Slashdot Mirror
Dark Side of Gig Economy: Some Instacart Workers Go On Strike Over Pay That Can Be as Low as $1 Per Hour (fastcompany.com)
From a report: Instacart shoppers and drivers -- the people who gather your groceries and deliver them to you after you order via the Instacart app -- are on strike. While independent contractors can't technically strike, via a Facebook group some of the company's thousands of employees have organized a "no delivery day" in the hopes of getting higher wages, the San Francisco Chronicle reports. The strike is only taking place in a few of the 154 cities nationwide that Instacart operates in. The action may be small, but the grievances are big. While Instacart, the 5-year-old San Francisco startup, is valued at $3.4 billion, it allegedly pays its workers as little as $1 per order. Ars Technica has a great breakdown of all the issues surrounding how Instacart employees get paid and it's complex, with three different income streams coming together Voltron-like to form a wage. The result, though, is that some shoppers are being paid less than the federal minimum wage, like a Jackson, Miss., worker who put in a 19-hour week in Jackson, Mississippi, that paid out $37.75 (roughly $2/hour). That's far below the $14/hour wage that Ars Technica says Instacart is targeting.
This is not a bug but a key feature of gig economy. Also, multi-billion valuation for a grocery delivery service? Why?
I think the gun pointing to their head is the need to eat and have somewhere to live.
Again, where's the gun to their head to do this contract job?
If you don't have a job, you starve.
That's a gun to the head.
So, are e-unions the future? I hope so. The plutocrats have gotten the upper hand for too long, creating growing inequality. It's time us 95% get some bargaining power back (if GOP doesn't outlaw or de-fang unions & e-unions).
Table-ized A.I.
HMm...I guess I must have missed it in the article, that this was the ONLY job in town for everyone.
I guess I must have not read the whole thing in true slashdot fashion to have missed such a crucial detail...?
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Yep. We all know that Instacart is the only employer in the US.
But the guy they quoted in the article already had a public sector job. Sounds like he was doing it on the side, probably because "public sector" means "I don't need to work much and have a lot of free time".
The only way it's economically viable for most people to get someone else to go shopping at a retail store for them is to pay that person much, much less than it otherwise would cost conventionally to do that.
The gig economy seems entirely oriented around pay schemes that are so complicated that most of the people signing up to do the work can't figure out up front they won't make any money doing the work.
the person 'can' refuse a trip
That's what they are doing by striking.
HMm...I guess I must have missed it in the article, that this was the ONLY job in town for everyone.
Yeah, the asshole libertarians think that a two dollar an hour wage is fine, because of course if people don't like it they can just go get a different job.
This is exactly why people think libertarians are assholes.
Again, where's the gun to their head to do this contract job?
Ok..it does sound like the app is a bit unfair, treating 6x cases of water the same as 1x case, but still...the person 'can' refuse a trip, or even to work for the company at all.
It takes a bit of smarts to figure out if the bill rate for a contracting gig is worth the effort, you know?
Put on those big boy pants and do some ciphering.
The articles cover the 'lowest' equivalent rates but fail to say how often that has happened. What are the average and highest equivalent hourly rates and why is that information ignored?
"...while on the clock for the state."
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
HMm...I guess I must have missed it in the article, that this was the ONLY job in town for everyone.
Obviously these folks have a wide range of employment immediately available and choose the lowest paying option. They're just ignoring the better paying alternatives because they enjoy this line of work so much. I'm sure that's what's happening.
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
On the flip side of that question, where's the legal compulsion to work if you don't think the pay is high enough?
Of course striking is fundamentally different than just deciding not to go to work; it's a collective action, one that attempts to establish a kind of monopoly leverage on employers.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
"Doh! Millionaire rock star was just below Instacart driver in the job listings! Why don't I ever follow through??"
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
Because though the lowly outsourcees working gigs at TriangleShirtwaist.com may not burn to death when the exits are blocked, they may go hungry if the site gets DDoSed.
Not so much that, but more that NOT EVERY JOB out there is meant to be made a career of, nor sole source of income to support yourself/family.
This should be common sense, no?
Each job should pay what it is worth. Do you think a burger flipper should make the same as a highly skilled computer programmer?
Should I have to pay $15/hr to get one of the neighborhood kids to pull weeds in my garden one weekend?
Is it worth $30K/yr for someone to put flyers on cars in a parking lot for an hour or two a day?
Seriously, not all jobs are meant or worth paying a wage to live off of....some ARE only for extra money on the side, or starting jobs for teens.
This has been the norm for decades, and only recently for some reason, has everyone started thinking that ANYTHING you could possibly do for money should pay enough to be your sole source of income.
Not all jobs are worth that....
If the individual doesn't like the jobs they are being offered, then THEY need to figure out what to do or what jobs to seek that do give enough compensation to live off of solely.....
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
These people are doing their work part time:
Furthermore, you cannot force employers to pay you more than your labor is worth. If Instacart is too abstract for you, think about your neighbor's kid: you offer him $50/month to mow your lawn. He says he needs $2000/month because his parents aren't feeding and clothing him properly. Are you going to pay him $2000/month? I would guess no: feeding and clothing him are his parents responsibility, and $2000/month is just too much for lawn mowing.
And what's this miraculous set of handcuffs that keeps them from seeking employment elsewhere but still allows them to drive around town where they live now? Is there some forcefield that zaps them back when they try to cross city limits so they can't relocate and look for work elsewhere? Come on guys...if there's no work where you live, that's the invisible hand telling you to move where the work is. People have done it since time immemorial. Whole boat loads and plane loads of people do it now. All the way to the other side of the planet in some cases. We issue hundreds of thousands of work visas every year to Indians and Chinese and Austrailians and Europeans, and hundreds of thousands more immigrant visas. People who want work will find it. What makes you so special that you think the work ought to come to you instead of the other way around?
Here's a novel idea....maybe move to another town with better opportunities?
Ok, I know it might mean having to move away from Mommy and Daddy, but trust me, it can be done....and has been pretty much since the dawn of time.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
And if they're smart they'll be looking for other work while "striking"
Again, where's the gun to their head to do this contract job?
If you don't have a job, you starve.
That's a gun to the head.
What about 'this' job?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I'm confused, is your argument is that they shouldn't not do the job because nobody is forcing them to do the job or that you agree with them striking?
basic insurance will not cover them like pizza drivers no you need the higher cost Commercial Insurance.
Each job should pay what it is worth. Do you think a burger flipper should make the same as a highly skilled computer programmer?
No. But if he's an adult working full time at the most sophisticated job that he's able to do, he should make enough for food, shelter, and health care. I'm not married to forcing his employer to bear that whole burden.
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
It's a job market. That is, you offer your labor and employers bid for it. You end up with the highest pay that your abilities justify.
If the highest pay you can get in the job market is below what you need to eat, you have a problem and society has a problem if there are lots of people like you. But you can't fix that problem by trying to force employers to pay you more than you're worth to them. The proper fix is to put you on welfare, linked to a requirement to make a decent effort to improve your skills.
Funny, usually I hear people refer to it as 'market leverage'. I guess it depends whether over-corporate America loves you or not.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
Yeah, but in the real world public sector jobs make as much as private sector PLUS they have better benefits and pension.
MinerTime, an app that lets coal miners take part in the wonderful new brave digital world of the "innovative" gig economy.
Oh! Oh! Do they allow me to skip that expensive and bulky respirator so I can maximize my profits?
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
Furthermore, you cannot force employers to pay you more than your labor is worth.
Yes you absolutely can. If the position is "worth" less than minimum wage, that's the employer's problem, not the employee's. The employer's not forced to maintain or staff that position, but if the position exists compensation isn't capped at "worth".
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
AND...once you get a civil service job, it is nye impossible for you to get fired, especially if you are female and minority.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
...where's the legal compulsion to work if you don't think the pay is high enough?
I'm legally obligated to pay my child support. If I decide not to work, it puts me on the losing side of that equation.
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
Still happiness / a comfortable living should be reasonably possible, without having to pay an unreasonable amount for tuition. Something that I think is sadly unattainable for many and getting more so by the day.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
"You seem to think this is a right that everyone is inherently born with...?"
Yes, just like corporations have a right to cheap labor? When did this happen?
"The declaration of the US said it wants to give everyone the "pursuit of happiness", but it doesn't guarantee it,"
That's a 200 year old piece of paper written by people with fleas and wooden teeth. Since when do we worship old ideas while surrounded by technology that can produce everything?
"And if you are such a dense simpleton that you cannot take care of yourself, well....there is always welfare."
