yeah my parents only remember their parents having to move their family farm to a different state due to the trucking union (Teamsters, aka the actual mafia associated group). you know where the business was prior to 1950.. Ferguson outside St Louis where the riots were. So they certainly didn't bring prosperity to the area. There’s a middle history of unions that’s not so nice.

I do think unions had some (modest) benefit but the role of raw economic growth in improving worker rights is often understated.

> Well, who the hell is in the teachers union if not teachers?

Professional bureaucrats.

Teachers unions in public schools are the worst. They hold our childrens’ futures hostage and get paid out by politicians buying votes, who pass the bill to the next generation.

> Well, who the hell is in the teachers union if not teachers?

well, union higher-ups are basically politicians, they're not usually working in the job by that point

I think police unions are a bit different for the same reason we don't have a military union.

> people who are actively hurting civilians

Police are civilians too. Using "civilian" in this way is supporting the militarization of police, and is not a good thing.

> the rich people have political connections.

This is exactly what happens, though. You don't stay truly rich without a decent chunk of political influence. So, yeah, police protect the private property of those who support that idea most.

That conforms with my diet but not my exercise plan.

If you’re talking about instructing people not to sign, then (as far as I can tell) it is.

If you’re talking about missing the slide title, don’t be so hard on yourself, mistakes happen.

Any kind of retirement future is fundamentally built on the labour of the still-active workforce, and will be for as long as labour is still required in order to produce goods and services. That's just inherent to the concept of retirement itself, no matter how that retirement appears to be funded - those retired people still need to consume stuff that requires workers to produce and they're not working themselves by definition. Every single retiree is taking a cut of the labour productivity of those still working whilst not returning anything, whether that's funded via shareholdings in their pension plan or a state pension scheme or any other form of pension.

More subtly, in the current economy there are basically only two pots that higher real-terms wages for workers can come from: taking from other workers, and taking from the retired. That's because the whole economy has a supply-side crisis in basically everything and does not have the capacity to supply people overall with any more than they already have. All the usual scapegoats, like the super-wealthy, just don't consume enough as a proportion of the global economy that redistributing from them would have an impact on ordinary people. (Often articles attempt to confuse people about this by using definitions of wealthy that include like a third of the US population, or by comparing net worth instead and tricking people into thinking it means consumption by ordinary people could be increased by that amount if it was redistributed.)

see also american corporate history of hiring gangsters to break strikes and beat workers, leaving some thugs to catch the blame

To be fair have you seen republican policies towards teachers and education in general. Of course nobody would ever intentionally pick that for themselves and their profession.

An alternative perspective to look at this is that orgs like USPS are services provided to Americans because they're the kind of services that would otherwise be inaccessible to great majority of Americans. For this reason, increasing the wages and potentially attracting better workers and increasing the morale (and thus performance) of existing workers are beneficial for Americans.

thanks for pointing this out. I definitely agree when it comes to police unions. need to learn more about this situation though

100% agreed. My comment was referring to the part of OPs comment where they criticized globalization and proposed capital controls.

You make it illegal to negotiate based on work stoppages, to plan a strike, or otherwise conspire to strike. And you permanently fire those who do. It happened to air traffic controllers in the US.

How to ban people in general from striking is easy: you just call the cops on them. How to prevent the cops from striking I don't know...

In Germany, police officers, soldiers and (depending on the state) teachers and other sort of public officials swear an oath of office that bans them from strikes ("Beamte").

biden literally just did this yesterday

I agree, though I don't agree with the shadowban (if I'm right about that).

Only been in a few rando warehouses, and I think the reason is most rando warehouses are inefficient. One worker may ship 15 packages an hour. I bet the Amazon packages per worker per hour is multiple times higher.

Could you share a source for this? Couldn't find much after a bit of googling.

Election votes are anonymous by nature. Card signing is not.

I'm not opposed to unionizing but I take issue with the idea that getting 50% support means "it is obvious that they don't need an election."

I am 100% behind Amazon employees unionizing, and I wish unionization was far more widespread. I wasn’t trying to impugn unions using the legitimate process to achieve legitimate ends.

>reduced income inequality. Which is what we want.

Reducing the PPP of rich people while only maintaining that of poorer people seems like a dubious policy outcome, at least in economic terms.

