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Why lay off people, when state can afford to keep them on minimum wage? and reap the benefit of their work (rockets, weapons, tanks, nukes, etc)
" highly educated engineers were paid like 100 rubles/mo, which is slightly above minimum wage."
I think it's kind of hard to quantify based on salary alone in a system like that. People in more prestige positions like engineers & scientists had access to things that others might not have: a better apartment, better schools for their kids, shops that had a better supply of goods.
Lets not pretend they didn't have millions in the gulags....
Let’s not pretend America doesn’t currently imprison over two million people [2]. That’s where you end up if you’re poor and unlucky enough in America (being homeless is also criminalized in many places [3]).
[1] https://www.urban.org/policy-centers/health-policy-center/pr...
[2] https://www.prisonstudies.org/country/united-states-america
[3] https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbeseq/2022/01/01/how-the-us-...
> A dismissed worker shall receive a severance indemnity equal to the average monthly wage.
[...]
> In case of restructuring or liquidation of the enterprise, the worker while seeking employment, retains his or her average monthly wage for up to three months, taking into account the severance indemnity.
Soviet Workers were exploited and underpaid by state, there was no private property and almost no private sector.
Soviet Union employed highly educated PhD rocket scientists and paid everyone minimum wage, because there was no alternative.
Literally every scientist family had to grow their own potatoes and veggies at home/dachas in order to survive.
Can you imagine Harvard dean growing potatoes just to survive in cold winter months?
Cars were not available, you had to wait for 7 years to be allocated a slot to purchase a vehicle.
Almost no selection of consumer products, everything was DIY, because the only good thing Soviet State was capable of - is building tanks and rockets (that are currently being destroyed by Ukraine Armed Forces)
Your comment is a laundry list of fun talking points, but I couldn't care less. This debate concerns families having reliable material sustenance.
"Capitalist West is bad, communism good" (C)
The religion bit is really off kilter, unless you think the impermanence of all things is merely a religious idea and not a fundamental aspect of all reality. After all impermanence didn’t apply in Soviet Russia? Oh yeah, it too passed. Guess not.
"Impermanence" is not a religious concept, but the vagaries in these platitudes are. Nobody in a capitalist society can rationalize layoffs. The best we can do is rationalize not thinking about them, which is the purpose actually served by the platitudes. Religion does the same.
An actually scientific perspective would be far more useful and actionable. There is a good book on this topic: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/Engels_...
By definition, a capitalist economy has a hard dependency on labor surplus. Remember when the Federal Reserve literally said they were raising interest rates to increase unemployment? That's why.
This story is about 17 people being fired. I'm not sure what rants about capitalism have to do with that.