Like for car manufacturers and banks? Oh, there's that right to steal from the poor (PS: that's you) to bail out billionaires.
For what it's worth (and I'm sort of a moderate rather than one of these libertarian assholes, more like I see that sometimes they have a partial point to make, kind of like everyone else), the crux of the problem is that the cost of housing and healthcare are skyrocketing. So we are arguing about how we should pay for it instead of trying to figure out why it's so damned expensive.
This is a libertarian insight that the rest of the political spectrum (me, I'm a moderate rather than a libertarian asshole, but they do occasionally have some partial insight, so you ought to at least read what they have to say and dismiss maybe 80% of it that's nonsense and assimilate the 20% nugget of truth out of the turd) could learn: costs increase the fastest in sectors that are the most regulated. And housing costs literally skyrocket in the Bay Area -- the most NIMBYed of them all.
What's more, most of this regulation benefits the already-very-wealthy in the form of real estate appreciation -- and that drives inequality. So not only do housing costs rise faster than people can pay for them, but the benefits go to those that least need them, exacerbating wealth inequality.
Like I said above, I think 80% of libertarianism is overblown. But don't mistake their general prickishness for not having anything valid to add to the discourse.
Hell, be a bartender!!
I did that during grad school, and made a LOT of money, and this was at a more typical restaurant bar, not a true BAR type bar.
Even back then, you got much more per hour than the normal server (I got about $6/hr)....and by the time I got tips from the bar, and tipped out from the waitstaff....well, I actually could go out and buy a few drinks for them after we all got off work and went out for a bit.
There's plenty of unskilled jobs out there....but, you have to be willing to compromise on some things, like make yourself presentable looking (if public facing), and do some weird stuff, like showing up when scheduled, etc.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
But the guy they quoted in the article already had a public sector job.
Here is the article cited: https://www.fastcompany.com/40498626/instacart-workers-are-striking-over-wages-reportedly-as-low-as-1-an-hour. There is only one "guy quoted," and the quote is "some shoppers are being paid less than the federal minimum wage, like a Jackson, Miss., worker who put in a 19-hour week in Jackson, Mississippi, that paid out $37.75 (roughly $2/hour)." No mention of a job in the public sector.
Here is the second article cited http://www.sfchronicle.com/business/article/Instacart-workers-plan-Sunday-Monday-strike-12366805.php. Two Instacart workers are quoted. Neither mentions a job in the public sector.
Here is the third article cited, the ars technical article: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/11/some-instacart-workers-to-strike-over-pay-that-can-be-as-low-as-1-per-hour/. Ah-- at last-- Six people were quoted, and three more people's wages were listed (but they weren't quoted directly). ONE of the many people quoted was the guy who said he had a civil service job.
So it's a little disingenuous to say "the" guy they quoted in "the" article.
So. What you meant to say was ONE of the large number of people quoted in the three articles cited also had a full-time job.
If you think that's bad, you should see the hourly rate made by people selling stuff on Etsy.
factoring in cost of materials, I'm pretty sure some people there are making a negative per-hour income.
Pound! Bang! Bin! Bash! is this a shell script or a Batman comic?
I've done contracting also. While it's good living during boom times, it was nasty during the dot-com bust. I scraped by under sweatshop-like conditions under clients who'd often flake on pay. I tried to abandon the IT field altogether, seeing visa workers flood in*. I had a young family such that gigs far away were a strain. (If you are the lone-gypsy type, maybe it's fine for you.)
IT has had 3 bumps in the past 3 decades: The early 1990's aerospace slump (techies flooding market), the 2000 dot-com crash, and the Great Recession. (Personal impact may vary depending on location & specialty.)
Recessions happen and the future is unknown. The good times have been nice, but during the bad times the employer has you by the balls. Myself, I won't bet that the IT good-times will last.
Plus there's agism and age-related problems. Software is often at the whims of fads, and fad chasing is a young-person's game: it's why the fonts are so tiny by default on all the dev tools/sites. Admit it: dev hates fogies. (There are gigs for legacy apps, but you fall behind by taking those.)
People often hate unions during their good times and like them during bad. Look at the long-term instead.
* One of the few things T did right is tighten the visa review process.
Table-ized A.I.
There is no gun forcing you to take a job you can't do well enough to earn a decent living doing
Work Safe Porn
It is enough if it is enough for these people sometime. Supply and demand. They can contract for another place or work a regular job with fixed shifts. We could reverse this and say that this company is helping out their customers by keeping rates low so they can afford to use their services and at the same time creating more jobs.
Typically fixed with automation. Jobs that aren't worth minimum are butt simple. For example: Every (Carl's Jr/Hardee's) has a burger flipping conveyor grill.
Worth is the intersection of supply and demand, labor is the same as any other commodity.
Locally fast food workers/operators have priced themselves higher than local ethnic restaurants. I can get a good Thai lunch special for less than a burger fries and a soda. Sucks to be them.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
If the business model is only viable when you effectively have slaves working for you, it's not a good business model.
Jobs that are supposedly only for 'teenagers' to make extra money have been mostly worked by adults for years now. Pulling weeds is basically gardening. You can hire kids to do it for cheap for all sorts of reasons, like they don't have to actually feed themselves or pay rent. When kids are young, it's kind of a fun thing to do so they can make some money and learn about working. But if you hire an adult to do it, they're going to charge you an hourly rate appropriate for a landscaper, and you can pay it or not. Maybe my job as a programmer deserves more money than a burger flipper, but I want that burger flipper to make enough so that when they go home after their 8 hours of real, legitimate work, they can afford to buy the video games that I make.
If the job is worth doing, it's probably worth paying for. If you can't because it's too expensive or you're too frugal, then do it yourself or don't get it done.
My local grocery store delivers (I think they even offer it free to seniors), and I imagine that those people are getting paid whatever the normal wage is at the store. Shopping for stuff, driving it somewhere and delivering it is a REAL JOB. Even just delivering things is a job that we pay people to do at *better* than minimum wage!
Instacart is not on the right side of this. Making workers deliver 20 cases of water for $3-4 is immoral. If these jobs are the kind that 'job creators' come up with when they get tax cuts, they can stuff them and pay more taxes.
In CA the state government has an administration (CA GSA) that exists only to warehouse useless workers.
They _can't_ fire them, the cheapest solution is to just transfer the air thieves to the GSA. It's a six story, full city block building just south of Broadway in Sacramento. Nothing gets done, but they are out of the way.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
If this job is paying what it's worth, then it shouldn't hurt Instacart at all for everyone to suddenly stop doing it. They are paying a pittance, so it's not that important to them if people do it, right?
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
If he's an adult working full time at the most sophisticated job that he's able to do, he should make enough for food, shelter, and health care
Sophisticated isn't the right word. There are a lot of jobs requiring unskilled/minimally-skilled labor that pay more than flipping burgers, Or where you can get the necessary training at minimal or zero cost ---- the burger flipper role or retail stockboy role are literally jobs for someone who has no marketable skill AND can't make a full-time commitment due to other engagements AND don't have the life experience/employee experience to plan or organize any kind of affairs, because they're a kid in college or something.
I'm legally obligated to pay my child support.
You can't do that on a $2/hr job.
Corporations spend a fair amount on political lobbying and pass those costs on to the consumer. Almost every product you buy in certain categories has a hidden "lobbying tax". You are essentially forced to pay it. Workers need a counter version of the same thing.
"Right to work", nice word-play there. Each job you take has pre-conditions that are not negotiable, other than leave. Why should union membership be exempt from such a pattern but other things not?
Table-ized A.I.
TFA says one worker 'put in' 19 hrs and got $37 in pay. Can anybody tell me what work the person actually did in those 19 hours? Maybe he did 4 hours worth of work? Maybe he did 40 hours worth of work?
Key information missing, so please folks don't get all bent.
It would be interesting to see the U.S. economy completely crash just to see who really is essential and who is superfluous. There's an excess of smugness these days. I can see an every man for himself situation develop very quickly.
Not to mention the risk that you still might not find a job when you get there, but now you need a vehicle more because you live on the outskirts of some big city and now child care costs are through the roof because you just moved away from the few people who would provide free support.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
In many towns, the unemployment rate exceeds 50 percent.
Yes, it can be the only OPEN job.
There used to be some $10.00/hr jobs before that was illegal.
You seem to think this is a right that everyone is inherently born with...?
