This situation is, at least in part, a result of how society has treated the lower tiers of the workforce for the last few decades. They have been marginalized, downgraded and squeezed for all they’re worth, without the government stepping in to protect their interests. They needed a government program to help them thrive while they’re working.
The government let them down, and now seek to get them back to work, not by making jobs more rewarding, but by making joblessness more awful.
I think that’s too broad to be meaningful. I mean, as you say, that means you basically think everything is exploitation except, oddly, if it’s the Government (thus the ‘private’). Even if the person who is doing the labor voluntarily does the work for an agreed-upon compensation that, to you, is exploitation. I don’t think that many…certainly not the vast majority…of people think that their work is exploitation or they are being exploited. Unless like me they work for the government, so it’s all good…which damn it, I should be just as exploited as the next guy!! 
Exactly. I don’t think most people object to working. What an increasing number of people are now rejecting is the idea of needing to work 2 or 3 full-time jobs to keep their heads about water while the millionaire (even the millionaires are having a harder and harder time keeping up with the upper echelon of the wealthy) and billionaire class continue to get richer. Beyond being, in my opinion, unfair, it simply isn’t sustainable. In the past, often such situations turned into violent revolutions. What we’re seeing right now is people just saying “No, give me a reasonable wage, and then I’ll work.” Of course to the ruling elite this is somehow unfair. People should be grateful to have a job and die, if need be, to improve the bottomline for their corporate masters (remember the Republican reaction in early COVID). Good grief.
You mean the people who’ve been subjected to an endless stream of propaganda fed to them by the employers all their lives about the nobility of work? They don’t think their work is being exploited?
It’s not a level playing field.
Yes, we are all deluded…me, because I’m not exploited since I work for the government, and them because they don’t understand that they are being exploited.
So, question…how do you envision a system working that isn’t exploitative to the workers? What’s your utopia here?
No one said it is. Life isn’t a level playing field and never has been and probably won’t ever be in the future.
I don’t know. Utopias aren’t achievable; they are fiction.
That’s no reason not to think about to what degree we wish the field to be tilted.
Whether @Sam_Stone meant it or not, I don’t think “working” in his statement should be limited to paid work. A farmer who grows all his own food and lives independently off the land and never uses money is doing a lot of work.
I would amend Sam’s statement to say that anyone who does not work (whether or not they are capable of working) can only survive if other people work for them, voluntarily or involuntarily. Thus, in a sense, everyone is forced either to work or to “force” others to work. “Work” here means doing something useful or productive, whether or not you get paid for it—so “anyone who does not work” includes not only those living off public assistance but also the idle rich and any businessmen who manage to earn a salary without doing anything useful or productive.
Well, leave aside the utopia then, just think about what the system would look like to you that wouldn’t be exploitation towards the workers. I’m curious, though if you don’t want to get into it that’s fine.
I think our society strives (and fails quite a bit) to change things for the better, so, I agree…we should think of ways to make things less tilted and generally better.
The example of Dan Price & Gravity Payments is, I think, a powerful one that shows that a business can be thriving while being much more equitable in compensation than is the current norm.
There is no real reason that Jeff Bezos (or any other employer) needs to profit so well while keeping his employees at as close to subsistance wages as he thinks he can get away with, except for greed and knowing that he can get away with it.
Of course not. Nevertheless, there is much to be gained by keeping in mind (real, functioning) societies (for example as researched in the references in The Dawn of Everything) that placed the highest value on real practicable freedom rather than the principle of freedom. For example, people were not theoretically free to travel, as long as they had money to pay for transport and accommodation. They could actually pick up whenever they felt like it and travel far from their homes and receive hospitality wherever they went. And the government or chief couldn’t force anyone to do anything, because the very idea was risible.
That rejection may be reflected in the statistics. Starting with the pandemic, it’s been the lowest percentage of workers since BLS started measuring it. Or it may be a drop in opportunity; the reasons for holding multiple jobs are varied. But I haven’t seen a study since 2000, much to my chagrine.
I did a bit of research. So, there are 100 employees for Gravity Payments, and everyone makes $70K per year (minimum…some make more). And the CEO cut his own salary so that he, also, makes $70K a year. But what the article doesn’t seem to say is that the company does between $3-10 billion a year in processing. As the company isn’t publically traded, but privately owned it’s hard to say what their value is, but I’d guess it’s over a billion dollars.
