The Great Resignation? More Like the Great Renegotiation

To simplify 100k split 50k @20%, 50k @ 40% is less than (105k split 50k @20%, 55k @40%) / 1.05

The fist is worth 50 * 0.8 + 50 * 0.6 = 70k, the second is worth (50 * 0.8 + 55 * 0.6)/ 1.05 = 69.52k.

I was thinking more of a case like this: If someone is already outraged about police brutality and they see that a "defund the police" rally is happening, there's a greater chance they'll go as it offers them an opportunity to express their general dissatisfaction with the police regardless of whether they agree 100% with the specific ideology of the organizer. When the headline the next day reads "10000 Attend Defund the Police Rally", this leads to the perception that 10000 people believe in defunding the police when the actual number is much smaller

>Of course, that doesn’t make sense because the employees are being hired at other companies.

I don't think this is a valid assumption. I know a lot of people shifting from dual income families to one parent staying at home with the kids. Even more wanting to go from full time to part time positions.

The local regional/ trauma 2 hospital had (admittedly) lost more than 50% of nurses in a year, (unofficially) replaced fewer than half of those, and that was before any of the vaccine mandates were announced or deadlines set.

Vaccine politics have silenced them since then, but work shifts that were already understaffed at the start of covid with 1 MD, 2-3 mid-levels, and 6-8 nurses are still regularly making due with as little as 1 MD and 2 nurses.

Obviously nurses are a special case given... the state of things over the past 2 years. But those numbers are just absurd, even as an outlier.

I think assuming any sort of (near) net-zero shift in staffing is going to be wrong, be it within a particular office, business, profession, industry, or geographic area.

The Socialist argument is that profit motives are fundamentally exploitative of workers, and that ownership over the means of production should be in the hands of people who work there. The reason why capitalism is bad is because it enables a privileged few to not work, by making other people do their jobs for them. This is why most Socialist law considers "social parasitism" to be a crime: work is a virtue.

The Anarchist argument is that work itself is the exploitation and that we should strive to reduce it wherever possible. The reason why capitalism[0] is bad is because it creates bullshit jobs that don't need to exist, not just that the workers aren't getting paid enough to do those bullshit jobs.

A good way to remember this is that Socialists gave us labor unions, while Anarchists gave us the 9-to-5 work day.

What seems to have happened is that /r/antiwork started off as strictly left-libertarian, and then gradually expanded to the sort of vague Internet Leftist consensus that we see today. This is a particular brand of left-populism that likes to use the word "socialism" a lot, despite promoting policies more akin to social democrats. There's an annoying quirk of populism (either side) in which they get drunk off justice porn and extremism and don't actually form a coherent political platform. It's one thing to say "I hate capitalism", and another thing to actually propose a workable reform or replacement. Reddit is particularly bad at this as the karma system encourages "content consumption" - i.e. the production of low-effort memes because that's what people upvote immediately. In a way, gaming Reddit itself is it's own bullshit job.

[0] I should point out that Anarchists do not restrict their criticism to merely capitalism but all forms of coercive power, up to and including Socialism as I have defined it here, as well as the Communism that the Soviet Union implemented. "Work is a virtue" is something shared across capitalism and Socialism alike.

- The pandemic gave most people an unusually-long period of time at home to help them realize all the things they could have been doing (e.g. spending more time with family, not being stuck in a commute), if only their work had not been sucking up all their time and energy.

- Income vs. expenses changed to the point where people couldn’t hope to pay off their debts even if they worked. Work has not been paying anywhere near enough. At that point, what is there to lose: if you will be swamped and in debt with work, and you will also be swamped and in debt without work, at least the 2nd option means finally not having to put up with the crap from many workplaces.

Also, it has just become clearer and clearer where all the lies were told. Society did not treat “essential” workers that way at all. There was all kinds of prioritization of bottom line over employee health, especially early on. We all assumed that governments could/would do a lot more to help. Heap on all the unfilled promises for promotions, raises, etc. and many workers just have no reason at all to give a crap anymore.