- cross-posted to:
- leftymemes@lemmy.dbzer0.com
- cross-posted to:
- leftymemes@lemmy.dbzer0.com
We need to rethink economy
In what world or country are professors not making enough to afford somewhere to live? In my country professors make good money despite the fact that tenure doesn’t really exist here. It’s one of the highest ranks you can have in academia above lecturer, senior lecturer, and reader.
Sorry we’ve got a vocabulist here hold on let me talk him down
Nobody is talking about whatever ivory tower caste system you are talking about, to normals “professor” is common parlance for “college teacher” and many campuses around the country still call adjunct “”“”“”““instructors””“”“”“”" adjunct professors
i hope this fulfills the terms of your devil riddle
Private equity, shareholders. No publicly traded business is in the business of providing service and goods of value.
In 1776, Americans engaged in open warfare, with guns and killing and infections and amputations and no anesthetic, with England, because they were tired of paying taxes and getting nothing from them.
Our current population has emotional breakdowns when told they have to wear a mask to keep old people from dying. I am not at all confident that we will ever reach the same level of energy that led to organized, cohesive revolution and war unless some outside power starts taking away people’s internet and pizza rolls.
Not when more than a third are too apathetic and disengaged to care, and another third are beholden to the robber baron cause through blind consumption of propaganda disguised as ‘fair and balanced’ news.
To be fair, who the fuck goes up against the American army‽
Canada. There are other wars the U.S. has lost, but I don’t know how involved the U.S. Army was in them.
Capitalism combined with markets with inelastic demand is a lot of fun. But communism bad because tankies or whatever.
Bad because the centralized planning committee is little better than ONE BOARDROOM TO RULE THEM ALL and if you disagree with them they send their secret police to yank a black bag over your head and disappear you in the night. Then you, everyone you associated with, and everyone within three generations related to you spend the rest of your short, brutal, agonizing existences starving and/or freezing to death at a slavery camp in the wilderness.
That sounds more like Authoritarianism…
I think that’s because communism has only really been implemented/taken over by authoritarians, and wasn’t really communism.
Any possibly good people that gain power and pursue communism are couped or destroyed
Was this written by a child?
Unchecked greed is bad for society, capitalist or communist.
People are the problem. If we could only get rid of the people. /sarcasm
I’m surprised to see such a well rounded, logical view here. Kinda feels rare on this platform these days.
Bureaucracy is a huge problem.
but the shareholders!
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.
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.
They 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.
And why is corporate greed allowed to exist? Capitalism. You were so close.
I get what it is. Not much we can do about it other than form unions and keep fighting.
there’s more we can do. united, we can do anything. every great achievement of mankind was because people bound together to accomplish a goal. anybody can organize. governments and corporations don’t have a patent on organization.
So capitalism in anutshells.
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…
deleted by creator
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.
Two words:
Record Profits
The shareholders are the real victims here. Despite being willing to pay their new CEO more than their competitors, the rate at which the company’s profits are increasing is 0.8% less than their competitor’s! Their stock price just took a massive nose dive of $0.08 overnight! Better give the CEO a better incentive package. I’m sure he can replace our QA team with Elon’s new Optimus robots. That might increase our margins and keep us competitive!
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.
Can I pls?
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.
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.
This scheme is just an example of how entire economy operates.
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.
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