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It’s time to balance the power between workers and employers

washingtonpost.com

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Re: It’s time to balance the power between workers and employers

#211

Post by tiggybear »

nunez wrote: post #194

This observation came to a head for me during a conversation with my fiance about tuition costs. I went to Stevens Institute of Technology, a private engineering school in New Jersey. When I started my schooling in 2005, the average tuition, not including room and board, was a little under $27,000. [1] It is now a little over $50,000, again, excluding room and board. [2] I studied Computer Engineering. The average sa…

Well you could always just tell your children they need to stop being so spoiled and work harder. Then when they do work harder for less than you, you can sell them your house that's skyrocketed in value to reap the rest of their hard work to fund your retirement.

Ah capitalism, you so sexy.

Re: It’s time to balance the power between workers and employers

#212

Post by ekianjo »

byroot wrote: post #162
yorwba wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And unionists, no matter how piss poor a job they do, can never be fired (in theory they can, but in practice it never happens). Do you mean union leaders or regular members? Because if it's the latter, then you have a counterexample in every 100% unionized company that ever fired anyone.

He means "delegates", kinda like union leader but not exactly. But they can absolutely be fired, they are simply a protected class of workers, meaning they cannot be fired because of their delegate status, but can be because of anything else. It's very similar to the US protected classes of workers. A very simple Google search will show you they do get fired from time to time, e.g just 3 month ago: http://www.courrie…

Its not because you find an exception it means the rule does not generally apply.

Re: It’s time to balance the power between workers and employers

#213

Post by tiggybear »

ekianjo wrote: post #67
sillysaurus3 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the argument goes: We make table scraps compared to the amount that a corporation rakes in. Yet we're the sole reason they're able to rake in that amount of money. Not that I agree with it, but that's an argument.

> Yet we're the sole reason they're able to rake in that amount of money. If you really believe in what you are saying, then go ahead and build your own company and grab the business for yourself.

Serious question: what do you believe value is? Do you think it's more related to how much you can sell your output for on the open market or is it how much leverage you have/your ability to extract capital? A mix?

I've been in enough meetings with sales, marketing, and execs to know that they see value as "how much can we get someone to pay for this."

So why is it, when labor applies this same concept to themselves people get really defensive? Who cares if you're making 100k, 1million, or 10million a year. If you can extract more capital for your product than your current rates then you are "undercharging", as most business folks have told me.

And good business also means using every legal trick in the book to extract more capital. Whether that be locking customers in at start-up stages so when they grow you have more leverage and they're forced to use your services barring a massive investment. Or unionizing so you have more leverage to negotiate the return on your product. I mean, if a business was going to lock themselves into only one paying customer they would set up a million different protection clauses.

Re: It’s time to balance the power between workers and employers

#214

Post by ImSkeptical »

scarmig wrote: post #195
ImSkeptical wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This seems antithetical to the concept of ownership. If it's my house, why do I have to give it up just because someone with more money wants it? Why should my taxes go up, just because people value my property at an increased rate? Property taxes are supposed to fund the services provided by the local government, not evict poor people for the benefit of the rich. You suggest that buying a house that people want is l…

Two points: 1) Someone's getting taxed, somewhere. The question is what we want to incentivize. Working hard for a living? Saving money and investing it to grow the economy? Purchasing food to feed and garments to clothe your family? Trading with people outside the country who make things more efficiently than you can? Or sitting on underutilized land? No matter what, someone's ox gets gored. The key is that it shoul…

>The question is what we want to incentivize.

I disagree with this. This idea is based on the implicit assumption that the purpose of taxation is to change behavior.

As I alluded to earlier, I think the purpose of property tax is to help fund the local government. We need waste disposal, food inspectors, schools, police, fire department, etc. These things are, in part, funded by property taxes.

If people value my house at a greater rate, that doesn't change the amount of education local kids need, I don't get better police protection, and the amount of government services don't necessarily increase. Why am I paying more in property taxes then?