If you're an American working as productively as you're capable of, you deserve food, shelter, and health care. I didn't say it was a "right"; it's just the right thing to do. Some people are born simple and will never make it beyond "burger flipper." They shouldn't be left hungry or have to splint their own broken arm. Like I said, this support doesn't have to be 100% borne by the employer. Leaving the weak to die isn't something a civilized society should do.
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
No. But if he's an adult working full time at the most sophisticated job that he's able to do, he should make enough for food, shelter, and health care. I'm not married to forcing his employer to bear that whole burden.
Careful with that line of thinking, as it could very easily get one into age-discrimination territory.
Stalin: "Join my party or starve"
Conservatives didn't like it when Stalin did that, but are okay with it in different forms. I see hypocrisy.
USA is the wealthiest (large) country. There is no reason anybody here should starve or die of readily curable illnesses other than Ayn-Randian political beliefs.
Table-ized A.I.
Communist!!
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
That's a gun to the head.
What you describe is just a "general" gun to the head that EVERYONE has.
That's not a gun to the head to do THIS contract job, specifically.
That's a gun to the head to FIND AND DO a sufficiently-paying job. Well, guess what.... this one isn't sufficiently-paying, so go look for something else.
I'm legally obligated to pay my child support.
You can't do that on a $2/hr job.
If I was making $2/hr and working full time, my obligation should be scaled to match. Paying enough to show an honest effort should keep me from being arrested or having my driver's license suspended. If I opt not to work, they very well may toss me in jail.
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
My sister did this while she was getting her biochem degree. She was making so much money, in fact, that she still does it today, even with a biochem degree now.
Wow that's a lot of syllables just to agree with the people in the story refusing to work for the pay given.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
That's a common libertarian statement, yes: they have no problem with people starving, but if you try to make a system where people don't starve, they say "The immoral position is yours, namely attempts to interfere with it."
Right. Let people die, it's the only moral thing to do. That way the economy works, and the economy is more important than the people in it.
I will repeat: this is exactly why people have such a low opinion of libertarians.
That's the solution! Everyone can go be a bartender! Even when no bars are hiring bartenders!
I made my rent and living expenses doing help desk work at $15-$25 an hour at my college library. Why can't everyone just do that! Even better than bar tending!
You heard it here and now folks! My free informative talk to success and pulling yourself up by your bootstraps!
Just be grateful they aren't all as awesome as you. You might be shielded from offshoring & H1-Bs but a bit of domestic competition could eat into your billing rate.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Technically, there is nothing illegal about it, and there were no one holding a head to the serfs and indentured labor either. The indenture was actually a valid contract between consenting bona fide parties.
Care read history about why they agreed to those manifestly unjust terms?
Care to read history to understand what usually unfolds when the population is pushed to breaking points?
Hint: One of the first heads to roll will be yours and mine.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
If a bunch of people from sub-Sahara Africa and Syria can do it, so can folks in America.
It seems a lot of people don't really know what the bare essentials really means.
You mean the government that is trillions of dollars in debt?
then i wont use their service until they get a decent living wage, either that or if i have no choice to use them then i will give them a nice fat tip, maybe a 20 dollar tip if they bring me my 100 dollars worth of groceries in good condition, i cant condone employees making less than a living wage, i want them to be paid fairly
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
I think the gun pointing to their head is the need to eat and have somewhere to live.
At $1 / hr (their words, not mine) they'd be better of doing anything other than this job. If you work for $1 / hr, you're a fool and your inability to eat is natural selection at work.
It's always been true. Most people just suck at financial planning.
There have always been many people that spend 110% of their income. It runs in families. Their parents were typically morons too.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
I'm more libertarian than anything else. And I think Instacart is exploiting these people. I hope they get sued, the assholes.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
That's a 200 year old piece of paper written by people with fleas and wooden teeth.
They also went to the same guy for haircuts, dentistry, and surgery.
Generations before them didn't watch their parents lose their jobs due to automation, technology and by extension, outsourcing. Generations before them stayed at the same job all their life because the company valued their employees with fair wages and fair benefits and stuck by them. Not throw them out on the street because they found Abdul in Bombay that can half-ass the job for a quarter of the pay and no benefits.
This generation is only giving back to the "powers" what they were given, indifference and "I GOT MINE".
If you have kids before a good job, your purpose is to serve as a warning to others. Better luck next reincarnation.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
You must be single.
Table-ized A.I.
Should I have to pay $15/hr to get one of the neighborhood kids to pull weeds in my garden one weekend?
Yes. But right now you don't have to, so you're good.
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
I know someone who used to brag about how he had a lady who would clean his whole house, wash his dishes, do his laundry, for $5 an hour because she was an illegal alien and was basically desperate for money. Not surprisingly, most people upon hearing this did not rush out to get their own service slave. They just thought to themselves about what a sleaze this person was. That's basically what the gig economy is doing. Finding the people who are the most desperate and taking advantage of their situation. The fact that people are willing to do a job for a low rate does not mean it is right for you to perpetuate that situation. Just because you do it through a flashy app, it doesn't change anything.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
Welfare and other government benefits are based on how many kids you have, whether you're married, partially disabled etc. Single childless fulltime workers aren't getting benefits. To say that walmart is the one being subsidized is disengenuous. Should walmart pay people based on how many kids they have? Do you pay the guy who cuts your lawn more after he has a kid? Do you tip your waitress based on how many kids she has and whether or not she's married?
If your wage isn't high enough to meet your essential needs (food, shelter), and your obligations to the job do not leave you sufficient time to seek additional income opportunities, there is exactly zero difference in the long run between being paid a dollar an hour and working for no compensation at all.
In the long run, the only time being underpaid is better than nothing at all is when you can either still (however barely) meet your own needs with the pay, or else your job obligation leaves you enough time when you are not working to have additional sources of income.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Because things were good when the kids were born and no one has a fucking crystal ball? I mean I know you're trying to get at the whole 'you shouldn't have kids if you can't afford them' line but life just isn't that fucking simple for anyone.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
Generations before them didn't watch their parents lose their jobs due to automation, technology and by extension
Generations have watched their parents lose jobs due to automation and technology since generations began.
Where was the outcry from farm workers when a steam engine could do the same work as a large number of farm hands? Or a steam shovel replacing dozens of guys with shovels?
It's the economy, stupid. What has been called a recession is a depression. Former full time employees are scheduled for 20 hours per week to avoid receiving benefits and overtime pay. Minimum wage needs to be $30 per hour so workers can afford food, a car, and a place to live.
Here's a novel idea....maybe if this business can't afford to pay their workers the legal minimum, the business should move to another town/country?
You are in effect compelled to work, but you aren't compelled to work for any particular employer.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
If you're a human being working as productively as you're capable of, you deserve food, shelter, and health care. I didn't say it was a "right"; it's just the right thing to do. Some people are born simple and will never make it beyond "burger flipper." They shouldn't be left hungry or have to splint their own broken arm. Like I said, this support doesn't have to be 100% borne by the employer. Leaving the weak to die isn't something a civilized society should do.
Fixed that for you.
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
If he's bringing in $500K per year of business, why shouldn't he get paid $100K? Just because there is someone who would do it for $10K? The problem is, there is a lot of talk about paying people what they are worth but it's really all just lip service. People get paid the least that companies can get away with paying them, which isn't anything CLOSE to 'what they are worth'.
Looking at it another way, if Instacart drivers are being paid next to nothing, then it shouldn't hurt Instacart for them to go on strike because they must generate very little of the company's worth.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
That assumes the worker has the resources to turn down bad bargains -- all these fair market arguments about wages have they same false assumption -- that the employee is am an equal bargaining position as the employer. That false assumption can easily be shown: what happens to most employers if they have an unfilled position for a year? vs. what happens to most employees if they are unemployed for a year?
Have you ever heard of a person in the US starving to death? Ever? Serious question.
Basically, using the guise of 'independent contractor', companies are skirting our (American) wage regulations and shafting workers whenever and whereever they can. And people wonder where that income disparity is coming from.
This here is a nice shiny example.
The problem is really people being hired as contractors without the usual client/contractor relationship. Else this would be a non-issue.
I've done contracts where I've lost money, which means I was paid less than these folks are (since I was in the negative). Didn't happen often though.
So the line between contractors and employees is too blurry here.
Why should union membership be exempt from such a pattern but other things not?
Mainly because people don't want it.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
The guy who mows my yard isn't a kid. He also gets a lot more than MY $50 a month. He doesn't just mow one yard.
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
Thats why the person you replied to said "the fix is to put you on welfare as you improve your skills".
