>fair working conditions
Ironic, considering that tech workers have by far the best working conditions of the working class.
Ironic, considering that tech workers have by far the best working conditions of the working class.
> our jobs do not destroy our bodies
I've got news for you there.
It is delusional to think our jobs are on the same level as someone who grafts all day with their hands and does back breaking work for minimum wage.
It is physically easy and it is very different from the other jobs I've listed.
Our jobs aren't working class.
Edit: by the by, boiler engineers are not paid well. A self-employed plumber with a gas cert can earn a good wage, but your average british gas tradie isn't bringing home half of what I earn
Yes, people who do not rely on overwhelmingly on selling labor for their support are not working class (people who are working class might transitionally be on support without working, or might be on support while working, depending on the benefit structure, but if their principal source of support over an extended time is not selling labor, then they aren’t, as a matter of economic class, “working class”.)
Just as someone isn’t part of the capitalist class if over time they do get most of their support from working and don’t have capital holdings. Economic class is a description of how you relate to the economy.
> It is delusional to think our jobs are on the same level as someone who grafts all day with their hands and does back breaking work for minimum wage.
The proletarian class isn’t defined by the nature of labor, but by the fact of selling it as one’s overwhelming-majority means of support within the economy. Yes, there are important differences within the class as well as the broad common features and interests.
This phrase would include any non-owner professional like lawyers or doctors or even upper management.
On top of that many tech workers don’t fit even your definition because equity is often an important part of comp. That’s not the case for lawyers or doctors or management in other industries.
Using standard and customary vernacular, tech workers are not “working class.”
Eh, compared to my relatives in the trades, construction, retail and warehouse work, and the jobs I had in high school, I'm on easy street here.
Negligible risk of trips or falls, no lifting anything heavy, no working around powerful machines or using dangerous tools, no dealing with chemicals, no need for hard hats or safety boots, no working in hot or cold or wet conditions, no working with knives, no splattering hot oil, no working in the dark, no loud noise, no working near moving vehicles, no standing on your feet 8 hours a day, no boss that gets mad if you're off sick, no mandatory overtime, very low stress.
The only thing that makes tech work more dangerous than sitting on my ass on the sofa is the office's free chocolate.
I mean, you’ve left out the petit bourgeoisie entirely, describing only the proletariat and haut bourgeoisie. Its true that some tech workers are in the proletariat (part of the proletarian intelligentsia) but a whole lot of tech workers are petit bourgeois, having a mixed reliance on capital and labor (not, for tech workers as such, the classical pattern of applying their own labor to their own capital, but that’s not the only pattern of mixed reliance that puts people in the middle class that sits between the working class and pure capitalists.)
Totally agree.
> If you or someone in your family has to work so that you can survive, you are working class.
It's not so easy.
A dentist owning his own doctor's practice - the means of production, quickly worth several million dollars - does pretty clearly belong to the (petit) bourgeoise. His interest are often clearly opposed to that of the staff he employs. Every dollar saved on salaries, every day of vacation denied means more money in his pocket.
Yet he has to work every day.
The real difference are the means of production.
There was a very important reason for that. Early socialist leaders were usually selected among the best in any trade. The carpenters chose the best and most successful carpenter to represent them, and so on with most professions.
That was simply unacceptable for "intellectuals" like Marx or Lenin or Trotsky that never touched a tool or worked physically on their entire lives, something they were all the time being reminded by actual workers(something Lenin hated so much).
The new Frame made them the bosses on the new system.
Like Natzis could decide who was arian or jew, even if they had dark hair or jew parents, the marxist could decide who was working class and who did not. The children of rich jew merchants that were most marxist revolutionaries could became working class if they said so.
There are lots of people that do not accept the Marxist frame at all because they are not marxist.
>if you or someone in your family has to work so that you can survive, you are working class.
As someone who has lived in Africa , Asia, South America and Europe, I tell you that 90% of people in the US don't need work to survive. Unless by "survive" you mean things like buying a pickup truck.
