Not much agreement between employers and employees on that idea.
That's why The Government needs to be involved.
Unfortunately, how much one gets payed to do whatever type of work is based mainly on tradition rather
than some connection to real tangible measurable benefits to the employer or society. Whenever workers
appeal to Uncle Sam to settle a dispute, 'prevailing wage' usually wins the argument for the employer.
The attitude seems to be that if you choose to be an employee, you are a chump who is lucky to be
getting anything at all from the company for your time and labor. Better do exactly as told, kuz there
are stacks of applications this high cluttering the personnel office!
As a model maker and tool maker the most I ever got was about 23$ per hour, even tho the jobs required
a great amount of knowledge, skill, intelligence and talent - more than many medical professions require.
Millions of tradesmen in hundreds of different technologies are trapped under an inequitable pay ceiling.
Even more unfortunately, while us honest working chumps are thinking 'fair pay' everybody else
is playing by 'as much as I can possibly grab'!
Lawyers, politicians, ball players, crooked appliance repairmen, singers, dentists, corporate executives,
bureuacrats, news readers, shock jocks, real estate salesmen, etc. etc. etc. - a long list of professions
that can grab massive piles of cash with no consideration at all for the value of the work they do to
'earn' it. Whatever they can shovel into a wheel barrow and slink away with is rightfully theirs.
Think about these points:
• Employment for most people is a raw deal, especially if the job involves physical work on tangible products.
If its feasible to outsource or automate your job, good luck asking for a raise. The company will complain that
raising wages will automaticly require raising prices, causing sales to decline. Then in the next news report
they will justify the CEO's 50,000,000$ salary with 'you have to pay that kind of money to attract good people'.
And it seems like half the time, this super genius will be the same guy who golden parachuted out of
a tech company that went under some years ago.
• Now that the Republicans are firmly in control of the federal government and the majority of states, we can
expect wages to stagnate or decline. They always fight tooth and nail against any organized wage increase
demands, ESPECIALLY minimum wage increases, even becoming emboldened during their echo chamber
campaign rallies to loudly proclaim their opposition to ANY minimum! And mark my words, ladies,
don't be surprized when you hear about them trying to undermine the Lilly Ledbetter act.
• A sensible strategy for us working chumps is to trade as little of our precious time as we can for
the meager stipend they graciously allow us. The words 'fair' and 'earn' are meaningless. There is no real
reason why the CEO of the megacorp you work for gets paid 1,000x more than you do. You are probably as
smart as he is and I bet you'd risk taking his job at half the price with no golden parachute if you fail!
Outright slavery started to fall into disfavor in the 1700's. Altho many of America's founding fathers wanted
to kick this country off to a good start by banning it, too many others were slave owners and adamantly
opposed to such a radical idea. It took about 3/4 century and civil war before slavery only sort of
ended here in America and our greatest leader was murdered for his accomplishment.
I say sort of because it really only changed to less obvious forms.
Perhaps the biggest revolution was that wealthy people and companies found that paying a wage to
employees is much easier and cheaper than owning slaves. Instead of having to house, feed, cloth and
care for workers, just give them money and let them do all that for themselves! All you have to do is pay
them as little as they will settle for. Not hard at all to find people who can do the work for less than
it would have taken to run a slave operation.
In the 1800's a variety of scams emerged that effectively got work done for zero or lower cost. Many were
based on paying workers in 'company script' which could only be redeemed at company owned businesses.
Men could begin their employment with real money saved and soon find themselves flat broke and forced to
choose between continuing to work at a loss or leave in debt to the company.
The so-called 'employers' got away with this mainly by having thugs on the payroll to suppress any complaints.
Taking a job in a mining town could be a fatal mistake, not only from hazardous working conditions, but also
for trying to leave with money in your pocket.
If you have any Fiscal Conservative notions about the Department of Labor and unions being the evil
enemies of the heroic job creator capitalists, you need to read up on how bad things got before
Uncle Sam finally stepped in to put some limits and regulations in place. Not that they did a good
job - to this day, you are lucky to make a living wage and will probably get fired if you complain about
unhealthful and hazardous working conditions.
Not a huge difference between slavery and employment if you are permanently trapped by a lack of
money in your louzy job and living in your parent's attic or a crappy subdivided apartment crowded
with similarly underpaid workers.
I am going to establish some fundamental principals here.
It is your most precious resource.
It doesn't matter if you are an unemployable Skid Row jib head felonious bum or Bill Gates, you have at
most 500,000 hours of conscious free time with which to make your mark on the world. That's cradle to
grave if you live to be 100. Realisticly, it's probably less than 1/4 of that because alot of your time is taken
up by the chores of life, leisure activity, leisure inactivity, laid up from disease or injury, and various
types of assclowns stealing your time. Plus, how old are you now AND you do not know how much time
you really have left - you could get zapped by a freak electrical failure while reading this!
It's all about the odds. Very slim chance you will get electricuglied in the next 5 minutes, but also very
slim that you'll be alive & kicking in 2117. The still alive odds favor something in between and it's a
downward ramp starting now. So, working 75 hours a week and never taking a vacation in order to retire at 50
may not be such a great plan. Not only could you die before or not long after retiring, but your nest egg
could be rendered worthless by Wall Street crashing the economy again. And the increased stress of working
too much will certainly take some toll, leaving you older than your years.
