[ck2]

Average people get all upset about unions when they see them applied to jobs that don't seem too too demanding.

But places like Walmart and Amazon are exactly why unions should exist, to counterbalance the inhumane over-optimization and maltreatment of people.

Amazon could probably make work less toxic by hiring 10% more people, but that would make things cost a few cents more.

[csmuk]

Yes and no. This subject somewhat angers me.

Yes people like Walmart and Amazon workers need protection form maltreatment. Definitely. This should be built into the law though, not into unions.

And no because the existing unions don't really protect people. If you look at RMT, Unison and NUT they regularly pop up just to cause trouble. From a perspective of people having to consume services offered by their staff regularly, they want masses of additional pay and do not improve standards along the way at all. They are simply allowing the incompetent to be propped up by the good staff. Also, the professional minority who agree that this is the case are forced to be dragged into union ballots and vote with other staff in favour of strike action regularly in fear of retaliation from their colleagues.

Also let us not forget a much greater threat of exploitation: being forced to work with no pay under the guise of "training". This is happening a lot in the UK a the moment as the Job Centre has been pushing for people to do this by threatening to cut their benefits if they don't do it. The result is people being forced to work for no compensation and having to pay for travel expenses out of their own (literally destitute) pocket. The employers don't have to pay the staff either. The result of this is a dangled carrot of "if you do this, after 6-12 months we'll give you a permanent paid position". This inevitably results in being laid off as not needed immediately when they agreed to take you on.

There are even posters going up in Job Centres telling people "try staff for free":

http://imgur.com/SdWpgvx

Edit: Also I've spoken to some business associates (the sort who worship the fully paid up Lord Fuckwit Sugar himself) and are applauding this as a great way of building their businesses. This is simply unethical. I've been pretty much excluded for mentioning the inevitable "abhorrent slavery" point, not that I care.

[buro9]

> This should be built into the law though, not into unions.

But how do the low-paid and exploited workers get the kind of representation and voice that results in the law makers and policy makers hearing it?

If the workers are not valued enough to be paid well, do you think the employers themselves value the employees enough to listen?

That is the point of the union.

Some unions do indeed give the entire concept a bad rep, but the fundamentals of "workers coming together to acquire a collective voice to be heard" isn't a bad one.

The output of that voice is law. Such as equality in the workplace, safety regulations, working hour regulations, etc, etc.

Few of those laws would have come to pass without the worker being able to have a representative and voice.

I see parallels between democratic representation in society and representation against powerful employers. To some extent, given globalisation, multi-national corporations and the power of corporations in political lobbying I'm becoming more of the view that multi-national unions need to come into existence.

And not to hit the "strike" button every 10 seconds. Withdrawal of labour is a nuclear option and likely no-one will ever win when it occurs. But... to have that kind of representation and voice against corporations that increasingly cannot be held to account by sovereign governments and local lawmakers seems an important check.

We remain people. Work isn't the be-all and end-all, and people should be valued. If a business cannot sustain itself by valuing people fairly and with respect...then the business is at fault. We shouldn't create human misery, and people who work for us (entrepreneurs, leaders, decision makers in companies) do deserve a voice and representation to hold us to account and constrain us (to some extent).

[mjn]

Denmark has something that sort of works like this, but imo it works okay and is usually not exploitative, partly because of several differences:

1. It's not completely free to businesses or completely unpaid: the person continues to receive pay in the form of benefits from the unemployment fund, but the company kicks in 17% on top of that as a pension contribution. This is partly to ensure the company takes it seriously, and partly because making sure everyone has a funded pension is in the state's interest.

2. The job must actually provide relevant training, not just gruntwork. The company must propose a training programme and learning outcomes, and there are periodic evaluations of the company's performance in fulfilling these.

3. It's opt-in; you are never required to do it. It's an option offered to people who are deemed to be having trouble finding a job because of lack of in-demand skills. One option among several: others include vocational courses run by the municipality, going back to school for an adult masters degree, etc.

4. The benefits are at a reasonably high level, so things like paying for transit are not a problem. Minimum benefit is around $1800/mo, I think.

[csmuk]

That's great and exactly where we should be. Glad to see some countries have actually hit themselves with the clue stick.

[RyanMcGreal]

> This should be built into the law though, not into unions.

