but the shareholders!
It has been unchecked corporate greed. If you just look around or follow twitter pages like more perfect union. Story after story of corporate greed and people coming together to try to make life fair and liveable.
hey recently had one of some big corpos buying up all the land in a state to build their own crypto city. Even that land is for farming is ultra important. Now that group of corpos are suing the people for coming together and not selling.
Oh my, reminds me of a saying we used to have back under soviet occupation. Translated it would be “If you aren’t stealing, you’re stealing from your family.”. Americans are at the point where that’s the world they live in, but they haven’t yet developed the depressing worldview of the average soviet citizen. Oof…
Don’t worry because you are free to exploit people as well! Oh, you’re not exploiting, fucking over, and scamming literally every human being you meet? What’s wrong with you. Maybe you’re just not smart enough to screw people over. /$
Wow, that “/$” is art. Congratulations.
/Fully sincere.
Revenue - Costs = ???
(??? is corporate profit, so they maximise fees and minimise salaries)
Here fucking here.
Stock Markets getting those record highs tho. If only people could get paid in shares of the companies that own their labor, but if that happened they’d actually have to answer to the workers and we simply can’t have that in muh free markets
Honestly, i don’t want to get paid in share of the company, i’d prefer cash directly bank into my account so it’s available immediately for me to use on the needs and wants. With share, i need to liquidate it, that took time in negotiation. And if no one want to buy it in a bad year, i’m stuck with shrinking money that i can’t use.
Different story if you work in those big tech of course.
Right because if that happened investors would dump their shares and invest in companies that use slave labor.
First time under capitalism
Two words:
Record Profits
Yeah baby!!
Line goes up, grandpa and kiddo can just go to the crappier nursing home and daycare and you can work a little harder can’t you!?
Now if you’ll excuse me, but I’ve got some senators dicks to suck
Now if you’ll excuse me, but I’ve got some senators dicks to suck
You got it backwards…
Line must go up.
One word: Unionize.
You have been permanently banned from c/Conservative.
LOL you totally had me with that message. Thanks for the laugh!
Don’t ask how I know what that message looks like! 😄
Username checks out
Can’t imagine how. LOL.
Guillotine
This is generating the typical anti-capitalist hate, but we should also consider that this is also a reflection on the kinds of unpaid work that women have been doing for generations. The problem isn’t necessarily profits or middle-men, it’s just that some things are always going to be expensive if people are actually paid for the work they do.
Take daycare. In the US the government says that one adult should care for no more than 3 infants, no more than 4 toddlers and no more than 7 preschoolers.
Take someone working at the US poverty line at about $15,000 per year. That’s $1250 per month. For 3 infants that’s $415 per month each, for 4 toddlers that’s $312 each, for 7 preschoolers that’s $180 each. That’s the absolute cheapest you could possibly go, where a worker is at the poverty line, and there are no costs for rent, supplies, and also zero profit.
But, as a parent, you probably don’t want the absolute lowest “bidder” to take care of your kids. You probably want someone who’s good with kids, kind, gentle, patient, etc. So, let’s not even go all the way up to the lowest possible teacher’s salary of $34,041 in Montana. Let’s say the daycare worker is great with kids, but doesn’t have the teaching background to get even the least well paying teaching job available in the country. Let’s say you’d be willing to have someone who makes $24,000 per year for easy math. That’s a wage where the caregiver is going to struggle to make ends meet in most of the country, but maybe it’s worth it for them because they like working with kids. That’s $2000 per month. For infants it’s $667 per month each or $8000 per year, toddlers it’s $500 per month each or $6000 per year. preschoolers it’s $285 per month each or about $3500 per year.
Again, this is before you consider any profits. That’s money straight from the parents to the caregiver’s salary. That’s before you consider rent, before supplies, before snacks, etc. That’s no reading nook, no library, no arts and crafts, that’s presumably just using someone’s living room.
Now, if the daycare worker is going to be able to take sick days or vacations, you’ll need to pay part of another person’s salary who will cover. So instead of 1 person watching 7 preschoolers, you have 10 people watching 70 preschoolers plus 1 who rotates in to cover when the main workers are unavailable, so make that another 10%. We’re up to almost $9k per year for an infant, and we still don’t have cribs, baby food or a cent in profit, and we have a worker who is barely scraping by.
