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Comment by malux85 | Hacker News Reader

Couldn't have said it better.

One of the reasons I'm a supporter of universal basic income is so that the employees can have a better negotiating position. I suspect many bullshit rules will go out the window when the alternative to employment isn't destitution.

For far too long has this negotiation been highly in favour of the employer.

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This is a bit of a tangent, but one should be careful with that path. Not all employers are 'evil' and have negative intentions for their employees. Think of an example such as the independently owned restaurant that cannot afford to pay employees high wages and their owners are not wealthy. Just as not all employees can be painted as untrustworthy and hostile, not all employers should be painted as untrustworthy and hostile.

I've been a line cook, restaurant owners are absolutely untrustworthy and hostile. The food industry is one where exploitation, highly aggressive staff retention practices (making employees dependent on you for a visa, threatening to spread lies about you, etc.), crazy unhealthy hours and just a generally awful culture are standard.

Can vouch for the life science industry being like this as well. Management threatened to make us check in every hour of work. Spending an eighth of that hour writing an explanatory email was pretty toxic.

I've worked in the restaurant industry in the US. It's nothing short of horrifying, and often traumatizing for those involved.

I've seen no overtime pay happen, lies from management to get unemployment claims denied, management not actually firing people but just giving them zero or reduced hours to mess with the unemployment claim process, the VISA fuckery you mentioned, harrassment. Intentional scheduling of conflicting days for people with multiple jobs. Being made to work 7 days a week for long periods of time. Being made to repeatedly close late at night / early in the morning and then open the restaurant the next morning, a few hours later, and work a double. Being made to work while sick (this happens a lot).

A gold comment I heard from one manager was "I don't pay overtime because these motherfuckers already take enough of my money" (referring to the employees). This same guy was shaving time slips to keep them below 40 hours.

All employers will value the enterprise over any one of their employees individually. When is the last time you saw an employer shutter their business but continue paying their employees? It isn't that they aren't trustworthy, it is that it is a mistake to trust your employer to act in your best interest. As an example you yourself bring up, think of all the restaurants that only function because they pay their employees peanuts and give them unstable hours.

I had a boss sum it up pretty well for us once. It was stressful and a bunch of people had been arguing at work. The boss rounded everyone up and basically told us all that in the end, the business would go on whether he had to run it alone or not. We could all keep arguing, fucking up jobs, pissing customers off and losing the business money, but then nobody would have work at all. Or we could all get over our differences, work shit out and keep getting paid.

That was pretty much all it took.

And I understand, he'd been running that business for over 20 years and started it from nothing. He was fairly successful while I was working there, but he'd been at the bottom before and would keep working back up from there again if it came down to it.

He's probably one of the best bosses i've had, he was fair and would invest in employees and the business, but the business always came first.

> When is the last time you saw an employer shutter their business but continue paying their employees?

Just last month: https://web.archive.org/web/20200410153705/http://www.lafari...

(They've since re-opened)

It's possible that a UBI could work out to the benefit of employers that respect their workers. Suppose your job choices are an employer that treats you well and pays $20k/year, and an employer that treats you badly and pays $30k/year. You might end up having to take the higher pay and put up with the abuse just to make ends meet. But with a UBI of $15k/year, the lower paying job becomes a viable option.

Looming destitution never made good work. The way one engages with a good employer is a sense of co-ownership in some way. I can't tell how my way of taking ownership to an arbitrary project is influenced by a relief of financial stress. It might, but I don't believe it's going to up it any, ever.

Which means that with UBI, I might be less inclined to take risks. I'm not an economist enough to tell what that means, but a rough estimate say it won't increase my income. And at this point of the discussion, we haven't even touched the topic of taxes...

Your sense of co-ownership is an illusion. Why should you engage with your boss by pretending?

Personal experience. I put more into a job when I see a point in it, because I start to like it. When I don't find my work worthwhile or find interesting in any other way, it's not going to turn out good. What does it take for this? I don't know, maybe I'm screwing up the wording for it somehow.

Why is it that, given your last sentence, your comment is about ubi and not unions?

UBI seems less risky than a union because of a long history of anti-union action, hostility towards employees, and lack of mobility once one is bound to a union. UBI provides flexible minimum support and someone could transform their life from one place to another by being sure they could at least maintain a minimum standard of living.

If they won't let you have a union then the ubi they give you won't put you on a stronger footing. Ubi could help create a minimum standard of living, that's what that tool is for, but that's separate from getting negotiating power for workers. For that, they need to negotiate together.

See jedberg. We have systematically destroyed the concept of growing with a company for it's duration in the US. Without the concept of mutual company-employee loyalty then something needs to protect inter-company transition/bargaining power.

Labor unions don't have to be tied to a single employer, or even a single country.

Unions only protect you in one job. A UBI protects you in all jobs.

If ubi can cover your costs of living. But if corporate america and government have broken the labor movement, then why would they give you ubi that truly gives you autonomy from work?

The point is not autonomy. The point is that it keeps you alive, so that you know that if you leave your job, at least you'll still have health care and food, so you won't die by being jobless.

It sets a minimum bar.

Realistically you need both -- a UBI and a union. The UBI sets the minimum bar that all jobs must reach, the Union sets the livable bar for one particular workplace (or maybe a group of similar workplaces).

UBI and Unions serve different purposes. A UBI prevents modern slavery, a Union provides for a decent quality of life.

Because we in the US need to understand that it's not about just passively being given something. This is about a whole country making decisions that steward the actual people who make it, not entities with highly biased representation.

> For far too long has this negotiation been highly in favour of the employer.

Henry Ford had to double the pay to lower employee turnover.

You don't need UBI for that, just a healthy social welfare system, and a health insurance system that doesn't depend on the job.

Basic income is socialist utopia, state doesn't have money to pay everybody "basic pay". People need to work to earn money. There is no other option.

Of all the reasons to be in favor of UBI, this is a first for me to hear...but to the point, the alternative to employment at a company deploying these kinds of tactics is not destitution, it is employment at a company that does not.

That works in certain fields - for instance, many of us here on HN can indeed walk across the street and get a new job if our employers are teetering into miniature surveillance states.

To be honest, though, the average worker doesn't have that kind of leverage, they don't have pockets deep enough to wade through the interview cycle, and many of the other employers they'd go work for are doing exactly the same thing. For them, the alternative to employment at a company deploying these kinds of tactics is very much destitution - especially right now.

I'm with you on one thing: if my employer demanded minute-by-minute accountability for my time, I'd leave, no questions asked and minimum notice given. I have that choice, though; when discussing things like UBI, I always try to remind myself that someone for whom that support would be life-changing is in a very different situation from mine, with a much more constrained set of responses / actions available to them.

They have all that they need should they decide to use it: the power of self-agency. That's the only and ultimate leverage anyone has if nothing else...

You've been posting all sorts of generic comments in this thread, and worse, and basically derailing it to the point of trolling. Please don't do this on HN.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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