There is no war but class war.
This reminds me of this old productivity / salary chart that shows how fucked we are.great but there are more studies about it just look up salary vs productivity
“That’s a bad source. So anyways, here’s a Reddit link.”
Would you like me to buy a domain for $10/yr and copy and paste it onto there for you, would that make it seem more legitimate somehow?
US labor laws and income distribution are pathetic.
The worst part is the majority of people actually want to work
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.
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.
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Every little luxury we have with working, from safety to days off, is paid for in blood.
Even things like the 15 minute break.
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.
32!? I was thinking like…4?
Always start negotiations asking for (far) more than what you want!
Fine, make it 60!
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.
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?
yes, I am hourly and get paid for my OT. unfortunately not above base hours at 1.5x rate though, that’s only at the legal requirement of over 44 hours. bit of a mistake on the company’s end, there, as it doesn’t encourage OT since if I’m only going to work 46ish hours this week, why even bother since I’m only making 1.5x on two of those extra six hours
I am always a bit surprised when people ask me that tho lol because like fuck no I would not work for free
Wth 44? Time and a half? Jesus, when did it stop being 40 and double?
it hasn’t been doubled my whole working career. though to be fair I’m only in my 30s. I am aware of a couple companies that did double time on Sundays, which predictably resulted in employees gaming the system to sit in the office on Sundays and watch Netflix.
“good” companies around here will pay overtime over your base hours, which is typically 40 hours. the legal minimum is to pay 1.5x regular rate after 44 hours. pretty much every company does the legal minimum of 1.5 times regular rate for overtime
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.
I want more people to think though
“If this tool makes me produce double, and I get paid the same, who’s keeping all that new value?”
If your productivity doubles, they will lay off half the people, and all gains disappear upwards. It’s already happening.
Maintenance workers, the engineers who designed the machine, everyone above who keeps it running.
Plants get shut down yearly for maintenance, stuff need to be lubed, replaced, upgraded etc.
Those contractors are gonna be making 3x what you do. Sure they’re keeping some extra profit, but their expenses also go up proportionally too. Millwrites here make over $50 an hour, the company charges out at $100+ per man hour. Maintenance is friggen expensive on machines.
All you need is 2-4 weeks off a year, and they save money while you’re off. Machines always cost money.
If that was true, if it was a wash to get the new tool for the owner, they wouldn’t do it. That’d be silly.
Upgrading someone from pen and paper to a laptop with LibreOffice is probably going to dramatically (let’s say 4x) increase their productivity, without a corresponding 4x increase in maintenance cost.
You know companies have whole branches deticated to computer support and cyper security, right?
Or do you think that before laptops businesses had their own divisions of Quill-Certified Problem Solvers and Paper-Based Troubleshooting Engineers?
And you think that costs more than the productivity gains from having the computer?
No. I think the computer industry is more expensive and creates more jobs than all the paper and pen industries have trough the history.
What does that have to do with the ownership class extracting value from labor?
Hmm. What could industry producing millions of jobs world wide offer for working class. What a tough nut. You got me stumped. Maybe we should have just stayed using pen and paper.
Jokes on you, I get paid for my five weeks of holidays.
Which is likely less than your full time rate, or it’s accounted for in total yearly “salary”. You’re paying for it somehow, even if it’s making a dollar less instead.
And think more the lowly workers, the ones that only get 2 weeks, and that’s because they’re forced to by laws.
Lowly workers? I had five weeks paid as a dishwasher. Make unions strong and reap the benefits.
They have their own issues, as described in my story in another comment.
They made a company waste millions of dollars replacing a job, than forced them to remove the machine and reinstate the worker.
They create problems where they are none, than celebrate when they win.
You are also fooling yourself if you don’t think you’re not paying for that time off another way. Most people would rather have the higher hourly rate.
I like the time off. I like having the ability to plan a trip every year (near or far), and not having to worry about how my bills are going to get paid.
Much better for my mental health than to work those weeks and not have anything to look forward to.
the contractor getting over double is a bad deal for the worker unless they are providing significant infrastructure like complex expensive tools and vehicles and such.
30 hour workweek should have been 40 or 50 years ago. 30 would be late. We should be moving down to 20 about now.
I think you mean “we should be fighting hard for a 20 hour work week now, as hard as our ancestors fought for an 8 hour work day, and we should be willing to die for the cause, the way they died for theirs.”
It should not even take that much. A big issue was unions somewhere in the 80’s or even in the 70’s stopped looking to shorten hours in favor of increased wages with overtime. The membership were easily swayed by time and a half. This lead to the reversal of the 40 hour week. More than 40 became more normal than 40. Of course then over time they have gotten rid of access to time and a half and more defining of roles as exempt.
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 voluntarily disadvantage themselves against their competitors?
The machine is eternally hungry.
Despite having full industrial machines, some workers here in a milk factory work for 24h in 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 tomato factory 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.
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 workers fighting together but another organization they can complain to.
Is there any way to build a 100% decentralized union?
