Mutiny at the big five is part of the future of work
abe-winter.github.io
abe-winter.github.io
I think you could make a case that corporations already take on some of the economic roles traditionally associated with governments, but they don't seem to have taken on the legal protection roles yet. However, I could see a future where the perks of employment include access to corporate retained lawyers. Or maybe corporations will hire lawyer secretaries to allow their employees to cut through government bureaucracy (e.g. to contest credit rating inaccuracies on an employee's behalf).
Another possibility would be the corporations and the cities associated with them sort of work together to act like city states. It definitely seems like the laws of San Francisco/California are informed by their association with tech and provide extra protections for the people living there (or at least the people living there who are employed by tech companies).
I think I would prefer that corporations - whose interests are by nature not aligned with peoples - do not run the place, as it were.
[Edit: Sorry I keep making so many additions!]
[0]: "In 1620, the state of Banten, on the island of Java, cut down its pepper trees in the hope that this would induce the Dutch to leave it in Peace. When a Dutch merchant visited Maguindanao, in the southern Phillippines, in 1686, he was told, "Nutmeg and cloves can be grown here, just as in Malaku. They are not there now because the old Raja had all of them ruined before his death. He was afraid the Dutch Company would come to fight with them about it."" - Page 245 of Why Nations Fail by Daron Acermoglu, James Robinson
FWIW, that type of thing still happens in the Africa and South America with oil and mining and some other resources.
These typically cover common things like living trusts, demand letters, etc.
Business related stuff is usually excluded and expensive stuff like real-estate disputes are very limited.
EDIT: Here’s an example: https://www.legalplans.com
A minority of Japanese workers are Kaishain (Salarypeople), and there's nothing you really really /need/ from a corporation. Corporate socialising is a thing, as is finding a partner at work. But given the low marriage rates in Japan, not really that big a deal. I guess there are people who are about the reputation of working at a well known company.
Corporations that routinely do international projects have always been working like that: employee x needs to work on assignment in county y for z years? There's a department for that.
Currently most of the support you get from a corporation is strictly limited to what you need to do your job. The corporation will rarely offer it's services for your private benefit.
There are a few that do though. Of course, opening that door is tricky for a corporation as it may involve more than you bargained for. The bottom line is profit which is easily quantifiable. The increase offered by a happier employee not so much.
Actually, no I don't, never heard of this until now, but it is beyond hilariously bad, assuming this [0] was the real version. It gets better, KPMG tried to claim that another website cannot link to them with their permission [1], now _that_ is hilarious.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NCvKXgp-Awo [1] https://www.theguardian.com/business/2001/dec/09/theobserver...
It takes satire to make us see how far we have come thinking the way we do.
Well done.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ASVcY8woQoM
A former employee of theirs told me that they had to sing it at an all-hands meeting. I would have quit on the spot.
Yes when I was younger I would have absolutely refused (it is ridiculous). Now I’m old and cynical and think everything is insane anyway I’d sing it with all my heart... most places are insane, but few are this entertaining!
A good place to start:
(It also has way too long instrumental intros and outros, but they’re just bad, not fun.)
Ugh, seems more like serfdom under a feudal lord. Gain protection in exchange for pledging fealty and giving up most of what you produce.
That is kind of the opposite of living under a feudal Lord: the nonsalaried employees are in that bucket (noncitizen residents in the ancient Greek analogy).
Serfs had a voice too, and just like in a corporation, the lord had no legal obligation to listen. Similar to a corporation, that serf could just be ejected because the lord felt like it.
The Greek citizen model is that you have a voice in government, but you still can be kicked out or have your vote stripped.
The feudalism metaphor is appropriate given the lack of collective bargaining power employees have access to.
And yes, a lot of the stuff feels like feudalism. But from my perspective the feudalism part comes from topic ownership and titles, budget ownership and headcount more than from employment status. Of course you can't get your own budget if you are not a full-time employee, but just because you're a full-time employee doesn't mean you will ever get your own budget to manage.
Inequality isn't new of course, but it's getting really hard to ignore.
People giving up leverage with labor just gives 'them' the upper hand. Why it's so hard for tech workers to band together over something as common as income is the problem, regardless of the disparity.
Teachers in my area are striking over much less money than tech workers fritter away on a daily basis. Sometimes it's worth standing outside with signs and waving at people passing.
Tech workers will band together the day that ends. Not anytime soon. Same on Wall Street or with Snowdens colleagues in govt.
An individual can be paid handsomely, even if the group average is a fraction of the individual's number. Though you believe you are paid well, and you may very well be, it does not mean actions do not happen to suppress the momentum of someone sitting a desk or two away working toward the same goal as you.
Pay has not been an issue, but overwork has been, and so has the interview process. A union/guild backing could help with this.
It also takes some onus off the hiring team to ascertain the technical abilities of prospective hires. “Just get me a guild member!” Now you can interview on other qualities...
