, but as a poster arguing from the right-wing, market-based side here, this is a little disingenuous. The party that most represents your political beliefs is adamantly opposed to any possible expansion of the social safety net, and actually advocates for the contraction of same. It’s also adamantly opposed to the taxes that would fund that expanded safety net. You don’t have a lot of room to maneuver in that particular political space.
For the record, I tend to vote more D than R these days. But that’s not really the point.
The point is that all wage supports (minimum or living wages or whatever you want to call them) are a just a thinly disguised tax/welfare plan. The one advantage they have is virtually no overhead cost, but the big disadvantage they have is distorting the market and hiding the true cost of the program.
My preference would be to leave the market alone to do what it does best, and use the general fund to supply a safety net. I don’t see any reason that, given a sufficiently robust safety net, that Democrats or even Progressives couldn’t buy into that. Unless there is a hidden desire to punish evil employers by making them pay more than they want to.
Sure, I’m okay with that. Making employers do it may be the most efficient method, though, for all I know.
This comment addresses what an individual should do given the current system. However the thread is about what the system should do to improve itself.
Bricker, can you email a mod to have your name changed to Bricker (and Chessic Sense)? It’d save me a bunch of time.
I agree that as the system is (and almost any concievable system could be) designed, people with more difficult skills will tend to have better jobs.
I do not understand the relevance of the comment, however. It seems to be addressing the question what an individual should do given the current system. I believe the thread is instead about what the system itself should look like.
I commend your father for working hard. It doesn’t mean he made money for the company he worked for. It would be nice if the mere act of hard work generated profit but that is not the case.
If the company isn’t making a huge profit then organizing a union probably isn’t the best solution at this point. The unemployment rate is high and states are bidding against each other to attract new businesses.