Comment on They eliminated cashiers and keep the profits. NY Democrats are fighting back.
MystikIncarnate@lemmy.ca 10 hours ago
This is why I try to avoid self checkout. If I’m getting like 2 things and there’s already a line, sure, maybe… But if the lines are short, even if I only have a couple of things, I’ll visit a real cashier.
Not because I need help with it, and not because I want to “stick it to the man” or anything. I want to be part of the metric that continues to justify that a cashier is still a position to keep, and pay someone for. I do it so that there will still be cashier’s in the future, and someone can put food on their table because I didn’t choose to do free labor for the 0.1%.
I know, I know. I’m so selfish, I should tHiNk oF ThE sHaReHoLdErS…
Rivalarrival@lemmy.today 8 hours ago
“Cashier” has pretty much always been a heavily exploited, poverty-wage position. Cashiers might be putting food on the table, but their dickhead bosses aren’t paying them a living wage. They aren’t putting roofs over heads, or kids through college. Turnover is ridiculously, criminally high. People aren’t getting fired when the position is eliminated. They are leaving just as fast as they already were, and they aren’t being replaced.
The position is used to systematically exploit workers. Eliminating that position is a net positive.
Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com 7 hours ago
And yet people still work as “Cashier” if they can get the job,
Wonder why…
Oh, wait, it’s because the alternative of having no job and no income IS EVEN WORSE.
Welcome the Capitalism!
Rivalarrival@lemmy.today 6 hours ago
True. Very true. But the solution to that problem is a completely different conversation than what we have been having in this thread. That conversation starts with a “citizenship dividend”.
Democracy takes the political power of the individual, conveys it to government, where it is used to provide all manner of services. Those services are available to everyone, but they are not utilized equally by everyone.
The individual is not currently compensated for the use of their political power. We are taxed proportional to those services that we use, but those taxes don’t make it back to the source of the power that enabled those services.
That should change.
Each of us should be individually compensated for the government’s use of our political power. We should each receive an equal dividend. The most common term for this dividend is “Universal Basic Income”, and it should be enough for the food on our tables and the roofs over our heads. We should receive that income before we get out of bed on Monday morning. The 40 hours we typically work in the week should not be for basic subsistence, but should be entirely gainful.