Should people be forced to work by the government?

Great Debates
41

Nobody in the history of humanity achieved their dreams by working some shit job they didn’t want but were simply made desperate enough to take. Frankly, the idea that he’s pushing people off of unemployment for their own benefit is even more ridiculous than the prospect of busing tables at a diner providing me with financial independence.

It’s not for the worker’s benefit, it’s (to be maximally charitable) for the benefit of society as a whole, but we all know what R’s think about being encouraged to do something unpleasant that helps society. R’s are usually for using the rules as-is to benefit yourself, pay the least taxes, earn the most profits, whatever. No shock that the moment their supporters are on the losing side of that grift, R’s are suddenly all for (someone else) pitching in to help.

42

“In our culture,” there are so many different people who are employed in so many different ways, under so many different conditions, by so many different people and organizations, that I don’t think that statement is meaningful.

43

And there vast, vast majority of them are exploited, IMO.

44

Why? Or, I guess, what does ‘exploited’ mean to you, exactly? If you are saying the vast majority of people ‘in our culture’, presumably you are moving this even beyond just the US, so I’m curious as to what exploited means to you and how you think the ‘vast, vast majority’ are exploited.

45

CEO pay is what, 351x more than the average worker?

The vast majority of our laws favor the employer over the worker.

The government agencies tasked with making sure workers are safe is underfunded and relevant rules and laws go un-policed.

Labor laws are weakened constantly.

Employees are much, much more disadvantaged than employers and employers go to a lot of effort to not just keep it that way, but to get things more under their control.

And while you can make the argument that employees go to a lot of effort to get things more under their control, it would be difficult to make the argument that they have same success rate and thus the same economic and/or political power as employers.

If you’d like to try and make the case that our culture is not stacked in favor of the employer, I’d read what you wrote.

46

I can see a program where if you run out of unemployment, the State will continue your benefits contingent upon you picking up trash, cleaning graffiti, etc for say a reasonable 24 hours a week. Leaving you time to job search and interview.

A job training program could be substituted.

47

Let’s be clear: Government isn’t forcing you to work; REALITY is. People have to work to survive, and if you are capable of working but choose not to, you are forcing people to do extra work to support you. There are no free lunches.

Government programs exist to help people who, despite their best efforts need help to survive or to thrive. They do not, and should not exist as an option for people to opt out of supporting themselves even though they have the capability to do so.

Able bodied people who are capable of working but instead choose to live off the public teat are literally parasites. It’s something you should be ashamed of, knowing that someone out there is putting in extra hours of work so you don’t have to, or that you are living off of money the government borrowed on your behalf and which will eventually be paid for by someone else. You are living off of other people’s efforts.

Because we are a charitable people, we help those for whom life has dealt a bad hand. Extending that charity to anyone who just doesn’t feel like working is not only ridiculous, it’s immoral.

48

I don’t see how that exploits the worker, but ok, that’s a valid point. Sports stars are paid a lot more money than the folks working at the concession stands as well. Again, I don’t see that as exploiting, but it’s true enough.

Kind of true, though there are certainly a lot of laws that are specifically for workers as well…certainly and historically a ton more for the workers that have ever been in place before. This would get into enforcement though, and their things are more imperfect wrt what some employers get away with (or attempt to) verse the actual laws.

Are they? Here I assume you are just talking about in the US.

Well, employers do wield more power than individual employees and always will, so no, I wouldn’t try and make that case. But, historically, workers have more rights and there are more laws to protect them than ever. As you noted, that doesn’t necessarily translate into enforcement, so that is still a gap.

I guess I just don’t see that the ‘vast, vast majority’ of workers are being exploited. But your definition of exploited is different than my own. I see exploitation happening when there aren’t any choices. Not any good choices…any choices at all. A worker who has to work 6 days a week from 9 am to 9 pm and has zero options…that’s exploitation. Couple that with a work environment with very little or zero safety checks and is very hazardous for the workers and you get into what exploitation means to me. A worker with choices, even if they are poor choices, is a worker not being exploited IMHO, with the concession that YMMV and all that…and I think in our culture, or even in the US if that’s what you mean, the majority of workers have choices and are protected by the law in ways workers in other countries with less stringent work environments or in past times could only dream about.