>You seem unrealistically worried about government coming in and removing people from houses they own at gunpoint

My main concern is the idea that we would use property taxes as a tool for taking people's property.

Re: It’s time to balance the power between workers and employers

#215

Post by dang »

ChristianBundy wrote: post #37
ianai wrote: post #13

Countries are best off that empower their people: the individual citizens.

Please take your capitalist apologia somewhere else.

That point was unsubstantive, but your response is much worse. When commenting here, please address others respectfully regardless of how wrong they may be, and please don't use HN for ideological battle. That's destructive of what this place is for.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: It’s time to balance the power between workers and employers

#216

Post by ThrowawayR2 »

scarmig wrote: post #203
ThrowawayR2 wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The actual worst case scenario is someone gets a reverse mortgage from the bank to pay property tax with equity from the home, and they end up bequeathing a smaller proportion of wealth to their heirs when they pass. In other words, a permanent and widespread subsidy that enriches the banking industry at the expense of the public. Don't we have enough of those already?

I'm confused how you'd consider reverse mortgages a subsidy.

How could one not? See https://www.consumerfinance.gov/ask-cfpb/what-are-the-costs-...

Reverse mortgages don't happen for free. The interest and all those fees go to the banking & other industries. By making reverse mortgages a considerably more frequent scenario, those industries clearly benefit.

Re: It’s time to balance the power between workers and employers

#218

Post by pattisapu »

hiisukun wrote: post #102

100 years ago in Australia, there was a 'great strike'. It was about a lot of things, but the straw that broke the camels back was timecards. Workers felt like management were 'Americanising' labour, and the pressure of worsening or stagnant conditions wasn't helped by the country being in the middle of contributing to the war. Anyway the strike was overall 'a failure', but filling in the outline I've given above was…

Interesting.

I'm an American labor lawyer and often find myself thankful when an employer actually keeps accurate time cards. "Time shaving" and wage theft are so rampant today and are a significant part of the billions of dollars that workers lose each year in this country [1]. It's a lot easier to do that when you fudge the time records, or don't keep any at all.

[1] http://www.epi.org/blog/wage-theft-by-employers-is-costing-u...

Re: It’s time to balance the power between workers and employers

#219

Post by ZeroGravitas »

ThrowawayR2 wrote: post #188
ZeroGravitas wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So your example of poor people that it affects punitively is a rich person who owns millions in assets? I guess that answers your question that it doesn't affect poor people. It's almost directly analogous to saying that the estate tax affects poor people who win the lottery. Both have received massive benefits unrelated to their efforts and are no longer poor, so talking about them as if they were seems like sophist…

On one side, you would have elderly people who would be forced out of homes they've lived their entire lives in and raised their families in. On the other side, there would your pragmatic but rather cold-hearted analysis. Which side do you think public opinion is going to come down on? A home is more than a structure that one happens to reside in and its value has other dimensions than what the market might be willin…

Most land value tax proposals have exemptions for a person's personal home. But even if they didn't, we have financial instruments that can release the value stored in an asset like a home. If the owner looks at the situation and decides to sell and move somewhere cheap and have lots of money to spend then great, if they decide to unlock the value in their land via a mortgage because living exactly there is worth more to them then what they pay in taxes then that's also great. In both situation they are richer, and they have the opportunity to decide how to spend these riches they have accidentally acquired. Either way, they're not poor people.

Poor people would be affected by the lack of affordable housing in areas close to work though.

Re: It’s time to balance the power between workers and employers

#220

Post by ianai »

fuzzfactor wrote: post #165
BurningFrog wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So each Boeing worker should be able to buy their own 787 Dreamliner in any fair society?

Good concept here where there should not be misunderstanding. When Henry Ford attempted to build the first commodity private motorcar for the middle class worker whilst also paying his assembly line workers enough to afford one of their own from their wages alone it was by design a very delicate balance. The idea was to enable someone, even without significant resources or higher education, who had the aptitude and i…

I really appreciated your comment. Lots of wrinkles added to my grey matter!
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