How work has gotten better | Hacker News Reader

How work has gotten better

vox.com

47 pointsFuturebot55 comments

This article seems to describe a certain breed of worker. I am sure a Walmart employee working their second job might disagree. It's true we have a lot more material wealth and luxury, but when basic necessities are denied such as adequate access to housing, health care and education, the people will suffer.

this is a complex topic. adequate housing is a relative term, and it's unreasonable to expect that everybody's wish to live as they want will ever be fulfilled, nor should be. that wallmart employee working in central new york should have a right to big condo near central park because... why? he has 3 kids?

if somebody is a wallmart worker, I dare to say they are not trying hard enough. almost everybody can do better, definitely in western society. if they don't, it's more a matter of personal choices (what to study and do with your free time, willingness to relocate for better work, etc.) rather than anything else. it doesn't cover 100% of the cases, but most of them (also from personal experience).

"They're weak, so they deserve to be victims!"

That's the same victim-blaming logic that ancient empires used to justify enslaving their weaker neighbors. Unless you're extremely rich/powerful, I'd avoid using such logic if I were you, as Fate may put you in a similar weak economic position someday.

no. what this means is try harder if you want improvement over current state. be prepared for a change.

please stop putting words in my mouth I didn't say nor implied and let's keep this discussion civil

I don't really see a way to try harder than working at the culture at Wal-Mart as a minimum wage employee. Especially in new york city? That person is probably trying hard very hard to avoid homelessness.

Right, because either that Walmart employee is living in a crate by the docks OR a condo next to central park, there are NO OTHER OPTIONS like maybe a modestly sized apartment in an affordable complex designed for people with children and responsibilities.

I'm a capitalist sir, but I believe if you put in your effort you ought to get at least a living out of it. A lot of Walmart employees do not, and as far as I know we're going to need Walmart employees in the future so we need to do better than "try harder" for them.

well if you are a capitalist, sir, you believe in market forces, no? if somebody's conditions are bad in one location due to unreasonable rent, but better in other why shouldn't they move to this better location but rather expect that market bends itself to support them? I do believe that all people should earn enough to afford adequately good place for their life, but this cannot be simply any location anywhere, because whatever. that's not how free market works.

btw this market bending is happening all the time, it's called social programs, progressive taxes etc.

If people don't have money for FOOD and RENT, how on God's green Earth do you think they have money to move to a new city?

And even if you could, anyone who's rented before knows you typically need one month's rent as a security deposit, sometimes more if you have children. Then you need to find a way to get all your stuff to said new city, and of course feed yourself while you're looking for that miracle job.

This may come as a shock to you but not having liquid assets excruciatingly limiting, including when it comes to finding better work or a cheaper place to live.

There's a bizarre assumption here.

It's that the very poor can afford to move. That generally costs a few thousand dollars if you're going any significant distance (UHaul, rental down payment, travel time spent unemployed, etc). If they're hiring in Raleigh, do you really think the people in Detroit can put together the capital to go there? We don't subsidize moving (we should), only ongoing poverty in one location.

Similarly: night classes, seeking better jobs without a car, working longer hours. These things all have overhead costs (like tuition, travel, or daycare prices), and the assumption that they're accessible to people with no assets is deeply weird.

47% of Americans cannot come up with $400 for an emergency room visit, much less moving to a different city.

http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2016/04/47-percent-americans-...

The problem with this line of thinking is that of course at the individual level anybody can do better*, but at the group level it means nothing. Somebody has to work at Walmart, and one person finding a better job doesn't eliminate the need for the worse jobs to be filled. We can't all be entrepreneurs and doctors. It doesn't make a lot of sense to depend on minimum-wage workers to keep society running and at the same time throw them under the bus for doing so.

A crucial distinction: almost anybody can do better, not almost everybody.

The "go to school at night, hustle more, get a better job!" rallying cry basically just pits the poor against each other. That can work for an individual, but in an economy structured on X% low-wage work it can't work for everyone. All it does is raise the minimum standard to get the same mediocre work (see: high school and college degrees).

Yeah, any one unemployed person could probably find a job, but that doesn't mean 25% unemployment in Spain is a laziness issue. Similarly, an economy with 10% of workers earning poverty wages can't be changed by telling those people to all get better jobs.

> Ensure we'll be able to retire.

Unfortunately virtually every developed country has raised the age of retirement to 69 or higher, and it's generally accepted that in 30 years when I retire, there will be nothing in the communal pot, so I better save my own, as well as paying into the pot so the people before me can spend it.

People also live longer. Social security (retirement) was never intended to support people for 30-40 years. The age has to go up with the life expectancy to keep it solvent.

the life expectancy for blue collar and low income white collar workers has sadly kept steady.

