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It’s not time stolen from you as the work needs to be done either way, but it’s money stolen from you as you’re either underpaid or paying too much for what you’re buying.
well if you got more money per hours of work or things were cheaper, you would probably work less
How many hours of work are necessary to build car? Does it suddenly take less just because the employees are paid more? No.
If a client wants an employee’s help for 15 minutes, will they suddenly want their help for 10 minutes just because the employee is paid more? No.
There are bullshit jobs around, but most of them aren’t, the with needed to accomplish the tasks will still be the same.
no but people may work in shifts still getting the same total man hours in a company.
Unemployment is pretty low right now, where will you find the staff for that?
For once companies could downsize not because they want to fire people but because there is an excess of jobs. There are many many businesses that produce in excess (take the clothing sector for instance) or others that have already hired beyond sustainability (software and tech). Many governments also have programs to hire in excess for non-required roles to reduce unemployment. There is so much room for optimization but realistically with other effects like average number of kids per family decreasing some degree of automatization beyond what we have now and some change in people’s lifestyles will be required too.
Suddenly everyone has a shit ton more money and you think demand wouldn’t go up?
Production would actually have to increase.
some may fall into rampant consumerism even more, but some (hopefully many) will come out of it because they have money and time for decent hobbies actually. so instead of buying tons of easily consumable crap stuff of every kind to pass whatever little time they have, instead they will focus on buying less but more decent of the stuff they are really interested in.
You are not only working to mentain a functional society, you are also working to constantly grow it (each year more stuff must be made, more money must be earned, more of everything) it and also to create a very big surplus for the rich. We also burn perfectly edible food, ruin perfectly wearable clothing and make electronic devices that intentionally break in a few years to get you to buy another one sooner just to get the 1% more money. If we didn’t do all that and they lived normal, non-luxury lives, everyone would have a lot more free time. If everyone worked only 20 hours a week, we’d make enough to sustain our society.
Also, most workers are so deeply alienated because they know that they aren’t working for themselves, they are working for someone else. Which is why most people simply stop giving a fuck at some point.
There is so much inefficiency because most who do the actual work don’t have much motivation to do a decent job, yet alone think about what they are doing because you simply get punished, or at least don’t get any reward, for thinking. And they people who (should) do the thinking often don’t have a clue as they live in a bubble.
And of course there is all the bullshit about shipping stuff across the world to do different stuff when it is completely unnecessesary…
If everyone was making more money demand would increase therefore people would need to work more, not less…
It’s time stolen from you if you have to commute to your job.
It’s time stolen from you if a lot of your job is pointless busywork.
Very often the work does not need to get done, the work uses up a poorly paid employee’s entire work day to squeeze out an extra fraction of a percent of profit.
You’re right about money, but they are often stealing both time and money.
I believe it was Marx who first observed that superfluous jobs, as well as unemployment, are inextricably linked to capitalism.
EDIT: Found a relevant Marx quote in Grundrisse:
Capital itself is the moving contradiction, [in] that it presses to reduce labour time to a minimum, while it posits labour time, on the other side, as sole measure and source of wealth. Hence it diminishes labour time in the necessary form so as to increase it in the superfluous form; hence posits the superfluous in growing measure as a condition – question of life or death – for the necessary.
See also Marcuse, 1969:
The absorption [i.e. disappearance] of unemployment and the maintenance of an adequate rate of profit would […] require the stimulation of demand on an ever larger scale, thereby stimulating the rat race of the competitive struggle for existence through the multiplication of waste, planned obsolescence, parasitic and stupid jobs and services.
Great quote. I’m sure people have been spying out bullshit jobs before the industrial revolution, too.
On call standing in the corner to present candied dates or wave palm fronds over the emperor was necessary only for the emperor to fool himself into thinking he was inherently more important than anyone else.
I can’t imagine nobody noticed.
