Revenge of the Chickenized Reverse-Centaurs
pluralistic.net
pluralistic.net
Our laws ban: sector unionization, sympathy and general strikes, and secondary boycotts.
On top of that, we have a very narrow definition of employee, an employers can permanently replace striking workers. The right to strike can even be taken away with a mandated cooling off period.
Even having one of those factors can hamstring unionization in a country, so they’re pretty much never going to “come back with a vengance” here
I never understood this. How can boycotts be banned? Seems inherently unconstitutional to me.
Not that it really matters to me in the sense that it's definitely an area where I'd do as I pleased regardless of the law. But I've always found the headlines that I see from time to time odd.
You'll probably be interested in reading https://chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?arti..., "Secondary Boycotts and the First Amendment", in the University of Chicago Law Review, by Barbara J. Anderson:
> Section 8(b)(4)(ii)(B) of the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA)¹ makes it an unfair labor practice for a union to "threaten, coerce, or restrain any person" with the object of requiring that person to cease dealing with another.² In NLRB v. Retail Store Employees Union Local 1001 (Safeco),³ the Supreme Court held that this section proscribes union picketing designed to influence consumers to boycott a struck product whenever such picketing "reasonably can be expected to threaten [the picketed retailer] with ruin or substantial loss."'⁴ Although the Court noted in passing that peaceful picketing is entitled to some first amendment protection, the Court found it "well-established" that Congress had constitutional power to prohibit "picketing that predictably encourages consumers to boycott a secondary business."⁵
I'm not sure whether NLRB v. Retail Store Employees is still valid law. But "secondary boycotts" are often understood as something much more coercive as simply "union picketing designed to influence consumers to boycott a struck product" (https://digitalcommons.du.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=46..., "Secondary Boycotts Under the Taft–Hartley Act" Philip Hornbein, Jr., 01953):
> The distinctive feature of a secondary boycott is that it is directed against a neutral party rather than against the employer directly involved in the labor dispute. The target of the secondary boycott is a third party who is engaged in business dealings with the employer as a customer, supplier, or otherwise. The object of the secondary boycott is to cause the boycottee to cease doing business with the employer.
Consider disputes other than labor disputes. Suppose Phyllis believes that, because you are gay, you are so immoral that she won't sell groceries to you in her grocery store. This is deplorable but not really threatening and coercive; you can still buy groceries from Chad's grocery store down the street. But suppose Phyllis convinces Chad's employees to strike unless Chad refuses you service as well. Suddenly the situation has taken on a much darker cast; Chad may have nothing against gay people, but he may start refusing you service simply as a matter of self-preservation. If this goes on, you may rapidly find yourself without sources of food or employment unless you recant your homosexuality.
I guess a lot of meaning rests on the use of "coercive" here. What immediately comes to my mind when I see that term is violent threats directed towards someone so it's worth noting that isn't what's being described here. Rather it's being used to describe the effect of a boycott (in this case the secondary one) on the targeted (third party) business. That seems tautological to me because what is the point of a boycott if not to nonviolently coerce the targeted business?
So the court seems to be saying that if you view businesses as individuals then it is illegal to organize with the aim of coercing one person not to associate with another. The indirection (going via the consumer) doesn't seem to be the issue here. Your second link cites an electrical workers case where picketing with the express goal that the employer should terminate a subcontractor was deemed illegal.
Certainly I would agree if the coercive measure was violent, but is that really the case if it is exclusionary in nature? Would the court find the same way if I told my neighbors that they must not hang out with some guy who lives down the street or else they won't be welcome at my pool parties anymore? I certainly don't think that's a good way to conduct oneself but it seems inconsistent that somehow upon adding economic activity into the mix my speech can suddenly be restricted in ways it couldn't before.
To me it seems to fundamentally be a matter of free speech - engaging with other people and managing to bring them around to your way of thinking on the matter. If you hadn't managed to convince a large group of consumers (or non-unionized laborers) of the merit of both your position and your proposed course of action then they wouldn't be participating in the first place. It seems to me that the court is ignoring the part where your ideas won out as well as ignoring the individual agency of the consumers (or other laborers) and treating this as nothing more than direct action on the part of the organizing union when it is clearly much more than that.
