Why would someone need to work a degrading job simply to remain housed, other than because such impositions support the profit motive for landlords, lenders, and employers?
I doubt there could be much meaning found in the possibility that corporate farms “suddenly” would have no profits.
Corporate farms are structured around the profit motive, which is supported by the claim they assert for exclusive control over certain plots of the land, and for exclusive ownership of the products from using such land. For farm workers not to be exploited, they must stop upholding respect for such claims. Plainly, their lives would be vastly better in consequence, as the full value of their products would be distributed among themselves, with no share being taken from them by anyone else simply from a claim to private ownership.
I generally agree. However, I was curious whether you had any thoughts related more directly to one of the earlier comments, concerning how fairness, within the context of employment, might be evaluated.
Many concede as inevitable that work should be miserable.
Yet, some even still cast shame on those who emphasize the misery it causes.
Meanwhile, among those who describe work as miserable, it is common to assume the reason as being that work involves effort, rather than that work, at least the way it is generally imposed, requires the worker being subordinated.
So, I just need to rant for a minute about what’s just happened. It’s made me feel fairly disposable as a worker. I work in I.T. support. I help people who can’t operate technology with highly complicated issues. I am highly skilled, well trained and I have a diverse set of understanding for technical issues....
The only challenge I face right now is finding someone who will see my value.
I am sorry for your experiences, and am hopeful you will bounce back.
Unfortunately, under our current systems, many are having similar experiences, or even worse. Many, in particular, with chronic or permanent disability, face near total disenfranchisement from the workplace, even among those who might support themselves through working at certain kinds of jobs along with appropriate accommodations and subsidies.
None of us is ever paid what we are worth, because businesses exist to extract value from the labor of workers, that is, to claim a profit from workers selling their labor, and doing so requires paying them less than the value generated by the labor they provide to a business.
Unions certainly will help improve work and life experience for the vast majority of the population, by allowing us to negotiate collectively for conditions, terms, and wages that are more favorable than simply the least favorable ones absolutely necessary for an employer to retain some worker willing to perform particular functions.
If we recognize and pursue our shared interests, then we can end the race to bottom that has been imposed on us as workers.
there’s always going to be some fresh-faced person straight out of college/uni who is willing to work outside the Union
Such a person is called a scab.
Scabs should be considered bad members of society, because they are bad.
They harm their own interests by siding with employers. They make life miserable for the entire working class, while helping billionaires become even richer.
Tech is a tough nut to crack, because the platform economy, social media, and techno-utopian ideology has shaped much of the software industry into a kind of self-styled professional managerial class, its workers generally apathetic and often staunchly antagonistic to addressing structural issues.
Nevertheless, as software is a labor intensive industry, worker cooperatives may be formed relatively easily in principle, and many are being formed.
Software may be an industry that emerges comparatively early with strong representation by worker-controlled enterprise, without necessarily benefiting so directly from unions.
Employers in any country take advantage of every opportunity to extract the most value from workers at the least expense and risk.
Workers have experienced better conditions in many advanced countries, compared to the US, but the overall structure of the system is entirely the same.
Meanwhile, the political forces that have dismantled systems of worker empowerment are operating in all countries, and in some sense are continuing to expand outside the US.
a lot of the recent college grads would just be happy to be employed for more money than they would be at pretty much any other job that they’ve worked
The workforce varies in terms of easiness to exploit, but the software industry is not prospering, and cannot do so, merely from the labor of workers without more than a few years of experience. Creating broad class solidarity both within industries and across them is an objective clearly within reach, even though the road will be difficult, uncertain, and at times dangerous.
The addage of “nobody wants to work anymore” is both true and false.
The claim is completely false.
Conceding it may be true also concedes a charitable interpretation, one outside the intention of the phrase as it is being proliferated.
The intention is gaslighting, defamation, and manipulation.
I think IT services (e.g. administration, support) and software development are effectively separate industries as concerned for labor organization. Business has clumped the two occupations into a single general category, but the reasons are in service to their own interests.
Software developers recently have not shown broad class solidarity or class consciousness.
