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Comment by jdkee | Hacker News Reader

“ I am opposing a social order in which it is possible for one man who does absolutely nothing that is useful to amass a fortune of hundreds of millions of dollars, while millions of men and women who work all the days of their lives secure barely enough for a wretched existence.”

-Eugene Debs

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Nobody at kickstarter is living a wretched existence.

That is some of the reason they can unionize. Kickstarter produces enough surplus that the workers can get a better deal than they would otherwise.

What's much more interesting is the labor status of the people who work on the Kickstarted projects.

> Kickstarter produces enough surplus that the workers can get a better deal than they would otherwise.

Not really. It may be short-term better for the workers, but not likely long term as they are effectively constraining the growth of the business relative to what it would be if the union did not exist.

Depends.

The whole entertainment industry is unionized in L.A.

I know an actor from Las Vegas who moved to L.A. and got a role in a TV commercial and was surprised to see somebody else standing in front of the cameras and was surprised to find that every actor has a "stand-in" who is there so they can set up the equipment, then the real actor is fresh when he does his scene.

These costs add up, but there are many specialists who are highly productive. For instance, setting up and tearing down sets is a special form of carpentry which the average carpenter would take a change of mindset.

Union labor helps maintain a productive and talented workforce that gives L.A. a comparative advantage. Being at times the the documentarian who travels light and feels it is extravagant to have a sidekick that sets up lights it heavyweight but it maintains a world-beating quality standard.

And if they want to negotiate collectively to change how the organization treats them, it's absolutely their right to do so. Unionization is also specifically enshrined in law.

I hope they pursue a path toward codetermination: getting workers a seat on the board. It'd be absolutely fascinating to see how that plays out in a US-based tech company; I believe it'd be for the good, but we'll know for sure if we can see it play out.

Edit: Oh, and not having a say in how your organization is run is a wretched existence. Time to raise our standards, if we don't see that.

That's why they have the leverage to organize and help reset the precedent for labor representation at a point in time when that representation is at a historic low.

Do they have to live a wretched existence? Exactly how wretched does it have to be to allow them the ability to organize.

Or perhaps they are justified to want a better share of the value created at kickstarter by their labor.

The quote at the top of the comment chain is about living a wretched existence. Don't get me wrong, it's totally fine to form a union on the principle of "we're doing okay but we want more stuff", businesspeople are allowed to try and get richer with no higher principle in mind. But it's dishonest to pretend that it inherits some kind of inherent moral weight from the traditional labor movement.

It's dishonest to pretend companies aren't perfectly happy to make their employees live a wretched existence as long as profits are brought in.. and that is a fundamental issue of the labor movement.

Tech workers are better off, but still treated poorly by management:

"Apple and Google's wage-fixing cartel involved dozens more companies, over one million employees"

https://pando.com/2014/03/22/revealed-apple-and-googles-wage...

The thing that gets me about Apple specifically is that they did this while sitting on huge cash reserves and being one of the top ten most profitable companies in the world, yet they still fucked over their own people to make more.

I used to think that, as a 733t programmer, I had no use for unions, but then this happened and showed that there's no particular reason to trust tech company management at all, at all. They'll screw you to make a buck and get a slap on the wrist if anything if they're caught.

Interview with Google and they will send you lovely little videos with folks sliding down banisters and such to show you how wonderful it is to work there. It won't mention the "wage-fixing cartel" that limits your job opportunities and take-home pay.

It's pretty sick when you think about it. I don't know it unions are the answer, it's complicated after all, but absolutely these folks are not your friends, and you should coe in with as much leverage as you can get if you want to work for "the man".

> one man who does absolutely nothing that is useful

Assuming all of the risk is useful. I understand the point, but it's undercut by that woefully inaccurate jab.

Workers assume risk taking on an opportunity cost with their employers, and the very wealthy often mitigate their risk by pushing it onto the government.

But the point is this part: "for one man who does absolutely nothing that is useful to amass a fortune of hundreds of millions of dollars" is irrelevant. Who has done this besides criminals?

It all depends on your definition of "useful", but anyone who's made that much money legally has probably put in a bunch of work (or put in work to educate themselves to be able to make good decisions), or assumed a lot of risk in an investment.

There's definitely something to be said for reducing income inequality, but we don't have to assume the ultra-rich have "done absolutely nothing that is useful" in order to be pro-workers rights. Capitalism is designed to produce ultra-rich individuals.

We also should not lionize wealth. There are many people who inherit a lot of money, have a family that has a business network, that have really contributed nothing but are massively wealthy.

There are massively wealthy individuals who have collected value in one area, and use that wealth to negatively influence many other areas. We really should not give money that much of an advantage.

> We really should not give money that much of an advantage.

What do you suggest as an alternative?

In general, tilt the system away from favoring money concentrations.

Favor small business formation (and worker coop formation) with higher SBA loan funding. Put required worker representation on corporate boards (like Germany) of larger corporations. Do actual antimonopoly enforcement. Tax large corps more. Create more public ownership of housing and infrastructure.. it's all pretty mundane well trodden and reasonable practice for good governance.

Exotic stuff would be government backed individual loan lines for citizens. The limit could be expanded on repayments but zero consequence if never repaid. The idea would be to open a window for entrepreneurship when right now, wages have basically squeezed out the possibility of most people starting any sort of business from savings. If you can make things grow, you get a larger limit. Basically decentralize loans.

>and the very wealthy often mitigate their risk by pushing it onto the government.

No they don't. Not even in the wall-street bailouts did shareholders get money from the government.

