In a lot of feudal societies the serfs were considered to be part of the property. If you acquired ownership to a parcel of land you also owned the people who lived and worked on it. Serfs weren’t allowed to travel because it was regarded as them stealing property from the landowner; the stolen property being themselves and their labor.
Have you traveled much outside of the U.S.A., Will? I meet median-wage earners from Marxist dictatorships like France on their voluntary month-long vacations and chat with them. They have the peculiar idea that life should be work & play, not work & work. From the pitying looks they give me when I reveal my birth-country, I’ll guess their outlook is different from yours. They don’t seem aware that they’re being oppressed by the “irrelevant” dictators who “steal their property at gunpoint” and waste it on healthcare for unproductive people — is this because they’ve been brainwashed?
I think quite a few of those who are enamored of the gig system think that they can be a starving musician or tech entrepreneur all night and gig to pay for it all day. So, they’re like on their big life path, fer realz, and just waiting tables until they’re discovered or bought out. Totally new thing, man.
Too bad for those who are utterly deluded about their music, writing, poety, or tech insights and will never make as much from those as they do with window-washing gigs. At least they aren’t, you know, working for bureaucrats. (Those would be the bureaucrats who hire them for $10 window jobs because they can afford it.)
This is a warning for failure to follow a moderator’s instructions by continuing to bring up sweeping generalizations in this fashion after being directed to avoid threadshiting.
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A point re Social Security and pay rates.
So far,and with no immediate prospect of change, to get full SS benefits upon reaching “Retirement Age”* or incurring a “Permanent Disability”** requires you to have paid into the system for 40 quarters.
That is the FICA withholding on your pay check.
People who are paid “under the table” do not pay into SS.
If your employer does not withhold SS tax, it is your responsibility to mail a check to SSA.
I’m sure every “gig” worker either has FICA withheld or pays into SS personally.
Exception: the Social Security Administration also administers SSI - a supplemental income apart from Retirement/Disability. AIUI, It does not require 40 quarters. Presumably, the gig worker may qualify. Note that it is defined and called “supplemental” - it is not intended as a full income, and is a whole lot less money than SS.
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- which is set by politicians and keeps getting raised
** - the definition of which can vary widely. See all the “exposés” of “disabled” people playing handball.
- which is set by politicians and keeps getting raised
It may be interesting to consider an economy that is nearly all gig. Apparently 80-90% of people in India are self-employed. Lots of reasons why and lots of consequences that follow. An interesting read.
Telling someone they can’t walk miles and miles to a job that barely allows them to subsist and where they’ll end up working themselves to death is patently different than adjusting the system so that that isn’t their best option. Being forced to choose between working yourself to death and dying from lack of resources to subsist is not in any way a rational choice. There is never a rational choice to be made when all legal options lead to death.
None choose to be born in the society they were born in, therfore they never agreed to the social compact. Just as it would be irrational for someone to agree to a compact that would lead to their death, it would be immoral for anyone to be forced into a compact that forces them to die in order to subsist or not subsist at all. Thus the burden is on individuals in society to have opportunities available for all individuals to rationally subsist, or to directly care for them until that is possible.
We are far beyond a near limitless account of available food and other resources that are available to anyone willing to work to collect them as long as they only take what they could use without it spoiling. We are also at the point in our society where we ate focused on everyone thriving, not simply subsisting.
I realize you qualify this a bit, but I’d say the prevailing social compact is something an individual agrees to the same way they agree to the prevailing climate and language.
You can fight it, and probably starve (or be killed); you can make the best of it by complying with its terms; or you can change it by changing some element of the society. Or you can leave for another social zone, which may or may not exist.
Serfs didn’t choose their status, anymore than slaves did. (It didn’t have quite the same set-up, but you weren’t given a choice to become one or not.)
the gilded age labor market is octopus’s wet dream
In case it has escaped anyone’s notice:
The people who run the large corporations are not in the habit of finding ways to make their worker’s lives cushy and comfty.
Find pics of a large office in the 50’s US. And a 50’s Bank branch.
The Secretarial Pool is gone - the email killed the typed memo, and those low-paying jobs disappeared.