There are kids in Africa in which "survive" means eating once a day and their minds being confused after two hours of work like learning to read.
In discussions about philosophy ans philosophical concepts, one do not need to agree with all the interlocutor's assumptions: it is just required to understand them and discuss them in a balanced way.
Anyway, for most people, compensation and income level are really good, which is why unionization isn't as much a thing for tech workers. This is also because there's a lot of disparity, with some earning $35K / year and others $350K / year for basically the same job; unionization and successful agreements would mean the $35K / year would go up, but the $350K / year would go down by a lot and wouldn't want to cooperate. And that's just salary, then there's stocks, stock options, bonuses, perks, etc to consider.
I'm not saying tech workers shouldn't unionize, all I'm saying is that the incentives are low. Because if you don't want to work under the conditons that e.g. Meta offers, you can vote with your feet and work somewhere else, pretty much anywhere and anything you want.
Well yes, those that need to work. As opposed to those whose day to day spending come from capital investments.
People usually believe investors are those scammers that advertise in Internet along rented Villas and Lamborghinis talking about how to live without working and so on.
They usually do not spend too much, as they are into the habit of saving way more than what they make.
Those that waste their money are not the investors themselves, but their families, like the trophy wife or the spoiled children.
However, I bet that the vast majority of software developers would hate the job and the lifestyle, perks or not--which among other things generally involves a ton of tightly-scheduled travel.
The travel is a prison they create for themselves, and generally one that they get off on. If your job is just chatting with and manipulating {employees,customers,higher-ups} then you need to invent a contrived way in which it seems hard, so you can keep justifying your salary.
Even better if you can tie your self-worth to your airline miles balance, and avoid your family for 3/4 of the year!
As a result, many are communing hours a day, to sit on zoom calls. Wasting their valuable time on earth for the sake of a manager's dictat.
Things are good. But they can always be better :)
Management pretty often do not have the best ideas, and often the people doing the work know how best to do it.
I mean, isn't that what work is?
You get paid, in exchange you spend your time doing stuff at your boss's behest, which you wouldn't do if you weren't being paid?
I mean sure, there are some jobs like being a doctor which you might consider a higher calling, but nobody joins Facebook expecting to do socially useful work, it's an ad company.
That's not necessary. A large portion of corporate tech in Germany is unionized, and union jobs have hard salary ceilings (and also, of course, salary floors). But a company is allowed to offer a worker a non-union contract. They just always have to allow a worker to decline and take a union contract instead.
In real life, this means many team leaders and senior engineers and practically all managers/directors are on non-union contracts.
Non-union contracts that on paper are strict worse than the highest union contract get killed by the union. But when you make the jump, you usually have to do some math. Because leaving the union contract means you go from 35h/week with compensated overtime to unlimited overtime, so you might get screwed anyway if you're not careful.
Of course! From a theory perspective, it's completely clear: just because capital gives some workers a mediocum of power over other workers doesn't mean that those managers suddenly have different interests than the people they lead. They still need to sell their labour to survive, after all.
> Are those members ostracized by the real workers?
So much for theory. In the real world, bad managers exist everywhere. In union shops, they are probably reigned in much more than elsewhere, because they quickly find themselves in mediation meetings between workers, union and management every time their workers realize that they actually do have rights, and that those are violated by management frequently. Those guys are ostracised, whether they have a membership card or not.
But yeah, managers can easily get into situations where their own performance metrics would suffer if they follow union directives, so conflict of interests are not uncommon. Just like humans everywhere, they somehow live with the cognitive dissonance.
As an example, I worked in a production plant where the floor boss would go through quite a bit of paperwork to hire scabs from a temp agency during union strikes, because missing production deadlines was unthinkable to him. Normally a pro-union guy, glad to take the union-negotiated salary increases, not a bad boss, but seeing that his production lines never stopped was his job, and so he did just that.
Why would the top-level go down? Employers are paying what the market demands. It's not like Jessica Chastain makes less money because she's in the SAG-AFTRA union with the same job as actors making less than $35K / year.