The same criticism still works, though. I can like their position for negotiating with Amazon today, without necessarily having to agree that I'm going to like it forever.

Mind you, I'm not necessarily on Amazon's side here. Their scare-mongering is pretty slimy, to say no more. But IMTDb's objection is valid, even adjusted for your criticism.

Try saying that again after paying 16€ for a kebab in Basel compared to 5€ in Germany, a few kilometres to the east. There is definitely a difference.

This not accurate. Eating out, for example, is very expensive there, even compared to major cities in the US.

Interesting, do the swiss eat less meat as a consequence?

Contract and agreement are not synonyms. Contracts require consideration.

Automation is going to happen no matter what. Even people working for free is not going to stop it.

Amazon is going to do that regardless.

I was wondering how far away are they from fully automating the process? I always see their new robots.

It's slightly more complicated in practice. The US has this weird system where you can opt out of full union membership and become what's called an "objector". You opt out of union membership but still pay a portion of dues (those directly around contract negotiation and the like), and you're still covered by the collective bargaining agreement. The downside being that, as you're not a union member, you generally don't get voting rights.

To quote the NLRB's website directly:

> Federal law allows unions and employers to enter into "union-security" agreements which require all employees in a bargaining unit to become union members and begin paying union dues and fees within 30 days of being hired. Employees may choose not to become union members and pay dues, or opt to pay only that share of dues used directly for representation, such as collective bargaining and contract administration. Known as objectors, they are no longer union members, but are still protected by the contract. Unions are obligated to tell all covered employees about this option, which was created by a Supreme Court ruling and is known as the Beck right.

This usually works well enough, but in certain circumstances, you can have a small minority control the entire operation and the vast majority are "represented" by an institution they have no voice in. This seems to be the case in lower paid unions (e.g. grocery baggers) because the majority can't afford the extra dues.

Unions are compensated proportional to N*S where N is number of workers and S is average salary. Workers care about increasing S, but unions sometimes focus on increasing N because it is easier. But then the individual worker doesn't see their life improve.

Except unions aren't for-profit, so it's unclear where those extra money is going to. Senior leadership perhaps? But unions beholden to members, which means there's no "fixed percentage", because that's decided by the members themselves. We can see a parallel in public sector compensation: democratically controlled organizations are very reluctant to spend extra money on compensating leadership (or any other high paying staff, for that matter).

>>Professional bureaucrats.

>My mom was a negotiator for the teacher's union for about a decade. She was a para-professional, working with disabled students, for about 20 years.

Nothing you said really contradicts the parent post's claim that the people working in unions are "Professional bureaucrats". If your mom was working with disabled students for 20 years, then switched to being a bureaucrat for the next 10 years, she's still arguably a "Professional bureaucrat".

I suspect your Mom is an extra-ordinary super-hero sort, and more power to her. However, here in the Western USA, urban public schools are a disaster -- the bigger the district, the bigger the disaster -- and the union is not innocent in continuing that. no easy answers

So basically, let's keep buying our average quality cars for more money, than allow free trade & importing better quality vehicles from a country that specializes with it?

For some reason, it was the growth of global trade that coincided with the growth of global GDP & the increase of the life quality of the earth population.

Globalism is coming from the same people that also want open borders for immigration. Should borders be open or closed? (European here, I have no stance on that, Amazon has no retail presence in my country and immigration is almost zero here)

The pay is why the employees don't quit en mass.

Only until you’re injured.

> your reference does not relate to my experience in Switzerland

Living in Switzerland is clearly way more expensive than living in any of its close neighbors, so please explain me how this is not related to higher wages.

Ironically, he didn’t even cross state lines (at least not that night), he was there the night before sleeping over at a friend’s house.

> since they're worse than a warehouse job, and Amazon pays so well

Not all warehouse jobs are equally terrible, as evidenced by the people working at warehouses other than Amazon's at lower wages. Amazon pays above the going rate for warehouse workers because of its reputation w.r.t. worker conditions.

> But I will say that unionization does come with a cost that is borne not by Amazon’s executives or their shareholders, but ...

I like parts of the analysis (if a big player has to pay higher wages, this will affect many in different ways). But I think it's hard to discuss what exactly the implications would be without a deeper analysis including numbers.

Without numbers, I find that participants in a discussion are often tempted to put a high emphasis on a certain argument or on the impact of a mechanism just because they have come up with that argument or mechanism. But actual numbers might imply a different weighting.