The BofA ERMA project (run by Stanford Research) proved that a computer could automate 90% of a bank’s bookkeeping. Before the IBM check sorter, your cancelled check was returned to your branch and put in a mechanical sorting device. Your statement was prepared by the Branch.
Wells Fargo account numbers were a classic example of why "account numbers should NEVER have any intelligence: - the first digit indicated account type. Next three were the branch number (see a problem with only 999 branches possible?) the last were called “customer number” - but only within that branch. Your “customer number” could be the same as mine - if we used different branches.
That number made returning the checks to the Branch very easy - the whole point of the number scheme. (WFB no longer uses this system. This info is now of historical interest only)
Nobody cried when the Bank Tellers and check sorters were replaced. Nobody cried when the Secretarial Pool was fired.
Nobody cried when the floor sweepers were let go and replaced by one person driving a machine.
The truckers DID scream when their trucks started telling on them when they tweaked their schedules to get time to visit home (or a brothel), but the tattletale stayed.
Now robots are threatening even assembly line jobs which require complex skills.
The critical part that kept humans on the job was the eyeball - machines were blind.
Then somebody invented an eyeball for robots.
The floodgates for robotic replacement are now full open - what the robot eye did not do, AI now can.
The whole structure of how we distribute wealth is up for grabs - those absolute minimum “work or starve” jobs are going away and never coming back.
If there are more people than “jobs” for people (meaning: still haven’t got a robot to do this), then how does a person “earn” his keep?
I’m old and will soon be dead - but the young will see this problem up close and personal real soon.
Start figuring out how this new economic structure is going to work.
Accepting the reality of one’s situation is definitely a part of the equation, but I think where society (in the political sense) differs from climate and language is that it is something that began voluntarily and is continually changed and maintained by other humans.
So in my view, it would be much more rational to complain about the details of a contract you had no hand in but are still bound by and are enforced by other humans whether it’s to your own detriment or not than it would be to complain about something we largely have no control over, particularly climate. Language falls somewhere in the middle, but that’s a different topic.
If automation goes the way many think (or at least the people I’ve read think), I’m seeing a guaranteed income as more and more likely unless there’s some sort of economic innovation that makes that unnecessary. But that might be outside the scope of the OP.
Actually, the “gig economy” is a first step toward “no more jobs for humans”. It removes the certainty of income and reduces “benefits” to little, if anything more than “here’s some cash”.
Uber made no secret of its desire to replace even a driver following a map controlled by Uber with a robot car.
So much for “taxi driver” as minimal employment.
Your fast food operation has you pulling your drink and some even have you running the ordering interface.
My drug store is thrilled to send me my meds from a warehouse in another state - those darn Licensed Pharmacists are expensive - the robot pill counters are dirt cheap - and don’t even need lights on.
If I were 20 years old in 2017, I’d be very, very afraid.
Clearly, what the market is indicating is, “Here is a job that needs to be done”. Now, my question is, how much is “the market” fucking the worker for the sake of a higher profit for the employer? The answer, due to the obscenely lopsided relationship between worker and employer, generally is: “as much as is legally possible”.
I’m sure that for many of these jobs, if they could, they would offer $4 an hour, and still find people for whom that is technically better than not working at all. I’m equally sure that for those same jobs, they could afford to pay $7.25 an hour. But without regulations and laws in place, they aren’t going to do that. They’re going to offer their tiny, paltry sum,
If my boss can look at someone else doing my job and think, “Hang on, that guy is doing this work for 5 bucks an hour with no benefits, why am I paying this schlub more than double that, plus health insurance and pension?” then I’d say I’m at least a little relevant in this exchange. The job market affects all of us, whether we like it or not, and it’s in all of our best interests to ensure that this market is not predatory or
Huh? What’s irrational about choosing to work 80 hours a week for a pittance in unsafe and dangerous conditions with no guarantee that you won’t lose your job if you cough at your boss funny if it’s better than not working and thus starving? Absolutely nothing. It’s a perfectly rational decision. However, it’s one that springs from a system that is fundamentally broken, one that could have been better then and definitely should be better now. And because the position of the worker in that case is inherently precarious and inherently weak, it’s up to everyone to ensure that we don’t enter into such race-to-the-bottom conditions.