Hard to get that to fly in the US, but it is a reasonable fix: employers have to pay employees more than what welfare would, else they just take a government pay check until their worth is high enough that someone will pay them more.
There are countries where things loosely work that way, and it's not too too bad.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Just want to point out that a lot of libertarians want to end all the welfare programs as well. I just want to consolidate them all into a basic income guarantee.
Basically, by removing welfare cliffs, we can encourage people to achieve all that they can, while providing just enough of a floor so that people aren't starving on the streets. This way you don't have people hitting a point and then just stopping because earning any more would cause them to lose effective income.
I don't read AC A human right
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No as libertarian I think a job with a two dollar an hour wage exists because there is a market for it. Somebody out there is willing to work for $2. Maybe its because they don't see it as 2hr, they see it as taking a gig that involves dropping something off on they way home for the grocery store trip they were making anyway, so for them is a $2/5min job or rather a $24/hr gig for 1/12th of an hour.
The fact that running errands does not pay well enough to do as an occupation isn't a problem. They problem is people think it should and expect to earn a living that way. There are similar jobs that do pay enough to make a living at. They have names like valet, personal shopper, etc. Wanna know what the difference is? I'll tell you those people are actually paid to think! They are expected to know what their client wants or needs, they have some limited at least decision making authority and an expectation they will solve simple problems. Executing instructions delivered by an app which the client had to dream up and craft themselves, and throwing your hands up when something is a miss simply isn't as much value. If instacart had to deliver what worked out to roughly minimum wage, its unlikely there would be many takers.
So here is the real question: Is it better that a few people can make a buck or two on a side gig once and a while and you get an app to request deliveries, or should we live in a society where there is no instacart?
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
Maybe its because they don't see it as 2hr, they see it as taking a gig that involves dropping something off on they way home for the grocery store trip they were making anyway,
Except that's not the way instacart works, any more that Uber works by you pick somebody up on your way to the store.
Indeed. This is why I support something like a BIG - Basic Income Guarantee.
That said, I'm a dirty libertarian who supports a BIG, as I've gone so deep into the looking glass that I came out the other side. It'd be cheaper and provide more liberty than traditional welfare programs.
My basic proposal is to have the BIG be ~$6k per person*, while eliminating the tax rates below 25% and the standard exemption(Deductions stay). The 25% might need to become 26%. Whatever. Neutrality is around $30k of income, where the BIG is neutralized by the extra taxes(same money to federal coffers otherwise). You pay more than $6k substantially sooner than that, of course. It doesn't really increase the taxes of those that make more either. Those earning less than $30k are better off on an even slope, except those that were experts at exploiting our welfare systems before. Response to them: It isn't your right to live alone on the government dime while you're unemployed. GET A JOB. Also, should help with keeping whole families because it wouldn't be like current welfare and encouraging single mothers.
*Yes, this isn't enough to live alone, much less in the bigger more expensive cities. If you want to live alone or in a big city, GET A JOB! Note: Meets the federal poverty line of $24k with a household of four.
I don't read AC A human right
From the Ars article:
shoppers make a per-item fee (typically $0.40)— however, this is not per unit of that item.
Ars spoke with six Instacart shoppers who said that they have routinely been made to pick up several heavy items, such as cases of bottled water, soda, or ice. Those items, of course, not only have to be loaded into a shopping cart, and then into a car, but they must be also hand-carried to someone’s door—sometimes up flights of stairs. Shoppers are still paid a $0.40 per-item fee even if someone orders one, five, or 10 cases of bottled water.
This definition of an "item" creates a windfall for people/businesses ordering lots of things--often heavy, bulky ones. Instacart's pricing scheme makes them a good deal more competitive than typical delivery services, so the customers do the rational thing.
I have to wonder how much this entire issue would smooth out just by changing this into a true per-item fee.
And for orphans?
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
... quit.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
If more young people, didn't have kids too soon before they can afford them
Wrong. The average age at which people have children is going up, and it has been for years. The trend has been toward older parents since at least the 1970s.
Source: http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressr...
if they didn't always go out and buy the latest shiny $$$ smart phone, didn't eat out all the time, etc, etc.
Oh, teens and 20-somethings in the 70s didn't blow money on stupid shit? Give me a break.
They did marry earlier though, and it is much easier to save for a house when funneling two incomes into it.
If you don't make Pro Athlete or rock star money, then you should know you can't live even close to that lifestyle and spend money like that.
We are talking about people getting paid $1/hour. I doubt they aspire to a celebrity lifestyle. If anything, they aspire to be free from the ever-present fear of homelessness.
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According to the latest ruleset, this post should be modded as Vorpal Flamebait +5.
can't figure out up front they won't make any money doing the work.
Can't Google "instacart average pay"? I just searched that exact phrase and found several websites with employees sharing their negative experiences working for Instacart.
Groundwater Sustainability Agencies ?
That's the first result for
https://www.google.com/search?...
https://archive.is/eU90k
https://www.google.com/search?...
https://archive.is/TstDK
I don't see anything about useless people being sent there though.
Got a link?
Where was the outcry from farm workers when a steam engine could do the same work as a large number of farm hands? Or a steam shovel replacing dozens of guys with shovels?
Most of them could go to a factory. They could either produce machinery or work on assembly lines. All of those displaced, unskilled laborers had a place to go. And economic output went up because of it.
Automation today isn't opening up any new opportunities for most people though. Your typical automation is replacing 100 laborers with an engineer and a few process/maintenance techs.
Those unskilled laborers aren't getting new opportunities, regardless of how hard they're willing to work. Maybe the smartest ones can retrain and compete for jobs as techs, but what about the other 95%?
Machines are replacing the grunt work, so we have a choice:
1.Find new areas to use grunt work, or
2. Decide how to handle the workforce attrition systematically, fairly, and humanely
Since we already pay for grunt work when it is economically feasible, I'm guessing there is not much room for option #1. If it's profitable to have someone do that job at all, people are probably already paid to do it. So I expect it's time to start working on option #2.
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According to the latest ruleset, this post should be modded as Vorpal Flamebait +5.
Family is the answer.
Many people don't have families. Many more poor people have families that are just as poor as they are.
If US becomes totally communist, I will move immediately.
What makes you think you would be allowed to leave?
Think this should be +1 funny..... Or even a +1 sad but mostly true
The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions that I wish it to be always kept alive
Look up the numbers. The cost of a house (or a college degree) as a multiple of income is a lot higher than it was in the 40's gramps.
What year was that?
The illegals in front of Home Depot won't work for a penny less than $100/day. Typically a six hour day.
I call bullshit!
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
You're going to have to be much more specific than that. That's most of them.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Again, where's the gun to their head to do this contract job?
Maybe that's why they are refusing to do it for that wage? Seems like they are doing what you think they should do, and yet you're bitching about them doing what you say they should do.
Ohh, I see...... the dreaded word "strike".
Never mind. I understand your problem with them, and where you are coming from.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Problem solved with legal 75th trimester abortions!
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
CA's GSA isn't the same as the federal one. CA GSA is an air thief wearhouse.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Leaving the weak to die isn't something a civilized society should do.
It's one of the crazy ideas that conservatives have that just don't work.
It's similar to the concept that we have to get tough on crime yet refusing to fund prisons.
Poor people just need to be rich, and the only difference between that special needs kid next door and Elon Musk is that the kid doesn't apply himself.
In fact, th eultimate non-solution by the conservatives and libertarians is "I don't want this problem, can't thos people just go away and die?"
This is why so many ideaologies end up deciding that they have to turn on their own people and murder them for their own good.
Because after all, how else can the ideology cope.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
2000? Anorexics and late stage cancer. Population of the USA is about 300,000,000
The USA spends billions/year on free obesity related health care treatment for those on the tit. You can see all the government paid electric scooters on the street on check day.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
^^ This is the basic stupidity of socialists.
They don't understand that authoritarian government is a monopoly. Employer != Dictator.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
If you're a human being working as productively as you're capable of...
Agree 100%, but it's harder to enforce beyond our borders.
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
So if people don't want unions, that's OK. But if people want minimum wage, that's not OK? A bit hypocritical there.
That's not what hypocritical means.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Looks like it's equally hard to enforce within the borders as well...
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
He was willfully ignoring the real value of her labor, and therefore taking advantage of her. You make it sound like charity, which cannot be so long as he is gaining an advantage from it.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
If you can't afford to pay someone at least $10/hr (or whatever min wage is in your city) to do it, go by yourself. What's a half hour every week?