Is that really the case?

"What’s remarkable, however, is how much life expectancy increased between 1990 and 2010 in counties of all poverty levels"

http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2016/05/the...

Those results disagree strongly with the most recent JAMA paper on the topic:

http://www.vox.com/2016/4/11/11405954/health-life-expectancy...

The 2000-2010 increase in your source is ~2 years for the poorest men and ~1 year for the poorest women. The 2001-2014 increase in my source is ~.3 for poor men and ~0 for poor women.

That seems like a really big gap, and I don't have a good way to reconcile them.

Over what time period? Life expectancy has grown continuously except for a few dips over the years.

Yes, but the growth for the poorest people (not blue collar workers, the poorest 5%) has been tiny-to-flat over the last 15 years. Well, according to one good looking study, I've seen wildly divergent results in this thread alone.

http://www.vox.com/2016/4/11/11405954/health-life-expectancy...

The poorest 5%, presumably people who had little to no employment in their lives, would not be getting much in the way of social security retirement benefits anyway.

Disability or other welfare, maybe, but that would be different.

Its generally accepted that unless there are changes there will be nothing in the communal pot.

Eventually, politicians will do something. I doubt millions of older, and therefore voting people will just accept there is nothing left.

Hmm yes like they'll never accept college is unaffordable, or health care is unaffordable, or real estate is unaffordable, or there's not enough blue collar jobs for decades, not enough white collar jobs more recently, not enough civil service jobs, etc. Doormats will be doormats. This is not the generation that stormed Iwo Jima, or whatever.

You're talking about progress, which is mostly ignored. He's talking about regression, which voters hate.

Tell people college is 300% too expensive and they'll sigh and agree. Tell them you're cutting 2% from income they're already promised, and they'll picket in the streets.

Depends on which streets you're talking about. I live in a liberal college town in already-high-tax NY. We bitch and moan and cut another slice of artisan cheese from Wegmans before remembering that we live in a town with an educated population, an efficient and responsive local government with effective public services, plenty of parks, and one of the best public high schools in the United States.

You get what you pay for. I pay a lot in taxes, and I get a lot back.

College age people don't vote, so they don't get nice handouts. Retirement age people do, so they do. They even get socialized medicine which is supposedly "impossible" for the rest of us.

>in 30 years when I retire, there will be nothing in the communal pot.

I assume you mean Social Security. Over the last 30 years upper-to-high incomes have skyrocketed while the legal SSA-taxable income cap remains at $118,500.[1]

Reports of Social Security's imminent death are greatly exaggerated, and more often than not a part of a classic Neoliberal (1940s+ Neoliberalism, not the Clintonian/New Democrat brand) "starve-the-beast" plan to convince young people that the program is unsustainable and should be gutted so people can save a measly few percentage points of take-home income. It is a generations-long propaganda tactic that makes sense if you don't think too hard but the simple fact is that raising the cap modestly will keep Social Security solvent for a very long time.

[1] https://www.ssa.gov/planners/maxtax.html

I'm ashamed I didn't know the origin, definition of neoliberalism. Ignorant me thought it was something like "new-liberalism" even though it was used in contexts where maybe something like "libertarian fruitopian Freedom Markets (tm) Murica!" seemed more appropriate.

TIL neoliberalism means laissez faire economic liberalization a la Reagonomics and Thatcherism.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoliberalism

I can't find a single country that has raised to to 69 let alone "virtually every developed country"

Finland has 68 already and two will raise it to 68 eventually (Ireland and UK)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retirement_age

The 'communal pot' in the United States is actually 'broad taxation of 5% GDP of one of the strongest, most stable economies in the history of the planet'. Social Security maybe won't be as much as estimated today, but it assuredly will be around unless the United States economy totally collapses— and if that happens, all your savings will be for naught anyway.

Or, I suppose, if people listen to fearmongering about how 'Social Security won't be there' and get rid of it. But old people do vote a lot, so that's relatively unlikely.

To be frank, I completely disagree, and I get the feeling that so do most people, actually. We don't call it "work" because it's pleasant and fun. I see this as someone who finds his job genuinely engaging and almost, though not quite, a benefit to society, and whose alternate career paths would potentially involve more benefit to society and even more engagement in my work. My job would actually be fun if not for the unpleasant necessities involved in treating it as business that actually has to ship a product some day, which is of course exactly what makes it at all useful to society and not just a shared team hobby.

Of course, the alternate career path would also involve significantly longer hours for significantly lower pay (ie: going back into academia), which brings us right back around to the point that it's called work because you don't like doing so damn much of it.