To your example, I don't see any issue with Phyllis advocating and would note that she isn't going to get very far (sans coercion) unless Chad's employees, and by implication the community at large, generally agree with her. That is, Chad has to be the odd one out for this to work. That's not a pretty situation but I certainly don't want the government hamstringing community organization either. Free speech and freedom of (non)association can't only apply when it's convenient for those currently in power.
To my mind the issue with your example is the ability of a public facing business to discriminate along class boundaries (ex homosexuals) as opposed to on a purely individual basis (ex person who previously shoplifted). That would be in keeping with how other public areas are treated.
I think the issue is that, upon adding economic activity to the mix, your exercise of freedom of speech threatens every freedom of the guy down the street, because it threatens his survival. I don't think this is dependent on whether the community shunning is on a purely individual basis or along class boundaries. (I also don't think actively gay people are a "class" in any sense that shoplifters aren't.)
I agree that this reasoning is incompatible with a strong understanding of freedom of speech; it could be applied very broadly to restrict political activity.
Upon further thought my pool party example has a serious flaw that the instigator is coercing the actors to in turn coerce the third party. In a secondary boycott the instigators merely present their case along with proposed action and the consumers voluntarily coerce the third party if they are convinced. To fix my example then, I have an ongoing dispute, I inform my neighbors of this fact, I suggest (but certainly don't demand) that my neighbors might shun him if they feel similarly to myself, and the court then finds me to have violated the law.
"Vote with your wallet" is such a popular refrain when people advocate for regulation yet somehow the advocacy to organize that is what's being restricted by the courts here.
Consider an alternative example where activists call to boycott a large retailer because they have a subcontractor whose operations are acutely damaging the environment. Is that an illegal attempt to coerce market participants or is it protected speech (by the activists) followed by the freedom not to do business (by the consumer)? A union advocated secondary boycott seems substantially similar to me. (Is my example even legal in the US?)
> threatens every freedom of the guy down the street, because it threatens his survival.
That does seem like a reasonable principle to me but it appears inconsistent with how things currently work. Generalizing, it becomes the principle that market participants can only ever discriminate in directly relevant ways on the basis that survival in the modern world depends on the market. Thus advocacy to do otherwise is clearly illegal. Effectively it would be outlawing political activity carried out via market forces. In the environmental example above the activists would need to instead lobby to pass relevant regulations.
That said, I think a relevant analysis needs to account for the various examples of chickenization from the linked article. When laborers become supposed arms-length subcontractors (of subcontractors, of ...) in name only it seems apparent that capital is also coercing market participants in ways it should not be allowed to.
Having a union wasn't, on its own, illegal but it gave no special status, but most union activity was illegal, and as soon as the union jointly planned that activity it became a criminal conspiracy.
Yeah. Because at one point unions got so powerful they formed their own union towns.
They even got infiltrated by the mob.
Plus Europe union laws and US union laws are separate things. For example in France, whatever concessions union gets, are applied to all employees. Which isn't the case in US and is iirc considered anti-union. However then you remember that US union depends on participation for union healthcare.
The biggest problem for unions today isn't the laws. It's ironically the free trade (lack of laws). Don't want to do this job for peanuts? We'll ship it overseas for someone willing to work for half a peanut.
Companies did this too, but it wasn't bothering any policy makers.
If market reaches a point even worst employee can quit to earn a raise this will force wages to spike, which is a cost that's passed to consumer, which forces consumers to switch to more profitable jobs.
Same response as above. Everyone is so eager to criticize unions for doing the same thing big business employers do, and so in fear of the negative consequences, that they'd rather accept the status quo (of massive power imbalance in favor of big employers) than even consider alternative arrangements. Don't be a mouthpiece for corporate propaganda.
In an ideal world, government sees its job as facilitating a balance of economic power betweeen big employers nor big labor unions, acting as a sort of economic referee, and neither of the two market players would exert political influence to unbalance the rules. Sometimes I wonder if the people who are so strongly opposed to powerful labor unions think that this is the current situation. Because if you look at the actual balance of power, political and economic, it's hard not to think that big employers have the majority of it, and that at least some balancing force is needed in the other direction.
Ok sure but laws can changes, right ? And that previous sentence is itself protected by the law ? I understand your pessimism but that's not to be confused with fatalism.
