It's funny that we have a dozen different open source software licenses that are all some version of "how can we give this to you even freer" but we have no notion of what an equitable work contract looks like. Until that changes, things will never, ever, get better for workers.
I don’t know of single US company that allows their workers on their board. I’m not against it. I think it’s an awesome idea.
Technically, if a CEO is on the board, then a company’s employee is on the board. Shareholders will probably not vote to put a line level employee on the board, though.
The compliment to "workers aspiring to join the owning class" is that the biggest risk a capitalist faces is the possibility of being thrust back into the working-class, and having to actually work for a living, as opposed to living off of profits derived from the labor of others.
In practice, socialism is a power grab where populist leaders redistribute the ownership classes' assets to themselves.
Wikipedia's treatment is a bit more nuanced. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialism
So the conversation becomes, should the government(s) in the US force businesses to place line level employees on the board (if the line level employees want to be on the board), and under what parameters?
In Germany, they do find it economically viable and important for line level employees to have direct representation on the company board. Talking about the CEO or other management classes being on the board is missing the conversation. Suggesting that because US companies don't believe in the economic value is missing the conversation. Suggesting that people are saying that this type of board composition is illegal is also missing the conversation. No one said it's illegal, but it's equally not a legal requirement either like it is in other places.
The conversation is that this composition doesn't exist, by and large, in the US, and people think it should. People seem to believe that it does have value to the business.
So yes, it does seem like you're creating semantic arguments because your points miss the conversation semantically.
On the other hand, we do have higher productivity, but not having codetermination probably isn't the reason for that.
Is this how workers’ councils work in Germany?
You don't really have a choice if nobody where you live will take your insurance...
Some of the low cost companies are essentially scams: most of the "providers" they list on their site will not actually accept the plan; if you do have any medical costs, they will do everything possible to avoid paying even when you are clearly covered; you'll wait for hours on hold to talk to support, then they will be rude and unhelpful; etc. etc.
It's well worth paying an extra hundred or so per month for a reputable provider so that you at least have actual functional health insurance.
There might be some states where the marketplace has nothing good in it, often because that state's governor was so ideologically driven they refused free money from the feds to expand medicare style systems. American health care is HUGELY state to state, largely depending on how willing a governor is to actually help their constituents instead of virtue signalling.
Both would only cover one of the four nearest major hospitals to me (though they did differ in which one it was) and only one of the two covered the huge local children's hospital that's also bought up nearly all the independent pediatrician's offices and pediatric urgent cares in the entire city, so if you have kids you actually only have one "option".
So much for the bounty of choice we preserved by not just going single-payer.
Health insurance is the "golden handcuffs" for most people staying in a job.
Regardless, there's subsidies if you don't have income, and it's just based on income; there's no requirement to seek income.
I'm near seattle, and my marketplace place for 2 adults around 40 and 1 child was around $1,200; unsubsidized.
Class struggle happens everywhere and workers can win anywhere, even the US.
Neither Medicaid nor Obamacare require you to work. My father in law did this in Oregon. “Retired” years before being eligible for Medicare, and is covered by the Oregon Health Plan. In Oregon you don’t even have to be legally in the country to qualify for fill OHP benefits.
No you can't. You're not thinking this through. As soon as enough people quit in order to start pressuring companies to allow this, it becomes more difficult for the growing pool of quitters to get new jobs and it becomes a buyers market, putting you in an even weaker position than you already were in. On top of that, capital always has more of an ability to hold out far longer. You need to eat and pay rent right now while they can scale down production until you come back with terms favorable to them. This is why unions save money ahead of time so that they can strike.
As far as I can tell, there is simply no place where a group of workers can borrow money. We have no concept of loans co-signed by a large number of people in the US.
For example, there should be a floor at which a loan is deemed risk-free because a typical person has that much money. Any of us can donate $5 to someone living on the street at any time. So 100 people should be able to borrow $500 together, no questions asked.
Now, how high can that go? Certainly $20 each. Maybe $100? $300? It's going to be an amount similar to what payday loan shops offer to strangers.
