this post was submitted on 27 Feb 2024
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While I agree that wages, employee treatment and benefits stand to be much better, Im having trouble understanding the argument. At the end of the day someone needs to do work to get anything
Correct. And if we were paid proportional to the generated value, we would have a lot more middle-class people.. working.. providing value..
But instead, we work, sometimes one, two, three jobs, and still can't afford to see a doctor, or do anything besides exist, go to work, pay rent, sleep from exhaustion.
This is prison.
The exchange is for that labour is extremely disproportionate to the value produced, especially in our modern environment of record breaking profits and runaway wealth gaps.
If we look at the whole result of production instead of its value, the situation is more disproportionate. The employer owns 100% of the produced outputs and holds 100% of the liabilities for the used-up inputs while workers as employees receive 0% ownership claim on the produced outputs and 0% liability for the used-up inputs. Capitalism is based on someone else getting what workers produce
That's not an inherent trait of the concept of labor though. That's a direct result of exploitation. The solution isn't to ban hiring a person for a wage; it's labor regulation and unions.
The inherent trait that distinguishes labor from other factors of production is that the actions of persons (labor) come with responsibility for their results. The services of things (capital and land) no matter how effective in increasing output can't be responsible for anything. They merely conduct responsibility back to their human users.
The solution is to have legal and de facto responsibility match. Consequently, all firms should be structured as democratic worker coops @microblogmemes
The alternative is to abolish the employer-employee relationship and have everyone be either individually or jointly self-employed as in a democratic worker coop. On top of that, since land and natural resources are not the fruits of anyone's labor, there is no fruits of labor based claim to it. As a result, land and natural resources can be subject to collective ownership arrangements with revenue from this collective ownership as a UBI
The issue isn't that someone needs to do work, it's that some people are forced to do more than their share of work so that other people can do less. There's a class of people who get money without having to lift a finger just for owning stuff (land, residential buildings, companies, etc.). When there are people who get money without having to earn it through work, that means there must be other people elsewhere in the system who are paid less than their work is worth. And there's not a damn thing they can do about it, because the owner class can simply refuse to pay them more, so the workers' choice is between being exploited or starving. The workers can't just go and find some land to claim as their own, it's all owned already.
There exist people at the top who are obscenely wealthy, despite doing zero work. In contrast, workers who produce everything of value are badly underpaid, entirely due to the fact that all the surplus value goes to the few fabulously wealthy.
The proposal is that of all the unnecessary, overpaid, worthless positions in society, there are none more worthy of elimination across the entire market than CEOs, executives, and shareholders. There is no reason for a scant few to gorge themselves upon all the resources and money. Instead, we ought to make all businesses the equal and collective property of the people who work there, with management positions promoted and removed by worker elections only, with term limits. One worker, one vote.