(disclaimer: am EU citizen)
After all, the laws were much more hostile towards unions a century ago, and strikes would often be dispersed with outright violence using both paramilitary organizations (like Pinkertons) as well as police and military. But if doing so just means that the strike gets bigger and broader, it's not a winning strategy for the capital.
It's a disturbingly prescient read, and unfortunately I don't find the optimistic ending plausible.
I didn't know Brain had committed suicide :( . More details about that[1].
0: https://villains.fandom.com/wiki/L._Bob_Rife
1: https://www.insidehighered.com/news/faculty-issues/academic-...
> In labor circles, “chickenization” refers to exploitative working arrangements that resemble the plight of the American poultry farmer. The U.S. poultry industry has been taken over by three monopolistic packers, who have divided the nation up into exclusive territories, so that each chicken farmer has only one buyer for their birds.
> Farmers are “independent small businesspeople” who nominally run their own operations, but because all their products must be sold through a single poultry processor, that processor is able to exercise enormous control over the operation. The processor tells the farmer which birds to raise, as well as what the birds are to be fed, how much, and on what schedule. The processor tells the farmer how to build their coops and when the lights are to go on and off. The processor tells the farmer which vets to use, and tells the vets which medicines to prescribe.
> The processor tells the farmer everything…except how much they’ll be able to sell their birds for. That is determined unilaterally when the farmer brings their birds to market, and the payout is titrated to the cent, to represent exactly enough money for the farmer to buy birds and feed and vet services through the processor’s preferred suppliers, and to service the debts on the coops and light and land, but not one penny more.
This amount of scumminess is mind boggling.
The craziest thing is this is well known trick, historically. In the 1800s there was a company run by a man that was both wholesale buyer of fish from fishermen and also supplied the mortgages for fishing boats. He was the only one for both in many small fishing communities and was universally hated for it.
But here it looks even worse as workers have to invest into equipment from the company that is of little use besides working for that company, making it borderline slavery.
It is, unfortunately, the natural result of insufficiently regulated capitalism.
There are very few poultry processors largely because it is difficult and expensive to comply with consumer regulations and maintain food safety standards. That, in itself, is fine. But once you have very few (or only one) processor(s), there needs to be regulation on how they pay and treat both their workers and their suppliers. For the most part, there is neither.
Even the local artisan bread-baker must pay workers less than their economic output. This isn't to say that the owner is exploitive and treating people with subsistence. But the pay/surplus split is still there as exploitation.
Reforming capitalism also doesn't work either. Hell, people can't get past page 30 of Adam Smith's treatise that discusses all the 'reforms needed' to instill capitalism. Turns out monied interests has always wanted to strip controls from the get-go.
No, its time to relegate capitalism to the dustbin of history. It was tried. As it lifted some up, more and more were ground into a gritty paste to feed the machine.
I don't know what to replace it with either. But whatever it is has to not have weird effects of infinite or 0 cost breakdowns (like copying software and data), and also aware of how to handle algorimthic labor (LLMs), amongst other concerns.
How are you so convinced that there is a better solution than capitalism if you can’t even articulate what that solution would be? How do you know that capitalism, for all it’s flaws, is not still the least-worst among an array of bad options?
In fact, its the complete financial ideation of rentals and homes. That's what's even pushed 2 earner homes to even afford a house.
But those who have, can get a house loan, rent it out for 150% of the total mortgage and paracitize off the public. And nobody is the better, except for the paracite class (landlords).
Rent controls would also do a great deal. But we hear howls from the libertarian types over controls ala Adam Smith.
And progressive heavy taxation on more than 3 houses would also help the situation of houses being bought for rental or AirBNB purposes. Again, those are parasites on all of us.
Of course, all these mean housing number go down. And those who own a large stake will definitely complain. But these are steps that would help, alongside building more with a rent-controlled and reasonable cost.
And reforming how banks are required to provide loans (proof of X rent = proof of covering x mortgage). But really? This country is going the opposite way of the common person, and has been for decades. Now, that strategy has been ramped up to extremes.
No, its not, restrictive zoning preventing actually building housing is. Which is why the mess is most acute in places which have the most such restrictions, and least in places that have less of them, wven when they are similar across all the dimensions you suggest are the real issues.
> Rent controls would also do a great deal.
At further reducing supply of housing by discouraging development? Yes, they would do a great deal of that.
