Why would anyone start a new business if they are required to employ 10 times more people than they need in order to start and run the business? If I intend to start my own taco truck under today’s labor paradigm, it would probably be me and an assistant to get the business started. Uh, oh! If my assistant works more than 4 hours a week, I’m a top 1% fascist! Ok, so I need to hire ten assistants and pay them all living wages.
Well, screw that.
People need to get their head out of the clouds sometimes.
If you run this to its logical conclusion you end up with wage slavery.
With no checks the pressure is on ever lowering wages. There is always someone out there without a job who wants to eat who will agree to do job-X for a bit less than the person who currently has the job. So the business owner hires the less expensive worker. Now the first worker is out a job and does the same thing.
Wages spiral ever lower.
We saw this happen in the early 20th century. If workers complained about conditions or pay they were summarily fired and new workers brought in (sometimes [all too often actually] they were shot…literally).
In 1950 the average household income was 20K per year. Now it is over 52K per year. This understates the growth in income since households are smaller. In 1950 people lived in smaller houses, drove one very unreliable car, they ate out infrequently, had a small black and white tv, had one phone making only local calls, and if they got sick had very poor health care.
If you would like to live the life of a 1950s person it is very possible with a part time job. Most of us would call that lifestyle grinding poverty, but if you would like to live like that go ahead.
Five seconds of thought should be enough to see through this. There are literally millions of people who want to play in the NBA. If one basketball players asks for more money just replace him with one who will work for less. Repeat this until all players in the NBA are playing for meal money. Yet the average salary in the NBA is 5.15 million. The owners of the NBA franchises must be some of the most generous people alive. They are literally giving away over 60 million dollars a year to their workers.
That’s not a cite, but there are plenty of employers today who provide sports facilities, pensions, day care, and all kinds of other services for employees. Ever been to High Tech company in Silicon Valley? If not, you should visit sometime.
First of all, “wage slavery” is an oxymoron. Secondly, why don’t we have that now, since I’m just describing the system that’s been in place for hundreds of years?
There has been some payoff from increased productivity; we can see that in developed world longevity, in retiring 20 years shorter than life expectancy, in time spent in education, working conditions, pensions, healthcare, etc.
You’d kind of hope for that given that great development of the 20th century, universal suffrage.
I read an article which states that it takes $30 and 17 hours for the labor to build an iPhone. Call it $2 an hour. Let’s say Americans would do the job for $10 an hour. That adds $120 to the cost of an iPhone. Given that most people purchase them as a discounted package with a cell phone plan for $200-300, adding $120 in labor is a pretty steep increase in price.
Now, I’m aghast at the stories of how the Chinese workers at Foxconn are treated, but the idea that the same type of consumer stuff (iPhones, tvs, DVD players, etc) could be made in the US for a few more bucks would require US workers to be treated even more like Chinese workers… or the cost of the items would have to go up significantly. Which outcome do you prefer?
I don’t accept your premise, but just for the sake of argument, let’s say it’s true. Are you saying that people currently spend less money because they don’t have the free time to spend more? Really? They’re just too exhausted on the weekends to go out and blow more cash on stuff? You should publish that, because you’ve developed a whole new economic theory that will revolutionize the world. You could be the next Karl Marx!!
I think he’s saying that Apple should suck it up and earn leas profit. Or that Americans should be forced to pay higher prices. After all, if they had more leisure time, they would spend more money on stuff. Win-win!
An NBA player has a unique skill that very few are capable of matching. Sure, anyone can throw a ball at a basket but few are good enough to get it in with regularity.
This is in no way equivalent with the vast majority of jobs which many can do.
Not to mention the NBA players are unionized. Within my lifetime there was a time when professional athletes earned very little money (IIRC there was an HBO special some years ago tracking the history of the NFL and some players from the 50’s mentioned they painted houses during the week to make ends meet).
So, if the owners had their way and were not forced to pay the salaries they do now history suggests they wouldn’t.
But you said there was always someone out there willing to do the job for less. Are you now backing away from that statement? Or, are you ready to acknowledge that the world is more complex than that, and it takes more than “willingness” to be able to do a job?
