61–70 of 73 posts
If you think Capitalism is bad, just try Socialism. Instead of making X amount of people miserable, it makes almost everyone miserable. The world is not perfect, there is no utopia, and whatever you might think, Capitalism is about as good of product/market fit (human-nature/society-type fit) as you can get in a world that's not based on small hunter/gatherer groups. It's also keeps us in a state of competition, whic…
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Or be replaced by robots. All I could think of reading that is why they haven't figured out how to fold and tape a cardboard box with a robot yet. They should get on that, and then those people won't have to be subjected to those conditions anymore.
Agreed. The automobile manufacturers were very successful in improving quality and efficiency via robotics, and were also encouraged to do so by enormous drags from labor unions. Warehouses have also increased automation, but clearly they can improve more. Beyond the warehouse, I'm eager to see their deployment in retail stores and fast-food. Consumers will benefit from efficiencies, and the unhappy workers will be f…
This whole schpiel just made me keep thinking: "I wonder how these people will feel when robots replace them in these kinds of jobs"...
Every year the same article. No one is forced to work at a temp agency or retail. If it sucks so much, find a different job. Yes, yes, I know, it's not that easy. But it actually is.
http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t15.htm
"U-6 Total unemployed, plus all persons marginally attached to the labor force, plus total employed part time for economic reasons, as a percent of the civilian labor force plus all persons marginally attached to the labor force"
Perhaps Amazon could add a checkbox to the shopping cart: [] pay 10% more that will go directly into the pockets of the packers. I wouldn't even mind a picture gallery of everybody who handled my package.
I wouldn't be interested in sitting for a professional user profile photo, or a standardized mandatory snapshot. I wouldn't smile for the photo on my ID badge. I wouldn't be interested in having candid photos of me snapped on the factory floor, while my manager, zippy the pinhead, brow-beats me, because I express obvious disinterest in a mundane, repetitive, soul crushing job.
I wouldn't put up a Facebook profile proclaiming that I work at McDonald's. Similarly, if McDonald's had it's own corporate social network at mcdonalds.com, where all the pages are themed in red and yellow, with your choice of one of three background images (french fries, a Big Mac or Ronald himself), and everyone wear's a visor or a hair net in their profile picture, it wouldn't be a social network I'd be interested in participating in. Not even for tips. It would feel a little bit like pan handling for spare change. There's a line of dignity I'm not interested in crossing, when it come to social websites.
When I drop change in the tip cup, as I pick up my morning coffee, it's a token of appreciation that goes untaxed, and unrecorded on a server. That's the way tips are supposed to work. A surreptitious reward as acknowlegement for the indignity of servitude.
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Labour unions are a lot like everything else that works in our society. (Hold your vituperation!) Labour unions, like democracy and capitalism, are the worst things we've ever tried, except for everything else that failed. We simply don't have a better way to appoint leaders except democracy. It's obviously broken in many ways, but the alternatives are worse. Economically, capitalism is deeply broken, but everything…
The power of labor unions for low-paid workers is not as strong as you think. Where I went to school (U Chicago), there was a very active mostly student-organized university workers' labor union, but workplace violations were still routine. The power to strike is no help when you depend on your paycheck to survive, and the union's legal clout was no help when the laws were hard to enforce and deep-pocketed employers…
It's exactly as strong as I think. I just think that all the alternative ways to protect them are even weaker.
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Labour unions are a lot like everything else that works in our society. (Hold your vituperation!) Labour unions, like democracy and capitalism, are the worst things we've ever tried, except for everything else that failed. We simply don't have a better way to appoint leaders except democracy. It's obviously broken in many ways, but the alternatives are worse. Economically, capitalism is deeply broken, but everything…
The power of labor unions for low-paid workers is not as strong as you think. Where I went to school (U Chicago), there was a very active mostly student-organized university workers' labor union, but workplace violations were still routine. The power to strike is no help when you depend on your paycheck to survive, and the union's legal clout was no help when the laws were hard to enforce and deep-pocketed employers…
For example, if you are hired as a driver for a delivery company, you, the driver, are responsible for speeding or running stop signs and red lights, not your employer. You never here about a manager telling their employers to speed and retaliating against those that don't speed to make a delivery. On the surface, similar laws may appear to victimize the people at the bottom, but it instead does something very very important. It's places a firm barrier across which almost all workers will push back from since they are the ones that will be left holding the bag when law enforcement shows up and starts handing out fines.
So in the original article, they could create a law that fines the manager some multiple of the amount that every one of those laborers lost. Let's say it is 15 minutes work times 30 employees at $12/hour. That's $90 dollars in lost pay. Now make the fine 10x that value plus court costs and lawyer fees and now every single manager is going to think twice before willingly victimizing these temp workers, and will question their bosses when asked to do things like this.
Laws that make illegal these unethical actions with very real victims would empower workers to stand up for their rights better than anything else. No one would ever have to stick his or her neck out, they can just call the cops anonymously and tip them off to unethical business practices. The enforcement of violations would be handled right there on the spot without ever involving the legal department of the corporation responsible for the abuse.
Perhaps Amazon could add a checkbox to the shopping cart: [] pay 10% more that will go directly into the pockets of the packers. I wouldn't even mind a picture gallery of everybody who handled my package.
Unfortunately, the theory of tax/cost incidence shows what can go wrong with this: since it results in above-market effective wages, that simply intensifies the competition for those positions, probably to the point that workers will offer to do them for less than the current wage Amazon is paying, since they know they'll still make the same from such donations. Here's a discussion that covered the question in the co…
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The balance is of course somewhere in the middle. The good parts of capitalism with the good parts of socialism. You get a much nicer society than with either one t the extreme.
How do you get just the good parts of X (for any X), without the bad parts? In most cases, you just get X as a package.
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What, livable working conditions don't matter compared to the prouct?
I'm not sure what you mean by "livable working conditions" If you are referring to total compensation and hours, this comes under what I referred to as "oligopoly". That is, labor unions can create market power on the side of labor, in order to raise pay. However, this doesn't benefit society as a whole, and so it is only reasonable when there is market power on the other side. In my industry, there did seem to be an…
But plenty of industries don't have that advantage. Many workers are very dependent on a single employer. This is especially the case with workers that have highly specific training and experience that doesn't translate well to other jobs. If they're exploited or otherwise unhappy, they can't simply quit and get a similar job elsewhere, whereas the employer can afford to lose a single employee and train a new one, which makes the employer-employee relationship an unequal one. There, unions can provide a lot of value to keep employers honest.