Are you confusing home ownership vs renting with total housing supply?
Since that isn't happening I'd assume that doing so has been made illegal by the regulators for some reason. Or that "chicken packaging" is wildly misnamed, because it sounds like something you can ... just do. People ate chickens for millennia without relying on 3 chicken packers.
I've had neighbours who keep their own chickens (curse them for the mice). It didn't look so hard a quasi-monopoly could form naturally.
the lack of antitrust action and the price of entry in the market are a market failure modes that could bring in the same final result. Especially, if the packagers are forming exclusive deals with the distributors to prevent new entrants from achieving market share.
The part of the supply chain acting as a "monopoly" is too simple to replace. Someone can literally set up a new local butchery, buy directly from the farmers and the exclusive dealership network is broken. Probably need some know-how and a refrigerated truck. It is barely possible that the sort of monopoly structure being described could have been built over the entirety of the US without regulatory support. It'd require something approaching a mind control ray to keep the competition under control.
I believe the other comment saying that chickens are a bad business, competition would tear through the margins like a rooster eating a mouse. But a country wide monopsony on chicken purchases is absurd (unless the regulators are pushing it). If nothing else there are a bunch of low-income people who'd be happy to buy and butcher their own chickens if it cut out a middle man. It isn't feasible to build a natural monopoly.
If you have a market with low margin and no differentiation between the offered stock, the gains are in size and it logically leads to a few players in the market so I doubt that the independent butchery has to be butchered and won't die of natural causes due to high costs or because a few of its partners are having a bad year.
I feel that regulatory capture is part of the problem - processing your own birds is safely is definitely possible, but what is required to process them for sale makes it so the local USDA butcher would have to charge as much for a chicken as for a sheep, and that’s just not viable.
The reason regulators made it illegal is basic food safety. A meat packing facility - whether that’s an industrial plant or a small group of farmers in a commercial kitchen or whatever - is a hot and humid environment that is an ideal place for bacteria to grow. Now that’s going to happen anyway, but the public safety goal here is to minimize the bacterial load that transfers to the meat so that by the time it reaches the kitchen, the pathogens haven’t reached dangerous levels. That means an entire facility that’s designed to be sprayed down with a foaming disinfectant from wall to wall and crevice to crevice. Small groups of farmers simply can’t afford that and be competitive unless they’re already selling high end organic/free range/etc meat.
Before refrigeration, people ate meat right after slaughter or cured it. They grew the animals at so low an intensity that >80% of the population were sustenance farmers that lived a precarious life prone to starvation at any time. It just makes no sense to compare the infrastructure to feed hundreds of millions in a single country to small scale pre-industrial agriculture.
We're talking about farmers here. Having to do something a couple of times a day is not going to intimidate them. In an extreme case they'd hire someone and promote them to chief sprayer. These aren't challenges of the magnitude needed to get natural monopolies to form - they're standard style challenges for running a business in an industrial sector. Challenges that farm owners are quite acutely aware of.
If there are monopolies in the US chicken supply chain it is probably just everyday regulatory capture.
I don't say this to despair but to argue that we'd need more details before we can make recommendations how to fix things. Also, there is an obvious power imbalance here, but then it's important to identity the source of that power, so you can address the imbalance.
The post above yours talked about this:
> "Small groups of farmers simply can’t afford that and be competitive unless they’re already selling high end organic/free range/etc meat."
It absolutely does happen. It's at small scale with higher relative costs, so it's only profitable as a specialty product. It can't compete with industrially farmed meat on price. This would be the range of the farmer who doesn't mind doing some things a few times a day and perhaps hires a helper.
Growing beyond the small scale requires the capital to build facilities and hire staff to run them while you're getting the operation going. You might need to be cutthroat on price to be competitive with existing players, so your revenue might not be great for a long while.
How much output do you think a farmer and a helper are capable of, versus a fully staffed modern industrial poultry farm?
Given that, it's a market in dire need of governments messing with it. The current situation is really bad.
One word: “Distribution.” (The Graduate reference).
Distributors hold the most powerful hands in selling physical goods. You can’t sell something, if you can’t get it to market. These cartels (and you are hearing about them, all over. See "Big Potato"), are getting strangleholds on distribution. Amazon has turned distribution as a goad into a dark art.