I'm not saying a traditional union is the Way, but tech workers as a whole are severely lacking a cohesive voice, any voice. The egregious hiring practices, which have been turned into a game at the highest levels, are symptoms of this madness. When was the last time a doctor had to bring Frankenstein's monster back from the grave with no tools while blindfolded? In tech, that's a fairly typical interview question.
It shows in the amount of overwork-related discussions, shrugged off as part of being a highly-paid, salaried employee. All the while, sharing on LinkedIn this great new shiny your company's CEO really, really wants people to see.
If you are as confused as I am as to what this means, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-06-21/google-en...
There are maybe a few dozen engineers with enough outsized talent to get away with challenging the status quo. Anyone else will be fired and replaced by a ready and willing throng of recent grads eager to put a dent in their student loans.
GP didn’t say these grads were sitting around waiting to get hired.
They just said those are the people who will do your job after you’re fired for not being a team player/trying to upset the status quo.
The recent grads will be hired either way. The point is they vastly outnumber the people who will even make a legitimate attempt to change a corporate culture.
It’s replacemwnt as in, when you get out of the ocean, you will be “replaced” by salt water.
Sheryl Sandberg however, does. Guess who won?
It’s worth noting though that those people probably would never have been hired if Sandberg didn’t turn Facebook into the financial giant it is today.
So, I’d put this story in the “I created you, and I can destroy you” category.
Sandberg is higher on the cash food chain than any engineer.
Yeah, well, remember there were at least a couple people who went around installing fiber replicators for AT&T to tap the entire internet for the NSA, and they managed to keep that a secret for a LONG time.
> At google: air gap, maven, dragonfly. At microsoft, ICE detention. At amazon, rekognition.
I have no idea what this is in reference to. A better introduction even if very brief would've gone a long way.
True, this portion also went a bit over my head but nothing a quick google search cannot fix :) (I was really speaking in broad terms)
My observation is the consumers pick only one of those.
Maybe this is an opportunity for the C-levels of the very companies responsible for the modern surveillance economy to have a tiny taste of the crap sandwich that is having every detail of your life out in other people's hands, to exploit for their exclusive benefit, at odds with your own interests?
Furthermore, in the gig economy you don't get a payslip. You invoice. That allows you to extensively use jurisdiction shopping to minimize tax bills. In Europe, that can spare you from handing over 70% of your revenue to the tax collector. Good luck trying to do that in corporate employment.
I had to look that up.
Most corporations have a Council of Elders who advise the Glorious Chief. The Council can technically depose the Chief, but this is extremely rare.
The Chief has a Central Executive Committee which is responsible for establishing and ordering policies. Politics is strictly limited to Committee members fighting among themselves and attempts to influence, bribe and convince the Committee members that certain plans should go forward at the expense of others. If the Council of Elders executes the Chief, it is usually a Committee member who they select to step up.
Large Corporations grow by dominating other Corporations through economic warfare and forcing them into starvation, invading and absorbing them, or, most insidiously, subverting their Council Elders and launching a coup.
For example Walmart, when they chose which company to buy lawnmowers from for example, they get to decide which lawnmower makers survive and which don't.
By picking one winner and putting in a huge order at a huge discount, they can undercut every other manufacturer, effectively putting them out of business.
I don't know about you, but I don't remember the election where I got to vote for who is in charge of Walmart, so it's very autocratic.
Unless the fundamentals of the system are decentralized: farming/farmland, fisheries, mining, and other commodities.
But then again no company really like competition unless the game is fixed in their favor, and neither does middle management.
If the law did not allow incorporation, in other words if officers and directors and shareholders bore full liability for the business, we would see the end of gargantuan businesses like we have now.
People pretend to be experiencing communism even though almost no one is practicing it in the modern world. China is communist? Give me a break.
The nice thing is no one remembers what communist actually means anymore. So someone will be able to come back and describe communism and people will be like “wow, this is interesting.”
I don’t see them resembling modern communes, like kibbutzes or Berkeley co-ops.
Seems more like a monarchy to me.
Actually the thing they most resemble to me, in terms of operational stature, is the military.
This is not meant as criticism, I actually like the lifestyle. Especially since in such a big corps there are actually resources available compared to end-times socialist countries. But if you live here in this company your whole life it is questionable why we should call ourselves capitalists.
The root comment wasn't so bad because it reported personal experience, but the generic ideological bit is a virus. It leads—inevitably—to a generic ideological tangent. Those make boring, repetitive subthreads and so are off topic on HN.
Perhaps there are new and interesting things to be said in the classic ideological debates, but the internet message board is not a medium capable of that discussion. It bursts into flames instead.
Lots more explanation at https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme... if anybody cares.