Of course, some do exhibit such traits, and some have managed to find each other and to create pockets of organization and resistance.
Largely, however, the current generation of the occupation has been captured under the trance of techno-utopian ideals, as embodied in Silicon Valley, if not the more classically liberal ideals of Wall Street, and has been too comprehensively enclosed in its own bubbles to reveal any notice or concern that the systems operating from such ideals have been immense failures for the mass of the population.
Value from my work will be extracted because the sales staff needs to be paid, and the accountants need to be paid, and management, and everyone I rely on as a worker to both do my job and get paid.
Profit is not wages paid to workers other than yourself, even workers performing other job functions. Other workers receive wages because they provide labor, just as you receive wages because you provide labor. Profit is value generated by your labor, and by the labor of other workers, that is appropriated by the owners of a business, claimed for themselves, despite their not having contributed any labor to the productive processes of generating the wealth.
All sophisticated productive systems are based on division of labor, and even most primitive ones entail at least some. Division of labor is as old as the hills, but the unbounded accumulation of private wealth by the labor of workers is not universal and indeed relatively recent.
You should not support the profit motive of your employer simply because you have an occupational specialization. One is not bound to the other.
There will always be something additional removed for profit above and beyond the cost of all of those other labor needs that make my job possible, since I’m not the only person contributing to the earnings of the company, and the only way to make what I’m worth is to get out on my own,
Along a similar theme as above, you are conflating organization of labor in general, with particularly labor being organized by a private business under the profit motive.
The value I’m seeking to be recognised for is that I’m worth paying a higher percentage of the earnings I’m capable of bringing in.
Employers always pay workers, with the rarest exceptions, the absolute minimum required to retain their labor.
Otherwise, they would be eliminated by businesses that were more competitive.
Tech is a mature industry. It is evolving faster than others, but fast change is its nature, and will continue in the future. Do you mean that the industry will evolve away from the platform economy and social media, which supports the private interests of sustaining harmful economic systems, rather than empowering personal agency among the public?
What I mean is, if a claim is dishonest, given with an intention to manipulate or to mislead, then it is best simply to call out the deceitfulness, without searching for a more charitable interpretation.
There are no explicit and uniform policies, and one as such, if it were real, likely would be well known.
However, even such a policy would seem unlikely to make much difference practically.
It is abundantly clear that the system reproduces itself by being good only to those who are good to the system.
Anyone who carries deeper curiosity, or inclination to question, the dominating systems of authority, power, and ideals, is unlikely to last long under an oath to protect them.
I think the format of system, as framed around obedience to particular elite interests, and detachment from broader social interests, is completely a valid target of criticism.
Of course, arguments should be based on factually accurate premises.
Some may have relatively pleasant commutes, but a problem with employee choice is that some will exercise the choice to make them effectively as scabs, limiting the options of others by making them appear as less valuable to the employer.
It would be best if workers as a class seized the newly opened opportunities to build community close to their own residential neighborhoods, helping to begin challenging the imposed conditions under which the workplace is so dominant a locus of social interaction.
A job opening being posted offers no important information about the situation inside any company, nor about the count of applications that have been received, nor the count that has been ignored or rejected.
For most of us, not having a job represents having a much higher risk of death. The conditions of workers are essentially conditions of work or die.
If you think workers have as much bargaining power as companies, then you are, frankly, deluded. You may personally not notice the depth of the disparity, due to your having certain privileges, but you are still giving a distorted representation of your own conditions.
You have argued that because you have encountered an abundance of job listings, therefore, employers have less bargaining power than employees.
Job listings are not a scarce resource. Any employer may create any number for any reason merely by choosing.
Your argument is fatuous.
The entire structure of the relationship between worker and employer is based on inequitable balance of power. Workers must sell their labor to employers in order to earn the means of their survival, in order to avoid destitution, homelessness, and starvation. Employers, in turn, benefit from a disciplined and stratified working class, and from a reserve army of labor.
The prevailing principle for workers, under the employment system, is work or die.
I’m talking about the realities of recruiting personnel and the demographic and structural changes that cause those realities
…your experience is not the broad reality.
