Submitted 2 months ago by sanitation@lemmy.radio to workreform@lemmy.world
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Original Reddit discussion: View on Reddit
What amazes me is how many people believe they will get universal basic income from the pedophile tech bro overlords who don’t pay taxes are actively gutting the meager safety net and worker protections we have. The cognitive dissonance is staggering
I would worry more about what conditions come with that UBI. They can make you agree to anything.
They all seem to just be lies dangled over everyone’s heads to keep them working into the grave.
There’s an argument that ubi will make you reliant on the state (which will be owned by private interest via the network state…)
Basically. The elites recreate society through who gets meaningful work and who gets an ubi and has to dance on TikTok selling products to the other group who has the money to buy.
Who gets meaningful work = the producers. Those who ship. The rest get to be beggars.
I guess I should say, those who own the means of production. Since it might seem like I believe the elites produce, which I don’t.
Welfare is a system of control. UBI would be used similarly.
I guess that’s why they’re trying to buy up all the farms
Every little luxury we have with working, from safety to days off, is paid for in blood.
Companies will begrudgingly give you the bare minimum they’re mandated to, and pretend you’re only getting it out of their sheer appreciation and benevolence.
Maddening.
I’ve been salaried for just over 30 years consecutively. What are breaks? What is overtime? You’re speaking a foreign language to me.
Worse, there’s actual practical evidence that a 4-day workweek for the same pay still makes the company more money and the workers happier and healthier but adoption is still glacial.
Despite having a full industrial machines, some workers here in a milk factory work for 24h a row and rest for 48h, mathematically it’s the same as working 8h a day but who tf does that to their workers? another industry I worked at kicked most of their workers and increased work time to 12h a day, everyday, even weekends, no shitty breaks, only 30min for lunch; bosses really don’t care, whether they have machines or not, they just don’t care for us.
It’s something of a joke that office workers do maybe 2-3 hours of work a day.
Or, at least, they did. And now offices are playing the “how many people can we lay off before the system collapses” game
It’s not a joke, there’s be studies done that prove it. Its closer to 50/50 iirc though.
It’s not a joke, there’s been studies done that prove it.
I mean, more that it’s a joke that we have to sit in an office for 8+ hours to do 3 hours of work.
So 4 hours of an 8 hour shift is wasted.
I think it’s unreasonable to call it “wasted”. Like telling a pro-athlete “if you’re not running the ball continuously for every minute of the game you’re wasting your potential”.
Some of it is socializing (which has knock on benefits). Some of it is simply resting/recovery (because intellectual labor takes real energy and people get exhausted). Some of it is bureaucracy.
The real gains of IT are in the speed of data transfer and processing. That saves human labor to a degree, but it also proliferates the labor. Excel allows every Mom & Pop accounting firm to do what required an army of NASA “computers” 60 years ago. But because everyone is doing this level of rigorous, high speed accounting, it actually requires more overall work, not less.
The individuals in question are no more or less efficient today. They were taking coffee breaks, long lunches, and clocking out early to play golf at NASA, too.
There is no war but classwar.
also the increase 30-40+hrs is design to exhaust people so they are to tired to protest for reforms socially, financially and to keep people disengaged from politics/ and information.
I suggest an alternative. All war is class war. Start fighting like it.
The bosses are much more likely to shorten the work week while shortening pay even more and then using the “not full time” to reduce any benefits. Be wary.
Benefits should not be a job thing. Start there.
They do this anyways… albeit through wage stagflation, reducing benefits, layoffs, increased contract work forces, etc. Workers have always had to fight for their livelihood.
It’s not just that technology doesn’t shorten labour time on it’s own. It’s that technology disrupts the status quo.