See also: bullshit Jobs
See exactly: bullshit jobs
It is time stolen from you as well. You only need to work a fraction of the time you do in order to cover your wages, the rest of the day is free profit for the Capitalist.
You’re ignoring that what you output from your work needs to be… Outputted? So the issue is that you make less than you deserve for the amount of work that you do… If you make 25$/h and it wealth got redistributed so you would make 100$/h it doesn’t mean you could work 10h instead of 40h, your employer would still need you to 40h (or close to it, maybe you would be motivated by the increase in salary and work faster but that’s speculations) to achieve the same result.
If unemployment was at 75% and wealth redistribution happened to quadruple salaries then we could say “Instead of having 25% of the population working 40h/week at 25$/h, we’ll have 100% of the population working 10h/week at 100$/h so in the end the people that are working already will be making the same annual salary” but that’s not the case.
A lot of the work we do is effectively to satisfy the (constantly changing and growing) desires or the wealthy (or let’s say, the desires of the people who employ wage workers).
Simple example: labour productivity has grown with 70% since the 70s while real wages have stayed more or less the same. So that growth in output hasnt been going to workers. (The time that productivity increase could have freed up, is now used to produce stuff that the workers do not get to consume themselves).
You’re talking about something else entirely.
Rich people disappear, wealth is redistributed, somehow you guys think that building a house will suddenly take less work hours than it does at the moment? No it won’t, construction workers will be paid more to work just as many hours building that house, they won’t suddenly work 20h/week.
Rich people disappear, wealth is redistributed, somehow you guys think that building a house will suddenly take less work hours than it does at the moment? No it won’t, construction workers will be paid more to work just as many hours building that house, they won’t suddenly work 20h/week.
Probably a bad example. The wealthy are the cause of fewer houses being built than are needed to maintain the surplus allowing reasonable pricing in the market. And it is being done primarily to extract more money from people without actually producing anything. So, that house would actually get built and probably to better standards than are currently seen with the efforts to maximize profit.
Holy fuck! That’s not the fucking point! The time to end up with a finished product is the fucking same no matter how much people are getting paid! Your screws and nails don’t go in any faster! You can’t type faster than your fastest typing speed! You can’t call more than one client at a time! You’re just paid more but the work isn’t accomplished faster!
You’re so blinded by rich people that you’re unable to analyze the rest of the issue!
So paying higer profit share or wage to construction wokers won’t encouage more people to spend more time building stuff?
Did no one tell you about how competetive markets work? supernormal profits get bid down by market entry.
banks and oligopolistic top tier construction companies, and landowners don’t want more construction, or entry into the market.
by your logic we should just offer people slave contracts and they’d opt in.
Holy fuck! That’s not the fucking point! The time to end up with a finished product is the fucking same no matter how much people are getting paid! Your screws and nails don’t go in any faster! You can’t type faster than your fastest typing speed! You can’t call more than one client at a time! You’re just paid more but the work isn’t accomplished faster!
That’s really not correct. Like, what you are saying here:
Your screws and nails don’t go in any faster!
is literally contradictory to reality.
Automation and technological advances literally make work more productive. A carpenter getting a share of the value of their labor that is both keeping pace with inflation and productivity would mean that they can invest in newer tools and equipment that can allow them to accomplish more in a safer manner in a shorter time. They could, for example, purchase a cordless framing nailer and spare batteries, eliminating the need to setup a workplace generator and pneumatic compressor, which would need to be moved periodically as they work. It also eliminates the hose as a potential workplace tripping hazard. Assistive robotic exoskeletons increase carry capacity while reducing strain on joints, reducing likelihood of injury while increasing efficiency.
You can’t type faster than your fastest typing speed!
But you can automate repetitive tasks, allowing more to be done in the same amount of time. More resources allow one to invest in their own or others’ knowledge to accomplish that.
You can’t call more than one client at a time!
This is true. But how many calls or meetings really are needed and can’t be sorted via email or Slack?
You’re so blinded by rich people that you’re unable to analyze the rest of the issue!
