An aggrieved billionaire this week lamented that workers had grown lazy and "arrogant" during the coronavirus pandemic and that many of them needed to be made unemployed for the situation to improve.The Australian Financial Review reports that Tim Gurner, the founder and CEO of the Gurner Group, exp...
He’s just saying what the Bourgeoisie has been thinking and doing since the beginning of capitalism, nothing new to see here.
Elites have been saying this well before capitalism. Capitalism sucks, but heirarchy is the problem.
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The French would like to have a word with you?
Before Capitalism, there was Aristocracy. It sucked. It got corrupt. So we replaced it with something else that sucked and was corrupt.
Is it your belief that ancient Egypt was capitalist, or that the people interred in pyramids were not elites?
Just curious which of those you think is true.
Janet Yellen wrote a memo in 1996 about this.
https://theintercept.com/2023/01/24/unemployment-inflation-janet-yellen/
The rich want workers to have weak bargaining power. It’s class warfare, plain and simple.
Correct. This is why I have a problem with people (ironically, mostly poor) who call non-working people lazy. It’s not laziness to insist on making somewhere near the value you produce. If a company makes $250,000/yr off an employee, it’s unethical to nickel and dime then of making $30,000 to $40,000 or judge them for not working for $30,000.
This is not why most non-working people don’t work. Mostly it is childcare costs or disabilities.
People are paid based on the market value of their skills, not the value they provide the company. You sell your skills. If you don’t have skills that cannot be found elsewhere (e.g. you do manual labor), your bargaining power is diluted because literally anyone can do your job.
This is the reason unions were invented.
Fair point, but for most it still amounts to making less than your work is worth.
Which is a breach of the EMH, and evidence the whole process fails. The more the Efficient Market Hypothesis is false, the more employees not having more leverage is a failure of capitalism. If goods are not traded somewhere near “real value”, then supply and demand go from being the effective tool capitalists claim to being downright wasteful at best, and Police-Theft at worst.
And for the record, many people ARE paid based on the market value of their skills. Just ask fishermen. It’s just still a minority payment structure because companies have no problem manipulating the labor pool, taking short-term losses to keep wages down. If you go back less than 100 years, they were doing it as blatantly as having towns where all goods in and out had to go through them and employees were paid in credit for those goods.
Unions are, and always will be, the small band-aid for big problems. I support them (though I’ve seen a few shifty ones who used non-voting workers as leverage for benefits for voting ones), but they will never solve the problem. A well-governed economy is one where the unions sit back and go “well shit, we got nothing to ask for because we already have it, and if we ask for more it’ll bankrupt the employer”. I’d like to point reference again to many classes of fishermen, paid in shares. You got 18 year old kids making $200,000/yr “unskilled” (scallopers, for reference), NOT because there’s nobody else willing to do the job for less, but because they’re paid by tradition based upon the value they create.
No it isn’t, because,
This just shows your misunderstanding of the concept of value.
Here we largely agree. Unions are kind of like the LGBTQ or deaf communities, in that ideally they would have no reason to exist.
As a side note you may want to consider that fishermen are paid well because it’s not a job many people want to do or can do (as it is often dangerous and always tied to a specific locality) and thus competition for the role is not as broad, meaning wages go up exponentially. Same reason linemen, which is also about the same skill level, make so much money.
Just because you don’t agree (or didn’t understand) with what I was saying about the concept of value doesn’t mean I am misunderstanding it. You don’t have a monopoly on how value works.
Have a great day. I don’t intend to reply again.
Always cracks me up when people say this. Peace out bro, thanks for not sharing more misinformation. Have a great day yourself.
I would say that he’s an aristocrat complaining about the uppity bourgeois. Many of the tech worker he’s talking about are upper middle class.
The modern usage of the term Bourgeoisie typically does not reference “the middle class” but “the owning class”. The wealth distribution of capitalism has changed since the 1780s.
Remember, in France there was a time where being a successful business owner had a ceiling because you couldn’t easily buy power with money, so you were “middle-class”.