Comment by AngryData | Hacker News Reader

Comment by AngryData | Hacker News Reader

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Whats wrong with the original luddites that you would try and use them to disparage modern worker rights advocates? They were right. Automation did reduce their quality of life and destroy their wages, and it is only through the luddites and other worker rights organizations making their demands unignorable that gave workers more modern and fair standards like 40 hour weeks, vacations, safety regulations, and unions.

You know who built the looms that the luddites later broke? The luddites themselves. They were the one building automated looms under promises that they would make more money and have cheaper fabric. Instead what they got was towns suffering in poverty under garbage wages, shitty working conditions with longer hours, and worse quality fabric as the corporate looms penny pinched their fibre and fabric more and more.

If the benefits of automated looms were actually shared with the luddites to start with, maybe their society wouldn't have gone down the toilet and they wouldn't have been so pissed. And today corporations are far more powerful than the capitalists back in the luddite days, both monetarily and legally.

People should own the product of their work.

It's really that simple, all the inequality, injustice and exploitation that's been happening since the first industrial revolution keeps happening because people who do the work only get paid a fraction of the value they produced and only as long as they keep working while the surplus and ownership goes to people who don't do any work, can be used to make more money which gives them more ownership and is heritable.

BTW, I am really happy whenever I see another person who knows who the luddites really were. The rest are condemned to repeat this shit and we're all worse off because of them.

> People should own the product of their work.

You do own your work, but you agreed to sell it for a salary. Makes sense, because there is often no tangible "product" you could own otherwise. What should cleaners own?

Co-op businesses seem to not have a problem sharing the profits on less tangible products and services. So I don't see why anyone should retain sole ownership of all profits from a business that they require others to do the work in.

I don't know how co-op businesses work. I think co-ops are hiring cheap third-party cleaners as well. Co-ops also have CEOs making a lot more than the rest of the "cooperative".

> So I don't see why anyone should retain sole ownership of all profits from a business that they require others to do the work in.

Because they are offering, and there are takers? Nobody is forced to work for your business.

> Nobody is forced to work for your business.

This is the root of the fallacy - nobody is forced to work for any particular business but everybody is forced to work for some business since 1) starting a new one is more costly than working for an existing one 2) we'd all end up working for 1-person businesses.

It's the same as people claiming they are sovereign citizens. It's a nice ideal but it doesn't work.

No, the mechanism is clear. What I don't understand is your use of the word fallacy. It is not a fallacy, it is the reality. Being an employee is not an ideal. It is the lived reality for most people.

So what are you going on about?

I've has similar discussions multiple times. Each time it boils down to one of these arguments:

a) "You're not forced to do it, you chose it so it's consensual and therefore right."

b) "The value of your work is determined by how much you managed to negotiate."

The issue with a) is that consent has to be informed and between parties with similar bargaining power, neither is true in an employer-employee relationship. Also choice from a limited set of options where some have large artificial upfront costs is not the same as 100% voluntary free choice.

The issue with b) is that the product (both the output sold to customers and the organization producing the output which can be sold by the owners) have value. This value is independent of the negotiated compensation for work.

Hence, arguments ignoring these issues are fallacious.

I see this fallacy all the time.

Can a 40 year old man have sex with a 12 year old girl if she agrees? What if she's 18? The first is illegal and wrong. The second is legal but most people will tell you it's at least gross. Why? Because of the power differential.

Starting a company takes investment (obviously money but also time spent on administrative tasks, hiring, marketing, etc.). Rich people can just buy companies and get passive income.

Salary negotiations are also unequal - one side has much more information and almost always more time and monetary reserves.[1]

I am tired so i'll cut it short - there's inherent power imbalance in the employer-employee[2] relationship which makes the outcome inherently and unavoidably exploitative.

[0]: They'll often use the word illegal because they have been taught to follow rules but have not been taught about differentiating legality and morality.

[1]: Why do you think you come to the company to the interview instead of them asking to meet you at a restaurant like normal business deals might be discussed? It's so ingrained this is normal that what I said sounds absurd.

[2]: Have you ever thought what those words actually mean? Employees are literally being used, it's right in the name.

There is no fallacy here. Just answer me this, instead of going on a rant tangent: Who does the cleaning? And what do they get for it?

They get ownership. The rest is determined from that, since owners collectively decide how much everyone gets paid.

(There might need to be further legal restrictions like minimum wage or tying wage to the skill coefficient used to determine rate of gaining ownership - see my other comments.)

See my other comment. As long as the cleaner cannot fire the CEO, but only the other way around, ownership doesn't mean anything. If you own 0.00001 percent of a company, that gives you about as much power as your vote in a democracy. Probably less so.

Why should the collective owners even have a CEO and why should he have the power to fire people? The only way would be if they collectively decided that. There are other ways to structure the company.

> 0.00001

That's a lot of zeros, must be a huge company and/or a very low skill short-time worker. And a small country if one vote is worth more than that.

Yes, I like my cleaner example. It will be a lot of zeros. Yes, let's end this discussion, I think your views are quite naive and not well thought out.

There’s a bit of a chicken and egg problem here bc you’re applying asking how to apply cooperative organization theory to a capitalist organization. Presumably in a largely cooperative economy, the cleaner would be a worker-owner of a cleaning organization that provides cleaning labor to the manufacturing organization in question.

BTW the company is part of the product. If certain work needs to be done, even if it's low-skill work, it contributes to the function of that company and should give fractional ownership according to amount worked and some coefficient accounting for relative skill.

Who decides who gets hired and fired at that company? How is the coefficient determined? Are we talking about amount of work, or how much your work has contributed to the bottom line of the company?

I don't see that changing anything. As long as there is private property, and you can sell your work for compensation, the rest pretty much follows.

> How is the coefficient determined?

Negotiations, just like salary today, except all sides negotiate with the same leverage.

> As long as there is private property, and you can sell your work for compensation

And that's why I think work should automatically give ownership by law - and therefore decision making power. See, slavery used to be legal too but then enough people decided it's too exploitative, picked up rifles and changed it. Employment is similar, instead of owning a full person, rich people own the entire economic output for 8 hours a day and instead of flogging, they fire workers they don't want. It's less bad but the same principle with more indirection.

> Negotiations, just like salary today, except all sides negotiate with the same leverage.

As the cleaner you don't have the same leverage as the CEO. There would be no change in leverage at all. That's what you don't seem to understand.

As the cleaner, the only leverage would be that you don't need a job. And if you have that kind of leverage, why would you clean at all?

I am all ears for a new system that could actually work, but I don't think it will come from you. You don't seem to be willing to actually think through things.

Hierarchical top-down power structures are only useful when you need to make decisions fast. Pretty much all other times, you can have a vote. As such, I don't see why an individual ("CEO") should have the power to fire workers (or why he should even exist outside emergencies and only have powers needed to avert those emergencies).

Generally, on a team, people know who does good work and who works poorly and drags others or the whole team down. Given that, I can see hiring/firing decisions being made at the team level. If a whole team is seen as underperforming/redundant within the organization as a whole, then the team should be given the choice of either making itself leaner or severing cooperation with the rest of the company. This is still hierarchical but bottom up.

Regarding your last sentence and your general attitude, I think I'll sever our communication here.

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