Work, Work, Work – So a Few Can Be Rich

&gt; ...between 1971 and 2018, 3,280 trade unionists were murdered in Colombia.<p>&gt; Is there a solution? Not within this system. No amount of union organizing or progressive legislation will alter the nature of work in it.<p>Why are they killing the union leaders if unionization does not work? The massive push by large industries to get unions out of the mix indicates that unions helps workers massively. Collective bargaining changes everything for the workers as companies are forced to give them a much larger part of the value they produce. A society where people make good money also creates a positive spiral of consumption which makes it much easier for others to create well paying jobs as well - when people actually have money to spend.

&gt; Only a radical change in how work is done and who controls this can make labor once again an integral part of life, one through which we can fully develop our capacities as thinking, acting human beings.<p>uhh. The article appears to suggest that we change who controls our labor...<p>#1 - we do, we can quit anytime we want and find another place to work for.<p>#2 - I assume they are railing against private individuals and private companies. Sorry, no. I&#x27;ve seen how government control of the workforce ends. The books been written. I&#x27;ll pass, I never liked the horror genre.

This is missing a lot of history. There was a lot of Anarchist violence in the 30s that led to things like the Inheritance Tax, now repealed. Up until Reagan it was possible to live reasonably well and even raise a family on a minimum wage. Now even middle class people can barely make it and are vulnerable to large medical bills. The past was not impossible. It actually happened. And we should be able to use that experience to craft something better if we really care to. Getting distracted with &quot;Not within this system&quot; talk is useless. The system can be changed and honed so let&#x27;s do that.

If you took all the income from the billionaires and distributed it evenly, the average person wouldn&#x27;t even get a 2% raise. If you took all the wealth and distributed it evenly, the a average person wouldn&#x27;t even get $500.<p>In the US - Billionaires have $1.3T: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;americansfortaxfairness.org&#x2F;billionaires&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;americansfortaxfairness.org&#x2F;billionaires&#x2F;</a><p>That&#x27;s ~$3880 per US person. Globally, there&#x27;s a lot more people, and countries aren&#x27;t as rich as the US.<p>Even if you count their entire change in net wealth in good years as income - their best year ever - during the pandemic - Billionaire wealth increased $240B. That&#x27;s not even $900 per person in the US. Median salary was almost $43k: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Personal_income_in_the_United_States#:~:text=The%20U.S.%20Census%20Bureau%20estimated,full%2Dtime%2C%20year%20round" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Personal_income_in_the_Unite...</a>. That&#x27;s ~2%.<p>This is counting billionaire income and realized and unrealized capital gains - cherry picked to the best year ever. It&#x27;s a massive overstatement.<p>Even if you cherry pick the best 11-year bull run ever - from 2010-2021 - Billionaire wealth increased $2.57T. That&#x27;s $697 per year per person. Barely a 1.5% increase.<p>Even if you try to get exclusionary - let&#x27;s only include workers - not children, retirees, or the disabled or the poor - you get ~$1400 per person per year - a ~3.3% increase.<p>And it&#x27;s a ridiculous idea. If you took all their capital gains starting in 2010 - they wouldn&#x27;t have compounded. Most of the gains wouldn&#x27;t have occurred. You&#x27;d end up with an even smaller number less than 1% for everyone, less than 2% for workers.<p>It&#x27;s not the reason people who work at Google and Intel aren&#x27;t mega rich.<p>And even in the US, Billionaires are definitely not the reason that people who work minimum wage or don&#x27;t work at all are poor.<p>Billionaires are concentrated disproportionately in rich places like the US and the EU. Globally the true picture disputes this article much more. There&#x27;s 5x more people on the planet than in just the US and the EU - but the billionaires there have almost 70% of billionaire wealth.<p>Do billionaires have enough money that it&#x27;s creating systematic problems and we should do something about it? That&#x27;s a different question.<p>They don&#x27;t have so much money that they&#x27;re causing everyone else to be poor.

Laughing at the thought of engineers making $400k reading this and identifying with it.

Very familiar sentiment to thoughts I have been thinking and feeling over the past year or so. Interesting to see more of this stuff popping up. I am starting to think unionizing is going to be the path to start pointing the majority of folks towards.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;medium.com&#x2F;@kris-nova&#x2F;why-i-wrote-hacking-capitalism-5094d26d4fef" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;medium.com&#x2F;@kris-nova&#x2F;why-i-wrote-hacking-capitalism...</a>

The unionization factor is interesting. It&#x27;s not a zero-sum game. The more everyone does, the better everyone is.<p>Due to egalitarian efforts getting women and others into the workforce it produced a large surplus of labour.<p>There was also very clever work by China in creating very low tax economic zones which created globalization and moved low skilled jobs out of the developed world. Also creating a surplus of labour.<p>Unionization doesnt work well when there&#x27;s so much surplus of labour. Worse yet, incompetent males were displaced from the workplace by competent others. Which created a net-negative growth on population. Therefore population decline is coming.<p>The thing is with the population pyramid, the decline isnt even coming yet it&#x27;s a productivity drop relative to the boomers retiring and the boomers are woefully under invested for retirement.<p>So we are going to have a transition quickly from labour surplus to depression level labour shortage. That already started, this is the antiwork movement. They suddenly probably for the first time feel no labour surplus and are excited to be treated properly by shitty employers.<p>The funny thing about severe shortages, unionization is still lame. You dont want to have your salary and benefits limited by union process. You want to job hop for better profits.<p>The really good thing about this productivity drop, the powers that be will put money into tech to boost productivity. Self-checkouts, atms, etc. No humans needed.

<p><pre><code> &gt; Since Taylor, management gurus, led by the Toyota Corporation, devised “lean production,” with its systematic hiring, work teams, cross-training, just-in-time inventories, and kaizen. This last, Japanese for “constant improvement,” is an insidious form of continuous speed-up. Management stresses the production system—by, for example, taking away a team member or speeding up an assembly line—and work teams are pressured to keep production running smoothly. Autoworker Ben Hamper, author of Rivethead, described modern auto factories as gulags. And no wonder. Workers must labor 57 seconds of every minute.</code></pre>

“44 years later he died of emphysema”…sounds like he had a long and fruitful life.

As opposed to communism, which will make everyone work like dogs so that the elite party members can be rich (like Maduro&#x27;s goons).<p>100,000,000 dead but let&#x27;s try it again, because that wasn&#x27;t real communism.

Another Marxist in a new coat. Good analysis, wrong prescription. Been there, done that, ended up badly.<p>Look into Georgism, that&#x27;s where the cool kids are now. You don&#x27;t need a revolution, you need a minor shift in tax code that you haven&#x27;t thought of yet.<p>It&#x27;s not the problem of your employer that prices around you increase, so don&#x27;t make them a villain that you can&#x27;t pay your rent. Go complain to your slumlord for riding the inflation wave and tak(x)ing away any raise and disposable income your employer gave you.<p>Explanation by a game designer: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;FTZH0Y6OS7g" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;FTZH0Y6OS7g</a>

Keep writing! We are just one or two more articles from everyone susddenly realizing that capitalism is mean and overthrowing the system.<p>What will we do afterwards? Who cares! That&#x27;s not nearly as much fun as whining.