Submitted 6 hours ago by VetOfTheSeas@discuss.online to workreform@lemmy.world
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Thats the billionaires squeezing profits out of every transaction, not just the enrollment fees, the rent on the property, the Healthcare and insurance premiums for the staff and the operation.
Everything they do is being optimized to squeeze wealth Into the mouths of billionaires.
Tax wealth not work.
This makes me think of an issue we had around here recently. We have a public company running the majority of school buses in our area. They receive funding from the government that should be enough to pay their drivers around 24$ an hour. Yet, they’ve been paying them 18$ or less for years.
This year the drivers tried to negotiate for a higher wage and the owners weren’t even willing to go over 19$… So they went on strike and buses stopped; parents had to make alternative arrangements. This went on for weeks, the employer just kept playing hard ball and not budging.
Surprisingly, parents were overwhelmingly on the driver’s side which I was happy to see. It reached a point where the owners almost had their contract taken away. After about 2 months, they finally gave in and agreed to an increase to about 21$.
What kills me is that in another town nearby with a different company running the buses, divers are being paid 23-24$ an hour like they’re supposed to. So the employer still came out ahead after everything was said and done. Apparently, the owners are from Toronto (about 3-4 hours away from us) and are just using this company to make money which explains their unwillingness to increase their workers pay.
Unrelated tant: Typical big city rich assholes fucking over people in smaller communities. It happened during covid with housing, they came over and scooped up every house they could just to rent them out for profit. I was paying 1000$ for a 3 bedroom apartment and some asshole from Toronto came over and bought it. Then when I moved out, they increased the rent to fucking 2500$…
I’m a school bus driver myself. We’re unionized (Teamsters) and the district operates its own buses. We make about $34 an hour and get subsidized health insurance and a small pension (after 10 years) as well. A neighboring district privatized their school bus service a few years ago; their drivers make $22 an hour with no benefits at all, their accident rate is 4X ours and the drivers keep getting busted for positive drug tests and drunk driving, and their operating costs (as measured per student/per mile transported) went up about 50%.
It is such an absolute no-brainer to realize that the only advantage of privatizing a service like this is to put money into the pockets of the bus service owners (as well as the officials and school board members that they bribe), and the disadvantages are literally every possible other aspect of the deal. And yet surprise surprise my district is discussing privatization to “save money”. It doesn’t help that our newly-hired transportation director is a member of the family that owns the largest private bus service in the area.
They also have their equity firms buy up anything still quality and decent, enshittify the product and wait for people to catch on and stop buying the product. Then they do it all over again with another company.
The solution is this: every sector of the economy has been optimized to extract as much money from everyone as possible. The is the implicit role of government–to help people make money. Have an idea that makes money? The government will help you make it happen.
This through-and-through corruption means that people now graduate in lifelong debt, working jobs that don’t cover the rent of places they can never own and spend money on health insurance they can never use because they can’t afford the co-pays and they are forced to buy an expensive car because that’s the only way to finance because the busroutes have all been purchased by car companies and liquidated long ago.
We are no longer citizens. We are cattle.
This is unsustainable.
It's about money. But a nice side effect is that it keeps the people busy so they have little down time to reflect on why they are in that condition, or more importantly, no time left to take action, as well as the threat that if they do anything, it could endanger their job and life. That's why they don't take away too much from too many, otherwise suddenly those masses don't have anything to threaten and a lot of free time to notice what happened and by whom. Bread and circuses.
100%, The New Deal in the USA was largely a result of the fear of a communist revoltuion during the Great Depression.
This is tangential, but I recently learned quite a bit about hospice care in Oregon. I was dating someone who worked in the industry. She said that private equity was buying up the industry, intending to bill Medicare for as much as possible. I asked why she and her hard-working co-workers didn’t start up their own hospice. Don’t quote me on the specifics, but 1) a new hospice here has to generate no profit for the first X years and 2) you have to have something like half a million in reserves in order to be allowed the license to start one.
The laws were well-intentioned, but they end up being a way for the wealthy to continue generating income on the backs of everyone else. If you have the industry knowledge and funding to start a hospice, you can do it, then sell it off to private equity after a few years. Rinse and repeat. The rich get richer and we all pay for it, largely via Medicare.
Yeah, if you are looking for waste, fraud, and abuse it’s this right here. It’s endemic in all things health related. Very few individual patients are wasting social welfare money, instead it’s almost entirely the providers who are milking the government.
