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Comment by sitkack | Hacker News Reader

Why should employees pay for desks? Sounds like a strategy to make the work environment suck so that people are willing to spend their own money on work supplies, traditional corporate welfare.

Which reminds me, all those jobs I brought my own monitors … I should have just resigned.

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they're not. the point is in a traditional setup the company springs for standing desks as a perk. in a unionized setup it's better to hold stuff back for negotiations. this is the flip side to collective bargaining, you kinda gotta go through "The Process" for everything. there's also the considerations that 1. unions sometimes don't like the workplace just adding perks bc it's perceived as "undermining" the union and 2. unions will always push for more even if you add a perk like new standing desks (bc that's their job) so the workplace kinda has to always push for less so they come to a middle ground compromise.

This is all easily answered and resolved by paying equity. Then we can dispense with this silly back-and-forth. Right now it's like a toddler trying to get other toddlers to work for them while they try to grub all the profit. Make the profit spread over all stakeholders...no more arguments and we can all continue on, making money.

Close.

It's not about pay equity, it's about a small minority (employers/directors/shareholders) currently deciding what happens with the profits made from the labor of all the WORKERS. (And about that same small minority also deciding whether to burden society with a newly unemployed person by firing any worker.)

Those decisions should instead be made by the workers, democratically, in the same manner we pretend to glorify for civil society's governance: one person one vote.

This is how worker-owned co-op's operate.

Worker-owned co-ops were always allowed. Nothing stopping workers from starting them instead of working for traditional companies.

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