Honestly, your explanation makes no sense to me. I don’t understand what’s so generic about this conversation. I think the idea that there are non-dominant forms of government operating inside institutions operating within capitalism is a rarely seen perspective.
And I read a lot of HN.
I'm not as convinced as you are that the point about capitalist institutions is so fresh or interesting, but I see your point. It's often hard to tell exactly where to apply the pruning shears.
What makes that entire setup capitalist is that it's privately funded and owned, as opposed to being subject to democratic control.
New and innovative initiatives are more often started from the mid- to low-levels of the company (three or four new lines of business have been started this way), and for the past year or so those initiatives are encouraged to become startups. The baby businesses are essentially put in an incubator where they have an initial budget and cash provided by the company but are encouraged to be individually profitable, report on their finances, are given coaching and regular meetings with startup business advisors, etc. And if they provide services back to the company, they're supposed to bill teams for those services. (The company still provides salary and benefits to the employees who start businesses within the company; there's some accounting magic to adjust which department budget actually pays for these.)
Examples of internal businesses started include:
* delivery of cafe drinks and food (with a delivery charge paid for by the receiving employee)
* conference room ownership and maintenance: these can now be permanently rented by teams, and the business that "owns" them is responsible for decorating, cleaning, providing technology services, etc.
* balloons, party supplies, swag, and desk toys, purchased either by the employee or their team
And businesses started with a focus outside the company include:
* providing detailed retail sales and product category data to suppliers and manufacturers
* tools to identify and encourage employee networks (who knows who, what skills does each employee have, who may provide an introduction to another employee)
* tools for polling and identifying employee sentiment
* self-organization consulting, training, mentoring, and software
* company tours (at $10 per visitor)
B) Why is democracy a prerequisit for socialism?
Diffuse power spread amongst many small power centers resists central control.
In a two-party system, there are two flavors of propaganda and people can choose which political machine they want picking the candidates. In a one-party system like we've seen with the great Socialist states of the 20th century or with American party primaries, leadership control over elections is even more blatant.
In the American system, for example, the existence of third party or non-Machine candidates acts as a pressure valve that ensures no real change can happen, since the major parties can divvy up the successful rhetoric and defuse it with their own loyal candidates, while anyone else who gets elected will be in too small a number to form an effective legislative caucus.
The result of individual elections isn't important. What matters is how the system functions in aggregate.
The polarizing antagonism between our political parties is a symbiotic relationship that keeps either one from having to own the consequences as both continue to feed off their common host. The party that gets elected determines which group of ultra-rich interests gets preferential treatment in looting the economy.
Good choices do not get handed to you on a silver platter any more than anything else in life. That doesn't change the fact that in a democracy, if enough people get together and FUCKING VOTE instead of sitting at home gazing at their navels and feeling sorry for themselves, they can change the world.
BTW, love him or hate him, Donald Trump is the poster child for democracy in action. He did not get to be president because some shadowy Powers That Be decided to make him president. He got to be president because he convinced tens of millions of people to FUCKING VOTE for him.
If you would like to support a good candidate, you should consider donating to Ross Barkan for NY State Senate: http://rossbarkan.com/
You certainly left me with that impression when you wrote, "We get to choose between corporate feudalism and outright fascism. Great choices we have there."
> Ross Barkan
... is a Democrat. So now you're asking me to donate to a corporate feudalist?
(BTW, if you want to respond to that, I suggest you look up my donation record in the FEC database before you do.)
Bernie Sanders is also a Democrat, but look at the kind of games party leadership played against him to make sure their preferred candidate got the nomination. Don't pretend you don't understand the difference between running under a party and being part of party leadership.
I happen to have a productized campaign contributions and expenditures database at my fingertips, so maybe I'll take you up on the offer to check. What state are you in?
EDIT: Your donations are probably to candidates in California, and we don't have that normalized and loaded yet.
Is not running AFAIK.
> Bernie Sanders is also a Democrat
No, he's an independent.
> Suppose we had Elizabeth Warren as a candidate instead?
Elizabeth Warren already holds elected office and is not up for re-election this cycle.
> Your donations are probably to candidates in California,
Don't make assumptions.
> we don't have that normalized and loaded yet.
And what exactly do you expect me to do about that?
I appreciate the fact that you are actually trying to move the needle, but you need to focus. Words matter.
"[Voting] only matters if voting actually functions as the root cause of election victory, but in practice it is merely an illusion of choice."
Don't confuse a data point with a recommendation. Data points are always in the past. Activism can only be effective in the future.
Your example had flaws I attempted to point out, but you are going to such great lengths to find any reason to misunderstand and mix up my statements that I find it both uncharitable and uncanny.
Are you somehow claiming Bernie did not run against Hillary in the democratic primary, and that party leadership did not attempt to sabotage his campaign in favor of their preferred candidate? Why did you suddenly switch from past tense to the present to claim a misunderstanding instead of addressing my point directly?