I think that you may be projecting a bit here. I’m just tired of the bleeding of the working class that has been actively in progress in the West for the last half century at least. I’m happy to dig into the slews of data showing how and why people are worse off than their ancestors and where that money has been going (spoiler: the wealthy have been hoarding it and continue to insatiably claw back more via price gouging and wage theft).
I’m not ignoring anything. Commodities trend towards being sold at their Value, and since Value comes from Labor and Natural Resources, Capitalists necessarily pay Workers less than the Value they create. Ie, if a Worker creates $500 in Value per day yet is paid 15 dollars an hour for their 10 hours, this means they have made $350 in Value purely for the Capitalist. With their 50 dollars in Value per Hour created, they cover their wages in a mere 3 hours, rather than 10.
A similar process can be seen in Feudalism, though it was more distinct. In Feudalism, serfs covered rent, then produced for themselves. They were able to clearly see what has been taken. Capitalism advanced on this concept to obscure exploitation through the idea of wages, yet still they take profit via paying Workers less than the Value they create.
I recommend reading Wage Labor and Capital and following it up with Value, Price and Profit if you want further elaboration and proof of said concepts, and have a couple hours to spare.
I’m talking about a separate issue! Even if rich people don’t exist anymore, something that takes 500h work hours to accomplish will still take 500h to accomplish, you won’t suddenly have to work less.
You are not talking about a separate issue.
Going off my example from earlier, the Workers would only need to work 3 hours to maintain their standard of living, the extra 7 hours are pocketed by the Capitalist for their enrichment alone.
Removing the wealth siphons reduces the amount of necessary work, as if you only need 3 hours to cover yourself without a Capitalist involved, you only need to work 3 hours.
Society overproduces vast amounts of goods and works far longer than necessary purely for Capitalist enrichment, not to cover themselves.
Except a lot of people’s work output is kinda fucking pointless.
If we managed the way we worked better and didn’t have the mindset of work for works sake/for the sake of the rich, we could be working a lot less.
I think Lemmy’s vision of productivity is skewed by the fact that there’s a lot of office workers on here…
I work in a grocery store, and while I would still need to be in about 25-30 hours a week to ensure product is on the shelves a massive amount of my time at work is useless facing and looking busy after the first few hours of real work restocking. If I was paid fairly I could come in for about 3 hours every day and have everything that needed done done without spinning on a thumb all day just to barely make rent.
It’s more skewed towards Marxist analysis of Capitalism and Value.
it impairs the economy. More folks could hire people to do things. Remember there were milkmen and tv repair men at one point in time. You could hire someone to clean your house and they could hire someone to do their taxes. its amazing how an economy works when people have money to spend rather than hoard.
There were also icemen at one point. Then we invented refrigerators. Nobody seems to miss having a giant block of ice delivered to their house to keep the food we buy at the stores cold. But one thing I think a lot of people miss is appliances that didn’t need to be thrown away.
Fam, at my last job they had roughly 23h of activity for me per week. 17h of nothing to do and still having to stick around because i needed every penny to be able to pay my bills.
Anecdotal, plenty of jobs where downtime doesn’t exist.
For many jobs it is indeed stolen time https://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=4042
I don’t mind working when it’s either something I enjoy doing and would do without it being a job, or if I can see it tangibly improving something or someone by providing something other people (or myself) need.
If all I see is the boss getting richer while I am doing something I literally would only do because I am being paid to do it, fuck that job.
They won’t sell the Hilux in the US because it’s too easy to turn into a technical. Nobody out here with a Tacoma technical
Bunch of yeehawdists rolling around in Hiluxes would be sub-optimal
If it makes you feel better…
Nobody seems to have mentioned the very oddly placed highlight
No they aren’t. The number that’s increasing is a price tag, not cash. That’s why no one’s wallet or bank account gets bigger when that same number goes down.
Who do you think the profit of increasing the price tag goes to? The workers in the factory to help them deal with inflation, or the rich shareholders?
