Hacker News Reader

Comment by windex | Hacker News Reader

A lot of jobs seem like modern slavery. Rather than focus on the deliverable, managers and people who pay money focus more on the "controlling someone" aspect. Tech has enabled this in a big way.

View on HN

Why do you think so many US businesses fight against universal healthcare? Employers want every possible measure of control over their employees that they can get.

I never thought about it like this. This makes a lot of sense and is blowing my mind. I've worked at the same company for the last 16 years partly because of fear of losing healthcare.

Come and live in a country where healthcare is not tied to your job in any remote way, and see how differently people behave. It really is night and day.

When my brother came back to Australia after 5 years away he said the biggest thing he noticed was not driving on the wrong side of the road, not the weather, not the food, not the accents - it was how people are treated at their jobs.

Even in Canada though, Dental is pretty much tied to your job. It's not as significant, but I've only ever had legitimate dental coverage during school and for 3 months over the course of a decade.

So move to a country where even Dental isn't tied to your job!

I'm working on it alright! Although technically it's not tied to your job, just not very affordable unless it's on a company plan. I figure this is the common definition of "tied to job", because I can't imagine a system that provides exclusive access to dental insurance to employers only.

Have a look at my 2nd earliest submission about full employment and the consequences it would bring, it's pretty refreshing reading.

I read a horrifying description by a American of their employment and health insurance situation.

Some details I don't understand, and I may be misremembering, but the gist was:

- they were (under?)-employed within their field, at an okay job

- they had health benefits

- they had had a major health condition which caused them to now have a pre-existing condition (cancer? I don't recall.)

- they were now in a situation where-in if they lost their job, or COBRA coverage for 2+ months, they lapsed out of their existing policy

- they would then have to apply for health insurance coverage with a "pre-existing condition" which would not be covered (by the normal policies?)

So now they were very clearly and palpably tied to their health insurance and by extension to the company that employed them, and felt very uneasy about going through the hiring / probation period somewhere else.

I may have the major details wrong there, feel free to correct me if I do.

I haven't had dental insurance for longer than 3 months in my 11 years as an adult because I haven't managed to stay employed longer at a company that would put me on the plan. Actually typing that out evokes a unique sense of sadness that I haven't had in a while.

If you're receptive to that way of thinking, try taking a look into Marxist theories, which incorporate that way of thinking into a political philosophy.

Absolutely true in my opinion. The cost of procuring and administering healthcare is one of the largest non-productive costs to most businesses. Its about retention and control.

There's a similar ugly dynamic at work with H1Bs, particularly in tech.

It's very ugly in graduate schools too, for grad students and postdoctoral researchers who aren't paid much better (salary is maybe 40-50k). In many west coast cities, rents over the past decade have gone up like 60%. Graduate student stipends on the other hand, have heald pretty steady around 30k during that entire time. These are people with a bachelors or even a masters degree, working on things like disease, being paid less from a government grant than a McDonalds worker in Fresno. Oh, but it's "training," so working for less than minimum wage is seen as OK. It also doesn't help that any professor who hears of the 30k stipend goes "Golly, back in my day decades ago when rents were a full order of magnitude lower, I only made half that!" without any realization of the words coming out of their mouth.

I don't think it's true at all that businesses are against universal healthcare. Businesses want very much to have nothing to with providing employee healthcare, thus the opposition to Obamacare.

But if someone offered to take it off their plate, absent proportionately higher taxes, I cannot see any business outcry.

Big businesses with younger, white collar employees certainly gain a competitive advantage by getting a tax benefit for paying people via health insurance subsidies. Their risk pool is healthier, so the healthcare costs are lower, hence premiums are lower. Plus, obfuscated pricing always benefits the seller. The employer can lower the value of the benefit without the employee being able to accurately compare the costs to alternatives.

"Slavery with extra steps" often comes to mind.

It’s slavery as a service. Great for saving costs because you only pay for the time that you actually use, and you can outsource the maintenance of the service to the provider.

If real slavery was still legal it wouldn’t even be used because the paycheque to paycheque employee model is so much more cost efficient.

Yeah, you need to feed, house and give free healthcare to slaves. That's not happening any time soon.

It's coming. "You will own nothing and be happy."

I wonder what it is going to look like when finally every single dollar you have is sucked up automatically by the month. The scales tip by the year. People in major cities are already paying 50% of their wages to their landlord alone. That's a degenerate economy, not a productive one.

Eventually we will reach an equilibrium where there will be just enough vultures out there to eat exactly how many slices there are left in the pie. Complete extraction of 'disposable' income will be achieved this century. For working people in major cities, some are already being completely extracted like this, having to work multiple jobs to keep a roof overhead and bellies fed with no time to do something that isn't low skilled labor for capital.

It is much worse. China is currently testing crypto money that expires after a certain amount of time. Forget saving.

Source on this? Sounds like an interesting, albeit terrifying, read.

I know you mean well, but nothing except literal slavery is slavery, and it's trivializing of enormous injustices to even lightly equate the two.

Chattel slavery involved practically-legal murder, beating, children born into slavery, rape, and a laundry list of horrifying things. This is bad, but we can come up with a term for "oppressive labor conditions" which is not "slavery".

Experience demonstrates that there may be a slavery of wages only a little less galling and crushing in its effects than chattel slavery, and that this slavery of wages must go down with the other. There is nothing more common now than the remark that the physical condition of the freedmen of the South is immeasurably worse than in the time of slavery; that in respect to food, clothing and shelter they are wretched, miserable and destitute; that they are worse masters to themselves than their old masters were to them. To add insult to injury, the reproach of their condition is charged upon themselves.

An amazing point getting recognized more and more.

Chattel slavery is only but one kind of slavery.

Now we have people being born into practically eternal poverty and forced to toil constantly under horrible conditions in order to avoid economic punishments.

If only everyone had a choice in where they spend their time and energy. Oh they do.

If only everyone had the money and time to actually make that choice. If you are living paycheck to paycheck, that means you can't afford to move without going into more debt. Moving costs money, even just moving across town. I'm usually out a good 1-2k when I move apartments just in my town after all application fees and deposits have been paid. My last landlord was a management corporation that figured out a way to whittle down my $1800 security deposit from my last apartment to $38 from things like "scratched floors" and "dents," so the deposit is rarely that. If I was broke, moving would be impossible.

If you are broke you are gonna have an impossible time lining up work wherever you are going. No low skilled place is going to hire an out of area candidate when there are local applicants. You will have to show up from say, expensive south central LA to 'cheaper' boise, having spent hundreds of dollars in gas along the way, and now need to put money down on a security deposit. Since your credit is probably bad since you are broke, you will probably have to pay a huge deposit. My very first apartment when I had no credit asked for three months of rent as a deposit. If you are broke you don't have money for gas or these deposits, and will have had to go into debt. So now you are in a new area where you no absolutely no one, with no job, thousands in debt. You might spend the rest of your working life trying to get out of the hole you just dug for yourself, and that's assuming you don't get sick along the way.

It's no wonder why so many people are homeless, and why most of the working poor in cities like LA live in overcrowded apartments rather than "going elsewhere" like wisecrack comments on the internet seem to suggest they do. I don't think people on this board have any concept of how expensive it is to be poor in this country, and this comment is case in point.

It also implies that it's not a consensual agreement with your workplace. If you can figure out how to live your life without working, youre allowed to. Slaves... not so much

Reply on news.ycombinator.com