But it was still a choice. And people's votes still mattered. (And BTW, tens of millions of people still purport to be happy with the outcome.)
A choice between staying in an abusive relationship and killing yourself does not meet the criteria for an uncoerced choice, especially when it is being offered by the people with whom you are in an abusive relationship. Not killing yourself doesn't imply you consent to being in an abusive relationship. You'd have to be trying really hard to consider that a choice except in the most literal unhelpful sense.
Even our legal system (mostly) understands that you can't have a valid contract without consideration on both sides.
"in practice it is merely an illusion of choice"
I think it's a real choice, not an illusion, and that therefore votes matter. You may not be happy with any of the options, but that doesn't change the fact that it's a real choice, votes matter, and the outcomes of elections really can and do change the course of history, for better or for worse.
As an aside, if you are not happy with the choices, you can do something about that too, but effecting that kind of change does require more work than merely voting.
We don't need to agree on the definition of choice, but as long as political machines are allowed to keep playing these games, we're going to keep voting into an effectively captured playing field, and our decline as a society will continue.
The difference between slow decline and quick decline is important, but we still lose.
Illusion of choice strongly implies that the choice does not matter in reality. Yet you go on to say this:
> One is obviously worse than the other, but neither are for the benefit of the American people.
If X predictably scrapes me up very badly but Y mortally wounds me, can you please explain how is choosing X over Y "an illusion of choice?"
Edit: let me abstract out the question to avoid digressions. If X bad but Y is worse, can you please explain how is choosing X over Y "an illusion of choice?"
Our two-party system functions as such a fork, multiplied by 100 million. Whether you think the Republicans or Democrats represent the queen or the rook is where Pick-Your-Own-Propaganda becomes a more effective tool than the easy-to-spot state-sponsored propaganda used in single-party socialist regimes such as the USSR or PRC.
In one sense of the analogy, you are correct: people who aren't filthy rich are deluded if they think their choice of presidential candidate will substantially improve their economic predicament. In a more important sense, you are wrong: Trump isn't a symbolic link pointing to the same establishment that was behind Clinton.
Put another way-- this was not the year to code up a random boolean generator to pick your candidate for you. Sometimes making the correct choice between two bad options is extremely important, even if the less bad option was set as a trap for you. Now we're living through the most expensive civics lesson as to why.
It's like trying to beat the house at gambling. Individual losses are possible, but the house wins anyway.
Don’t confuse being unhappy with the choices on offer as there being no real choice. That one election has consequences still being felt today all around the world.
If you want to claim that it doesn't fulfill Marxist ideology, well yes. But not even communists believe that. The world that fulfills this true common shared ownership is called communism, and from a communist perspective we've never seen that. Socialist countries where an experiment at triggering human evolution to achieve communism. It failed. But if we look at Star Trek for instance, there they have achieved commmunism. No need for money, not much need for ownership, everybody works to improve oneself and further the community. That's communism according to communist, and yes that's different from how capitalist propaganda labels communism.
I'm not part of that group of communists though. I have a more fatalistic/pessimistic approach and think we are not really able to develop any further. We apply different labels, but in the end it's always the power pyramid that succeeds, because we can't overcome our limitations.
Someone will probably jump in here and tell me this is already happening in developing countries...
You could argue that that’s what stock in a non-public company is already
Now I went to the western side of the Iron Curtain and see that actual, real life capitalism is not how "they" taught us it would be. It doesn't contain much of the bullshit that was created in our countries to be more capitalist. It is the same stuff we grew up with and that we know that it works. Just here it has a "capitalist" label attached, so nobody thought they need to destroy and replace it.
So yes, from my perspective it's socialist, because the capitalists told us that it needs to get replaced when they arrived in our countries. In fact it's just normal human behaviour.
Capitalism is about who owns the capital. In a big corporation, most of the workers are unlikely to even have meaningful control of capital, let alone anything approximating ownership.
The community aspect of socialism isn't the problem - that is one of its more beguiling features. The problem is that once you take the cynicism of capitalism out of the picture ideas take root that are pleasant sounding but turn out not to work in practice.
There are a couple of big hitters in that bad ideas category, eg, everyone should get a roughly equal share of societies resources. In practice this turns out to be a catastrophically bad idea where everyone is equal and has nothing. We've seen that story play out more than once - it turns out the best equilibrium is people who are more productive should get more, and people who are less productive should get ... politics is still out on exactly how much they should get, but it is settled that it should be substantially less than the productive ones.
In a corporation, if ideas like that take hold, the people with prospects flee like rats from a sinking ship, the corporation goes bust and then everyone moves on to something that works.
The definitions of the words aren't simply "capitalism = good" and "socialism = bad", so that the moment something feels bad, it should stop being called capitalism and start being called socialism.
This is pushing the analogy too far and destroys credibility for the article.