It can save you a bunch of time.
IF you manage it properly!
You have to think of it this way: 'I only have a year left. How many of my remaining 5,000 hours should I trade
for dollars and how much should I charge to maximize my quality of life?' Factor in what you will be doing in
those sold hours and your odds of being happy with your life increase. If you happen to live more than a year,
great! You can decide what you're going to do with this next year.
The notion that if someone else is willing to work for less you need to accept less leads to bankruptcy and,
in the bigger picture, the eventual collapse of the community. There is always someone on Earth more desperate
than you who will work for less, so an employer can theoretically get his product or service done for virtually
nothing. In the biggest picture, this could lead to the collapse of civilization. If money always goes straight
from the customer to the CEO, pretty soon nobody has any money so there are no customers. Game over.
Companies that don't pay their employees some amount above the bare minimum required to support
themselves are essentially parasites. Their product or service is actually stolen from the workers.
The business plan that depends on the worker's cost of living being far below what it is where the product
or service is sold does not change that at all - parasites suck.
Just because a place in Tennessee or Taiwan is desperately poor does not justify paying them less. 'It's better
than nothing' never works out. They take the new jobs, then 5 or 10 years later the company goes out of
business or moves to an area where the workers are even cheaper and the community finds itself just as poor
as before, plus their land and health ruined.
What has gotten lost sometime in the distant past is that we are all co-operating to make life better than
it would be if we were independently scratching out an existence in the wild. The man with the dollars
isn't any better than the rest of us. He does not automaticly deserve a bigger chunk of
the proceeds of our co-operation.
The laws and policies have been tilted in favor of the rich for too long, turning vast swaths of America and
many of the countries we trade with into slums. Far too many of us would be happier living like
Les Stroud
(Survivorman) out in a forest instead of being employees.
Civilization can not exist only to benefit people with excess money.
We started replacing muscles with machines hundreds of years ago.
80 years ago we began replacing brains with machines.
The job is almost done.
Before this century is over, the only work for pay available will be for athletes, entertainers and artists.
And even that will only be if we still like to have real humans in those roles, not because machines can't
do them 10x better than us. All manufacturing will be automated. Construction, repair, service, and other
non-stationary jobs will be done by droids.
How will people get payed? Not everybody can be the owner of a manufacturing facility that's cranking out the
stuff people want to buy. A new way to distribute wealth has to be adopted, otherwise civilization falls apart.
We can't wait till massive hordes of starving American citizens are storming the castle walls of the people
who ended up with everything at the end of a giant game of Monopoly.
Transitioning to an economy that does not involve selling and buying each other's time needs to begin as soon
as possible. We are in the beginning of that future NOW. Delaying the transition will only make it more painful.
Politicians who are still talking about bringing manufacturing jobs back to America are either pandering or
very short sighted. The majority of today's good paying jobs are nonproductive or even counterproductive.
Creating more fake jobs is a waste of everybody's time. We don't need more lawyers or insurance clerks.
Nobody entering the workforce today will be retiring with a pension in 2070.
Some countries are beginning to experiment with Garranteed Basic Income plans as a way to cope with
automation. We should be leading the way on this because American technology & capitalism are the
forces pushing the world in that direction.
A BIG part of past and current problems is cheap foriegn labor sucking jobs out of this country. Trade
agreements have never worked out well for us because they failed to address this.
Intead of trying to even things out with tarrifs, which only raise prices for consumers, a law that requires
companies to pay foriegn workers at least half of what the American workers get, regardless of what the cost
of living in those countries is, will both reduce the temptation for companies to offshore AND raise the
standard of living in the countries where they are already operating, creating new customers.
Since alot of these countries are burdened with cleptocracies that would just steal all the money, it will be
neccesary to create an enforcement agency with the authority to protect against such activity. Companies
could be required to employ security forces to protect workers from local criminal organizations that are
common in 3rd world countries, usually in cahoots with the government.
Capping executive pay at a reasonable 50x whatever the lowest payed worker in the company gets would free
up LOTS of money for paying the employees andor lowering the price of the products and services. Here's an
idea for them: Use the money to hire enuff customer support people to handle calls in a timely manner!
This would raise the standard of living in poor communities and help to even out the regional wage variations.
another part of this will be that it's an absolute minimum - no exceptions! No more unpaid interns! No more
phoney salary schemes created to bypass overtime laws! No more migrant farm workers getting next to nothing!
Seriously - if a business can't pay a living wage to all it employees, it is really just a charity relying on the
government and parents of the workers to make up the difference. They need to either rethink their business
plan or give up and let their more competent competitors expand.
Women who worked for any part of the government will be payed whatever the difference is between what they
got and what male employees got all the way back to the Equal Pay Act of 1963 in adjusted dollars. No red tape
for you to deal with, accountants would just go over the records, calculate the discrepency and notify
the Federal Reserve to cut a check to the victim or their decendants.
Who is JO 753?
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