An example would be: With longer fingernails you might be able to swim faster. But to what degree?

wages are one thing, working conditions are another.

It doesn't matter how much you pay me if I can't see my kids and have to pee in a bottle.

While I like the idea of unions, I can say that they've been a disappointment in my career. One of my colleagues desperately needed the protection of the union at work when he got caught up in office politics. Some of his rivals for a big promotion got him accused of something that had nothing to do with work. It was all cancel culture. The union, though, didn't back him up at all. They make a big show about somehow fighting management for the workers, but in this case they were happy to help the management screw the guy over and end his career. Sure they're a union, but they're humans and sometimes they'll be aligned against you.

The trouble with that argument is that you haven't justified why it should only cause downward pressure on prices when companies have to increase pay due to unions demanding more cash. The exact same process should drive down prices and the amount executives make all the time, which means that the price will already be near the optimum given a particular level of costs and that increasing the costs will increase that optimum price. (This is particularly clear in scenarios where this works so well at pushing prices down that the increased wage demands would lead to losing money on every unit sold at the original price. Obviously in this scenario the price must increase.)

Ah yes, let’s make a rule that makes a difficult process (unionization) for a vulnerable group (workers) more difficult, based on a vague theory about imagined pressure being applied. Sounds like solid reasoning to me.

The federal minimum is not really something that should be taken as a point of reference (from the employees side).

A better metric: "How much do jobs pay that are easily available to me?" (And so in this sense, the wages of Wallmart and Amazon seem to be very much relevant for many.)

Another metric: "How long does it take to earn enough for my baseline expenses (rent, food, health, retirement money, etc.)".

If the costs of labor go up fast, they have much more incentive to automate. When right now they may think it's cheaper to hire humans.

Who is more efficient than Amazon/Walmart/Target/Home Depot/Staples/Costco/etc?

They set the bottom price, and if they are earning 2%-4% profit margins, then their costs increases will have to end up in either prices increases or them no longer selling the product.

The funny thing is that it is Amazon coming along and greatly increasing demand for labor (in conjunction with reduced supply of that type of labor) that caused all the other warehouse jobs and retailers to increase pay.

And I hope the labor continues making gains in their quality of life at work and pay, but I do not see this happening without an increase in prices for products (like we have already seen).

Treating workers like shit and churning them limits the workers they can hire and retain.

They even know this - Amazon is running out of eligible workers to hire. But the need to hit quarterly metrics forces the line management to make strategically bad decisions.

Wouldn’t this situation make imported goods cheaper for everyone?

The same argument applies to the structure of capitalism.

It could be either. In most cases it is likely both (shrinking margins, higher prices).

The price is determined by the market. But there’s a demand curve. There are many prices that an item could sell at, with varying numbers of buyers at each price.

In a highly competitive market, the price should be driven down close to the cost of production. This allows the most people to buy at the lowest possible price, at the expense of retailer margins.

Amazon probably has the best cost structure of online retailers. Which means in many cases they are setting the floor on the price. If their labor costs go up enough to wipe out their margins, their prices must go up, or they must exit the market for highly competitive items. With less competition, other retailers have more leeway to increase prices.

As a society we may decide it is worth paying more for goods to ensure a fair living wage and safe working conditions. That doesn’t sound unreasonable. But to assume you can get that without increasing prices is naive.

Anecdote not data

Some of the grocery shops near me are known union shops. The prices are in fact higher than the non union shops.

Amazon rose wages and have some the highest warehouse worker wages around, to the point where they are creating upward pressure on wages in other industries.

Their jobs also are super stressful and burn people out.

These things are not contradictory.

Anecdotally, in support of the comment you are replying to, Starbucks poached our babysitter. $25/hour is the market rate for babysitters around here, and $100-$150 a night isn't anywhere near enough to screw with her sleep schedule. She works $18/hr morning shifts and now owns a car.

>their jobs are shit I have a couple friends that have worked at Amazon warehouses and also worked at shipping centers for UPS and FedEx and they both told me that Amazon not only paid better but had better working conditions. Not saying that's the case universally, but I don't think it's right to uniquely criticize Amazon and not the industry at large, especially if Amazon really is a better employer than their competition.

> The only visible difference as a consumer is there are less (or no) automated checkout lanes.