So, a quick calculation says that the employees make around $7 million a year (this is the unloaded cost…I don’t know what their benefits are, but let’s say that it simply doubles the cost…so, $14 million per year in loaded costs). So, I guess the point would be…where is the rest of the money going? $14 million for employees (or whatever their total cost of salary plus benefits actually is) is just a fraction of the money coming in or the value of the company.
Well…except that Bezos employs 1.3 million people (plus 170K additional seasonal staff). Doing the math here and using the $70K as a baseline, that’s $91 billion (unloaded) per year for salaries just for the 1.3 million. Just the 170K seasonal is $11 billion a year (again, unloaded). Amazon’s net revenue which is known as it’s a public company is $386 billion. You see the problem?
According to Wikipedia, before Covid, Gravity’s revenues were about $50M per year. They only get a small fraction of the money they process.
$14M labor vs $50M revenue is about 28% labor cost. Amazon at $100B vs $386B is 26%.
No…I said I didn’t load the costs. Using the same metric, Amazon’s loaded costs would be $182 billion a year plus $22 billion a year for seasonal (though maybe they don’t get benefits, so maybe just $11 billion a year…or they aren’t paid the same as seasonal workers, so just cut that out).
That’s interesting that Gravity’s revenue is only $50 million. Thanks for that. It does make it less extreme than I was thinking.
No, a big part of the problem is that, due to technology, a whole hell of a lot of us don’t have to work just to survive. We, as a species, are producing more real wealth (food and other essentials) with less labor than at any time in the past. By orders of magnitude, more for less.
In the 1800s each farmer grew enough food each year to feed three to five people. By 1995, each farmer was feeding 128 people per year. In the 1800s, 90 percent of the population lived on farms; today it is around one percent. Over the same period, farm size has increased, and though the average farm in 1995 was just 469 acres, 20 percent of all farms were over 500 acres.1 And the trend has continued to accelerate.
Very few of the jobs that are really “essential” for feeding, clothing and housing the vast majority of our population are desperate for workers. There’s a lot of us who have “bullshit jobs”, just because we’re stuck on this notion that you must have a job.
The big issue here is that we don’t have a good system for distributing the essentials of life outside the old-fashioned “work for money” system that is entrenched in our society.
This post is undercut by the mocking disdain and contempt of your other posts in this thread and by your posts which advocate for the status quo, like when you said:
I see now that your subsequent post also mocks and contains ridiculous gymnastics, attempting to apply one example as a blanket policy to all situations.
That’s why “utopias” usually get brought up, as they are impossible and thus any attempt to outline one provides an opponent with easy fodder for refutation.
Do you see that as mocking disdain?? I see that as reality.
Good grief. I’m merely pointing out the issues of trying to scale something up from 100 people in a prosperous company to a company that employs many orders of magnitude more people. You were the one who brought up this example and then brought up Bezos.
No, you were the one who chose to post a link instead of what I actually asked you for, which is how it would work in your mind. I wasn’t looking for a link, I was looking for YOUR THOUGHTS so we could discuss them. But basically, you are taking any sort of counterargument as ‘mocking disdain’, so I guess there isn’t any point in continuing. Just for the record, I was neither being mocking nor disdainful, and I don’t even advocate for the status quo. Just trying and keep things grounded in some sort of reality in these discussions.
< shrug>
If those were your goals when posting, you apparently did not achieve them.
You were using the most ridiculous case you could make to say, essentially, “it’ll never work”.
The link was an example of more equitable compensation, which is what I THINK society should strive for.
Well, that’s the term Marx used, and it’s a central concept in economic thought. I agree that it’s a problem that in common usage it means something different, but I’m not aware of any better alternative.
To answer your question briefly, a society without exploitation would be a socialist society, where economic production is collectively planned and organized without the profit motive being a factor. I know that leads to a whole bunch of other perfectly reasonable questions about how that might work in practice, but I don’t have the bandwidth to have that whole conversation at this particular time.
Not at all…clearly, it DOES work for that company. And there are reasons it does (there are also some caveats such as where it is wrt that $70K a year). It wouldn’t be a one size fits all solution…which was the point I thought I was making, though obviously, you took offense.
And it works for them. That’s great, and if you are looking for more equitable, that seems to be a good example.