I do not have a specific citation to offer, but I am aware that it is part of the basics of Laissez-faire economics. Of course, the opposite of that would be found in Roosevelt's "Fireside chats" where every job should have not just a bare-essentials livable wage, but a "decent living" one. Someone can use their favorite search engine should be able to cherry-pick citations for either for both economics and ethics/philosophy. The US is primarily a capitalistic economy which, at first blush, would imply the former; however, in the 19th century we started to regulate business to reduce the negative effects of raw capitalism and in the early 20th century, partly due to the Depression, the culture shifted the responsibility of social welfare from family and religion to the government. Which way one leans depends both on how one weighs and interpret the natural rights, law-given rights, and responsibilities of individuals versus other individuals and society. I might add that it may be useful to have a clearer definition of the target of the livable wage. It is easier to justify setting a minimal wage to a livable wage of an individual versus that of the livable wage of a family to those that see minimal wage are starter or "teenage" jobs.
Torching the strawman will not only result in a PG-13 rating rather than the suggested R-rated scene, but it will also be a good lead into an entertaining Michael Bay style explosion. Snarkiness aside, I certainly did not see it in the previous comments that I read, but, just to state, I have heard the argument being discussed on several previous occasions, not that they have any real bearing. I think a better question would have been how to deal with the wage/salary devaluation that occurs when minimal wage increases. Rather than a computer programmer, whose salaries can often be large enough to absorb wage increases, let's look at the much lower paid parametric who would probably has the national median pay close to $15/hr (similar to prescribed minimal wage), but has more difficult prerequisites and potentially greater risk. If minimal wage is raised, there is nothing that requires that employers raise pay proportionally if even at all. Of course, giving a "fair" (which tends to be in the eye of the behold), might increase costs enough to offset the required wage to be livable faster than desired (depending on which economist you ask). Concerning minimal wage for traditional employment, I would be willing support smaller, local-based regularly scheduled, inflation-relative targeted periodic minimal wage increases along with matching minimal salary for "exempt" employees and percentage scaled (higher the pay, lower the mandatory increase percentage) minimal increases for those with yearly salaries below the minimal "exempt" level. Of course, I only took Economics I in college so my opinion of such should be considered that of an interested amateur.
Now concerning the OP, I do agree and support the workers right and reason to strike. While not necessarily a moral imperative, I do think there should be a certain level of balance in power between the worker (whether employee or contractor) and employer. Striking as a virtual union is one way to push the pendulum in the other direction. That aside, I do not think it is practical to use traditional minimal wage in regards to this "gig economy" nor do I think that people should be forced into a "traditional" labour model in order to make it easy "to keep things fair." If I were to make a suggestion, I would do two things
Where was the outcry from farm workers when a steam engine could do the same work as a large number of farm hands? Or a steam shovel replacing dozens of guys with shovels?
There was plenty of outrage, and there were plenty of people, including this guy, preaching about how workers were going to spiral into poverty. Of course that didn't happen, because rising productivity leads to prosperity not poverty, but many people thought it would happen, just as many people believe the same today.
So we are arguing about how we should pay for it instead of trying to figure out why it's so damned expensive.
It's so damn expensive because we've tried to force fit ideology into it.
Housing is so expensive because we've allowed uncontrolled access to credit, and allowed it to people who never should have had it. That started a megaflation of housing prices.
We have a mutant health care system where people without insurance get their basic healthcare at emergency rooms - the most expensive healthcare on the planet, then the costs, which tehy obviously don't pay are just transferred up teh line, and basic services for the insured are inflated to cover the emergency room healthcare, which is passed on to the insurance companies, who then have to raise insurance rates, which causes more people to enter teh uninsured realm, when makes those people have to go to the emergency rooms for basic healthcare which...... Makes for a perfect example of a positive feedback loop, which never works.
We've demanded that there be no increase in the minimum wage for a long enough time - long enough for all of the basic living expenses to inflate, so that now the grunts working for WalMart and all the other cheap labor giants - are eligible for supplemental benefits. Which you and I pay for in taxes. So we end up with a mutant system that has free market anti-government people who support WalMart's ideology while at the same time supporting WalMart's corporate welfare.
We have people who insist that these are all starting level jobs, never to be made a living off of. It's funny, but growing up, There were lots of people I knew working in the downtown department stores who were making a living off of it. Of course, My father paid around 12 percent of his take home pay on his mortgage. Mine sucked up 50 percent of my take home, and apparently many people were paing much much more.
We have been sold a bill of goods that tells us that if we just apply ourselves, we can be anything we decide we want to be. Which sure as Spandex is a nasty soul crushing lie. Yet trotted out as a meme for anyone who thinks that some of the folks at McDonalds are capable of being rocket scientists, and the only reason they aren't is that they are too lazy.
Then we have this case, where people are refusing to work for the wages offered, and some wag bitches about "Nobody is holding a gun to their head.
That's true, as evidenced by them doing what he says they should do, then pissing and moaning when they do what he says they should do.
When in fact, we either have to help them, or allow them to help themselves. Or just euthanize them. Some of us have a real problem with that last idea. I think there are a fair number of Americans who don't.
This is a libertarian insight that the rest of the political spectrum (me, I'm a moderate rather than a libertarian asshole, but they do occasionally have some partial insight, so you ought to at least read what they have to say and dismiss maybe 80% of it that's nonsense and assimilate the 20% nugget of truth out of the turd) could learn: costs increase the fastest in sectors that are the most regulated.
Hmm, now you have my attention. Perhaps the Bay area is so socialist bureaucracy regulated where the forms have to be filled out with a certain brand pen, but here in the Right coast, we had a different issue, based on lack of regulation.
As an example, My father's mortgage on his house was originated at the local First National Bank. Every payment was made to the local First National Bank. When it was finished, he picked up the Mortgage papers there.
Contrast that with mine. We had a "loan originator" who got paid by how many mortgages he "originated" He couldn't give a flying fig if we were agtually eligible. In fact he was surprised at how good our credit rating was. So we got really great rates. But not everyone did. And our Mortgage was sold a number of times to other banks. Anyh
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
tl;dr.
Paragraphs.
They're for separating thoughts. While on one topic, stick with the same paragraph. It's fine to have from a single sentence up to several. They should be related.
When you begin a new thought, a new paragraph may be useful to your reader. If you run everything together, your reader may get confused or become disinterested. Separating thoughts benefits both the reader and the writer.
You're failing to take into account large changes that have happened since then, such as the ability to transport manufactured good over seas cheaply, globalization, and the fact that automation has never been so potent at replacing human workers as it is today. But ok, stay in your little dream world.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
I pay the neighborhood kids 15.00 an hour. I am disabled and they can get a lot more done in that hour than I can.
*"Cogito Ergo Liberalis"*
Actually I have a friend who is from Africa, and they refer to each other as 'black' there too.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
We are talking about people getting paid $1/hour.
No. It is $1 per ORDER not per hour.
TFS and TFA both say "per hour" in their headlines, but both are wrong.
Whole generations died in grinding poverty before their grandchildren and great-grandchildren got the new jobs. Do you think this is a minor detail you can just gloss over?
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
It seems that if I know that I'm only worth $10/hr to an employer, I should be allowed to work rather than being prevented to by minimum wage laws.
There are alternatives.
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
Family is the answer.
Not everyone has a family.
Agree 100%, but it's harder to enforce beyond our borders.
Some irony present in this comment, since it's beyond your borders that these notions are more regularly enforced.
Fine, but then you're not paying them what they are worth to your business. You are paying them the minimum that you can get someone to fill that role for.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
No, I'm saying the person should have been paid the going rate for a house cleaner, regardless of the fact that she was in a desperate situation. This person could easily afford it, and if $5 an hour was keeping her from starving, imagine what $20/hour would do. If this person couldn't afford it (which he could) then if we wanted to do something nice then he could have found someone who could afford it. But no, he stopped at exactly the point that *he* was happy and didn't go a step further. That's what made him selfish.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
The employer doesn't have a problem with that at all; the employer will simply leave the business and invest their money and time in something more profitable. What an employer won't do is pay $15/h to someone worth only $10/h.
This is the US, you always have welfare. A minimum income is practically guaranteed by the government these days, signing up for these contracts is not a full time job for any of those people.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
Only 2000 people of malnutrition? Plenty of people die from obesity, that's also malnutrition.
There is no way in the US you are starving involuntarily.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
Large parts of the rust belt and South game little or no jobs. Go back to the Guilded Age and you'll find anyone with a decent job had servants. That's not because they made a lot of money, there were just that many desperate people. These people know they're getting screwed. They're desperate. It's why they elected Trump. Remember that when we go to way with North Korea in a few years.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
If it's about "freedom", then a union has freedom to negotiate terms with an employer, and that freedom includes possible contract stipulations that all workers in the company must contribute to the union. Your suggestion would strip unions of freedom.
