[lsc]

>Working is taking up more and more of our days. Gone is the 8 hours work, 8 hours rest, 8 hours leisure. It's going back to "as many hours as you can physically go without sleep" once again. No benefits, no retirement, no healthcare, no affordable higher education, no affordable family housing aside from company closet tenements with communal utilities, next to a corporate campus but far from a town center. Out in the suburbs with one company store. That will come back in our complacence. Fewer opportunities than our fathers.

I thought we were talking about the big silicon valley companies that are talking about building housing here? at those places, a guy without a college education can pull down more in two days than your fast food worker makes in a month. And these jobs come with better food, a sweet gym, and a bunch of other perks.

I mean, I'm all for unions for the oppressed, but when you start saying that the facebook engineers are being oppressed... well, you kinda lose some credibility.

[vertexFarm]

I'm not talking about them, I'm talking about more workers in other industries who are affected by this as the trend continues. I'm not a facebook engineer or somebody in the googleplex, but one of my major clients just switched over to a coworking space and is constantly shaving benefits and putting people into contractor positions which are more vulnerable. Nearly all of my colleagues in the same industry at different companies are going through the same.

If we let it slide for members of the middle class then it will eventually lead to an ever greater portion of the population unable to earn a dignified quality of life for their work.

Engineers, web developers, etc. are paid very well now, sure, but as more and more people enter that industry and those skills become more commonplace, do you really think things will remain that way? As more of the industry is able to be automated, do you think as many people will be able to stay in the middle class?

And when people in the middle class start accepting things like company housing, contractor jobs over salaried employment with benefits, longer working hours, etc. what do you think that will do for the lower classes of society? I think we're starting to see that now with pseudo-jobs like Favor and Uber, which have even less security than the service industry has traditionally had.

It's not just about facebook engineers or whatever, it's about society as a whole. The problems faced by society are largely the same, different only in degree; we shouldn't separate them up and devolve into infighting because these yuppies or whatever can afford something like the quality of life an average worker a couple generations ago could have, and that's considered fabulously well-off now. If industry starts treating middle-class people badly, they're treating lower-class people worse for the same reason. The whole scale slides.

A strong middle class with strong labor rights helps all of society. We can't do this crab bucket thing where we say it's foolish to defend people with some amount of privilege because there's people over there who are worse off--what is the ultimate end of that strategy, a search for the most downtrodden person on earth and delay all progress until we work our way up the list?

[lsc]

> We can't do this crab bucket thing where we say it's foolish to defend people with some amount of privilege because there's people over there who are worse off--what is the ultimate end of that strategy, a search for the most downtrodden person on earth and delay all progress until we work our way up the list?

How about we start with someone who is below the 50th percentile?