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Comment by robertlagrant | Hacker News Reader

This is a narrow, binary view of the world. People are not born employees or employers. Anyone can start a business and also become an employer. Almost anyone can see that their skills are in demand or not and move to new industries. Anyway can become a consultant.

I'm not saying this is perfect, but assuming people are at an employer's mercy is not a great place to start. I don't think people should blame themselves if an industry collapses. Of course people fall on hard times. But I also don't like how little agency we tell people that they have, and we don't teach people the skills and attitude to stay ahead of things rather than just wanting to clock in and clock out and not have to worry.

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I suppose that anyone can get that 1 million dollar loan too, for start capital? Heck, make that $100k + student loan + a home.

What you said sounds like a fanfiction. Most people really are at the mercy of their paycheck, even the top of the middle class.

I'm not saying people don't live paycheck to paycheck. I'm saying they shouldn't assume their current employer is their only plan, and should be working to ensure that they are not. That has the nice side effect of what could have been activism effort going into creating value for other people.

I mostly agree with your points, but it takes certain personality traits to be able/willing to take chances with your career when the bottom rung is "eat at soup kitchens and sleep in your car". After all, society doesn't exactly make it easy to live without debts or financial commitments. Few of us are still homesteading.

I'm not convinced the alternatives are net better for the overall wealth of society. But the fact that anyone can sell their services to the market is also something that's hard to view in isolation.

Sorry but you sound like you were beamed down from the mothership yesterday and you got this info from an introductory pamphlet on planet earth :)

The issue isn't that people don't have agency, it's that when they use their agency to enact any actual meaningful changes they get beaten down mercilessly by people which much more wealth and power.

And that's exactly what was happening to workers in Henry Fords era, and it's what lead to an explosion of labour activism which was responded to with murderous brutality that is too well documented to recount in full detail here.

And the question here isn't whether people use their agency or not, or whose side you take or whatever, it's just whether educated onlookers can even talk honestly about it without going off in to flights of abstraction and fantasy.

Edit: added a smiley to clarify I am not trying to be mean, just communicate some level of incredulity about popular conceptions of labour history of the late 19th / early 20th century...

I'm not talking about activism; I'm talking about meaningful changes individuals can make in their own lives to always have a plan b/c/d and not assume their employer rules the roost and should be relied upon to provide.

> assuming people are at an employer's mercy is not a great place to start

I don't assume that. It's just a matter of who has the most power under what circumstances. Employees usually only have any power at all if there are alternative jobs they can take.

So when there is lots of unemployment, people are at an employer's mercy.

Neoliberalism has this covered though and maintains a certain degree of unemployment through monetary policy. Look up "Non-accelerating inflation rate of unemployment" (NAIRU).

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