Yet for some reason (hmmm) basically all the laws to “stop fraud” focus around the patients and not the providers. May have something to do with the fact that senators like Rick Scott being one of the biggest medicare fraudsters in the US.
Waste in government happens when private businesses get involved. There’s very little real waste (beyond, ironically, laws which create waste to try and stop waste or means test recipients).
Healthcare should be nationalized. We’d save huge amounts of money by eliminating all these private company hucksters stealing public funds.
My dad went into hospice a year ago and died less than a week later. We keep getting letters from Medicare indicating that his hospice program keeps submitting bills for services to them.
The math definitely adds up.
Shit Policies + Shit Wages = Shit Country
Sadly this math adds up. In my country those are public services. So no corporate greed is involved and no significat ammount goes to corruption or overpaid management.
Sadly this formula for example in daycare is true:
(“Huge payment from us” x “number of kids”) / " number of people getting paid" = “low number”
We usually just do not account for cooks, cleaners, janitors, administration in our intuition.
Yet somehow a struggling mom can take on babysitting as a gig and watch four kids a day by herself, for like $50 each. That includes cooking, cleaning, changing, and a smile on your kiddos face when they come home.
My sister does this. Shes the cook, cleaner, janitor, and administration.
I think part of the problem is also the fact that entrepreneurial types have convinced us that the necessary architecture for a successful business also happens to be the architecture which makes us give up most of our proceeds.
You are capable and can make a difference by yourself. You don’t need them.
Concerning you did not list educator in her tasks, and instead focused on the least important aspects of “childcare”.
Children shouldn’t be a business model, but proper ECE is vital at that age where they learn more than any other time in their life.
True facts. The “missing” money in the equation is all the boring expensive stuff. Rent, property taxes, legal, administration (bookkeeping, compliance), insurance (child safety/liability is a convenient excuse for sky-high premiums).
Assuming a 9hr work day to cover another persons workday… Likely closer to 10hr due to commute… but I wouldn’t know.
200/9hr=22/hr
BSing utils at 300/mo is a mere 0.40/hr
BSing rent/mortgage at 1200/MO is 1.64/hr
So basically she’s getting $20/hr assuming she does all 3 jobs just within that 9hr.
Not terrible but it does raise more questions and definitely doesn’t scale well. Like presumably these are older kids that can be ignored while cooking and cleaning or that 9hr estimate is low… And prob isn’t caring insurance for this? And utils, rent/mortgage is quite possibly off considerably…
Comparing someone doing it out their house vs an actual business is always going to be silly.
It adds up…
It adding up is the problem.
Because it means “job creators” who do nothing but posses titles to land and company stocks are syphoning off money.
If they need 3 staff for 21 kids, they’re going to pay as little as they can to keep 3 staff. And charge as much as they can to keep 21 kids.
There’s no correlation between what staffing costs and what prices are charged, why would there be?
Both are just line items, and the person in charge just wants the profit line to have the biggest number.
The larger the company is, the worst that becomes. Or if the company is small, but owned by someone with a dozen other companies.
Expecting salary to match what people pay is toddler logic, sure it would be great if it worked like that, but any adult thinking more than 2 seconds can see why that’s not related in the modern age. Hell, its been decades since the “if we pay workers a living wage a value meal goes up $0.02!”.
Americans literally all said they were fine with that, almost zero companies increased pay, and all of them.increaswd prices anyways
There’s obviously no correlation
“In reality high profits tend much more to raise the price of work than high wages.”
But that quote is from famously woke Adam Smith in his wokeism opus magnum Wealth of Nations.
Labor is often the biggest expense, but it’s far and away not the only one. They may pay extractive rent, property upkeep costs, property taxes, administrative costs like bookkeeping and legal advisory, and insurance. (Any business involving the safety and well-being of more than a couple kids has to have unbelievable premiums just for liability.)
I wouldn’t be so quick to point fingers at the people running a fucking daycare ffs. If they run a tight ship, the owners are making at best a moderately decent salary - they’re not fleecing parents because they literally can’t. Look instead at all those auxiliary industries which are required for legal compliance - especially the “consultant class” - legal, tax/accounting, and insurance. They have leeches attached all the way up the chain, starting with individual workers.
You can’t wrap your head around the economy being a wealth extraction system and not a society?
It adds up when you consider the parasites.
*boomers finally cashing in there absurd housing appreciation
Younger generations: we can finally use some of our family money to get on the housing ladder
Private equity nursing homes: not so fast, you gotta give us half of that or grannies going to the streets.