The point is, any job that involves a lot of human supervision is going to be very expensive. Caring for babies and old or sick people involves a lot of human supervision. Much of this work used to be done by women who didn’t work outside the home. Now that women are working outside the home, even when they have young children, we’re realizing how expensive it is. None of what I’ve talked about involves capitalism or profits, it’s just purely paying someone to do child-care work while the woman does other work.
But, this is where the capitalism / socialism aspect comes in. If we want women to be able to work outside the home, and we also want kids to be something that isn’t financially ruinous, society needs to help pay for those things. In a purely capitalist, no socialism, winner-take-all world, having kids is a major liability. Having an option to not have kids is great, but in the long term society is doomed if nobody is willing to have kids anymore.
This is a very interesting thing to point out, but I believe you are not realising how intrinsically tied the generations of women unpaid work is to the economic system.
“mainstream economic theory is obsessed with the productivity of waged labour while skipping right over the unpaid work that makes it all possible, as feminist economists have made clear for decades. That work is known by many names: unpaid caring work, the reproductive economy, the love economy, the second economy.”
“the household provision of care is essential for human well-being, and productivity in the paid economy depends directly upon [the core economy]. It matters because when – in the name of austerity and public-sector savings – governments cut budgets for children’s daycare centres, community services, parental leave and youth clubs, the need for care-giving doesn’t disappear: it just gets pushed back into the home. The pressure, particularly on women’s time, can force them out of work and increase social stress and vulnerability. That undermines both well-being and women’s empowerment, with multiple knock-on effects for society and the economy alike.”
Doughnut economics - Kate Raworth
Capitalism thrived and keeps thriving in concentrating capital because it is able to get away with not accounting for the value it extracts. This is true for this example of unpaid labour as well as for natural resources extraction, ecosystem damage etc(we are beginning to realize this with carbon tax). That’s the cornerstone of the system function, not just a side effect. The unpaid labour may be starting to be dealt with in the West, but this just means it is aggressively outsourced in third world countries. Without these so-called economic externalities there is no profit (or extremely little of it).
Do I detect a little Barbara Laslett and Johanna Brenner in there? Love the post, chef’s kiss!
This is a really good point. Historically communities have always relied on unpaid/underpaid labor in some capacity. Even mowing your neighbors lawn once in a while could be considered a value of a few hundred dollars (fuck lawns btw) - there has always been this invisible layer of communal support that is now becoming commodified.
Marginalized groups being fairly compensated is an objectively good thing, but the financial stress is real. As society continues to grow even more individualistic, we will probably see additional pressures mount until another fundamental shift happens. I have no idea what that will look like, but it is interesting to think about.
The only way it will work is taxes. There’s an irreconcilable gap between what people can afford and what is a fair wage for proper supervision.
A very interesting and well-written post.
If you went 100 years back in time and told people that school teachers would be dead broke despite making the best financial decisions possible and be nearly homeless despite working long hours they would be fucking shocked.
Being a school teacher, even one for elementary school kids, in the late 19th century was not only a respectable profession, but also decently paid. I think Horrible Histories said that the average school teacher in the 1880s and 1890s in the UK made around 60 pounds sterling a year, which was a fairly decent wage at the time.
The problem is there’s not a good historical context for the high cost of daycare and nursing homes. Just 60 years ago it was considered normal and good parenting for kids to be left unattended for most of the time. We’re taking 3 year olds wandering around town unattended. This is where some of the outdated expectations of children come from is teaching kids to survive in a world where they’re expected to be on their own for such a huge amount of their childhood
And on the flip side of the spectrum people are living far longer than they ever have so end of life care has become a decades long investment. Social security was first implemented because people who didn’t expect to live long enough to need to think about retirement suddenly found themselves too old to work but needing to make ends meet
The only window of historic context we have for the sheer cost of daycare and nursing care would be from about 1970 and later, since that would be after civil rights protections had been passed (meaning you couldn’t just pay a minority person a pittance to do the work) at a time when women really started entering the workforce in earnest, and expectations had largely become that children were not left unmonitored
Like someone else said, £60 in today’s money is £9k. Per year. What am I missing because that does not sound like a decent wage.
