> How do you square the circle of management wanting to pay employees the minimum they can for the maximum amount of their employees labor?
Competition, where people can go to the highest bidder, or start their own business if they know they can do better than working for someone else. Lack of freedom to go elsewhere features prominently in the abuses you and the article cite.
> The company is a giant thing, with lawyers, power and resources that are impossible for an individual to push against and win anything that is contested.
People can and have prevailed against companies in all sorts of lawsuits.
> Like 80 hour work weeks. Children working in manufacturing jobs. Unsafe working conditions with fire exits blocked. Which are all things that companies were doing before unions pushed against it.
And made them illegal, ending those as major problems, and the desire of most people to go into a union now that the most exploitative practices have been eliminated, like company towns. Though it's true that the occasional idiot employer will do something like this and get sued into oblivion. I'm pretty sure there was some idiot who locked their employees in while doing inventory overnight a few years back, for example.
When the capitalist class colludes to push down wages, make working conditions worse, and do mass layoffs when the company is so profitable that they have so much money they don't even know what to do with it and are therefore buying back stock, are there any laws that protect workers?
(those are the conditions that the article describes, not me)
Should there be?
Are the laws you're citing currently good, do you agree with them?
Is there a lawsuit that someone that isn't from a protected class can pursue to get a raise? Work less hours? Have enough coverage in a role that an employee can take holidays and vacation time? Have a consistent schedule?
> When the capitalist class colludes to push down wages, make working conditions worse, and do mass layoffs when the company is so profitable that they have so much money they don't even know what to do with it and are therefore buying back stock, are there any laws that protect workers?
Yes, the laws don't magically vanish. Also, you seem to be neglecting inflation in those numbers, which is the main reason things have gone out of whack economically.
The fact is you can have bigger numbers and less real wealth. There is greed causing that, but mostly from the political class who printed a ton of paper even though there isn't more stuff to actually buy with that paper.
It's ironic that the stock buybacks work like the inverse of this, showing that they understand the effect of printing too much, even if they're dick moves by people who are compensated mostly in stock.
But you can't really call this out without calling out our government robbing us by printing more paper in a regressive stealth tax, which is what started this whole mess. No, Putin didn't do us any favors with his bloodthirsty war, but he poured gas on a fire that was already burning strongly well before then.
> Are the laws you're citing currently good, do you agree with them?
All of them? No. But the ones keeping me from being stuck working for company scrip are pretty good.
> Is there a lawsuit that someone that isn't from a protected class can pursue to get a raise? Work less hours? Have enough coverage in a role that an employee can take holidays and vacation time? Have a consistent schedule?
You have to become more valuable for that, then you have more options. You know, invest into your own human capital. If you don't produce things that other people actually want, why should you be entitled to the things that they produce?
The thinking in this article just leads you down a downward spiral where everybody loses, when the economy is a positive sum game where we're constantly making new things that people want. If you want more of the pie, you have to start baking.
I say this as someone who has worked a crappy ass factory job. I can see why the lower end of jobs makes people feel this way, since I spent years in an awful factory working myself half to death, not feeling like I could even get vacation and not having any kind of stable schedule at all, given that I'd drive for two hours to work for 1d20 hours, not even knowing how many ahead of time.
Now I work at a place where my whole job is helping people, we work a stable schedule, and things are good. When I just naively asked for a "market" salary, they quoted a figure that was $20k higher than I expected.
And I did it by making myself more valuable, spending all the time I could get making some projects to show what I knew and finding places that valued that.
But if you follow this advice, you'll find yourself in a race to the bottom.
I was a marine. I got paid 1000$ a month to be shot at, by people who know how to hit a target. I know what a bad job for low pay is. I also know what solidarity is.
You gave a bunch of examples for why people don’t need unions, because laws will protect them, then undercut your examples with your personal anecdotes about making yourself valuable. You don’t need laws to protect if you’re “valuable.”
… but you’re only valuable until you aren’t. That was the whole point of the original article. Some of the most valuable workers in the world are currently getting kicked out on their asses by the bosses who’d been getting them massages and laundry services, free food and free transportation.
No question, that's a bad job for low pay. But based on the experience of friends, I can also guess that your solidarity did nothing to fix that, and GTFO from the military did.
And no, becoming valuable doesn't undercut anything I said. It means you have other people willing to hire you. This is an economic problem, with real profits going down even as numbers go up thanks to inflation that got boosted by energy supply issues.
There are issues from technical disruptions, e.g. the proverbial buggy whip makers. But these are more reason to understand what you do that gives value, not less. For example, if I were an artist, I'd be learning how to use Stable Diffusion, not hoping that I can continue to live on simple image commissions.
The laws against collusion aren't going anywhere, but if you expect to do things that no longer have value for money, you're living on borrowed time even if the government mandates purchasing of your work.
Competition, where people can go to the highest bidder, or start their own business if they know they can do better than working for someone else. Lack of freedom to go elsewhere features prominently in the abuses you and the article cite.
> The company is a giant thing, with lawyers, power and resources that are impossible for an individual to push against and win anything that is contested.
People can and have prevailed against companies in all sorts of lawsuits.
> Like 80 hour work weeks. Children working in manufacturing jobs. Unsafe working conditions with fire exits blocked. Which are all things that companies were doing before unions pushed against it.
And made them illegal, ending those as major problems, and the desire of most people to go into a union now that the most exploitative practices have been eliminated, like company towns. Though it's true that the occasional idiot employer will do something like this and get sued into oblivion. I'm pretty sure there was some idiot who locked their employees in while doing inventory overnight a few years back, for example.