Why is it an oxymoron? Even slaves were fed and housed and clothed which could be deemed a form of wage. Of course they were totally beholden to their owners for that meager existence and exploited as a result. Semantics aside it is a term that is in use and has meaning even if you do not like the word combination.
And we do not have that system now because we have put protections in place to stop it. We used to have it. Just look at the history of labor in the US. Look at the history of child labor. Look at company towns and companies that paid in scrip. Workers rarely managed to not be in debt to the company. They were not “owned” as a slave is but were effectively bound in servitude to the company.
No, of COURSE there are people out there willing to be in the NBA for less.
Thing is an NBA player, at that level, is an exceptionally skilled job which very, very few are able to achieve.
There are about 350-450 players in the whole NBA. Most of those are not superstars of which there are only a handful. This out of a workforce in the US of roughly 150 million people.
Add to that players are unionized in the NBA (they have a minimum wage) and the average career length in the NBA of 4.7 years.
Hardly a good stand-in as an economic model of labor.
When someone proclaims lower prices as the only factor they are ignoring a host of other costs we as a society or we as humans need to be ok with.
You may pay little for a pair of Nike shoes but are you ok with that if you know children are being exploited to make them in sweatshops?
It cannot (or at least should not) all be one way or another. Of course companies need to turn a profit but doing so should not be at any expense whatsoever to workers.
We have seen what labor relations look like when workers have no protection in the US in the early 1900s. We still see it in other countries even today. No need to speculate.
Does anyone here wish a return to 1910 labor practices?
At various time throughout history. In the past “company towns” were fairly common (eg. Homestead, Pennsylvania). You also had people like Henry Ford who deliberately paid more than his competitors for a variety of reasons. Now, most of those things happened as a result of enlightened self interest. Ford paid more in order to reduce turnover, and extra control over his employees. Some company towns were run poorly, and fairly paternalistic. That said, I am struck by some of the things Ford said. Some may have just been empty rhetoric, but I can’t imagine most modern CEOs saying:
[QUOTE=Henry Ford]
"The country is ready for the five day week. It is bound to come through all industry. In adopting it ourselves, we are putting it into effect in about fifty industries, for we are coal miners, iron miners, lumbermen, and so on. The short week is bound to come, because without it the country will not be able to absorb its production and stay prosperous.
[/QUOTE]
[QUOTE=Henry Ford]
"The harder we crowd business for time, the more efficient it becomes. The more well-paid leisure workmen get, the greater become their wants. These wants soon become needs. Well-managed business pays high wages and sells at low prices. Its workmen have the leisure to enjoy life and the wherewithal with which to finance that enjoyment.
[/QUOTE]
[QUOTE=Henry Ford]
"It is not easy so to look at leisure, for age-old custom viewed leisure as ‘lost time’ -time taken out of production. It was a suspension of the proper business of the world. The thought about leisure usually went no further than that here were hard-driven working people who should have a little surcease from their labors. The motive was purely humane. There was nothing practical about it. The leisure was a loss – which a good employer might take from his profits.
[/QUOTE]
[QUOTE=Henry Ford]
“We are now working out the wage schedules,” answered Mr. Ford. " We have stopped thinking in terms of a minimum wage. That belongs to yesterday, before we quite knew what paying high wages meant. Now so few people get the minimum wage that we do not bother about it at all. We try to pay a man what he is worth and we are not inclined to keep a man who is not worth more than the minimum wage.
[/QUOTE]
Now, clearly Ford was just as interested in profit as the modern CEO in many respects. What I think has changed is the he could afford to take the long view which requires viewing employees as more than means of production, and that he truly embraced competition.
If you let me get close enough, I can throw the ball in the basket and practically never miss. It is really not that difficult if you practice.
The average NBA salary in the year the NBA was about 4,500 dollars which was about double the average for the nation. The league had no union in its first seven years.
The average baseball player averaged a little over 13,000 dollars a year in 1950, four years before the player’s union was founded. This was six times the average income.
Professional athletes have always made good money, even before unionization.
The reason for this is the same reason all workers make over a subsistence wage. Competition keeps wages high. If an owner of a business or sports team stops paying good salaries their workers will leave and do something else. If a business’s workers leave and quality suffers, then customers will leave. If customer’s leave a business will go broke.