At that time it was.
Holy moly! According to this website that’s over £9000 today! And teachers are risking their physical, mental health and lives, today.
Wait, why are you impressed by £9k per year? That is below minimum range in all western society.
At that time it was considered better, and they sure as hell wouldn’t be homeless.
Oops, my brain must have autoconverted “year” to month. That’s… Not good.
I used to work as a building superintendent in a condo. I did the math and the corporation brought in around half a million a month in maintenance fees and the operating costs aren’t anywhere that high. I used to get paid minimum wage. I did the math on the amount of units in comparison to my paycheck. It was something like a dollar per unit was going towards my pay. So whenever anyone acted like I should bend over backwards for them, I remembered that their particular issues and complaints were only worth $1 to me
In the condo and building maintenance industry, the less you do the more you make, the super and cleaners do everything and get paid shit, the manager and offsite manager’s boss make a fortune
It’s beyond immoral that anyone could be employed to provide labor to an apartment complex without being paid enough to live in one of the very units they maintain. Having maintenance live on-site is a win/win for the maintenance person and for the tenants. But it would result in ever so slightly less wealth being stolen by the owners, so it’s not allowed.
So whenever anyone acted like I should bend over backwards for them
In theory, there should have been a dozen of you with what they were paying. That’s something they failed to understand (or refused to understand) as tenants. It is - at some level - something they needed to be made more aware of.
Renters can and do unionize. And when both renters and apartment workers realize they share economic interests, they can exert a ton of leverage over a building that has effectively been abandoned by its official title holder.
the super and cleaners do everything and get paid shit, the manager and offsite manager’s boss make a fortune
It’s all a pyramid scheme.
The internet has a serious issue with managers, upper management, and even landlords nowadays. It’s so weird to see people slip back into blaming anyone but the real grifters who provide no benefit but take a dollar for no real benefit, or the wage inequality with CSuites. Even people here are falling back into blaming people in their own wage bracket rather than looking at people who provide nothing or paid too much.
As someone who’s worked the peon doing the shit to management, so much of the issue is rooted in insurance and government mandated oversight.
People love to hate on their manager making $20,000-40,000 more than them, but they’re basically the same as you to everyone grifting or the 1%. Quit blaming them for living in a society that both WANTS and REQUIRES massive oversight.
Running a business ethically takes far more money than anyone wants to admit.
Running a business while making sure you follow all government regulations, codes, is insurable, and is cost efficient is even harder.
First, get rid of for profit insurance. They should all work as collectives.
Get rid of for profit healthcare and go single payer. Remove middlemen who provide no benefit. Quit overpaying shit like salesmen because they’re a clear tick that shows more $$$$ and pay people nicely. A housekeeper making $40,000 shouldn’t be $50,000 away from their manager and shouldn’t be $400,000 or more away from their President. Quit overvaluing and paying a rich person to what amounts to having to have someone dedicated to sucking up to other rich people to stay alive.
Understand that the stock market only works with infinite growth. You will need to save up exactly what you plan to use in retirement without the magic of it or compounding interest and redistribute the wealth through unionizing, and collective bargaining.
Understand that all of it takes someone to lead and do it that will need to be paid as well. People want to live their lives happily, not sacrifice themselves and their life out of some noble goodness of their heart. Pay them appropriately and understand that if you’re in these positions, you shouldn’t be paid double what other people make just because you do important work. We all do.
Remember that it takes more people to run anything that we like to admit, and that often these regulations are there for a reason. Find the real fat, and cut it while you can.
Seriously though, blame for profit businesses that should just be government run if they’re a requirement. Insurance/public health, safety/audit oversight, infrastructure, utilities, public health.
Push for cooperatives for things that can be more privatized but get sketchy when it’s all government or full on for profit, like private land ownership, private schools, banking to credit unions.
I agree with the general thrust of what you’re saying, but your comment includes several contradictions. You imply that $400,000 a year is far too high a salary for a president of a company, but then you suggest that we should pay top dollar for a competent leader. You say we shouldn’t be angry at the manager making $40,000 more than us, but you also say to remove unnecessary middlemen.
