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U.S. Ranked Worst for Workers’ Rights Among Major Economies

bloomberg.com

31–40 of 59 posts

Re: U.S. Ranked Worst for Workers’ Rights Among Major Economies

#32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I think if you ask typical US immigrants how the reality corresponds with their prior expectations, I think the theme will be disappointment. Do you have any numbers on what percentage return home?

One paper showed about 1/3rd. Source: https://www.pnas.org/content/116/1/116/tab-figures-data

Yea, that paper is trying to prove their novel way of estimating emigration flow. I couldn't find anywhere that their numbers were proven with hard reported numbers.

Re: U.S. Ranked Worst for Workers’ Rights Among Major Economies

#33
post #28

This is going to catch a lot of flak because it's a rather cynical observation. It's interesting that almost all the best countries for workers rights on the map have stagnant GDPs in the past decade outside of Uruguay and Ireland.

Yet another hint we shouldn’t consider GDP to be the benchmark for economies.

Re: U.S. Ranked Worst for Workers’ Rights Among Major Economies

#34
post #11
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>South Korea Wow you Sir are the blindest of the blinds...really South Korea and Japan??? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_in_South_Korea http://www.koreaherald.com/view.php?ud=20190501000216 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_in_Japan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karoshi

He was clearly joking, but Japan’s suicide rates have dropped. Meanwhile countless Americans are dropping out of life, overdosing on drugs, and their deaths are counted as a separate statistic. There were about 46,000 suicides in America in 2016 and 70,000 drug overdose deaths in 2017.[1] Looking at rates of unemployment, depression, and other problems, I doubt the overwhelming majority of those are completely accide…

>but Japan’s suicide rates have dropped.

Yes as everywhere in the world.

>He was clearly joking,

Why? Because the US is so much better? It would be acually a joke, IF the US is much better...

EDIT: And im really no shure why you point to drug abuse...

Re: U.S. Ranked Worst for Workers’ Rights Among Major Economies

#35
post #11
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>South Korea Wow you Sir are the blindest of the blinds...really South Korea and Japan??? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_in_South_Korea http://www.koreaherald.com/view.php?ud=20190501000216 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_in_Japan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karoshi

He was clearly joking, but Japan’s suicide rates have dropped. Meanwhile countless Americans are dropping out of life, overdosing on drugs, and their deaths are counted as a separate statistic. There were about 46,000 suicides in America in 2016 and 70,000 drug overdose deaths in 2017.[1] Looking at rates of unemployment, depression, and other problems, I doubt the overwhelming majority of those are completely accide…

> Including them in the statistic enough to push the American suicide rate to about double Japan’s.

Including all drug overdoses in suicides would be a very far overreaching fabrication requiring knowledge that you can never possess about the person that died (you have to know their state of mind and intent at the time of overdose). It also does a disservice to the aspect of how extraordinarily dangerous opioid drug addiction is and how easy it is to overdose by accident (especially if fentanyl is involved).

If we're going to play that game, then you have to use that god-like power to remove all suicides that didn't really mean to do it and all accidental drug overdoses.

Magically the number just dropped by 2/3.

Suicide is defined by a successful attempt to kill one's self. The fact is you have no idea what the intent of all the people that overdose on drugs is, so conflating them is plainly incorrect.

Re: U.S. Ranked Worst for Workers’ Rights Among Major Economies

#36
post #31
post #3

Strange not including China as a major economy. I thought they were huge!

It's a badly written article and headline. The US was ranked worst among the G7, a very specific group of countries.

Yeah, basically among the first-world countries. Which the US probably is no more.

Re: U.S. Ranked Worst for Workers’ Rights Among Major Economies

#38
post #3

Strange not including China as a major economy. I thought they were huge!

Headline: U.S. Ranked Worst for Workers’ Rights Among Major Economies

Sub-head: Labor union survey ranks every other G-7 country better

First and second sentence: The world’s largest economy is ranked a 4 ... Every other Group of Seven country ranks 3 or better.

G7 mentioned in sub-head and 2nd sentence.

The illustrated map indicates China is worse.

Re: U.S. Ranked Worst for Workers’ Rights Among Major Economies

#39

Interestingly it's also ranked one of the highest for average wages: https://data.oecd.org/earnwage/average-wages.htm .

That is a bullshit measure. That is an arithmetic average pulled up by the excessive compensation to the 1% in America.

Look at e.g. the wage of a McDonalds worker in the US and it is among the lowest in the west.

I think e.g. in Norway you make 3-4x what a US McDonalds worker makes.

It also does not take into account that US workers have almost no vacation and long work days.

US workers don’t have they high hourly wage. They just work their ass off while Europeans are at the beach enjoying life with their family.

Ok, a simplification but life is not great for American workers and they ought to demand better treatment.

Re: U.S. Ranked Worst for Workers’ Rights Among Major Economies

#40

I hate to say it but, at this point this kinda stuff comes across as anti-American propaganda to me. It’s always an assertion that the U.S. is terrible on some metric that upon further digging was measured in some arbitrary way to get the desired conclusion. Here’s the thing: living in the United States, for a significant percentage of the population, is pretty awesome. For people not within that group, maybe it is e…

It's interesting to me that you perceive the US getting a bad evaluation as some sort of deliberate smear against America. If that were the case, you would expect to see the US mentioned in some detail in the actual report [1]. It's not; they primarily focus on labour violations in the developing world. The rating the US gets is pretty incidental.

While it's easy to see life in the US as awesome from our perspective, we work in tech. The median US income is about $40,000, and the lower quartile is $22,000 [2]. Fully a quarter of Americans live in the $0-$22,000 income bracket, and another quarter live in $22,000-$40,000.

> But IMO the solution might really be to keep working at extending the awesome to the rest of the people.

Then surely workers' rights are exactly what we should be discussing, right? Labour activism is what drives wages up in profitable industries. How is it "anti-American" to discuss problems which we're trying to solve -- if anything, it's pro-American, since it's part of an effort to improve America.

[1]: https://www.ituc-csi.org/IMG/pdf/ituc_globalrightsindex_2020...

[2]: https://dqydj.com/average-median-top-individual-income-perce...

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