Also, it really would have helped to segment out the statistics by income and education levels. Remember, the arithmetic average of a power-law distribution does not make sense.

FOSS still ships, why wouldn't your team ?

One in how many projects ships? And of those, how many are actually useful and useable?

Scratching the itch goes only so far.

Easy there or we might discover that FOSS numbers are better than enterprise ones.

There's a very low bar to pass, and FOSS is going back into the UNIX's small software philosophy[1]. Scratching an itch may likely go far enough.

[1] Yes, sometimes too small. Maybe we need new kinds of consolidation projects.

Most successful FOSS projects are backed by companies who have employees work on them. I would love to see some statistics on pure "hobby FOSS" vs "commercial FOSS" and their deliverables.

Based on my own experience I would say most hobby FOSS projects ship a lot less frequently than the commercial FOSS projects.

The point about segmenting is big.

I was absolutely baffled to see "people can't afford to move for work" answered by "the typical household is more mobile". That's not the same thing! The typical household isn't involuntarily unemployed, which is what we're talking about in the first place!

A couple things I've seen on work improving:

- Much less reliance of physical papers and filing. Email, as much as people complain, is a much better record and easier to search than paper memos.

- No more suits and ties. Dress for comfort. (For most of us, at least)

- Much more flexibility on hours.

- No more smoking in the office. (Yes, that was a thing)

These don't apply to 100% of the world, but to some extent or another they impact most of us.

Nice clothes are better than when you can do it right. Which means on the odd occasion.

I'm not sure I follow you, but I agree that nice clothes are great for some occasions. But I don't miss situations where I was forced to wear a tie when I was staying up to the wee hours coding. (I didn't stay there, but just point this out to say that such jobs existed.)

The point is, it's hard to maintain a high standard when you have to do it all the time.

Yes. Maintaining 6 or 7 expensive suit combos is a lot more expensive than casual-wear.

Another advantage of a more relaxed dress code is that it costs less. Five t-shirts and two pairs of jeans is a lot more affordable than a couple of suits, three dress shirts and enough ties to rotate through. (And that's before the cleaning costs.)

Yes - and you wind up needing 5+ dress shirts for the dry cleaning rotation.

I also note nice shirts don't last so long, before looking a bit worn. Worn/faded t-shirts can actually be better looking.

>No more smoking in the office

I'm glad this is a rule now, but for the opposite reason: If I could smoke at my desk, I'd probably be dead now. What a wonderfully convenient way to satisfy my (former) addiction. Now, where did I put my coffee...

Interesting how little effect the introduction of OSHA seemed to have on the slope of the workplace fatalities trend graph. I would not have predicted that.

I wonder how much OSHA has cost us in terms of both direct government spending as well as regulatory compliance in corporations (which is surely orders of magnitude greater) for such pitiful results.

You'd need to look at death/injury by sector to see its effect. FWIW, I don't have a horse in this race, but I'm inclined to believe OSHA is a good thing. AFAIK most economics/manufacturing research has suggested the health and safety precautions in developed countries are cost-effective. Moreover, it's probably telling that most (all?) other developed countries have similar health and safety agencies.

If health and safety precautions are cost effective, which I believe they are, then OSHA is redundant because businesses will strive to be economically efficient regardless of the regulations.

I think this would be true in an ideal world, but in practice I fear businesses can avoid dealing with the externality of employee injury. Many people working in building, manufacturing, manual labour, etc are low-paid, low-educated, and in the US may well be illegal residents. All of these things make it difficult for an injured worker to sue.

Maybe because the incidence of death on the job was already low and safety (and consequences) is more than just about fatalities?

My thought was that fatal accidents are much more prevalent in manufacturing jobs than the service industry and the drop corresponds more to manufacturing jobs leaving the US than anything else.

You need to look at stats by job classification. There are far fewer miners and production line workers than there were in the 1960s. Peak manufacturing employment was in 1978.

At a guess, fatalities have always been bad for business. The decline just represents a decline in jobs that tend to kill people (Vox is really bad with ignoring this sort of association).

I can't seem to find good pre-OSHA injury data (because OSHA are the only people counting), but that's where I'd expect to see the difference. You can run a business assuming injuries will happen, but pretty much everyone tries not to kill workers.

I don't understand how you can discuss work, the essay of Keynes, how works give meaning to life and... just don't say a word about how the results of that work are distributed.

If you find this interesting, you might enjoy The Rise and Fall of American Growth, which spends much of its time discussing the dramatic changes in American working and living conditions since the 1870s. It will certainly erase and illusions you have about the good old days.

The conclusion (that the tech industry will not generate nearly as much growth as the previous revolution after 1870) is HN bait, and probably deserves a separate discussion.

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