I'm not disputing any of your other points, but what does "paying them what they’re actually worth" mean? Is there some objectively fair remuneration calculation that others are using and I wasn't aware of?
> Is there some objectively fair remuneration calculation [...]?
Lopsided power arrangements will always be grossly unfair to one side and generous the other. In this case it's Amazon vs the Precariat. Moreover, the two sides (and everyone else) will always have a very different idea about what is fair.
The best way to address this without directly getting into the vast grey-area of "what is fair" is to limit the political power of corporations and then address labor laws and union formation.
The sad thing is we've been through this before.
There's a reason labor unions came into being. Do we really have to wait until labor conditions for workers become the 21st century equivalent of Industrial Age steel mills run by robber-barrons? Can't we learn from history?
Thanks for introducing me to the term Precariat. It was quite interesting to read the Wikipedia article[0] about it now and attach a name to the phenomenon.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precariat
> In sociology and economics, the precariat (/prɪˈkɛəriət/) is a neologism for a social class formed by people suffering from precarity, which means existing without predictability or security, affecting material or psychological welfare.
There is an objectively fair remuneration calculation, but others aren't using it, except possibly in worker-owned cooperatives. That is, to pay workers the total value added by their labor.
But, if I understand correctly, by definition an employer would have no expected direct benefit from hiring at this salary. Are there any for-profit employers who use such a calculation in-practice coupled with some fixed multiplier (or multiplier range) for all their roles?
>I'm not disputing any of your other points, but what does "paying them what they’re actually worth" mean?
It absolutely means nothing because there is a queue of people that are desperate to accept any job. If you decide to ask for a higher salary then someone more desperate than you will take the job.
There's no objectively "fair" number, but there are far better approximations. No-one really cares if it's perfectly equitable between every employee, but they _can_ see obvious inequities harming people's lives.
Objective is overrated. There's a clear tendency towards evil when you try too hard driving bonuses and promotions on objective performance metrics. The ruthless deathmarchers will always outperform their more benign peers in locally measurable metrics.
The paperclip maximiser algorithm doesn't actually require a computer, it could run just fine on a group of humans implemented as their set of intraorganizational rules.
1) I'm assuming GP missed a negation, "not", before that.
2) Obviously if you can find workers for your compensation level that's some market definition of worth.
But I would also argue that ones society is broken if there are people who stay at a job where they have to resort to peeing in bottles because (ostensibly) they don't feel that taking 3 minutes to go to the bathroom is possible.
Lopsided power arrangements will always be grossly unfair to one side and generous the other. In this case it's Amazon vs the Precariat. Moreover, the two sides (and everyone else) will always have a very different idea about what is fair.
The best way to address this without directly getting into the vast grey-area of "what is fair" is to limit the political power of corporations and then address labor laws and union formation.
The sad thing is we've been through this before.
There's a reason labor unions came into being. Do we really have to wait until labor conditions for workers become the 21st century equivalent of Industrial Age steel mills run by robber-barrons? Can't we learn from history?