> Pay will never be enough, as a point of fact
can you explain this a bit further please? also, what's the storm that's coming?
can you explain this a bit further please? also, what's the storm that's coming?
So you can say the company is "greedy"...but that implies that the worker is also "greedy" - which is true for both IF you define it the way I described above. Or you could say that the company (owners) are trying to maximize their return on investment (time + money), and the the workers are trying to maximize their return on investment (of time).
Is that true though? I come from a family that works in the crafts, small business mostly (which is like 70% of businesses). Most employees are employed for life, what's being made generally costs a decent amount but quality is high, people are content when they make what's perceived as fair and enough to maintain a middle class lifestyle, and so on.
Nobody actually tries to rip each other off, cuts every penny and leaves for 5% higher salaries. People are around for decades. The MBA business logic isn't some universal truth, in fact it's not even how most people work.
Because there is no disincentive for labor to ever-advance the claim that their wages are enough.
In addition, the incentive to ever-claim that wages are not enough is unable to be quneched due to the fact that there is no risk. That logic is what supports my point.
The point can be proofed to economic mechanisms, as well. The exchange of money for goods naturally sets prices via an auction mechanism that, in turn, naturally creates an economic hierarchy in purchasing power.
Which is a verbose way of saying that raising the wages of the working class, while periodically necessary, will always lead to rising prices to create relatively par pourchasing power over time. When speaking of wages, purchasing power is all that matters (assuming lack of debt).
Artificially and dramatically forcing wages up only creates economic churn in job availability, housing equality, and asset ownership. All negative for the working class. If forces them into unemployment, out of urban centers, and creates firesale auctions for assets that wealthy people take advantage of.
To make matters worse, the "forced equality" economics of communism are only feudalism in disguise (which is hidden on the balance sheet of the State and Feudal Lord). The closer that the working class gets to forced economic equality, the closer that they get to slavery.
The storm that's coming is a cyclical return to various feudalists battling it out for workers who are paid the lowest possible wages and who have no labor protection. But on a wider scale than we are used to seeing.
The problem with wage debates is that there is no solution aside from a delicate balance that is easily corruptable. In fact, its natural state is corrupt imbalance.
This problem is unsolveable because it is inherent in the system of money.
The storm may or may not come depending on how long your prediction time window is.
In any of these discussions about wages and fairness, I wonder if the people with strong opinions have ever tried to hire unskilled labor.
If I pay a worker $20 per hour to make 20 doodads an hour in my doodad factory and then sell those doodads for $5 a piece, I make $5 for every $1 pay my worker. Of course that extra $4 per doodad has to account for the cost of the doodad factory itself (initial investment, maintenance, material) and the literal cost of doing business (taxes, permits, fees, paying an accountant) and of course market fluctuation (warehousing, building a financial buffer to remain solvent if sales lapse or production has to stop) but if the business is meant to be successful, that needs to add up to less than the extra $4 I'm making. And the bigger that difference is, the more profitable my company becomes and the more spare money I have to expand my business and get ahead of my competition up to the point where I can sell shares in my business to other people and pay dividends from my profits to them.
So in other words not only can't you pay workers exactly "enough" (i.e. 100% of the value they contribute to the company) but you're actively incentivized to pay them as little as you can get away with (and perversely, paying them more by reducing your profit margin may actually be worse for them by making your company less competitive and less resilient). This is before we even get into the politics of what work is overvalued or undervalued (e.g. the idea that CEOs should receive massively disproportionate compensation for their labor, which again creates pressure to compensate for this by underpaying lowly workers).
This, by the way, is why collective bargaining matters. No matter how cool and nice your employer is, the market actively incentivizes them to do the least for you they can get away with and punishes them for doing more. So by not taking advantage of collective bargaining (i.e. using the pressure of all employees to your advantage rather than just yours individually) you're leaving money on the table. Note that is still true if your role is proportionally overpaid relative to other workers in your company unless you literally co-own the company.
That's a silly definition of "enough" to label as a fact.
I feel like the lifestyle you can buy with the pay matters too, but even if we ignore that aspect, I think most people will agree that the worker getting 90% of the surplus value is "enough". (just as an example percent) There's no reason the bar should be the absolute extreme.
There's no "factual" definition of "enough" as "enough" is subjective.
I'm also not sure what you're trying to argue. I already said that it can't be 100% for practical reasons and that the market actively incentivizes companies to aim for as close to 0% as possible instead. You pick 90% as an arbitrary percentage. So it might be 99% or 50% or 1%. But you're still agreeing that the measure for "enough" in this case is in relation to what the product of that labor can be sold for (after deducting the various costs). In reality that percentage is often much closer to 50% than to 90% - in many cases (especially so-called unskilled labor) it is closer to 1% than 90%.
A better rebuke would be that "enough" is normally about need, not revenue. Especially because it's nearly impossible to value the relative contribution to the bottom line for all labor involved (and in fact trying to minimize "cost centers" can lead to a rude awakening about this).