To me, this is like customer acquisition cost (CAC). In the 90s, CAC was under $1 before advertising got saturated. Today it's between $25 and $50, which has eliminated nearly all indie websites selling handmade goods for less than that. And driven the rise of influencers, and incentivized taking over making.
I know we have Kickstarter etc. But for something like this to work, it would need to be available everywhere immediately with no nonsense, no exorbitant interest or fees and no wait time. The government could offer group loans like this with a $100 per person limit today and bootstrap the economy to where it was 25 years ago and make a huge return.
Maybe this is what drove crypto and NFTs, just in a way that was obviously going to implode because workers were expected to pony up the cash. So I'd be curious to hear if investors know of any places to take out group loans like this.
The central problem will be inequality of all kinds, such as aptitude/motiviation/effort/etc. Eventually, in many businesses, you will get into a situation where some people will think they deserve more than others, and then politics will take over, and you have a similar problem to weaknesses in democracy.
>As far as I can tell, there is simply no place where a group of workers can borrow money. We have no concept of loans co-signed by a large number of people in the US.
There is. A family reunion, a bank, a credit union, a local business group meeting, etc. There is nothing stopping this happening other than the fact that it is not economic. Underwriting, agency risk, and pursuing unpaid debt is not a negligible problem.
>For example, there should be a floor at which a loan is deemed risk-free because a typical person has that much money. Any of us can donate $5 to someone living on the street at any time. So 100 people should be able to borrow $500 together, no questions asked.
Very few lenders exist who would accept that deal. As a lender, would you?
That's othering. You're separating the "us" that are hard workers and successful from the "them" that are slackers.
But wealth inequality is an injustice specifically because it doesn't discriminate.
For example: in software development the hardest workers are penalized because the 10:1 or 100:1 leverage in their solutions often isn't recognized or rewarded. They might get paid twice as much as another dev even though decades of experience and orders of magnitude differences in problem-solving capacity separate them. That could be where your perception comes from, if you feel undervalued for your work and see others around you as entitled.
The hardest workers I've met in my life were generally the lowest paid. When I was moving furniture from 2001-2003, women automatically were paid $9/hr to pack boxes while the men were paid $10/hr to load them. Never mind that packing is a much more difficult job psychologically. I could pack about 30 boxes/day if I went as fast as I could, while a woman I worked with averaged 80. Almost 3 times my productivity for less pay and opportunity. And she had kids. And she didn't have the money to go to the dentist. And she never complained. Not like me.
Today 20 years later, costs have at least doubled while pay has stayed the same. I worry for her and the literally 100 million Americans who work harder than we do and live hand to mouth. It's a travesty of such proportion that it's become unthinkable. We literally can't overcome our own biases to think about it rationally. Our inability to empathize is the root cause of suffering.
So yes, I would make that loan all day. And nothing against you, I don't know you, I don't mean to be critical. I just feel that your argument is rooted in bias which somewhat ironically causes you to not entertain the insights I've gained acquiring my bias.
Edit: I may have misread your point. Do you mean that some people will think they deserve more than others and hoard the profits of the business? Sorry if I got that backwards or projected my context onto what you said.
Yes, and I posit "othering" is an innate part of humans (and other animals). Of course, it is worthwhile to work against excessive "othering" that causes a net loss in the functioning of society.
>Do you mean that some people will think they deserve more than others and hoard the profits of the business?
Yes, although I would not make a judgment call as to whether or not it is "hoarding".
The lag between people quitting and people finding their next job reduces the labor supply. That’s compounded by onboarding time required to conduct interviews and get people up to speed etc. It’s why companies so frequently fold in the face of strikes rather than just fire everyone, they have a great deal of individual leverage on any one employee but are completely dependent on having a workforce.
> As soon as enough people quit
You don’t actually need a formal union to get large numbers of people to quit.
I do think a strike could be effective here though. A company is in more of a bind when all / many of its workers refuse to work.
So long as the company acts as a group and labour acts as a individuals, all the bargaining power will be on the side of the company.
I think the union formed at Microsoft may be a good example to follow.