Thank you for this un-asked-for and entirely nonsensical psychoanalysis. I wonder, is it reasonable to assume that you just want to be able to screw over anyone you personally employ? No? Then stop inventing reasons to paint us as bad people based on fucking nothing. Thanks.
Let’s say my employer could pay me anywhere between 1 and 8 dollars per hour for my work. In this hypothetical example, I am entirely replaceable. 1 dollar is the bare minimum I need in order to not starve; 8 dollars is where my work ceases to be reasonably profitable for the employer. What motivation is there for my employer to offer me anywhere near 8 dollars per hour for my work? Snagging the better employees? Ha ha. That’s not how this works. That’s pretty much not how this has ever worked. For low-skilled, replaceable workers, it is almost always a race to the bottom.
Now, it turns out the whole economy does better when I (and by extension the rest of the workers) get closer to 8 dollars an hour, because it means more people able to buy the shit that’s being sold and a more functional, fluid economy. It means my life is better, because I can actually save money, or buy things I want beyond bare subsistence. But it’s clearly worse for my employer, because if he pays me 8 dollars an hour, that’s 7 dollars not going into his pocket per hour, compared to the $1 wage. So why the hell would he do that? There’s nobody forcing him to. So instead, we continue this race to the bottom, with wages bottoming out at the point where starving to death occurs whether you work or not.
This is why we have things like the minimum wage. Because everyone except the single person who holds the power in the employee-employer relationship benefits when we do.
But sure, you can just say it’s because we want to control people. It’s not like there’s any actual societal interest in ensuring that working conditions are better than in the gilded age. Speaking as someone currently living in an economy with far more work restrictions and far better support for the poor than America has, I cannot fucking fathom why anyone would actually support the positions you hold. Because it’s nonsense. It’s fairy tales, told by rich people to entrench their position.
It seems like a self-destructive movement for the economy. Each individual employer benefits by reducing their payroll, either by reducing the number of employees or the amount they’re paid (and the former makes the latter easy).
But businesses need more than just low production costs. They also need a customer base. And if every business is racing to the bottom on the goal of paying as little as possible to employees, where are they supposed to get these customers from? The handful of business owners aren’t going to be enough to support the economy, no matter how much money they have. A robust economy needs a large middle class.
Too early in the morning to make complex posts. Urgh. Some fixes:
Derp.
You people are making the mistake of applying the effects of a major disruptive change to the economy, assuming everything else will stay the same. The gig economy and automation are going to have at least as profound effect as the industrial revolution. You can’t look at the invention of the steam engine and bemoan the loss of jobs in the sailing industry.
It’s not. While employers reduce their headcount, they also reduce production costs, making products cheaper and more available. Automation and technology makes certain complex jobs more available to less skilled workers. Freed from tedious, dangerous or repetitive work, it allows workers to come up with other ways to utilize their skills.
Imagine a world where you didn’t have to enter into a Faustian bargain where a company will provide you some minimal standard of living in exchange for chaining yourself to a cube 40 hours a week performing some stupid task you hate (or not task at all).
30 years ago, many of the jobs that exist now weren’t even imagined when I was trying to figure out what to study in college.
Of course that’s the positive side. The darks side is something like Idiocracy where there really isn’t any actual work to do. Remember that everything from fast food, being a doctor, flying an airplane or managing a global corporation was completely automated such that a retard could do it (and still live a kick ass life!) I see that now in a lot of big companies where they are run by people who have been there 20 years and don’t know shit. So they outsource everything to layers of consultants and vendors. Eventually it will all be automated and you’ll just have a bunch of idiots in suits playing work.
Meanwhile in the real world, the race to the bottom for low-skilled, replaceable workers at Walmart has increased their starting wage to $10/h. I have no doubt there are decreases elsewhere, but it would help the argument to bring actual examples of this supposed race.
Maybe. But it’s more the last evolution of the immensely service-driven economy we’ve grown/collapsed/evolved into over the last thirty years. From high-end “service” stuff to adults working at McD’s and Walmart to… “Hey, wash that windshield for ya?”
Services =/= a viable economy.