OR do you believe unions DON'T have the same rights as people? We can go down that route, but we should apply it evenly and ALSO conclude corporations don't have the same rights as people.
It seems to me conservatives want corporations to have the same rights as people but not unions. I find this inconsistent and hypocritical.
I may agree to strip unions of such "rights" if corporations are also stripped of many rights. Otherwise, I'd like to have unions have power to balance against corporations, who have a long record of exploiting employees during difficult times for individuals and during national slumps.
I will agree some union leaders are jerks, but corporations also have jerks. Jerks can happen in any org. If you want to get rid of all jerks, then kill all humans.
Table-ized A.I.
Your lemonade stand analogy makes no sense to me. That's not what unions do. They don't block consumers. Anyhow, see my nearby reply about "people rights" versus "union rights" versus "corporation rights".
Table-ized A.I.
Name-calling, how classy. I'm not even a socialist: I'm a "mixtillist": combo of capitalism and socialism. Just because one wants some socialism doesn't mean they want the whole enchilada.
Companies are a de-facto dictator if the practical choice is to work under a single or limited set of companies OR eat scraps from trash bins.
Most desperate people don't give a shit about nominal freedom unless it relieves them of desperate circumstances. Read about Maslow's hierarchy of needs
Table-ized A.I.
So where are all those jobs? Do you actually think these people are turning down better offers for some reason? Rip away the smoke and mirrors and you'll find that adequate employment isn't that easy for a lot of people to find.
Any job worth doing is worth a living wage, end of story. How big that living wage is and what it covers should be discussed but any job in society should pay it upon at minimum an 8/8/8 5/7 basis. If it is not worth a living wage, than it is not worth doing. Hence default wage is a living wage, to ensure those who contribute to human society can live off that contribution. Those who oppose it should simply spend the rest of their lives in a custodial institution proving a income for those correctional services officers who will ensure that the insanely greedy can not escape and cause harm to reasonable citizens.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
No, absolutely wrong. If it isn't worth paying a living wage to be done, then we as a society don't need the work done, and the business owner can do it his fucking self. If they don't like that, pay a living wage.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
That's a good thing. Free time is good. Why not have a maximum of 40 hours a week of work in all jobs?
Your ad here. Ask me how!
Why bother hiring a full time lecturer when you can sub in a few videos and computerized grading systems and just have the teacher there for a few hours a week?
The teachers unions actively refuse any efficiencies and block any technological adoptions that could possibly pave the way. As a student I would ask the best professors to give their course material to adjuncts or record their lectures on video. You should have seen the looks I got.
I object to power without constructive purpose. --Spock
Wall of text...but nothing to say.
I object to power without constructive purpose. --Spock
Don't forget what student aid did to the cost of college.
Yeah, I forgot that one. We produced a generation of people with liberal arts degrees, some with 100K in loan debt, and only qualified to work at WalMart.
Wow - we really did screw up didn't we?
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Wall of text...but nothing to say.
The irony is delicious. But thanks for playing.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Do you really think jobs pay what they are worth? Employers will pay the burgers flippers as little as they can, irrespective of how much they are worth. They also have little need to compete with each other on salary since the unskilled workers have been made interchangeable. Instead the tax payers are in essence subsidizing the owners to help pay their workers a living wage.
Then why are people trying to make a living off those jobs. I don't really care what was intended, I care about what is happening.
I think you've got things backwards. Now, people have to struggle and do anything just to get enough money to live.
And if enough of those jobs don't exist then it's survival of the fittest.
Chris Mesterharm
Who was stopped from working?
Table-ized A.I.
Most people don't want the purchase price of a product they buy going to business lobbying either. Double Standard.
Table-ized A.I.
Who exactly was "stopped" from working? I smell high exaggeration.
(I thought I posted this reply already, so please forgive me if it eventually shows up twice.)
Table-ized A.I.
Define the logistics of "deserve". If someone " "deserves" more than they can produce, whose productivity output should you take it away from? There is nothing for free in the world, someone has to bake the bread the "deserving" person will eat, and if you give it to them for free, you now robbed the baker of a good he or she has produced. I what if that baker then decided he deserves stuff for free too, then what, slave labor to force people to work to their full ability?
Nah. If it were just a matter of dues, it mostly wouldn't be a problem. But what do you get for your dues? Seniority rules and another layer of bureaucracy that doesn't care about helping you.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Why is it that every time someone mentions a strike, there's a comment like this? It's a purely capitalist argument, so going from the same angle, a strike is a pure capitalist action. They have decided to charge the company a higher price for their services. If the company chooses to look elsewhere, they are entitled to do so.
Nah. If it were just a matter of a part of the purchase price of a product, it mostly wouldn't be a problem. But what do you get for that part of the price of products ? Anti customer laws and corporate law-writers who don't care about helping you.
Wars are great for profits of many companies, BTW.
Bingo Dictionary - Pragmatist, n. A myopic idealist.
What's difficult for me to ascertain is how the "shopping" of groceries is being done which is a big part of whether $1/order is reasonable. Initially, it looks like the shoppers went into the stores and bought the items individually and it was also possible to place orders for multiple stores. Paying $1 for the shopper to go to Whole Foods and Kroger vs paying the shopper $1 to go to Whole Foods? There is definitely a scale difference there that should warrant differing costs.
The same assessment could be applies to the size of the order. $1 for an order that takes a full shopping cart or $1 for an order that can all be placed in a shopping basket. You can make a slightly better argument for $1/order if the shoppers are all doing curbside pickups and not going into the store but there's still the scope of the effort necessary to load/unload 1 bag of groceries versus 10.
While the pay rate may be $1/order just looking at the setup I can see how the effective pay rate would be $1/hr. I already get home 30 minutes later any day I go to the grocery store and that's when going to a grocery store that is maybe 2-4 minutes of additional travel. This just goes to continue to highlight the economic problem with the gig economy. The jobs have customers because the gig is cheap enough but the labor cost is low and the depreciation costs are non-existent. Every single one of them was founded with the goal that people would do the gig as they're doing something else making the extra cash a nice little incentive which is what made the low compensation seem reasonable. It's the individuals who are attempting to use a single gig as their primary income, which the system was never intended and likely cannot reasonably function with.
"Lack of speed can be overcome. In the worst case by patience." --Znork
So you give away most of your income? Sounds like you have more than you need
I'm a libertarian that supports UBI. I support it precisely because it reduces welfare cost/burdens by dissolving those systems along with their structure to determine whether someone qualifies. The overall outcome should be a cheaper system, lower regulation, and better coverage. It provides income stability to individuals which is probably the single biggest thing we can do to combat crime in a general sense. It's something I consider prudent because I believe we're on the cusp of wave of automation that is general purpose rather than specific purpose. To me it's not a question about whether there's a solution that doesn't require the use of force. For me it's a question of which solution uses the least amount of force in the least painful way.
"Lack of speed can be overcome. In the worst case by patience." --Znork
I've heard people spout "Taxation is theft" before. This is the first time I've seen someone claim "Taxation is 'slave labor'."
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
Well, she was here illegally....if she'd not been here against the law, she would not have been taken advantage of....
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Geez, it's common sense man....
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Housing is so expensive because we've allowed uncontrolled access to credit, and allowed it to people who never should have had it. That started a megaflation of housing prices.
I respectfully think this gets cause and effect backwards. People don't just sign up for loans totaling 5x their yearly income* without a good reason. They do so because housing costs are expensive and that's the only way to get in on the increase in prices and the perks of homeownership (including the MID).
That is to say, credit was created and extended to account for expensive house prices. And since houses were always projected to be valuable, creditors didn't have to charge a lot because the loans were secured by a good asset. So I see the high prices as the fundamental cause of both the increase in credit (that people reluctantly signed up for) and the cheap price (since the cost to the creditor of default is lowered by continued projection of value).
And I see the fundamental cause of high prices as being the insane restrictions of where and how you can build. Cities like allowed construction to happen where and how people wanted saw much lower increases in prices.