That’s one reason that the Internet has upended so many industries. It’s democratized distribution of digital goods, and digital goods have become a lot more valuable (sometimes, because of the Internet). With digital goods, advertising and promotion are the new Distribution. You can’t sell your apps/music/images, if no one can find out about them.
But we can start with the massive capital requirements of being a logistics provider. It's not something that many farmers, shopkeepers, or even medium-sized businesses could manage.
Variables like temperatures, lighting, ventilation rates, chicken house construction, and access/ density have well-established bounds to maximize pounds of poultry. The farmers have leeway to deviate from the recommendations, but they take on all of the risk in doing so. From the outside, it looks like a pretty oppressive relationship.
Actually, there are stages, e.g. some farmers just do chicks, someone then may pick them up and go to the next stage.
- poultry farming dictated by the big guys like this has been going on for decades.
- it’s provided structure for entrepreneurs in rural areas that had land, some money, and a willingness to work.
You could similarly say some fast food franchises or businesses can result in some form of exploitation, because not all result in good conditions and opportunities for growth of their workers.
Some may then extrapolate to say “all business is bad”, but it’s a spectrum; it may be providing work and income where there was none before, and that could be seen as a good thing. Or maybe the risks are too high and/or conditions are terrible, and that’s a bad thing.
I’d argue that finding that balance in business is why religion and capitalism spread together.
Hundreds of years ago, slaves kept spirits up through their religion and those exploiting them were more likely to keep working conditions better than they would’ve been because of their beliefs; slavery was pure evil, and religion didn’t enable that. It did improve a terrible situation, though I know the Marxists may say the opposite.
Today, religion is waning. If the people exploiting others do so without morals, we risk evil beyond what’s discussed in this article. We feel like technology must be there to save workers from being exploited, but it’s an uphill battle, and money/power may win.
"According to Archie Green, the lyrics contain several key passages that Travis took from quotes from his family members. When asked about his health, his father reportedly replied that he couldn't afford to die because he owed his soul to the grocery store[7] where he had debts. Sixteen Tons is a socially critical song about the sometimes inhumane conditions that American miners and their families had to live under in the past. This included wage slavery: US miners were mostly paid not in cash but with tokens (scrips), some of which could only be redeemed in company-owned stores, as there were no other shops in the area; local food supplies could only be obtained in these stores (company stores), which had a virtual monopoly and could therefore charge excessive prices; The income and expenditure situation in the company stores, which was deliberately controlled exclusively in favor of the mine owners, resulted in unavoidable debts for the workers (Another day older and deeper in debt), which created a relationship of dependency similar to serfdom ("I owe my soul to the company store"). By the time the song was written, the miners' living and working conditions had already improved significantly, partly as a result of numerous strikes. Payment with tokens had been banned in 1938 by a federal law, the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938. However, working conditions remained harsh and the memory of exploitative practices was still fresh in the minds of the families and communities affected."
It’s by no means certain though, and i think the article takes an over-pessimistic take.
It’s true that uber drivers and doordashers get bid down, but this is the bottom rung of the ladder of unskilled labor; there is currently massive demand for this job.
If you look at restaurants I believe post-covid you see a different story, where workers are not racing to the bottom and instead employers need to offer way above minimum wage to fill roles. Trades would be an even better example, where skilled carpenters and mechanics are so in demand that it’s a comfortable six-figure job.
Personally I think all these low-skilled jobs are quite likely to be automated soon. How society responds to the influx of unemployed unskilled workers will be the crux. And of course the skill bar for automation will increase; in the long term many (most?) jobs are going to be automatable.
UBI or similar is the obvious solution, but Capital will of course oppose this vigorously. A new social contract will be needed; the slippery slope that the US is currently on does not end in a pretty place.
I really wish we would stop using this term. Not only is driving very obviously a skill, and one I'm grateful for everytime I get in a car, but jobs that are labeled as "unskilled" often emphasize skill to a higher degree.
Furthermore, as someone who has worked many "unskilled" jobs (picking crops, working in a kitchen, working front of house), the skill you have makes a massive difference to your happiness and, many times, your take-home pay. We're going to see many, many types of office work get automated long before we have automated crop pickers or cooks or (actually usable) waiters. It seems to me that office work has the highest concentration of the low-skill workers.