...Really? That's a straight detriment in my book, as a customer.

I would generally prefer to support a union shop, but I'm extremely fond of self-checkout—and, in fact, further upstate, Wegman's has introduced a self-scan app that you can use to tally up your total as you shop, and just scan a code at the self-checkout register with your phone on the way out to pay.

One of the worst things unions can do is try to "protect jobs" at the expense of technological advancement, customer service, or improved product.

In my experience, Aldi/Walmart/Lidl/Costco prices are much lower than Shop Rite. Also, Shop Rites are sort of like franchises, different ones have different owners and management.

> People call the current National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) election system a secret ballot election—but in fact it's not like any democratic election held anywhere else in our society. It's really a management-controlled election process because corporations have all the power. They control the information workers can receive and routinely poison the process by intimidating, harassing, coercing and even firing people who try to organize unions.

(via https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Card_check)

Without reforming the secret ballot process, you’re just handing power to the companies by advocating against card-checks

There have indeed, historically, been cases where a union threw its weight around, bullied, and abused people.

However, a huge percentage of companies today are actively doing these things to their workers, and if you selected 10 companies at random where there were unionization efforts, I'd bet you money that in at least 9 of them, management was doing everything they could legally, and probably some things that are questionable or outright illegal, to try to prevent unionization.

Stop the "both sides"-ism. It's disingenuous and detrimental to genuine understanding of the situation.

The vast majority of union elections result in more votes for the union than cards signed. It is extremely rare for the number of cards signed to be a higher share than the vote.

I'm not.

Did you ever work on AI or robotics?

Yeah, and I don't think it would be terribly unusual for 50% markups to translate to low-single-digit profit margins in cost-competitive retail sectors - those both seem like about the right ballpark overall. Retail has a lot of costs and wages are one of the big ones.

What rock are you living under? Plenty of the documented absolute nightmare of working for Amazon in their warehouses is corroborated by their own internal analysis. Unions are for more than just making sure people don't die when doing their job. The union I am a member of more than doubled the wages of its members after its first 12 years of existence. Crucially it also ensures twice yearly cost of living adjustments. It is the only way for labor to have a meaningful negotiating position. There are shitty unions out there, but there are a lot of shitty employers too. Amazon's internal reporting shows they're going to exhaust the labor pool in several areas because they've cycled through everyone who could possibly work at the warehouses and fulfillment centers. People aren't leaving Amazon because they aren't allowed to use the bathroom. They're leaving Amazon because it is dehumanizing and miserable. Funny how the people who make the lowest wages have to put up with the most shit.

OSHA is always thrown around as either an overbearing force of oppression or a magical savior of the worker by anti-union people.

The reality is that it’s a toothless tiger by design. Many states do their own enforcement, and don’t exactly prioritize it — IIRC, North Carolina has 20% of the inspectors that it says it needs.

I’m sure your cushy IT gig requires you to stand for 6 hours without taking a piss. Try it sometime before attacking others.

OSHA did away with all that on paper. In reality, OSHA compliance varies considerably across manual labor jobs. Here's how:

Suppose you're a manager/foreman. You never outright tell your staff to ignore safety regulations; you simply give them a huge workload with a deadline and set of equipment that make it impossible to feasibly accomplish the workload within compliance. Your workers catch on that in order to get the job done, they need to ignore the safety regs. As a manager, you look the other way as they ignore the rules. If an injury happens on the job, you then blame the worker for ignoring the safety regulations, which of course you instructed them to follow. Follow up by giving them a drug test so you might even be able to get out of paying them workers comp.

This is how it works in the real world. Source: seen it, done it.

This is pure historical revisionism concocted solely to diminish modern struggles for worker organisation.

Wages are and have always been the primary driver of unionising.

The main motivation was never mustache twirling capitalist charicatures shoveling children into furnaces as fuel or some other unambiguous evil that we have since banished. Conditions have always been part of the bargain, but the goal has always been first and foremost higher wages.

Earlier in my life I nearly died driving 50 miles to get into work as a grocery store clerk on no sleep because a manager called me and in no uncertain terms told me if I didn’t come in that day I’d be fired.