[ Although, I can see that this is a vicious self-reinforcing cycle. Owners buy in and want their houses to appreciate, so they logically vote for restrictions out of self-interest. This causes houses to get more expensive, so the next set of owners also votes that way. To loosen restrictions then would be to be left holding the bag after everyone else cashed in. ]
[[ Actually, the latter is kind of a counterpoint to the intelligence thing. If the folks inside a community (instead of, say, at the State level) vote on restrictions, they should vote the most restrictive policy they can, since it limits the supply and hence raises the price of their assets. ]]
* If you spend 1/3rd of your income on mortgage, and 1/2 of a mortgage is interest, then 5x your yearly income ends up being 10x total paid to mortgage, or 1/3rd over 30 years.
She wasn't in the country illegally for fun or something, you know that, right? Presumably the conditions in her country were bad enough to drive her to enter illegally, and the process for entry is sufficiently onerous or difficult that she had no other choice.
But don't try to shift the blame to HER. HIS immorality is on display no matter what her circumstances were. He was deliberately exploiting someone in an exploitable position, and he didn't need to. As the story tells it, nobody else rushed out to be an immoral asshole, and he could've paid what she was worth.
In most unions, members vote for the union leaders. Don't like em? Change em. Other voters disagree with you? Then persuade them of your better way.
As far as "not helping", union members earn more on average than non-union members for similar positions.
Table-ized A.I.
I didn't say "you deserve food, shelter, and health care from the government".
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
"Again, where's the gun to their head to do this contract job?"
Starvation usually suffices for most forms of wage slavery.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
If it's not enough to be your sole source of income because of limited hours, that's one thing. If it's not enough to be your sole source of income when done full-time, it's not paying enough. If the job is worth employing someone to do, it's worth paying them enough that they can eat and not die of hunger on the job, as was common during the Industrial Revolution.
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
That's a bit simplistic. Think about what it takes to move for someone who's likely renting:
o Timing for the existing lease - can't afford breaking penalties
o Security + first + last month rent for a new place -- thousands of $ that have to come from somewhere
o Landlords who in a scarce market demand a perfect credit report
o Some way to move belongings
o Time off work to do it all
But, that's not really our problem in the US, you know?
We still have laws, and she shouldn't have been here...period.
If you break the laws, you get hurt...if there's a problem in MX, then those people should work to fix their own problems, rather than sneak over there illegally and work illegally.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Where was the outcry from farm workers when a steam engine could do the same work as a large number of farm hands?
Well it was in the fields, of course. Some people sabotaged the machinery, some people picketed the farms.
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
And therein lies the answer to this entire thread: Boot the illegal immigrants out (as mandated by law) and the low-skilled Americans can take such jobs, forcing the overall pay to increase due to the dwindled labor supply. You may mod this post as trolling if you find it distasteful, but this is simple economics.
Do you think a burger flipper should make the same as a highly skilled computer programmer?
A burger flipper can do the job on time, on spec and on budget, which is more than any programmer has accomplished.
In most unions, members vote for the union leaders. Don't like em? Change em. Other voters disagree with you? Then persuade them of your better way.
If that worked so well, we could just get good leaders for our country in the first place.
As far as "not helping", union members earn more on average than non-union members for similar positions.
That's true, if a union came in and offered me a reasonably good raise, I would vote for them.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
No, it is that simple. It's in fact simpler for someone renting than for someone tied down with a mortgage. Point by point:
o Do the math and don't break your lease unless eating the rest of the rent costs less than your new job would. Ask nicely if you can get out early. Ask nicely if you can sublet. The answer is yes far more often than you might assume.
o See above. You are, in fact, expected to plan ahead.
o In the context of this discussion, that would imply you've chosen to move to a high-cost city while working a low-wage job. That isn't necessary. There's plenty of work between the coasts and there's plenty of housing if you don't insist of living in the center of it all. Even in places like Boston, for every 3k/mo one bedroom walkup there's a 1300/mo two bedroom in an elevatored building in a good school district if you're willing to spend an extra half hour commuting. Plan ahead.
o That would be called a truck or a van (rented or borrowed from a friend), and in the worst case, a yard sale, a trip to the flea market or Craigslist.
o Again: do the math. Either your work pays enough for you to stay put or it doesn't, in which case you need to cut your losses.
In case you haven't noticed: the theme here is Plan Ahead And Stop Making Excuses.
Done it more times than I care to count. A couple of times as a kid along for the ride when my parents did it, a couple of times as an adult paying my own way. Ditto for the wife. Your point?
Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness indeed. And props on getting the document correct. Most people think that's in the Constitution, not the Declaration of Independence.
But that said, "Life" necessarily includes food and shelter, no?
Every full time job is, by definition, meant to be. It needs to be structurally as well, else we will see this scenario everywhere. Unrestrained, Capitalists will ride carts made from people like you over people like those poor schmucks who end up working for $2/hour to their vision of paradise, which is paradise for them and dystopia for everyone else. Even that Deity of Capitalism Adam Smith warned of the dangers of unrestrained Capitalism.
I don't think setting the boundary at "private enterprises cannot socialize the costs of their labor onto taxpayers in the form of welfare" is an unreasonable boundary. In fact, as a taxpayer, I think it's a necessary boundary. But if you don't, that's cool. Maybe we can structure the tax code so that people like you can pay more towards the inevitable explosion of welfare costs the policies you advocate will result in.
This comment is my opinion and does not represent an official position of Donald Trump or others I do not work for
If you are criticizing democracy in general, what do you propose as an alternative? (Yes, it does sometimes hiccup, as do all political systems.)
Sometimes they do. It all depends on negotiations and circumstances. Often they cannot promise such up front because they have actually have a unionized work-force in order to start negotiations with employer. It's a process.
Table-ized A.I.
If you are criticizing democracy in general, what do you propose as an alternative?
I'm not, I'm pointing out that if your solution worked, it would work by democracy alone. So your solution is superfluous. No need for unions in that case.
Often they cannot promise such up front because they have actually have a unionized work-force in order to start negotiations with employer
I don't trust promises that aren't made. In that case, what benefit is there to having a union? The hope that some undefined thing might get better in the future?
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Please elaborate.
Life is an investment and a gamble. Nothing is for sure. But note you can know the current wages of an already-unionized shop.
Table-ized A.I.
Please elaborate.
It was elaborated here
Life is an investment and a gamble. Nothing is for sure.
If that's the best a union can offer I'm not joining a union. The risks of clogging up processes are real, too.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
I respectfully think this gets cause and effect backwards. People don't just sign up for loans totaling 5x their yearly income* without a good reason.
I can't think of any good reasons. The math really isn't there I recall some whacky storied like an 80 year old man buying a house with a 50 year mortgage, and million dollar mortgages with advertised paymens of like 500 dollars a month.
This is totally whack. People only live for so long, and the math is simply not there for anyone who actually spends some time doing the math.
As well, those 50 year and incredibly low monthly payments were going to zoom up in monthly payment in a year or so, and if people were paying attention, they would have noted that the montly payments were going to be more than their take-home pay.
They do so because housing costs are expensive and that's the only way to get in on the increase in prices and the perks of homeownership (including the MID).
This is true. What happens though is people get house hypnosis, as I call it. Americans have had it drilled into them that you MUST have a house, you MUST own it!. . So yeah, most people will pay anything, sacrifice everything else, in order to buy a house. Of course, most way overextended themselves on credt at the same time, but that was a symptom.
And most of the time, the banks are about the only control over their mortgage feeding frenzy. But the control was lost. There is simply no way mathematically that a person making 50 K a year can afford a million dollar house. But since the brakes were fried, originators originated those kind of financially foolish mortgages. It was truly insanity.
Weird thing is, there was one or two economists who said "This is going to end badly." No kidding, I knew we were headed for disaster the first time I saw one of those ridiculous loans on Yahoo. My question was why didn't everyone see what was going to happen? The math was elementary. IOt was like people lining up to get screwed by con men, and cheering as they finincially destroyed themselves. Then the unavoidable thing happened, and billions of dollars evaporated overnight. Along with these foolish people's dreams.
Now I know that a lot of people who consider themselves really smart cannot even imagine what I did, but My wife and I lived quite cheaply to start our married life. We even lived in a mobile home. But we socked money in the bank like crazy. Then during a lull in the local housing market in the early 90's we pounced on a home at a good price Paid it off quickly, less than 15 years.
Meanwhile, my peers were buying Escalades with their re-fi's, bought way more house than they could afford and went to "creative" financing, and are wondering now that they are in their early 60's just how they are going to retire with 15 plus years on their mortgages. Even when they bought their places before I bought mine. Meanwhile, I have been retired since I was 55, and loving it.