What people really mean with the term is "engages in physical labor", I think, but that should also expose how silly it is to expect these jobs to be automated anytime soon.
I now work as a software engineer, which obviously takes enormous experience aka "skill", and I'd estimate that i'm on the "thickest of ice" outside of HR and the executive suite. It's the customer service people, designers, PMs most at risk of being replaced, although I think the outsourcing trend will continue for a long time before this is successfully productized in a general case. People managers tend to be replaced (or rather, not rehired) as productivity per capita goes up. I worry far more about being forced into contract work than I do of layoffs.
I'n much less bullish on UBI than other people are because I see the demand for it coming from fueling the consumer economy rather than any sort of collectively-rational approach to divvying up resources and funding development of services and infrastructure. Sure, maybe there is a role for that—I'd love to rework SSDI (without pulling the rug out from under it, as neoliberals are bound to try to do) so my disabled friends don't live so vicariously, but delivering UBI before increasing democratic control of the economy that funds it feels an awful lot like putting the cart before the horse. But that's another story。
Edit: oh one last thought: I do think we are more likely to see people getting paid to play video games long before we "bring back manufacturing" or whatever. It's going to be much easier politically to directly subsidize the bottom of the economic pyramid than it will be to basically go through another economic revolution altering the pyramid structurally.
And no, it’s not a proxy for “physical labor”. Trades are highly skilled, picking groceries from a list is not. (To be clear, not being pejorative here. These jobs are needed.) The key difference is the supply of workers; the lower the bar for entry, the more supply and therefore the bid is lower.
(Or in the other direction from the workers perspective, demand is much higher for jobs requiring less training/certification.)
I don’t think working class jobs are going to go first as a group; I bet paralegals will be automated before plumbers.
This is also true of my day-to-day work. Granted I pitch myself as a generalist with over twenty years of experience, but my day-to-day work uses a vanishingly-small sliver of that. I'd estimate I could train a teenager to do a substantial portion of the work I do in just a couple of months. Would they offer the same value? No, of course not, but time and money can overcome that for most businesses.
Plus, there is clearly some kind of aptitude that is difficult to teach, and harder still to measure, and even harder still to quantify. I'm not sure I'd call that "skill", though, and I don't necessarily need to make 10x as much as you do because I have that aptitude. In an ideal world, anyway.
> Trades are highly skilled, picking groceries from a list is not.
I'm assuming you're referring to instacart workers?
Normally I'd agree with you that the skill barrier to entry here is quite low, but an astonishing number of workers apparently can't tell the difference between a russet potato and a yam. Granted, AI can at least help with that problem.
But surely this would also apply to many office jobs that require college degrees. For instance, my bestie has a degree in chemistry and works at a local bank branch. This job, inexplicably, requires a degree. It almost seems like the college degree is just a stand-in for, well, literacy. Surely LLMs stand for the automation of literacy on some base level—but you still need to man the bank branch with humans. So is literacy really the skill, or is it just existing with a body? Many if not most workers are not hired for their bodies, but for their literacy. Hell, if you think about it, the janitor probably has more job security than anyone else in the building from the advances of technology.
> The key difference is the supply of workers; the lower the bar for entry, the more supply and therefore the bid is lower.
Why not call these jobs "high supply" or something like that? It gets to the point much easier, and you have less of a chance of being mistaken for saying something semantically completely different.
I'm not saying that the term "unskilled labor", or certainly "skilled labor", is inherently unuseful, but the vast majority of times I've seen it employed I sense incoherence regarding who ought to be paid what for what work, and it rarely does boil down to just "skill". As you point out, supply and demand are much stronger explanatory forces. I'm just saying that some highly-valued skills are just as unimpressive as those supporting sub-minimum-wage work (ie the gig economy), and the allegedly-low supply of workers leaves me scratching my head.