I was raised to believe that a job is more important than just about anything, so I decided to try to go in as I was out of town. I crashed my car as I fell asleep at the wheel. It shouldn’t take that to get someone to realize the relative unimportance of a job, but the US culture (as channeled through my conservative parents, at least) doesn’t value anything higher than work and productivity in the service of capital as this deified virtue.

I wish r/kroger and r/antiwork would intersect more, it's so sad to see the experiences people post in the former

that lifetime ban on working for the Krogers may have represented a much bigger threat to Mr. Manager than it ever would to you

> Auto factory jobs (which were outsourced)

The decline of Detroit UAW auto industry definitely weren't outsourced. It certainly wasn't GM that opened car factories in Japan and Germany. And it certainly wasn't GM shareholders or executives that benefited from the rise of Japanese and German imports.

This isn't outsourcing, this is simply a case of American carmakers being outcompeted by better products from Japanese and European competitors. (A significant fraction of which were actually assembled in US-based plants owned by those overseas competitors.)

This has nothing to do with "mobility of capital", and unless you shut down trade completely, there's nothing in the world that can protect poorly managed American companies from foreign competition. (Nor should you, while one million UAW workers saw their pay decline, 300 million Americans benefited from a vast improvement in car reliability, affordability and safety.)

The majority of the auto factory jobs that were (e.g. automotive assembly line work) are considered unskilled work; not even semi-skilled; never mind high-skill.

For various reasons, I won't be replying after this.

> I can easily assume that you haven't worked in a warehouse.

I don't think that I should have said this, and my combative tone wasn't constructive to the discussion. It is my normal, sometimes incorrect operating assumption on this site that while the general user knows about tech that they know jack-all about working in retail etc.

> Then I'm sure you'd consider any job away from an air-conditioned office to be terrible.

Generally speaking, I do consider this to be true, especially in triple digit weather with high humidity which seems to be the norm moving forward. We are all less human and more prone to aggression in this heat. I am grateful that I have the privilege of working in an air conditioned office now.

> Warehouse work is certainly hard work; picking and packing certainly entail being physically active. I won't pretend it's immune to asshole bosses or that injuries never happen; that's the nature of manual labor under capitalism. > I'll take walking 5+ miles through a pick path or packing 50+ boxes all day (even with leads and sups breathing down my neck over my numbers).

Neither of these descriptions provide a positive assertion of warehouse work being not terrible. Warehouse work often takes a physical and mental toll that makes pursuing opportunities to leave it absurdly difficult without social support. I think that your descriptions only further lend credence to my claim that working in a warehouse is generally terrible or at the very least not pleasant.

> It's still vastly preferable to outright abusive job sectors like retail or restaurant work or customer service > long before I'd consider subjecting myself to snotty asshole customers berating me over their own ineptitude.

I recognize this misanthropy. I still have it from my time working in retail and elsewhere. It'll be a cold day in July when I go back of my own volition. I get it. I really do. I'm not going to rehash my experiences here, but it sounds like you've had similar moments, hours, shifts, years.

I see that you've also fallen for that trap of hating one type of low income work more than another. They all have their shitty sides. I think all of our lives would be improved if the general public learned a shred of empathy and respect. I won't hold my breath, but sometimes I have hope.

> this assertion that a megacorporation with a specific reputation for abuse is somehow representative of an entire job sector is one of those baseless assertions that demonstrates considerable ignorance and inexperience.

Amazon typifies and exemplifies this trend of declining working conditions, respect, and exacting work. Also, maybe you should calm down and take a few deep breaths. Try getting more sleep, eating healthy, going for walks where possible, and limiting caffeine intake.

> workers outside of Amazon could certainly be paid better - all workers could and should, in many many sectors

I think we'll both find common ground here. I've often had enough of people expressing disdain for 'undifferentiated' or 'low-skilled' labor' being undeserving of income necessary to afford living. I think we could both find common sense and common views, but we have different outlooks on society. Given the quality of our discussion here I sincerely hope we don't have the displeasure of meeting. Vaya con dios.

Hold on just to be clear: do you think the problem in Detroit is that the unions weren't powerful enough?

That analogy is poor because we don’t know of a good alternative to democratic governments. But there is an obvious alternative to unions that many workers do prefer.

My guess is that it reduces sales. If you can see a total dollar amount accumulating as you shop, you're more likely to stick to your budget, maybe select cheaper items or avoid impulse buys. If you don't know the total until you get to the checkout lane, you are more likely to just pay it rather than start setting some items out.