Oversimplifying but I think it’s worth thinking about an angle I haven’t seen here yet:
People to tend to trust Big Corporate care-givers and distrust private individual caregivers.
There are of course Good Reasons for this (Who do you sue if they hurt your loved one? Who licenses and trains them?), but among the Bad Reasons are: People just inherently trust a big name they’ve heard of before, especially if that big name has similarly gargantuan PR and legal departments who scrub any bad press away.
In other words, you could hire your neighbor to take care of your kids all day, but most people choose not to, and instead send much more money towards big businesses with massive overhead costs because people trust So And So National Healthcare more than Jane Doe.
Same with universities and overworked, underpaid professors without tenure.
Tangentially related a bit, but I feel like this is part of why the “no one wants to work” became a meme after COVID.
Because everything shutdown, some of these people realized just how much they were paying for day care and getting lunch and gas, and how little they made formit, that they realized they were better off just, not working that secondary income job and didn’t go back.
On the other hand, that was also the time where there seemed to be an increase in the online bullshittiness jumping through flaming hoops to apply for jobs that ultimately didn’t exist because companies had to show that they were trying to hire so they didn’t have to pay back loans, while saying people weren’t taking the positions or weren’t qualified so they could keep the money.
I remember at the tail end of things waiting for my order in a burger place where the owner was working because they were short staffed and he was bitching about “no one wants to work anymore” with a customer. The guy sounded like a dick, and all I could think was that either he’s not paying enough or he’s treating his employees like shit - that’s probably why they don’t want to work for him. Either way that was the first and last time I went there.
I would seem to me, there’s a market for opening a daycare that pays livable wages, and another where you could both undercut nursing facilities and pay the staff living wages.
I’m not a fan of capitalism by any means, but it does seem that this should market correct no? What’s stopping that from happening?
For a daycare, it’s because setting up a new one is expensive and risky. You need property, insurance, and licensing. You need employees you’ve vetted and trained. It takes months to do all this and during these months you aren’t making any income.
Nursing homes are even worse because they have a lot of legal requirements (that should exist!) which raises the barrier even further.
It’s hard to get the loans needed for these new businesses if you aren’t already wealthy.
The people that are wealthy enough to do this are instead investing in PE firms which buy up daycares and run them into the ground for profit.
With regards to nursing homes there’s a second level. I’m going to borrow from my own past writing here :
Due to the way that insurance pays these days and that they can take up to 18 months to review and deny a claim at which point you have to pay them back, it’s becoming harder and rarer for single practitioners or small groups to have the ability to have a practice (unless cash based, which is difficult and excludes a lot of people from care which I have FEELINGS about). Corporations have the administrative ability to have a dedicated coder, dedicated team for denial challenges etc. However corporations are predictably exploitative.
I really don’t see any way to run anything medial based without a dedicated admin team ensuring cashflow. Which sucks. It also costs a ton of money up front.
Interesting info, thank you!
insurance, frivolous lawsuits, lack of cooperation from regulating authorities, take your pick
The ‘I just don’t understand’ shit pisses me off so much.
Nursing homes in my area are like $3500 a month and they’ll have one or two people working the 12 hour shift from 7pm to 7 am making jack shit who don’t know a damn thing and then call the fire department for free labour if an elderly person has fallen to the ground and needs help getting up. The nursing home doesn’t want the financial risk of their employees getting hurt, or hurting a patient getting them off the ground. That might cost them a tiny sliver of the profits they take in.
FWIW, I’m a massage therapist who works in hospice. Legally, if someone falls I’m not allowed to try to get them up because that’s not an area of training for licensing/my scope of practice does not allow it. Someone working in a nursing home would be trained on safe transfers, BUT if there’s a chance the patient experienced an injury or is unable to assist in getting up themselves, it really is safer for all parties to get a lift assist from the fire department. If I had a loved one that needed to stay in a rehab/nursing facility and they sustained a fall, I’d rather the extra set of eyes assess before just putting them back in bed.
Look up Welltower Inc. According to equilar, welltower’s CEO, Shankh S. Mitra, received $821 million in compensation last year. Welltower boasted $10.8 billion in earnings.
Corporate greed pal. No one tell Luigi
Factor in owner profit and executive compensation and it all sums up.
I’ll never understand the economy. To me it’s just imaginary money. I did understand some parts of it thanks to the explained with bananas videos by Primate economics but that’s about it.
I’m no libertarian, but a major problem is that a lot of our industries are severely over regulated. Regulations are usually a good thing, but often they are pushed by big business to prevent future competition. If the only way to comply with the law is to retain a staff of lawyers, then it becomes impossible for individuals to set up small operations.