One of my other physical jobs as a teenager (i was a lil rural hustler) was caddying for very rich and occasionally even famous people. Many of these people are hilariously helpless with basic tasks—they can't cook, they can barely button their shirts or tie their shoes, they don't know how their phone works (which was even more baffling back then when phones had about three functions total), they don't know how to talk to their children or socialize with workers (like me), they're terrible drivers, and I even ran into a few I suspect couldn't read (which was jaw-dropping to lil hyperlexic 14-year-old MangoToupe), etc. One of them had a child who could speak better Haitian-accented french and even some patois than she could english because of how much time she spent with her foreign nanny—watching her belt out a filthy swear right next to her blissfully unaware parents had me struggling not to laugh. Serene calm and being quick to laugh at jokes is the ticket to good tips.
of course you would also run into people who grew up poor or middle class before finding financial success, and the cultural and social difference was like night and day—those are the people who would continue to thrive if someone took their wealth.
So—to me, the "skill economy" narrative just kind of fell apart as I grew into an adult. I just don't get why, if it's so obvious to me that "skill" isn't the core driver of many parts of our economy, we retain this language implying that it is (even if I do find my work primarily through my own said skills).
Edit: oddly, I can edit this comment.
Happy clients are of utmost importance for her and she cherishes the ones who recognize the extra care she puts into her work.
She also loves cleaning in of itself. Even describes it as therapeutic.
I look up to her in many ways. There’s deep wisdom in what she’s doing and how she’s doing it. Day to day.
I once used the term „unskilled labor“ and she asked what it meant. I explained it. She only gave me this look, no comment.
From then on I understood how ridiculous that term is.
Someone just quoted me 60k to renovate by backyard. I have been doing it myself and there is certainly a lot of skill to doing even simple tasks like seeding a lawn effectively
Because there aren't enough high-paying jobs, and who gets which job often comes down to luck (in the best case), and favoritism (in the worst case). Sometimes jobs require expensive prerequisites that reflect access to finance rather than just skill or merit
It's obviously more complicated than that—the situation involves the whole pipeline from child to working adult—but not by a whole lot.
And residential trades prices are based on how much they think they can get you to pay, not what the work is actually worth. Part of it is because people living in a nicer areas can require extra hand holding and change their mind on things 20 times throughout a project which inflates costs, but a lot of it is just "He drives a really nice car and lives in a neighborhood with property values 4x the average of what we typically serve, so we will quote him 4x as much, and that will help make up for the other jobs for poorer people we do that we only earn tiny margins off of or tried to stiff us on pay and required us to go to court for."
Also, trades are largely boom-bust industries. You make money when the market is hot, but that has got to cover enough for the 5-10 years later when the market is trash. And if a market is hot, customers are bidding against each other for their time. Maybe they already had a $30K project, but then someone else wants the same thing too that they would have to work overtime for, so they quote $40K. But then someone else comes along and also wants it too, but now it is crazy amount of work to get all these things done on time, so they quote $60K. Maybe they don't want or need the work and are hoping you turn them down, but if you agree to pay some outrageous price then they will of course make the time. Just like if someone offered you 3x your normal wage for crazy overtime you would probably take it too, but if someone offered your normal wage for crazy overtime work you would likely decline. That doesn't mean your normal wage is actually worth 3x as much, it just means someone is willing to pay a premium for you at that exact fleeting moment in time.
Also jesus, $60K for backyard renovation? Either they didn't want your work, or you are wanting an ass ton of soil moved in, or wanting multiple years of pre-established trees and plants, or they are pegging you as a sucker. Seeding grass is not any more difficult than picking orders and stuffing boxes, but lawn and garden care industries were one of the scummiest and scammiest industries ive ever worked in.
The guy down the street from me just paid 250k for two exterior foundation walls on his Craftsman home to be replaced.
I have come to the realization that I can't afford Bay area tradesmen prices after having several jobs quoted by different contractors and ending up doing them myself.
Not looking forward to reroofing my house.
(Also, while there are regulations on how badly egg-producing chicken can be treated, that doesn't extend to most eggs : those sold to businesses to be used in recipes.)
There's a bill to provide some relief for poultry processors, but despite bipartisan support the bill hasn't gone anywhere.[1]
The dairy industry in the Northeast has managed to get into a strange situation. The dairy operators are suing their own cooperative for creating a monopsony and holding down raw milk prices. Milk is a shrinking market, but dairy farmers have a lot of political clout, which leads to some very strange situations.
[1] https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/senate-bill/150...
[2] mhttps://vtdigger.org/2022/08/02/lawsuit-accuses-dairy-farmer...
That's what means to replace a manager with few lines of java (or with AI).
