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Comment by malux85 | Hacker News Reader

That's true - except rather than just rolling over and accepting it, maybe the workforce as a whole should wise up so they dont get totally fleeced a third time?

Because capitalism/free market rewards companies that do this behaviour then a unified collective coordinated action among the workers will never happen, so the next best alternative we have is to discourage blind, jaded acceptance : and encourage the rebellious message that maybe, just maybe, SOME, nah, a decent chunk, of the rewards can go to the workforce itself.

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This would be true, but we now have a globally market. So all it takes is one country to reject this and use AI, while putting in the same (or more) work, and they will win.

You can view this as a negative, but it’s also an argument against layoffs. If AI makes a person 20% more productive, laying off 20% of the workforce is short sighted. If everyone is increasing productivity by 20%, they will need their full workforce to do that. Laying off 20%, or cutting back 20% of the hours, will leave the company at their old output.

Of course, in reality the saving probably won’t be 20%, at least not in the short-term. We could also probably cut 20% of our work week and maintain similar productivity by simply avoiding interruptions, pointless meetings, and other such nonsense. But that’s a harder culture change than saying, “go use AI.”

While it's true that we are competing in a global market, perhaps we shouldn't be racing to the bottom at the expense of our labor class.

I generally agree with this, but we’d need systems in place to incentivize companies to keep local workers and for customers to support local companies. There are a lot of politics at play.

Those are called tariffs and other barriers, and in many sectors they work very well. I live in a country (South Korea) where such barriers have been enormously successful in keeping tech jobs and revenue inside the country. Literally everyone here has benefited from it, it's a huge win-win-win; consumers get human customer service, properly localized services and much less enshittification, politicians have a success to point at and get more tax revenue, the public gets jobs. Everyone gets sovereignty.

This also extends past tech. Forcing physical companies to set up a local subsidiary/do JVs has done the same. Examples abound, Starbucks being a big one. Forcing them to do a JV means a huge portion of the revenue of the biggest coffee chain in the country stays inside the country, as well as plenty of office jobs. Otherwise everything but the actual in-store jobs would have once again flowed to the US.

China of course has done the same, to similar success. Imagine if they hadn't, and just let e.g. Meta be their social media platform of choice, Google their search engine, Amazon their shopping platform. It'd be nothing but a massive net loss to everyone involved but those tech firms; including the Chinese public as the state would impose the exact same censorship and rules on those companies, as they currently do with the remaining ones.

That other countries haven't done so and just let SV walk over them in order to appease the US - who has now turned out not to be their friend after all, surprise surprise! - is very unfortunate.

This incredible imbalance is what has let the average HN FAANG employee make absolute bank at the cost of the rest of the world, so I'm not expecting this to be particularly popular here :)

Unless the country can be completely self-sufficient, even that is not enough. If a country decides to cut working hours and other's won't, it will eventually not be able to afford the resources it needs from other countries because the countries that squeeze their workers will have more money to pay for them. I believe these competition based systems will be our downfall. Nobody can do anything that doesn't improve their position compared to competing countries/companies/people, even if it would make things better overall. If you do, you lose and die out. We will use all our resources, kill each other, etc in pursuit of victory for as long as the systems of this planet can support it and then we die.

Yeah every time workers do this, the ruling class sends in the cops to beat everyone into submission, gives everyone some pittance (maybe we'll get paid sick days for hourly office workers this time!), and everyone shrugs and says "well it could be worse."

The luddites literally attempted this, btw, and now everyone mocks them for trying to slow the inevitable exploitation of labor by technology.

I've seen this sentiment come up multiple times, but it's theoretically impossible in current economic and political conditions.

A world-wide revolution may be the only way to change. Or wait for the inequality between nations to erase.

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