Who do you think is going to get these protections built into the law? Who do you think has been responsible for getting the protections we do have built into the law? It's unions. They're not perfect (no organization of people ever is), but they're a hell of a lot better than an alternative economy in which unions don't exist, all workers are atomized and disorganized and the public policy dialogue is entirely dominated by what large corporations want you to think.

[yummyfajitas]

This is happening a lot in the UK a the moment as the Job Centre has been pushing for people to do this by threatening to cut their benefits if they don't do it. The result is people being forced to work for no compensation and having to pay for travel expenses out of their own (literally destitute) pocket.

From the perspective of the employee/trainee, the only difference I see between this situation and actual employment is that the name on the check is different from the name of the employer. So what's the big deal?

[csmuk]

That's the sort of ignorance that is promoted.

The big deal is that JSA which is the only paid amount is £56.80 a week. For a 40 hour standard week that is £1.42 an hour.

The national minimum wage is £6.31 an hour.

Not only that, the jobs in question can be literally 20-30 miles from your residential address so travelling is not even possible.

Also, we end up paying the JSA for the business. The business sees this as another expense avoided rather than an investment in the business. This should not be promoted!!

[yummyfajitas]

That number isn't right at all. I just pretended to be a single unemployed female with one child, and they said I was entitled to this:

Jobseeker's Allowance (Income based) £71.70 per week

Child Tax Credit £62.72 per week

Housing Benefit £115.39 per week

Child Benefit £20.30 per week

Total weekly income £270.11 per week

(This excludes the below market rent, $500gbp/month, I claimed to be paying for council housing.)

https://www.dwpe-services.direct.gov.uk/portal/page/portal/b...

That works out to 6.75GBP/hour.

As for the incentives on the business side, I agree with you. Rather than being private sector jobs, these should be low skill government jobs. We can even help the budget by replacing overpaid unionized govt workers with job seekers working for their benefits. But it's dishonest to claim that they are paid only 50GBP/week for their labor.

[edit: I took out the child, benefits were 187 GBP/week, ignoring council housing subsidies.]

[csmuk]

It doesn't work like that. As someone who has been unemployed you have to deal with the following:

1. Child tax credit works on your previous year's income so it can take up to a year to get adjusted. Same with child benefit.

2. Housing benefit takes 8-12 weeks to come through. Not only that it won't cover most private rents inside the M25. The council waiting list is 3-5 years in London so you'll have to go into arrears. The only way out is to stop paying your rent and go the council and tell them you are homeless. At which point either you or your children are split up or you get wedged in what I can only describe as a "crackhead den" at best. My other half had to clean the needles away before she could wash in the morning when this happened to her (after she was made redundant and the market was suddenly saturated with her speciality).

3. You don't get JSA immediately. It takes 4-8 weeks for it to start.

You don't just clap your hands when you're unemployed and cash starts rolling in. There are other concerns.

It's a fucking rough ride and not only that you have to do the legwork and deal with government incompetence and prejudice along the way which is more than rife.

[yummyfajitas]

Try to pay attention. We were discussing the "problem" of people already receiving benefits being compelled to work for those benefits.

While it is a problem that the council allows crackheads into public housing, and there may be problems with government incompetence, this is a somewhat separate discussion. Tangentially, if you want to require drug tests for benefits and kick people out of council housing for antisocial behavior, I have no objection.

[Nursie]

>> That number isn't right at all. I just pretended to be a single unemployed female with one child, and they said I was entitled to this:

If you're childless and (for instance) living with family then it would be accurate. Adding child allowances into the picture is pretty much beside the point here.

[Nursie]

They have to pay their own travel expenses, if you do the calculations then they get less than minimum wage and they are threatened with having even that withdrawn.

And the taxpayer foots the bill instead of the business, which as a societal meme can just go f*ck itself.

[arethuza]

Exactly, far better off to have the unemployed doing something rather than sitting round watching daytime TV.

[Note that I say that as someone who actually has signed on for a bit when I was a daft kid and done some pretty ghastly manual laboring jobs in agriculture and fishing].

Mind you I think having to pay their own travelling expenses is a bit harsh (mind you the first employment I had was for 12-15 hour shifts and I had to cycle 45 minutes to get there and back.)

[csmuk]

Disagree:

1. The business should foot the wage.

2. The wage should be fair.

Doing something isn't actually necessarily possible. We've automated a big chunk of people's jobs away. There isn't necessarily a place for everyone to work now. Not only that, we're living longer. Provisions need to be made for these facts.