Who do you think the profit of increasing the price tag goes to?
Whoever sells the appreciated asset to someone else, who was willing to buy it at the new, higher price.
And if they don’t sell, there is no profit, it’s still unrealized.
Unrealized on paper, but not in a practical sense when they can borrow against those assets to access their wealth tax-free.
borrow against those assets to access their wealth tax-free.
…until they pay the loan back, you mean.
Hell, loans better be tax free, it’s not income if you have to pay it back.
P.S. Some food for thought: if workers’ labor is being ‘skimmed’ by employers, making workers into a source of profit as a result, then why would a company ever downsize as a measure against financial difficulty? Why would any business ever fire anyone who’s doing their job, if worker = profit for the business?
I’m not opposed to being rich, or really even being filthy rich, I think the fair chance of being able to live lavishly is a great motivator for folks to shoot for their best ideas.
What I am opposed to is being so obscenely rich that it would take several generations of chronic mismanagement for your descendants to manage to blow through the funds within a time limit of “by the end of the 22nd century.”
Most generational wealth has reduced to being a small supplement for the recipient to supplement still having to work for their living with by the time the original person who built it up’s grandkids have had their turn with it, maybe the great grandkids if the family makes it a point of staying grounded and using the wealth wisely.
That’s not even from blowing through it like madmen, it’s from how many people it’s getting divided among by then and how likely any one of those individuals are to just decide they don’t need to work anymore on getting access to it.
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I’m fine with people having money, but there should be a hard cap.
Billionaires do not need to exist.
There doesn’t even need to be any kind of cap, they just need to pay more taxes and be prohibited from buying politicians.
At some point people do not actually become happier from additional wealth. If you create a system where people are allowed more than that you are just giving them power over vast quantities of resources for no particular reason. It becomes an incentive only for those whose lust for more cannot be satiated and is anti democratic by it’s very nature.
That’s actually not entirely true, although what is true is arguably even worse.
See money does keep buying you happiness…just in diminishing returns.
So basically, the ultra wealthy are drug addicts forever chasing the satisfaction they once knew when they got their first big hit having achieved an independent standard of living, but every dose is less and less effective even as they keep upping it, eventually they die strung out and paranoid of everyone around them.
Agreed, but just saying “you can only have this much money” will get fought tooth and nail, IMO the way to do it is through basing the rates in tax brackets on the percentage of wealth controlled by people in those brackets.
It’s not a “hard” cap, but it does pit the rich against each other to have more than the other rich assholes while not having so much that they’re all paying an above 100% tax rate.
Might not be as delicious as frying them for ourselves, but watching the rich eat each other will be far more entertaining, and is shown to be far more effective. Take it from the once Shah of the Sasanian Empire Kavad, if any one noble is getting too powerful, the best tools to use in bringing them down is other nobles jealous of their ascendency.
But then we still live under the same corrupt system and nothing fundamentally changes except us offsetting our issues onto future generations. Continuing to find ways to prop up Capitalism and make it liveable doesn’t actually fix a ton, it just shifts the burden from us onto our children. That’s why we’re in the shit as much as we are globally right now, and our kids will be drowning in it if we don’t act.
I literally just made the owning class start a battle royale against each other and you want to argue nothing fundamentally changes? What are you worried it’s gonna be a .io game and we’re gonna end with a big fat superowner who ate everyone else?
thats just gonna create a different owning class and continue the cycle. change would be removing the idea of class altogether.
How does it just create a different owning class if they’re all at war with eachother?
You’re coming across as very "nothing but ‘just do revolution bro’ is real change!" right now ma dude.
Fucking yes. We need to be having economic conversations on the basis of time.
Conspiracy theory: The reason we have the Chicken Tax is to keep the Hilux out of the US because it’s too effective a weapon against the military
Top gear put a Hilux up against a 1984 chevy half 4x4 they found on craigslist. The old chevy won, only vehicle running at the end.