Would be great to see something like you suggest take off and gain national appeal, but I suspect that VC money helps with getting billboards/ newspaper ads/ etc. You would need to craft a new sort of coop model that can generate enough profits at the top to be an attractive investment but also share some. AFAIK this works best in small teams doing high value work.
The ideia that a chess IA needs a human to be able to win is laughable. No human being even close to be capable of playing chess in the level of alpha zero.
The actual evidence he listed suggests this is a war between different humans to work out who has better computer hardware ("the lack of decent equipment is being felt quite notably in Russia, where embargoes have limited access to new hardware and the latest chess tools. As a consequence, the Russian team finished near the bottom of the standings in the last Correspondence Chess Olympiad"). Cool and all, I can imagine people having a lot of fun, but it isn't obvious they are competing based chess skill here. The computers are bringing the chess skill and the human seems to be bringing logistic, financial and clerical support to operate the computer.
> (…) that’s not the kind of centaur that we talk about when it’s a chess master paired with a chess program. That chess master is being augmented by the machine, and the machine is the junior partner in the relationship. The human is the head, and the AI is the body.
currently we are in option 1
Customers will vote with their wallets, assuming there are any durable net advantage to the customer base, so the cumulative effect would be far more penetrating and enduring than millions of written arguments.
What’s good for the end customers is almost certainly not the same as “what’s good for business”.
Consider someone starts a slavery business that grab easily pickable children to raise them as perfect specialized workers then put the to the free sell/rent market.
End users could choose for other "moral" alternative if they wish. One even could point out that already happen in some parts of the world and that helps happy customers to solve their needs.
However most people prefer to contraint others wallet usage to enforce certain ethic rules. Where to place the line of ethics/constraint is very cultural dependent - to its wide definition.
One way to handle that is to look profitability for citizen instead of customers, then what's profitable for Uber users should be balanced with what's profitable for Uber drivers. That is usually what people want from a gouvernements and laws (and I guess we both agree that is not the same as what is profitable for business).
Given how much it’s been discussed over human history… it seems very likely that does not exist. And is yet another dispute that has to be decided via the political process in the first place.
So no, businesses may end up doing things that are not very beneficial to customers, and not that beneficial to the business, but be in a situation when changing their behavior results in significant losses, so they won't change. Same with customers: in some situations, they might get a better outcome, including a lower price, if they did not chase the lowest price outright.
But if that scenario were to occur, then all arguments ever written would be likewise literally worthless.
Personal development works the same. Even going far back in history, people concluded with certainty that cultivating one's body has many benefits for oneself. Yet, even now, in the supposed information age, people reach for promises of miracles to change their life.
This all is to conclude: overall, people are not rational. And so, by extension, businesses ran by people aren't either. And even if they were, many valid rational decisions can be made, depending on the goals. Maximum value is not always the goal. There is also risk tolerance, and there can be simply a limit to realizing the effects of one's deeds, aka not giving a fuck.
I believe that people can be rational, to a degree, and at times. But I further believe that this is far from the complete human experience. The rational part, at most, is a significant subset of the human workings.
If so, then by definition the real world success rate is somewhere between 0% and 100% for both.
The Denmark vs US Big Mac is the go-to example here. People argue that businesses need to be free so that labor, and therefore Bic Mac can be cheap. But real-world examples show that labor protection and cheap goods can co-exist, such as the case of Denmark's Big Mac. I think this would be the same in our context, and unions. Unions would bring changes for a business for sure, but they would find that they can be profitable just the same, just doing things differently. But if left to their own devices, businesses don't have incentive to optimize for that.
Question: "If a business, after unionizing, ultimately delivers more value per dollar to the end customer… then why would anyone even need to write essays arguing for it?"
Argument: This can happen because businesses are not rational. Businesses are not rational, because people run businesses, and people are not rational. People are not rational, because while they are capable of rationality, they are neither perfect, nor simply just rational - rationality is but one of the components that influence their decisions.
Evidence of people not being rational: the very lifestyle they end up living. Personal development demonstrably works to improve life outcomes, and yet people often give up on it.
Evidence for business being profitable despite heightened worker protections: McDonalds in Denmark. US routinely rejects increase to minimum wage or worker rights, citing economic unviability. But the very same businesses flourishing at places where such things were implemented demonstrate otherwise.