49

I agree with this, with the caveat that there are just things that we, as a society simply won’t allow. Such as letting folks starve or whatever. There is going to be a base level we simply won’t and can’t allow people to fall below. And we are a wealthy enough society to do this without it being an overly large burden on those of us who do work.

Where that bar is going to be set is going to depend on the country. I know you are Canadian, so your bar is slightly different than our bar here in the US, which is different than where other countries set their bar. But that there is a bar in most modern countries with operating democracies is definitely not in dispute.

50

Employment is historically exploitative. From feudal times to today, it has been a long struggle for the workers to share more equally in the profits of an endeavor. IMO the fact that workers today are exploited x% less than they were in the past doesn’t equate to any kind of real parity even tho it is more equitable than in the past.

If the employer works 1 hour per week but the employees work 8 hours per day, the worker is being exploited. If the employer makes 351x the employees pay, the worker is being exploited. Because the things the employer is taking have to come from somewhere and they come from the pool of resources that the employer has.

Some of this comes from the power imbalance that our culture demands exist in employment, but that’s really just a symptom of exploitation.

51

I know you feel this way, and I respect that…I just don’t. A worker, whatever their level, works what they agreed to work for what they agreed to work it for. If another employee works the same work for more or less, that’s not exploitation either way. If an employee works and receives many times more, again, that’s not exploitation either way. If a worker works 1 hour or 8 and they get the job done they agreed to, it’s not exploitation either way.

I get it…YMMV and we disagree. It’s just how we look at things. I make a lot more than the people who work for me. By the same token, I make a lot less than the people I work for. And the people who are at the top make many times more than I make. That doesn’t mean I exploit those who work for me, or those I work for exploit me. I could simply leave for another, higher-paid job somewhere else if I chose to…as could the folks who work for me. If I had no choices and HAD to work for a sum I hadn’t agreed upon and in conditions I hadn’t agreed to work for hours I hadn’t agreed to work THEN, IMHO I’d be exploited.

52

I think the argument, which I agree with, is that the OWNER of the company is exploiting ALL the workers, not that the higher-paid workers are exploiting the people who are below them in the organizational chart.

53

Depends on which company/corporation you’re talking about, really. Something like 45% of people are employed by companies with fewer than 500 employees and 15% are employed by companies with fewer than 20 employees. If I buy a fast-food franchise and set it up as a corporation, I am probably not making 351x what my average employee makes. I found a cite which says

The Economic Policy Institute (EPI) estimates that CEO compensation has grown 1,322% since 1978, while typical worker compensation has risen just 18%. In 2020, CEOs of the top 350 firms in the U.S. made $24.2 million, on average — 351 times more than a typical worker.

Doesn’t tell you anything about the other 6 million or so employers or the people working for them.

54

There is a power imbalance, tho, and the employer, in our culture, always holds much more power than the employee.

Correct, but again, a matter of degree. I think it’s a reasonable argument that the higher paid workers are helping exploit their lower-paid fellows, but they aren’t the source of the exploitation.

55

The ‘owner’ of my ‘company’ is the Government so…yeah, I agree. Exploitive bastards, all of them. :wink: Again, YMMV and if you agree with Bo that’s fine…I will just agree to disagree.

56

I define “exploitation” as when one private party profits from the labor of others. Since the government isn’t a for-profit organization, I wouldn’t consider it exploitative. Note that by this definition, almost all private sector employment is exploitative, which is obviously not true according to the more usual pejorative-but-not-clearly-defined use of the word.

57

Since no one thinks he is proposing to force people to flip burgers at gunpoint, how else to force people to work except to withhold support when they don’t - which assumes that finding work is practical. When it isn’t, unemployment benefits get extended.
I suspect there would be fewer jobs with no government, not only because of the disappearance of government jobs but because of the general chaos, but I don’t think that has much to do with the topic.