[citation needed]
That’s Top Gear America, which is very much not Top Gear. Plus they didn’t run the Hilux head-to-head. I bet none of those guys have even driven a Hilux.
It is so smaller more competitively priced and actually usable trucks stay out of your country
That’s too credible for me to believe
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If you can work and you choose to live from benefits, you are a leech.
i think anyone should be allowed to choose whether they want to work, and if they choose not to, they should at a minimum be provided housing, food, running potable water and clothing.
On what basis? Are you asking me to support financially someone fully capable of working? Fuck that, I have my own children to support. If he can work, he should work.
Unless you are talking about universal basic income - but this is completely different idea to benefits and should be paid instead of all the other state payouts, including state pension. I am not opposed to that, that’s just basic wealth sharing.
i’m not asking you to do anything, unless of course you’re a member of the super wealthy who don’t pay a fair share in taxes. The burden should be on the wealthiest individuals who profit off our backs and keep us in this perpetual capitalist hell.
There is absolutely no doubt in my mind that the wealthy should pay much, much more than they do. They also should work for their money rather than spending time on golf courses or wanking themselves on twitter.
That does not alleviate the basic duty of every single person, capable of working, to be able to earn his own maintenance.There is plenty of people unable to do so (or temporary unable to do so) and these should be helped.
You should read OP’s edit, cause you sound like an ass. An why the hell do you want to be a slave to work so damn bad, and think others should be forced into that mentality? You do you, but I garauntee if you were in the position of a billionaire, you would be doing the same. No one wants to work. No one needs to work 40hrs. If everyone could make enough from a 20hr work week, im willing to bet their would be a hell of a lot less “leeches” as you so unemphathetically call them.
Guess what, I don’t give a flying fuck what you think I sound like 🙄
The good news is that Capitalism cannot be perpetual, so the Hellscape will end at somepoint.
On what basis?
On the basis that they are alive and if they didn’t get those basic amenities they wouldn’t be anymore. You know, like we do with healthcare in actually civilized countries.
Oh, but they will be alive. Alive and working like they should.
We had almost full automation for 60 years in factories, where did that money go? There are leeches in society, but OP is not among the relevant ones.
Two wrongs don’t make it right. The fact that rich people are often leeches does not change the fact that poor people can also be leeches.
Billionaires leech literally millions of times what a poor person leeches, and yet you’re here complaining about the poor person (who has likely already paid more in taxes than they have leeched).
I am not “complaining” about anything. I am calling leech “a leech” because he is a leech.
You’re still missing the point lmao. Who gives a fuck about a tiny drop of water when there’s a tidal wave coming for them.
Yeah, who gives a fuck about a guy stealing car if there is a another one just robbing a bank. Sound thinking, Sherlock 🙄
Brother. This is childish thinking. The exploitation of the rich is killing the planet, literally making it uninhabitable for all things living. One guy living off welfare is not on the same level, not by a long shot. Get a grip
What the fuck are you even talking about? Justifying a leech sucking welfare system when he is fully capable of working just because there are other wealthy leeches is like justifying a thief stealing a car, because he didn’t rob a bank.
It’s more like a thief stealing a pebble from the garden in front of the bank.
People consentually drawing from the public safety net to meet their needs are entirely different from a Class based on accumulating vast amounts of wealth and power off the backs of Workers via wage slavery.
It’s good that you are getting support. I do think your jokes here are a bit in bad taste though. It isn’t likely to make anyone feel good about supporting others, or about being supported.
The point of helping others isn’t to make yourself feel better
That definitely is not what I was saying. What I’m saying is that mocking and taunting people does not help social cohesion. It can cause reluctance and spite. We just don’t need that.
I was happy to pay my taxes before I needed it, and I’ll be happy to pay my taxes after I need it. This is temporary, and it’s important that people get the help they need when they need it.