Point is, what you have to do is look at total cost in a world that is screaming at us about Easy Monthly Payments. Not that I expect anyone to believe me, but if you have to have a house at any cost, you certainly will pay any cost that they are happy to sell you that house for. This has been well proven.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
That's the economic equivalent of believing that the earth is flat. Thanks for demonstrating your complete and utter ignorance so clearly.
Here is the Forbes article (you know Forbes, right? Not exactly a left-wing-socialist-tool) explaining it: https://www.forbes.com/sites/f...
It would be easier to show this by showing graphs of demand curves, but /., with an old-fashioned text-only interface, doesn't support that. The take-away calculation is that if minimum wage increases, while some businesses will decide not to hire some workers because their productivity now is less than their cost, pay increases for the rest of the minimum wage workers, the ones who had been being paid less than their marginal value. It turns out to be a net win-- the workers not hired are the ones who were producing minimum value.
Real economics is actually somewhat interesting-- you should learn some of it, instead of the oversimplified cartoon economics that libertarians hold so dearly to. You might like it.
When banks issued a mortgage and intended to keep it and collect the payments for the duration, they had incentive to issue only reasonably safe mortgages. What happened during the housing bubble was that the mortgage originator could sell any mortgage, no matter how stupid, for real money. Other people would buy the worst mortgages, put them in a bundle, and sell shares of them called "tranches" for real money. (The first money going into the bundle is the first tranche, the stuff left over goes into the second, etc. Some people thought many of the tranches, typically not the last one, were sound investments.)
The lending institutions expected to have some foreclosures. However, if someone gets a $100K mortgage for a house that's worth $120K at the time of foreclosure, the bank gets its money and the owner is not left holding the bag. Housing costs were projected to keep going up.
If anyone bothered to look at the system as a whole, they saw that issuing NINJA (No INcome, Job, or Assets) or liar's loans could not contribute to a sound financial system. If anyone looked at the individual details, they'd see that NINJA loans could be sold at a profit, that the buyer could package them and sell tranches at a profit, and so on. The people running the system typically saw their little detail, and paid little attention to the system as a whole, because they were making lots of money.
It's foolish to rely on the average person to have good money-management skills. People will take out stupid loans to buy stuff. That's not going to change. Typically, we don't consider this a problem because typically it's not a good idea to make a loan that won't be paid back, so out of self-interest lending institutions will make only loans that look like good bets. (There will always be mortgages foreclosed on for a variety of reasons, but if the rate is low the banks still come out ahead.)
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Reading the comment I replied to might give you a clue...
When banks issued a mortgage and intended to keep it and collect the payments for the duration, they had incentive to issue only reasonably safe mortgages.
Exactly. If all you do is originate the mortgage, there is zero incentive for anything other than issuing as many mortgages as you possibly can. So all the old rules like the actual ability to repay the loan was irrelevant.
Other people would buy the worst mortgages, put them in a bundle, and sell shares of them called "tranches" for real money. (The first money going into the bundle is the first tranche, the stuff left over goes into the second, etc. Some people thought many of the tranches, typically not the last one, were sound investments.)
Which was another rock bottom stupid shell game, or perhaps better called a game of "hot potato".
Housing costs were projected to keep going up.
Which in fact, was either the world's biggest lie, or world's stupidedt idea. It is simply not possible for that to happen. Shortly before the shit hit the fan, I was listening to a radio program where some presumed expert was telling us that the USA had moveed to a new model of permanent debt for people, where everyone was going top be millions in debt, and when they needed money, they'd just do a refi on their houses, which as we alll know, never lose value, and always appreciate over everything else.
IOW, promoting the idea that houses would eventually be infinite in price while everything else would stay the same.
And people believed it.
The people running the system typically saw their little detail, and paid little attention to the system as a whole, because they were making lots of money.
It was a game of reverse musical chairs. where instead of taking away one chair at a time, they added them. Then the cairs vaporized, along with all of the money.
It's foolish to rely on the average person to have good money-management skills. People will take out stupid loans to buy stuff. That's not going to change.
Sadly, this is true. I've worked with a lot of people whowere very smart, but when it came to money, they turned into assholes. One guy was a millionaire according to his retirement account, used to brag to me about it. He was smart, and I wasn't making as much in mine. Then he stopped bragging. The reason was he had 100 percent of his money in high risk Tech stocks, and then 2000 happened. Another lost everything in 2000, then lost everything again in 2007.
Or refi'ing the house and taking their kids and their friend's kids to Disneyland (always impresses the neighbors) or buying that Escalade ( because it only makes sense to use that low interest rate on your mortgage instead of taking out a separate loan amirite?) Hell, we did a refi in the early part of that insanity to take advantage of a lower interest rate. The bank did a "drive-by inspection, and there was a minimum takeout, something like 40 K. We really pissed them off when we plowed that money right back into the mortgage on the next payment.
It's really simple. No need to get paranoid about it. Who here hasn't worked with a mortgage calculator program on the web, or even rolled our own spreadsheet. You just do the math, and then ask yourself if whoever it is that's trying to get your money is on your side, or their own side.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
The frightening thing is not that some people bought into that, but which people bought into it. I had a front-row seat of the start of the burst, making C++ repayment models for mortgages at the home mortgage arm of General Motors. Scary.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
This is exactly why people think libertarians are assholes.
Nope. There are other reasons.
Libertarians tend to be introverts, and not very good at communicating complex ideas to other people.
Some libertarian ideas are counter-intuitive, especially economics ideas. When it comes to economics, people tend to trust intuition. While intuition works pretty well for small groups, it fails horribly for larger ones. A reasonable approach for a band of hunter-gatherers divvying-up the day's kill does not scale to a market economy of millions or billions of people.
The same applies to various non-economic positions, to varying degrees.
Libertarians, who tend to be introverts, are often not especially skilled at countering the hostile statements of others. Those others are usually uninformed or misinformed about what libertarians actually believe. Or they know the "what" but don't understand the "why", and who then invent their own "why" -- which they then attack.
And of course, some libertarians are assholes.
Which, of course, doesn't mean they are wrong.
And I'm having trouble recalling any libertarian who was unwilling to support their assertions with facts and reasoning. I may not agree with their position, but I know what it is, and why the hold it.
But I encounter people all the time who are hostile to libertarianism, but who cannot articulate the reasons for their opposition clearly and support them well. Frequently they display classic signs of cognitive dissonance when asked a simple question, even a yes-no one: personal insults, intense anger, subject changes, etc. And they somehow, even after posting a dozen or more messages, cannot get around to answering the goddam question.
But clearly they care about people. Specifically, the people they disagree with. They sure as hell care about me: my educational background and age and circumcision status and all kinds of things, the better to insult me with.
Maybe "care about" is not the right phrase. ;-)
There's no time like the present. Well, the past used to be.
Right, because two wrongs make a right. How old are you, 6?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
This is exactly why people think libertarians are assholes.
Nope. There are other reasons. Libertarians tend to be introverts,
I see no evidence whatsoever that libertarians tend to be introverts.
and not very good at communicating complex ideas to other people.
"Not good at communicating," maybe, but "complex ideas"-- no, the exact opposite.
The essence of libertarianism is very, very simple ideas. Unfortunately people in the real word live in a complicated real world with real world problems, and libertarian simple ideas are often too simple; they don't solve real world problems.
My view of the typical libertarian is that they took a introductory economics class, went to the first two weeks in which the ideal free market is described, shouted "eureka! that explains everything!"-- and then decided that they know everything about economics and never went back to that class again.
Some libertarian ideas are counter-intuitive, especially economics ideas.
Nope. Libertarian ideas are very simple and intuitive, especially economics ideas. That's the attraction of libertarianism. It fits that model "for every problem there is a simple solution."
When it comes to economics, people tend to trust intuition. While intuition works pretty well for small groups, it fails horribly for larger ones. A reasonable approach for a band of hunter-gatherers divvying-up the day's kill does not scale to a market economy of millions or billions of people.
Exactly!!!!! This is precisely the problem with libertarianism: it takes a simple solution that works well in the case of one farmer with a cow and another growing tomatoes who agree to exchange milk for tomatoes, and says that intuitive model solves any complicated problem with billions of people where everybody's actions have repercussions on everybody else with multiple non-intuitive effects.
The same applies to various non-economic positions, to varying degrees. Libertarians, who tend to be introverts,
Unsubstantiated.
are often not especially skilled at countering the hostile statements of others.
Yes. In fact, they are not especially skilled at even listening to the comments of others.
Those others are usually uninformed or misinformed about what libertarians actually believe.
Or, more to the point, libertarians always start with the going-in position that everybody else is uninformed or misinformed.
...