58

The closest we would probably have to a factual answer on that (to try and give one) would be to look at the Enlightenment era ideas that went into the foundation of our government. Whether those ideas are correct or not, it would be the working assumption of the people who made the country and a reasonable answer to the question.

From that standpoint, they’d view government in a way similar to diplomats from nations, trying to agree on a shared set of rules on how to all inhabit the same territory, live free lives, and not screw each other over terribly.

There’s no real hard answer there except to say that we have competing interests:

  1. Personal desires.
  2. Not getting screwed over by someone else’s personal desires.

For example, maybe Lizzie Borden has a personal desire to slice me into tiny pieces and take all of my money. Personally, I feel like that’s an unreasonable intrusion into my own personal freedom and, from there, my representative, her representative, and everyone else’s representatives are going to go and debate what seems like the most reasonable compromise point is between her freedoms and my freedoms. And, in this case, we would probably expect the vast majority of representatives to come to some logical conclusion like that if Lizzie has that freedom then the whole country becomes a free-for-all and shrinks down to just the one largest, scariest man. A negative freedom to almost everyone in society is probably not a freedom worth having, regardless how precious it might be to a notable few.

But, fundamentally, there’s no rule that the representatives have to come to that conclusion. It’s really just down to the arguments made and who we chose to represent us. In theory, we’ve all hired people that we trust to sponsor us, and we’ve all signed on to accepting their wisdom.

As it is, from history to-date, we’ve allowed them to lock some percentage of our number away for their full life, execute others, and force yet others into hard labor depending on what they felt the situation merited. Usually, they don’t come to those sorts of decisions, but they have, and we all seem to accept that they have that right. There’s no rule that they can’t do any of these things as a punishment for refusing to work, if the argument wins the day among the people we chose to obey.

I think it would depend on the state of society on that moment, and what the arguments were for and against.

Let’s say, for example, that someone promises to heal people and is given a special status and special rights in society. We might choose to say that he is required to try and save a life, even if he hates the individual who needs help, or else he will be punished. With his rights come responsibilities.

If the nation was being invaded by tank-driving, genocidal, carnivorous dolphins hell bent on destroying and eating each one of us, we might decide that every one of us has a duty to fight and defend against the invaders.

In general, in matters of life and death, we’ve so far landed on a duty to work.

And, if we were on a colony ship that required each of us to work or else all of us would die, I would expect that work would be non-optional.

In an alternate setting, where we’ve created machines that can produce food and shelter at zero cost, all supported by automated, infinitely inexhaustible pipelines - well, probably we wouldn’t need to be so harsh on your mellow.

It really just depends on what seems reasonable to reasonable people, after debate and consideration.

59

The reality is that there are a lot of shit jobs that need to get done and most people wouldn’t do them if they had an alternative.

There are also a lot of shit jobs that don’t need to get done. Like working at Taco Bell or McDonalds.

I find it amusing that my elderly, retired, conservative inlaws constantly complain about “people not working because they are making more on unemployment”. Clearly it rubs them the wrong way that local fast food restaurants and discount box stores are understaffed. But apparently the social construct that allows them to not have to work because they are too old, unskilled, and in horrible physical condition is ok.

I also thought Gov. Pete Ricketts’s comment about hiring more immigrants to be out of character for a Republican.

60

ISTM that that’s a rather over-simplistic take based on the supposition of a clear binary distinction between “working” (i.e., meeting your bills through your takings from paid employment and/or business profits) and “not working”. Many people who are not earning enough to meet their expenses through paying work are nonetheless providing valuable services to society, e.g., through family care and similar.

I think you’re possibly being a bit naive when you assume that it necessarily costs society more to let such people, quote-unquote, “live off the public teat” than to take on the costs of the unpaid work that those people would have to abandon if they devoted their working day instead to earning their own living.