Problem is that the cost vastly surpasses the taxes you paid and will pay. And since the really rich always have the means to weasle out of the system, the middle class is bleeding until it can’t any more. Countries like Germany are squished by the cost of their welfare system.
Pretty big assumption here that they won’t pay more taxes than what they get from the government. I paid $20k in tax in the first year of my first non-retail job. If they paid taxes for 7-8 years before covid they probably already paid for themselves.
Your calculation would make sense - if all of your taxes went into the welfare system. In Germany the contribution rate is only 2.6% though (paid on top of your taxes) and with that your whole career might not be enough to pay for a single year of unemployment.
Also, the payment that arrives on your account hardly is the whole cost. There are up to whole ministries of government to pay for with thousands of tax-paid employees. Every pay-as-you-go system only works if the vast majority pays and only a few get paid.
the funds sholdn’t come from the working class, but instead the rich. increase taxes on the highest earners to fund welfare.
I think for this to work you need an agreement between wealthy countries to all apply this kind of tax. This would be an attempt to stop all the accounts from just living offshore.
Not sure if the EU can apply this as a bloc style rule. I doubt the US powers that be would want to, and then other large powers I’d argue have even more questionable ruling classes anyway, but I’m open to bring wrong on that last statement.
I could be wrong on my first statement too. I haven’t thought it out that much.
no, you’re right. The wealthy would do everything they can in order to avoid those taxes, up to and including moving to a new country with lax tax laws.
That is the fun stuff. They don’t. That is the lie.
If the USA and EU decides that the rich has the pay taxes then where do the rich go? They go to XYZ country, you might think but they don’t. Their business is in the US and the EU and their wealth is. They can slowly move their business and wealth… But they can’t move their market, which is where? USA and EU.
Also e.g. The old money in Germany will never leave Germany. Due to privacy laws and the safety that they live in, they remember the RAF and they are thankful for the privacy and safety.
It is a lie that they tell you. They don’t leave.
They don’t because they don’t have to - they are not very highly taxed (in Germany business profit is taxed at 30%, private capital gains at 26% and salaries by up to 45% - and the rich don’t have salaries).
Once you start a policy that is exclusively paid for by the actual rich, they’ll either prevent it or find a way to net profit via their contacts in legislation, or they will just change their main residence to one of their vacation homes. Plenty of German rich folks have done so already.
Or tax businesses based on where they make their profit, if they refuse to show their numbers and comply close them.
I mean, that’s a sweet position if the safety nets actually helped. Just kinda lame you have the same attitude as a 1%-er about it which just points to trolling. Would rather my taxes go to housing someone than war manufacturing or price gouging by corporate companies.
You see how that would be bad for the economy, right? Good for individual workers, but bad for consumers since there’s no longer a person doing some service, like I don’t know, medical care. I fell off the bike in Canada and spent 7 hours covered in blood before a nurse saw me and bandaged me up.
As an American I also had to pay $1000 USD for this (insurance will eventually refund this to me, hopefully)
I’m Canadian, and I dont mind our healthcare system one bit. You only had to pay because you were American.
It’s far from a perfect system, but at least I’m not riddled in medical debt, or have to financially plan to have my wife deliver a kid.
Employers steal the entire fruits of your labor as well. The fruits of workers’ labor consist of the liabilities for the used-up inputs combined with the property rights to the produced output. Both of these are entirely held by the employer. This assignment violates the ethical principle that legal and de facto responsibility should match. You and your fellow workers are jointly de facto responsible for producing the product, but the employer has sole legal responsibility for it
@lemmyshitpost
Who tf pissed on this image?
Forget not working. It’s not even that I want to not work. I just want to not struggle to survive. I don’t want to have to work a gruelling 40 hours every goddamn week. I want to have the time to pursue other means of work, to contribute to society as a whole, not just to one, single company! Yeah, being able to have more time off would be great, but I don’t want to not work, I want to be able to contribute in my own ways too. And I can’t do that when I’m working 40 hours and still living fucking paycheck to paycheck.