A union uses strikes, sabotage, work stoppages, and everything they can to get an agreement that only a master weaver is allowed to sell woven products, and that anybody who wants to become a master weaver must first serve a 7 year apprenticeship. Then weaving machines are invented. The disruption isn’t merely that a master weaver can make a woven product in a much shorter time and the additional profit goes to the owner of the machine. It’s that now the owner of the machine is hiring orphan children to run, clean and fix the machines and the master weavers are unemployed. And, the government, rather than enforcing the laws about 7 years apprenticeships pass new laws to make the destruction of machines punishable by the death penalty.
New technology doesn’t just mean that workers have to fight to get better treatment than they currently have. It means an uphill fight just to get the same level of treatment they had before the introduction of that new technology. Just to give a simple example of something that happened within the last few decades: from 5pm to 9am people were off work, and weekends were free. Then phones, cell phones smart phones, etc. meant that it was much easier to get in touch with an employee during those hours. Now many people’s time off isn’t truly free time because they can be forced into working (even if it’s just replying to a message) during their time off.
They didn’t just hand us the forty hour workweek. You can thank the early unions for that. Organizations like this.
My union had been fighting for 32 hours for years. Right when I retired, the college agreed to 36.
I’m “lucky” to have the option of a compressed 4x10 work week
the Friday off is beautiful. if I had a commute, doing that 20% less often that would be a big plus too. but the fact that this is presented as a perk and not a standard option, as well as the requirement to often work on my “weekend” (Friday aka unscheduled day) kind of makes it less of a perk
They pay overtime for that “weekend” work. Right?
Out of curiosity, assuming a lot of this discussion is US-based, which I’m not, do you have the work from home options there very much? I know managers in my organization often work 4-4.5 days but a day or half a day is at home.
Others that can work most of their job from their home! Not sure what this is looking like in other countries these days (I’m in Australia). Obviously depends on the job!
If anything we’re back sliding in the other direction and I think one of the most troubling things I’ve noticed is that workers don’t see unions as themselves fighting together but another organization they can complain to.
Is there any way to build a 100% decentralized union?
Class consciousness
US labor laws and income distribution are pathetic.
The worst part is the majority of people actually want to work
From the perspective with decent workers rights in EU and I’m not against the reforms or improved payment.
Excluding capitalisms exploitation. Work does have a nice bonus of forcing a fixed structure and a simple goal. Those can be rather beneficial.
From personal experience, i do start to slowly drift towards depression during my mandatory 2 week vacations as oftentimes there just isn’t anything to do and i tend to doomscroll way too much. Nighttime sleep goes to shit and day-night cycle starts to shift. Sometimes even the 1 week vacation can be hard to manage.
Usually i do try to counter it by planning some home renovation for that time to keep me active.
So I used to work in industrial automation, and I did see a factory owner buy a robot to automate a task because it was a brain meltingly simple task that was unpopular with his workers. The robot was slower, and more expensive than a human.
It was taking a small piece of metal from a stack and putting it in a machine and pushing a button (not sure if he had a two-hand-no-tie-down set up) then taking the now bent price of metal out of the machine and putting it on a stack. I think they had about 8 hours production per week of demand for the part.
He didn’t do it out of the kindness of his heart but because he got tired of paying recruiters to find people willing to do it.
*fucking
starvation isn’t even about how much food you produce but about how much the amount of food supply goes up and down from one year to the next.
Or Henry Ford oddly enough
That was back before it was ruled illegal to not always prioritize profit.
Biggest mistake in history
technically companies today don’t have to always prioritize profit. they just have to follow the orders of the shareholders, and most for-profit investors are gonna demand that profit be maximized.
if you have a company but it’s 51% city-owned then it doesn’t have to maximize profit. the city can set its own goals, such as selling a certain number of items at a certain maximum price or opening up a grocery store in food deserts. public transport is typically a city-owned company, yet prioritizes availability over profit.
From the article you linked:
Shareholder wealth maximization is a standard of conduct for officers and directors, not a legal mandate. The business judgment rule [which was also upheld in this decision] protects many decisions that deviate from this standard.