So if we define "need" as "enough to sustain a healthy existence in society and access to moderate leisure activities" (i.e. having a roof over your head, food in the fridge, access to medical care and transportation and enough spare change to spend on things like streaming services, books or the occasional trip to a nearby cinema, amusement park or restaurant) we can define a minimum monthly income and if we assume a 40 hour work week (which should be uncontroversial given that overall productivity has only gone up since its introduction and we need to provide some leisure time to accommodate family formation and the aforementioned leisure activities) we can translate that into a minimum hourly wage. Something tells me that this minimum hourly wage would be significantly higher than the legal minimum wage in the US, even if we don't actually consider the lackluster state of medical care affordability (note that I didn't assume public single-payer healthcare so Medicare/Medicaid is just a crutch to account for medical care being unaffordable otherwise at that level of income).
But of course the system is not set up that way. It's not about needs, it's about paying as little as you can get away with and this means that pay is proportional to power (i.e. C-level execs are paid a lot because they have a lot of control over the company and therefore "deserve" more even if all the value they "create" relies on the actual labor and competence of others) and the floor is theoretically infinitely low (i.e. you could realistically charge people to do labor for you, e.g. as a "training opportunity" to earn a meaningless qualification required to access other jobs) and ultimately the company needs to produce a lot of waste money (profits that are not re-invested in the company) that can be drained by its shareholders/owners (who ideally contribute literally no labor in return).
I agree. Which is why "enough" is not an objective threshold of 100% of surplus value.
> I'm also not sure what you're trying to argue.
I'm arguing that "less than 100% means not enough" is an incorrect statement. That's all. The bulk of your post isn't relevant to what I was saying.
(To be extra clear, that's my paraphrase of this line: "in a very literal sense, pay can never be enough because it is economically necessary to underpay workers relative to what they contribute because profit by definition can only exist from surplus value, i.e. making more money from selling the product of labor than you pay for that labor.")
> But you're still agreeing that the measure for "enough" [...] A better rebuke would be that "enough" is normally about need, not revenue.
But I did address that. "I feel like the lifestyle you can buy with the pay matters too, but even if we ignore that aspect,"
This is just a fyi when trying to write out your thoughts.
I just think "100% of surplus value" is a wrong definition, so using that definition to argue that "in a very literal sense, pay can never be enough" is a very flawed argument.
I don't think I need to offer my own definition to claim that, do I? They later said it's subjective, which seems to favor my claim.
Does that clear things up? Is there a reason you thought I was trying to give a definition, and failing? Is there something wrong with my argument?
Unfortunately, much if not most of the time this calculation by the worker will be in error. As they tend to exclude the company scaffolding that they are not responsible for but that enables them to make their contribution.
Either way, its amazing that there is so much legal opportunity today for anyone to build an asset (eg: business) that they own. Asset ownership being the key to legal and ethical economic success in this world. I feel like more children should be taught as much at an early age, with less emphasis on the "nobility of work" that tends to exclude the importance of assets.
If group ownership is important, workers can certainly begin a business with that in mind.
Last, stock is sometimes sold publicly (direct ownership of the asset).
I literally addressed that "company scaffolding" in more detail than you do here (second sentence of the second paragraph). There's no error here though as running the company and owning the company are two different things and while there are plenty of business owners who need to work for their own company to keep it running, we're specifically talking about surplus value after the cost of paying all labor (including your own, at market rate), i.e. what ends up either being reinvested at the end of the fiscal year or drained by the owners/shareholders as dividends. You may need someone to run the business side of things, you don't need that person to also own the company, be able to drain any profits and fire you at will.
> If group ownership is important, workers can certainly begin a business with that in mind.
We like to proudly talk about individualism when it comes to seeking praise for personal achievements but times like this demonstrate how it can blind us to systems thinking. Yes, you can create a worker cooperative. And yes, you can be a business owner who tries to be "fair" to their workers. But you exist in competition with other businesses who don't engage in such "waste" and you compete in a system where the "benefits" of such an approach are considered externalities and have no direct value (even if you try to argue it's "positive PR" that will only get you so far). In other words, the system disincentivizes and actively punishes redistributing surplus value to your (co-)workers - because it's literally based on profit-seeking (i.e. maximizing that surplus).
> Asset ownership being the key to legal and ethical economic success in this world.
Yes, and asset ownership is only attainable if you have the necessary capital to buy assets. Being self-employed won't get you far because you're still selling your labor for money (just with fewer middlemen but in practice not really) and if everyone owned their own business that's all they'd accomplish. If you want to be economically successful from asset ownership rather than labor, you want your "asset" to "do the work for you" (i.e. passive income). But in real-world terms this ultimately means you need to get a cut (i.e. profit) from someone else's labor (and they therefore can't take this advice or else they wouldn't be in that position for you).
I'm a business owner. I've been at various stages self-employed, an employer and a business owner using external freelancers and subcontractors. But I have no illusions that essentially the easiest "legal and ethical" economic success I've seen involved little more than either rent seeking (i.e. being paid for continuous usage of something you already built/bought) or scalping (i.e. selling something someone else made/did at an inflated price and pocketing the difference).