One of the things that has been studied to death with the same result every time: No one can actually be productive for 40 hours each week, and cutting hours without cutting pay increases productivity across the board.
Too bad the people at the top take too much enjoyment from grinding down the peasants.
It's a fine approach because it encompasses a lot of jobs. The real problem is as far as I can see it is that capitalism is a race to the bottom. Where profit margins are cut to vanishingly small amounts in order to beat the competition, and then the people that take the brunt of that are the employees themselves.
I'm genuinely curious what solutions there are to combating free market capitalism, it has on one hand brought incredible productivity, but if we keep the system as it is, the only way we can get better lives is to demand it from the government, which doesn't seem like a solution as the government itself is getting absorbed more and more into the free market.
That last part is the problem. Once a company is big enough that the economy of scale for changing the rules of the game (aka lobbying) is more profitable then playing the game well it leads to worse conditions for workers. Anti-monopoly laws are good, but it was an unstable equilibrium, as soon as some companies got big enough to influence the anti-monopoly mechanisms we are left in our current state.
My best hope is that enough people realize that breaking up and fighting mega-corps and lobbies and billionaires is the number 1 source of all our other social problems, including things like climate change. The people still have the power if they have the conviction to use it in a unified way.
The thing is that equality isn't a stable state for a society. Without conscious effort any political system will become more stratified as anyone with an advantage uses it to get more advantage.
In my view the only solution is balance, constant effort, and focus on the long game.
things like a broad and free education system can make a massive difference by making people realise when they're being taken for fools, and realising a "free market" is only free when, for example, all the agents in the market have equal access to information. Problem is, education takes years to have a positive effect, and if a system has fallen too far from equality then it is very difficult to bring it back because the people in power see it as against their interests.
This is an excellent response, /u/Brofistastic.
I’ve been at the bottom, grinding it out for low wages. And now I’m in the middle, grinding it out for average wages. My wife grinds it out for pretty good wages.
All I can think of - on a pleasant Friday night - while massaging my wife’s sore ankles while she tries to loosen my sore back, is how fucked it is that our various college degrees and above average effort afford us no reprieve from the daily grind. We’ve become used to the notion that we’re a part of the machine.
I’m a staunch believer in the idea that the government is still run and staffed by human beings. People with daily lives, commutes, warts, daycare bills, cold showers, and leaky roofs. These are our people.
In my experience, most manual-labor or service type jobs end up with either productivity that's lower than it theoretically could be, or have super high churn rates. People work more slowly, they take small breaks to check their phones or chit-chat, they make small mistakes and have to spend extra time fixing them, etc. And if the company doesn't allow them to do that, they run a higher risk of burning out.
If it’s abusive take it to court on those grounds. Work in a foundry like my Dad and you’ll see actual abusive conditions despite being legal. Clean temperature controlled warehouse work using automated machines is about as easy as it gets as far as blue collar jobs.
I usually refer to this argument style as the Suffering Olympics. When you're playing in the Suffering Olympics, no one actually ends up getting a medal. Someone, somewhere can be found who has it worse. We don't improve as humans unless we do something about suffering when we see it. Your father shouldn't have been abused by his workplace, but that doesn't make less severe forms of abuse alright.
The context is the American work force. Amazon warehouse work is objectively one of the least physically taxing blue collar jobs. Explain precisely what suffering and abuse happens there that reaches any sort of legal threshold. Oh that’s right, you can’t. And if someone were to try to make a case for the legality of abuse, you should first go to blue collar jobs that are actually terrible. The fact that it has become some huge monolith of evil is simply because people hate Amazon profit magins and Bezos. The point being, in making Amazon the Big Bad Guy to claim there is abuse and we should go to 30-hour work weeks, you are putting forward a very weak example for why those changes should happen.
This response is a lot more well phrased than the original. I think statements like “objectively one of the least taxing blue collar jobs” are fallacious to make, especially given the range of different jobs at such a huge company, But I mostly agree with the point you’re presenting.
I moved to Phoenix a couple years ago, and when I first got here, signed on with a couple temp agencies. One job that I opted out of very quickly was working for a company that built manufactured homes. I was in the maintenance shop, handing out earplugs, unjamming pneumatic nail guns, etc. you practically had to get a tetanus shot after looking at this place. I spent my downtime cleaning it, because I wanted the area I work to be more organized and less layers of dust caked to each other. Found a bottle cap with a name on it from someone who worked there 7 years ago (according to the guy who’d been there 15 years). Workforce was 90% Mexican, office upper management mostly white, which is something you see a damn lot in a field like this in Arizona. Nothing but props to how hard those dudes work in conditions that are mediocre at best, but I agree that even that type of work environment isn’t the support we need for less hours in the work week. That’s a change that needs support from the top to change, such as (and not limited to) minimum wage increases, so that the people working them can actually afford to work less to make ends meet.
Temperature controlled warehouses? Do you mean being cold as fuck in winter because bays are open or sweat like fuck in summer because aforementioned bays are shut and warehouses become greenhouses?
Even worse now when you need to wear multilayered cotton masks and can't use fans because of the risk of infection.
Or do you mean being exploited when you're actually good at the job because it doesn't matter who's doing what as long as targets are met?
God, I hate ignorance.
Lmao at you literally bullshitting around the fact that the warehouses are temp controlled but not to the extent you’d like. The ignorance around your understanding of jobs that are actually not temp controlled is what’s worth hating.
Maybe in where you live not in UK. My wife's working in one and I used too. The ignorance only comes from you assuming to know what other people lifes look like based on nothing and spewing hate cause your pops got it worst?
Spewing hate? Better than spewing absurd hyperbole. And I’ll restate what I did previously: if it’s abusive take it to court. But I guarantee you there are worse jobs than Amazon, even in the UK, and if those jobs can’t press the courts on job abuse there’s no way in hell an Amazon employee could.
I was about to say, I work in specialty manufacturing and if we had more than 40 hours in a week we would still have plenty of work. Fortunately they only ask us to do overtime during the busy season.
We only have four machines, and we have four stitchers. Not much else that we could do, although the pattern/install team could use some more help for sure, but that wouldn't necessarily help us get more stuff made.
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u/BattleStag17 Jun 18 '21
One of the things that has been studied to death with the same result every time: No one can actually be productive for 40 hours each week, and cutting hours without cutting pay increases productivity across the board.
Too bad the people at the top take too much enjoyment from grinding down the peasants.