This is why the Golden Age of American manufacturing throughout the '50s and '60s was able to raise so many families into the middle class: business decisions were made for the good of the business as a whole, because a well-trained and fairly-treated workforce was more productive and less likely to strike. Preserving the maintenance of the business is what improved shareholder value.
Union-busting and Reaganomics gave us Jack Welch and the pump-and-dump bullshit we see now, not a hundred year old court ruling.
I’ve seen unions in plants reinstate workers and remove machines because it reduced labor.
this reminds me of a story … the american foreign politics minister visits china in 1950. he sees the workers are building a new railway using shovels instead of machine baggers. he asks the construction leader “why don’t they use engines for that?” the construction leader replies “sothat it creates more jobs”. american minister replies “they should use spoons the next time!”
factory jobs have alway been abusive and exploitative, they wouldve done it either way if it saves them money. look at Lays union protest that happened a few years ago. they were working 60+hrs/week.
Yup.
Workers have to fight hard for every little thing, which is why it’s so sad to see us back pedal by electing born rich anti-worker dipshits into the highest offices in the land. We’re losing things that will take years and a lot of struggle to get back.
Of course not. It needs to be legislated, just like the 40 hour workweek and worker safety laws. Is there anybody who really thinks companies will disadvantage themselves against their competitors?
I’m so fucking done, it will take 4 years for us to get a 40 hour workweek and yeah that’s great but it’s a fucking joke
Gracias Sheimbaum
Here in Colombia it were like that and did it work. I think it’s because not terrorize the right hand
yeah they gave us the same reasons here and I get it to certain extend. the same companies that have exploited us for decades were scared of this reduction and asked for this compromise.
I’m still mad that the so called “left leaning” president bent to their claims but was not able to secure TWO free days a week
Exactly. Productivity gains don’t magically turn into free time for workers unless people organize and demand it.
Right and why would it? If you let people take advantage, they will. Doesnt matter what’s right. Doing what’s right gets you fucked in this world. Literally people distrust you if you try to do what’s right. It’s a lonely existence and that’s fucking sad.
The grabbing hands grab all they can
All for themselves - after all
It’s a competitive world…
not really because it is a race to no where. It is the inverse a period of die back. It seems like they got something going but in reality the are trying to make us to pay for capitals mistakes. We ain’t building no infrastucture just boxes with gpus powering boring chat bots and spying on those with no skrilla. This is the end. The economy is shrinking. A pyramid with a brittle tip.
32!? I was thinking like…4?
Always start negotiations asking for (far) more than what you want!
Fine, make it 60!
This isn’t quite right.
A technological improvement in production efficiency does shorten labor time per output.
However, employers don’t respond to this new efficiency with shortened work hours.
They respond with fewer staff.
Improved technological efficiency, leads to higher unemployment.
I’d love to have a 32 hour week.
It’s been a struggle lately to get even 16 hours of work a week lately.
Turns out, problems are more complex than just what goes on in the US
you can have a 32 hour work week but you get paid for working 32 hours
leave your ai to cover for 8 hours. they’ll love it
This, I feel, is the real message behind Animal Farm
The machine is eternally hungry.
vane@lemmy.world 2 months ago
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This reminds me of this old productivity / salary chart that shows how fucked we are.
RaccoonBall@lemmy.ca 2 months ago
wtfhappenedin1971.com
vane@lemmy.world 2 months ago
great but there are more studies about it just look up salary vs productivity
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shaztopher@lemmy.zip 2 months ago
reddit.com/…/the_bad_economics_of_wtfhappenedin19…
AdolfSchmitler@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Literally been flat lined for 50 years
BillCheddar@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Weird that the divergence is also the same point in time where (a) modern conservatism is born, (b) Fox News is conceived, and © the middle class died.
Total coincidence, I’m sure.
the_wizard_of_0Z@lemmy.ca 2 months ago
“Class now observe this is called a K shaped economy.” The students now start to grind their teeth.