You are now being dishonest, by insinuating that I have presented an argument from personal experience, and also that you have presented a structural argument.
Both suggestions are false.
You have given no structural argument. I have given one, and have not appealed to personal experience.
There are more jobs than people and workers
As I say, job openings is not relevant. A job opening is not a resource of limited supply.
Any employer may post any number of job openings at any time, and also may eliminate any of them, at any time, and also may eliminate any job, at any time, dismissing whoever is holding it.
Indeed, an employer may also post a job opening, and simply reject every applicant, or even ignore every one.
There is no system in which this is not the case,
Yes, there is, obviously. As long as distribution of basic needs is decoupled from the system of organizing labor, everyone may survive even if not providing labor.
and that has nothing to do with your bargaining power.
It does, completely, for reasons I already explained. Only one side of the bargaining relationship is being subjected to grave threat.
A job is a social relationship between a worker and an employer.
A job opening is a declaration by an employer of being willing to receive applications. If any application is accepted, by a job being offered to an applicant, then the applicant may accept the job, and may hold it, as long as the employer remains willing to maintain the employment relationship.
A job opening is only a declaration.
Do you understanding the meaning of bargaining power?
Please think about the substantive meaning of the concept, and then provide a clear explanation, based on your understanding.
Now, do the same for a company declaring a job opening. Explain the meaning, clearly.
Please offer an explanation of how you may arrive, in general, at a sound conclusion, about which side of a negotiation has more bargaining power.
Now, please provide a meaningful argument that job applicants have more bargaining power than employers.
You have so far attempted to poison the well, but have not provided any genuine argument for your stated conclusion.
There may be some accuracy in your analysis about the causes for differences in preferences, but a broader issue might be the poverty of opportunities for meaningful social interaction outside the alienated relationships of the workplace.
Perhaps. There are other possible uses, though, such as commons spaces. Also, even housing that has a quirky design may carry value, within the context, in symbolizing transformation away from the old.
In principle, municipalities could gain control of the assets.
Little doubt, if a course were followed, the previous owners would be compensated at outrageously inflated prices, defended as rescuing the investors, but nevertheless, control by the public, in the sense of genuine control by the public rather than control by corporations pretending to be concerned for the public, could open pathways for many opportunities toward social interests.
Either you are trolling, or you are simply extremely thoughtless in forming your beliefs.
Clearly, you are entirely lacking any understanding of social structure.
You have rifled through a handful a variations of the same general theme, attempting to argue, or perhaps attempting to avoid arguing, that employers have less bargaining power than employees.
The employment relationship is not a relationship of mutuality or parity between the two participating parties, employer and employee.
A business is a social structure, which is completely different from an individual worker, and the billionaires who own businesses, and through them accumulate private wealth, have no shared interests with their workers.
Each business may expand to employ arbitrarily many workers, but workers have only limited time to sell.
Businesses completely control the resources in society that the population requires to survive. They profit from the labor of workers, who sell their labor to earn the right to live.
It cannot be overstated that your comparison to romantic partnership is so utterly absurd.
The number of job openings is not related to the bargaining power of employees.
Certainly, it is expected that politicians operate on the same side as developers and owners, and that all such parties insulate themselves from the population through NIMBY.
The larger issue may be that companies occupying the buildings supports interests of the owning class, and so its influence is being applied accordingly to shape the larger social forces.
How in the hell ( slrpnk.net )
I hate how much culture is controled by shitty people
https://sopuli.xyz/pictrs/image/23aa8373-a06b-4e1e-8ea9-c3cbf33f3d8c.jpeg
Workers are not valuable
So, I just need to rant for a minute about what’s just happened. It’s made me feel fairly disposable as a worker. I work in I.T. support. I help people who can’t operate technology with highly complicated issues. I am highly skilled, well trained and I have a diverse set of understanding for technical issues....
Infosys co-founder calls for youth to work 70-hour weeks • The Register ( www.theregister.com )
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Artists around the world are joining forces to protect their jobs, and their souls, from the ramifications of AI that sounds just like them.
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