[arethuza]

You could argue as the loaded cost of employing anyone is a good bit more than their salary that any employer is making a contribution. (Usual rule of thumb is ~50% of salary for fully loaded costs - and that's without any thing fancy).

[csmuk]

I'm a business owner and have owned several businesses. I have employed over the years ~50 people.

Your point is total bollocks. Sorry for the language but that's the sort of detached non-holistic thinking that allows slavery to exist.

They like being whipped. After all what would they do if we weren't whipping them?

It's simply exploitation although capitalism has worked out how to call it training and internship to shrug off the social and moral responsibility.

Not only that, who pays the NI and employee tax contributions? Oh wait, that gets sucked from everyone else's income tax.

[Nursie]

You could, but it would be disingenuous.

Some of the cost of employment in the UK is employers national insurance (effectively a kind o tax that gets paid by the company before the employee even sees the pay check). This is not present here. Neither is there any question of employee rights, or employer responsibilities because there's no employment.

[Houshalter]

Hopefully this becomes more and more automated over time and eventually people won't have to do it at all.

[PeterisP]

Of course, "people won't have to do it all" also implies "the future doesn't need us".

Currently those poor workers are cheaper than the machines that could do the same job. Once the machines become cheaper than a sustenance-wage for a human, there will be literally no jobs for those people, ever.

And than means that either by that time we drastically change our distribution of resources - where 'having a job' is not needed for living; or expect literal class warfare.

[Houshalter]

The point is the issue isn't amazon treating workers bad. Obviously they'd be even worse off if amazon got rid of them, yet that's considered perfectly acceptable. If you think it's not, then think of all the companies in the world that also don't employ people because technology makes them unnecessary (or they just don't need to in the first place) and place equal blame on them.

The problem isn't with one company, or even just the industries that hire lots of unskilled workers. The problem is our society requires people to depend on their job and the value of their labor as their only source of income. This problem becomes more and more obvious as the value of labor continues to fall with technology and competition with other countries.

[eli_gottlieb]

>And than means that either by that time we drastically change our distribution of resources - where 'having a job' is not needed for living; or expect literal class warfare.

So? We've been due for class warfare for decades now. The sooner the better. I'm tired of seeing the entire planet's worth of societies optimized for hoarding capital. Enough!

[PeterisP]

I'm not sure if anyone should be happy about the prospects of literal class warfare, i.e., a large portion of society being so disenfranchised that they need to resort to mass violence in order to survive. There are 3 possible outcomes to that:

(a) the warfare is limited and we're back to the same decision point (how do we change society?) but lots people have suffered for no good reason;

(b) the fighting ends with 'permanently jobless' getting physically eliminated in large numbers - increasingly sophisticated military/police forces + growing drone warfare may make it a possible outcome;

(c) the fighting ends with them winning, and implementing, as I said, "drastically change our distribution of resources - where 'having a job' is not needed for living;".

Why don't we just agree on (c) and implement it without need for bloodshed?

There will be in my lifetime billions of people without a possibility for any economically viable "job", i.e., the rest of society doesn't need anything at all from them, not their labor, not their services, not their flesh. They still need resources to live. So either they'll (a) not get those resources and not live; (b) we'll simply give them those resources; or (c) they'll try to take those resources - but in the end it results in (a) or (b) anyways.

[eli_gottlieb]

>Why don't we just agree on (c) and implement it without need for bloodshed?

Because large portions of the not-completely-disenfranchised consider (c) immoral.

Trust me, I agree on (c). I want my post-scarcity society, goddamnit. The diminishing happiness returns point on income is $70k/year USD per household or local standard-of-living equivalent, and I'm sure with further study we could find out exactly the cost of living variables behind that number. For reference, the current GDP/capita of the USA is $48k/year per person, easily enough to get over the diminishing returns point with approximately 1.5 "GDP/capita portions" per household (ie: leaving several more portions for investment, government, and other nonpersonal uses).

Or as I sometimes joke to people, the Economic Singularity, the point where our economy tips over into being definitively able to satisfy each and every citizen's fundamental needs, has long-since happened. There is no remaining moral excuse for poverty or toil.

However, the powerful elite of society now require poverty and toil for the rest of us simply because their moral code is: "He who does not work shall not eat." That is why there will be class warfare: because we have implemented a system which views mass starvation as a moral local maximum.

[csmuk]

See my point in a sibling post. The government want to keep unemployment statistics down so they will end up forcing people into training placements and unpaid internships without a job at the end instead. This is already happening.