For example, there’s no reason we couldn’t have micro nursing homes set up in individual private homes. Maybe a trio of licensed nurses can operate one out of a home. Maybe they can care for up to half a dozen patients.
Yes, this does induce additional risk of abuse and neglect, but I would argue that is probably less likely to occur at such a human facility than one run by a big corporation. And maybe accepting a bit more risk is worth it if it allows people to get card they otherwise would be shut out from.
Like a group home?
Yes, but more for nursing home care.
Just like with everything, the US economic system creates a bunch of rent-seeking middle men who need to get paid to deliver any service that the public needs. The more necessary the service the bigger the piece they get, we call these “insurance companies” and their job is to take money out of every public service and they are effective because they can get the government to create a system that makes the mandatory in order to conduct business.
Well, let’s look at the math briefly.
First, what should a nurse make?
Add 20% cut to this for your risk and management.
Then, how many people should the nurse care for?
(Nurse pay * 1.20)/patients=cost per patient
(22*1.20)/5=5.28 per hour 24 hours per day So 126.72 a day Roughly 3,8000 a month per patient just for nurse care. Not including housing, utilities, food, or medication.
Alternatives could be mandatory civic or military duty at 18 for a few years and nursing duty could be in there?
Another alternative could be inmate care, paying minimum wage in municipal bonds, as a way to work off a sentence?
Pay nurses less, requiring less certification?
Outsource nursing to countries where wage arbitrage can be leveraged?
Obviously this was fast and dirty but illustrates the expense.
“Sorry, we can’t afford $3,800/month for nurses; this year, we only made $100 billion more than last year. Sorry, it just isn’t in the budget. You know times are hard, we all have to be a team player and buckle down here if we’re all gonna get through this together.”
That’s what you sound like.
Why the actual fuck would anyone think admin fees per employee would be percentage of salary?
That makes no sense.
It’s roughly 17k/year, regardless of if you pay $5/hr or 5k/hr.
I was thinking more like 20 percent markup as a profit margin. Other fees not included yet
While better pay for care workers could end up being a problem resulting in higher costs, when people like you bring up this topic it is without addressing the potential cost savings to be had by clawing back “administrative” costs.
Yes, there is absolutely some level of administration needed, and no one is arguing that we should make some aspect of care worse to enable better pay for nurses and other care staff.
The argument generally is that there is more than significant overpay happening at high levels (executive and levels close to them) which could be drawn from at little to no noticable difference to the executives and overpaid themselves while significantly improving things for the levels below them.
Oh no, one of them made 3m in a year instead of 4m? That’s 5 whole six-figure positions even with your 20% overhead.
Until such time as these sorts of hypothetical talks about the impact of raising pay begin to also including the hypothetical that this additional pay could come by redirecting money that already exists and already goes into these systems, examining executive compensation packages and the like, you aren’t going to make any ground on the “costs” argument.
Because there’s currently a lot more than 20% of expenses going to “overhead”. Maybe 20% to administrative overhead, plus 50% to executive compensation packages.
And look, I get that not every exec is Musk, and the margins can be smaller than people may assume. I have family that run a small family business who have to make those sorts of decisions and costs absolutely do add up fucking quick.
But that’s all the more reason to be open and honest about this shit instead of trying to frame this with only one side.
There probably are some hospitals out in podunk nowhere where there isn’t anything left to cut from the execs and administration, but there are plenty of places (at least in the US) that are explicitly for profit.
So just as I have family running a small family business where things are fair for their grand total of… four employees I think, my wife’s family used to be close with the elder care magnate in their area. Wife’s family matriarch was close friends with the lady who married the elder care magnate.
We had to sit and watch this entitled bitch have a puff-piece novel ghost-written about the trauma of having a dedicated live in care team for her own mother while she declined, dedicated driver and multiple handlers so they could go on beach days still… while her former supposed best friend (my wife’s mother) suffered in one of her husband’s facilities. Had the audacity to message asking if there was anything she could do, but couldn’t even get off her ass and visit. To even risk seeing the true mess of elder care as her husband ran it.
So yeah, all that shit to say: Yes, the money has to come from somewhere, but there’s a whole bunch of fucking money right fucking there that keeps going into hoards instead of actually being put to use for the betterment of the company/workers/etc.
"we can't pay for basic services because we started another war that's costing us trillions"
InvalidName2@lemmy.zip 3 minutes ago
You see, honey, when a billion dollars and a billionaire love each other very much …