Generally, I think all of that is unnecessary considerations. As you said, some things just require a lot of people to physically be present for oversight and require a lot of regulations. Where these things are necessary for society, they should be paid for at least in part by taxes. It is immoral to have the bulk of this labor be done on the backs of uncompensated people. It is also immoral to set them up such that only the very wealthy can afford them. The only way to reconcile these two economic facts are through making them a publicly funded service.
Girlfriend works in childcare and I work in elder care. Fuck me double
Elder care wealth is extracted using service companies as services. E.g. they hire their for-profit cleaning service for astronomical money while their non-profit elderly care facility claims to make no profits. Since the service takes the money and the elder care facility is paying for a known cost (cleaning, supplies, whatever) then they can still claim to be non-profit. The non-profit pays no taxes so they aren’t doubly taxed either.
This is a widely known scheme in the north east, combined with the fact that when it’s inspection time to see staff levels the business owners mysteriously are given a heads up before they show up so they can make sure just enough staff is there. They routinely understaff these facilities because each person there is just another wage to pay.
Bottom line, for profit healthcare is appalling and corruption is everywhere.
How do you know all of this?
<notices username>
Ah, checks out.
I took a few courses about public policy at my university and met with the groups trying to create change. Did a research paper on this topic even.
The ones in the industry know the secrets and the ones in the government turn a blind eye because lipservice and inspections on paper sound great when you’re trying to get votes from older people. They want to believe that when they need care that the providers will be doing the right thing. Sadly, they are not doing the right thing. There’s so much money in it when you’re charging over $400 per day per patient.
Here’s an article that talks about it.
They use nicer words to make it sound less predatory:
Providers have wide latitude in how they utilize MassHealth and other funds, since there are no limits on self-dealing transactions/contracts and no ceiling on administrative costs.
The growth of for-profit ownership in nursing homes, including significant investment by private equity firms and real estate investment trusts, makes it clear that nursing homes are profitable businesses.
A Boston Globe 2014 study of Massachusetts nursing home finances found that many nursing homes directed cash to subsidiaries “…paying million-dollar rental fees and helping to pay executives’ six-figure salaries…”
If you reach out to the authors of that article, including a former state senator, they’d be glad to talk to you about it. They won’t remember me though, it’s been a while. The things that can be said aloud go way beyond what is written down. No one wants to air their dirty laundry but trust me, the nursing homes are generally given a heads up before inspections take place so nobody gets fined and there are no problems. Unless something changed very, very recently.
This scheme is just an example of how entire economy operates.
Hey there and solidarity from the disability care world. We need a damn union, I heard like 25% of the millenials are in human care positions, so I’m hoping we do something soon, we got the people for it.
I would join an care workers union in a heartbeat
Most definitely… This sort of job is ripe for it.
This union should have a board seat too since can’t trust corporate for anything
Damn y’all must bounce from flu to flu every month of the year lol
My immune systems is jacked SpongeBob
Hospitals will ruin your life but most of the staff lives paycheck to paycheck.
Not just the staff either, providers are making significantly less every year.
I work in orthopedics and rehabilitation, and even though the cost of school, licensing, and insurance has skyrocketed. My field is basically being paid the same amount they were 30 years ago, and that’s not even accounting for inflation.
In some ways it’s nice, as medicine doesn’t attract people who are just in it for the money any longer. But, hospital organizations now know that providers are basically locked in a sunk cost fallacy to pay back their loans, and on top of that they have a calling for it.
That is the main reason my wife and I are moving to a different state. As a nurse, she has seen her income decrease with her 1.5% raise with inflation going up 3-5% year over year.
Hope she cashed in during COVID. Our hospital administration was trying to get everyone to turn on all the nurses making bank during lock down, but pretty much every provider I know was just happy there were people hitting the administration where it hurts.
But, hospital organizations now know that providers are basically locked in a sunk cost fallacy to pay back their loans, and on top of that they have a calling for it.
Sounds like slavery with extra steps.
Closer to indentured servitude but yeah
Fewer steps actually, as the slaves aren’t being provided with housing and food.
Sounds like slavery with extra steps.
Aka a residency
