[roenxi]

> I'll just be blunt: wages are also protection money. They're not just compensation for doing your job, they're compensation for not burning down warehouses, not going on strike, not sabotaging workloads, and not unionizing in the first place.

I'm interpreting this as venting, but the attitude on display here is madness. It is totally unreasonable to throw these sort of temper tantrums because an employer isn't adding crazy high wages to what is already a quite pleasant and comfortable desk job. One of the issues tech workers have is that even at a slightly lower wage than median it'd still be a much better deal than what an average worker is being offered.

People do far more work for far less money to a high professional standard. And trying to burn down a business because the person offering you the best deal you can find isn't what you imagine yourself to be worth is entitled to an undignified extent.

[AnimalMuppet]

For at least some people, envy and spite are very strong motivations. If you are making rivers of money, and they are making a little trickle, and they see no path for them to get to where you are, at least some people will decide that the game is rigged, and therefore that the appropriate move is to destroy the game board.

My personal take is that the 1950s were such a great time for blue-collar workers not just because the US was the dominant economic power, but also due to the threat of the ideology of communism. Capitalism faced a competing ideology, and business owners restrained their own greed out of fear that their workers would decide that a communist revolution was the answer.

On this reading, what went wrong for the American worker was the fall of the USSR plus the switch of China to a capitalist version of communism. After that, the owners felt free to get greedy, and to leave their workers with no real hope of things ever getting better for them.