Banks were bailed out by quantitative easing to the tune of $4+T, so at the very least, one can draw a direct line from that government bailout from banks to bank stock shareholders.

Just to review: QE bought risky Mortgage backed securities off of banks and finance companies completely absolving them of carrying the negative effects of their bad investments...

> Assuming all of the risk is useful.

I've never seen a multi-millionaire, let alone a billionaire actually take the cost of failure on personally. Risk externalization is the theme of the era.

I think you may be misunderstanding - "risk" here is a financial thing, not a personal risk of being tossed on the street. If someone is worth $10 billion and will lose $2 billion if their company fails, that's still a lot of risk being covered, even though it won't really change their life to only have $8 billion.

Doesn't that mean that all the employees taken on a much greater personal risk? Personal risk seems to have higher stakes than financial risk - so it's unclear why financial risk is so prized. When you lose $2 billion because your company fails, workers are thrown out onto the streets. What makes the $2 billion risk more valuable than peoples' livelihoods?

I'd rather be a multi-billionaire who loses $2 billion than a mid-level worker who loses their job (and for a proper comparison you'd have to aggregate all the trouble caused by all the job losses the closing of the company has caused), especially in a country with a smaller social safety net. That alone tells me enough about the value of this "risk" supposedly so greatly undertaken by the owners to entitle them to perpetual gains on it.

Financial risk isn't prized in some moral sense. It's just an instrumentally valuable service. If a factory costs $100m to build, someone has to put $100m at risk to build it; no matter how much the workers self-organize they won't be able to build the factory if they don't have the $100m.

It is prized in the sense of providing justification for huge salaries, which is the point of discussion here. Just as you couldn't build a factory without $100M, you couldn't operate it without workers - and sometimes, because they self-organize. In a capitalist economy, one needs capital and labour. Capital without labour is unproductive, and labour without capital is (usually) the same.

Each and every employee takes a risk by being employed at a company. At the moment, it seems they are only compensated for their labour. Why is the owner of the company compensated for risk, possibly in addition to being compensated for labour, but the employees aren't?

>It is prized in the sense of providing justification for huge salaries

No it's not. Investors don't take salaries. Many stocks don't even pay a dividend (e.g. most tech stocks).

Switch "salaries" for "compensation", then. If the idea is that risk-taking is inherently useful and therefore deserving of constant income, it must be shown why that risk is compensated in some cases (investors, CEOs) but not in others (employees).

The argument was as follows:

* People who do nothing useful gain high compensation (Debs).

* Acutally, the high compensation is due to taking on "all the risk"

* But employees also take on a large amount of personal risk which is not compensated.

* Ah, but the kind of risk being discussed isn't personal risk, it's financial risk.

* But this means that when constructing an argument for high compensation, financial risk is prized and personal risk is not. Why?

The fact that investors don't take salaries is irrelevant to the discussion. The justification for their profit is still "financial risk" without regard for "personal risk".

Stock appreciation isn't really "compensation". When Bezos for example gets billions of dollars richer, that's an artificial number from multiplying a NASDAQ price by his holdings - there's no actual flow of billions of dollars which could be redirected to employee salaries. The only way for employees to get a piece of the pie would be to give them stock. And most large companies do try to give their employees stock; even Walmart part-timers have an ESPP.

"The consequences of $X failing will have no impact" is quite literally the definition of risk-free.

Losing $2 billion is not 'no impact'. That's money that could have been pumped into the economy somewhere else and could have done much better for both the investor and society. The investor might get some extra tries, but going from 5 attempts down to 4 is still a big loss.

Probably because a lot of that risk was taken before the success and you're looking at a filtered selection of results (the ones who succeeded).

So if the risk was taken before, why does that entitle the risktaker to seek constant gains on it? If I wrote a program essential for the success of the company, before the success of a company, would it entitle me to a perpetual percentage of the company's profits? The benefits of that program, by current standards, belong to the company perpetually. Why does the risk, taken on behalf of the company, only belong to the person in charge?

By looking at employees, you're also looking at a filtered selection of results (the ones who were able to gain employment). The person who took the initial risk (say, a founder) may often leave the company or sell it. Who in the company has then assumed all of the risk? The person who bought the company?

Even then, we're not living in a just world. What's admirable, or a social justification, for taking a risk in a business that operates in immoral ways, or illegal ways? I'm not saying this applies to Kickstarter, but it certainly applies to a great many other companies.

And when GP said "assuming all the risk", I can't think how that's possibly true. Workers in all professions assume some level of risk every day - either to their safety, career prospects, or continued employment.

Elon Musk invested all of his funds. Let's be honest, tons of people believed Tesla and SpaceX was going to fail.

https://venturebeat.com/2010/05/27/elon-musk-personal-financ...

According to the filing — part of his pending divorce case from sci-fi novelist Justine Musk — Elon Musk has been living off personal loans from friends since October 2009 and spending $200,000 a month while making far less. Musk confirmed this in an interview with VentureBeat.

Personal—not Tesla—burn-rate of $200,000 a month, and he still owned property.

Putting aside that if "I may get slightly less rich but still never have to do anything, whatsoever, that I don't want to, ever, and neither will the next two generations of my family" is the risk please fucking sign me up for taking that "consequence of failure", I don't even need the chance at up-side.

If the world gets to the point where it really thinks their work is useless, I hope _they_ go on strike.

I'm sure this phrase inspired many, but it's talking about an extreme. What if the disadvantaged are not having a "wretched existence"? Is immense inequality ok then? That's the big question.

Your definition of "wretched existence" might be very different from the folks seeking union representation.

That's my point. It's not a useful concept when explaining the situation.

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