No, it’s about a recent, popular self-defense case in which many people wanted the victim to be found guilty, and they would talk about how he “crossed state lines” as though crossing state lines was some ominous, evil thing. This “crossed state lines” rhetoric was even parroted by the media, and eventually it became a meme as people used it sarcastically.

I'm not sure what point they're making, looks like they don't like encouraging workers to organize (or with specific tactics) based on the below

> I personally did not have my own shit together enough to earn minimum wage, not quite, at the very start. $15/hr+ starts to become a mountain that the least well-off cannot land a position earning, or cannot stay competitive at that rate, in some parts of the nation.

This is the most salient point in my opinion when discussing minimum wages. Employers have to decide which potential employee can produce enough to make up for the wages that they pay. The higher the minimum wage goes, there are less opportunities to get a career started due to not being hired. Experience is highly valued in almost every field. If you cannot get a low paying job just to build some experience in your resume, you delay or never get the next high paying job. Minimum wage ends up crippling the very people it was meant to help.

We already produce enough food, goods, and housing for everyone in the country to live with their basic needs met. The only reason that isn't happening is because there is a small group of capital owners and corporations that work to create artificial scarcity. It's an absolutely disgusting practice that benefits nobody but people who are already rich

With the AI cliff that you discuss, productivity will increase even more than it did in the industrial revolution and there is even less of a reason to continue with our absurd current system of making a tiny out of people rich at the expense of everyone else.

>Maybe CEOs and executives don’t need to pay themselves such absurd salaries, that would probably help

Can you show your work here? Assume Amazon executives cut their salaries to 0, how much extra would they be able to pay workers?

> 1. Who is asking for $100/hr at this level?

Why not? If you can double every few years eventually you will get to 100 dollars. And if you claim that everyone needs to make decent wages, who is to define what "decent" is supposed to be? People will always be asking for more, never less.

> 2. Maybe CEOs and executives don’t need to pay themselves such absurd salaries, that would probably help.

Even if CEOs gave up their whole salary tomorrow, it would not change the pay of people working in very large companies with dozens of thousands or hundred of thousands of employees.

Go ahead and re-read the comment you are defending. I think it has twisted in your memory to something much more reasonable rather than something that can be verifiably fact-checked as false.

> I might define baseline food as beans and rice, while others might define it as steak and lobster.

And such quibbling over definitions is irrelevant when people can't even afford the more affordable of the two.

Transacting is one aspect of business - ownership is much more important, and only exists as far as the government enforces it.

I'm talking about all jobs

Capitalism was good for the time between feudalism and the industrial revolution, but now we have an excess of goods, food, and housing yet corporations are creating artificial scarcity in order to continue enriching a few people at the expense of everyone else.

We have enough empty housing in California alone to house all homeless people in the US yet we still have people living in the streets. We have people starving while we produce enough food to not only feed all of the US but also Africa, yet corporations throw away good food to create artificial scarcity to protect the profits of a few.

Forming cooperatives owned by the workers who make up the business would be a good step in the right direction, and making the excuses like 'some people don't need that baseline' is horse shit. The purpose of a system is what it does and those jobs aren't just filled by young people, there are older people who should be retired worming minimum wage jobs. There are people trying to support their families in those positions. If those jobs are meant for kids, why are the business open during schools hours?

If we work together we can improve living conditions for all humans

My point is that the entire organization's profit margins are not likely to be anywhere near 2-4%.

Professional-managerial class. Basically people with white collar jobs who have more sway than the working class due to professional moats (university degrees, accreditations) and more influence on society due to controlling to some degree how capital is deployed.

The point here is that getting blacklisted is probably a much scarier prospect for the manager. PMC jobs typically have more stringent reference checks and employment history requirements. Meanwhile a low-wage grocery store clerk is going to have no trouble finding another shitty job. Typical minimum wage jobs just want someone who will show up and doesn't have a criminal record.

pro managerial class

For heaven sake. You're enabling this type of behavior. Every manager will push and squeeze to get everything out of you they can.

Here's the secret though: It's their ass on the line if it doesn't get done. If they're a middle manager, they now have to go back with hat in hand and tell their higher up they made a mistake. That repeats for however many layers of middle management exist until resources get properly allocated. It's their business that takes the hit if it gets out to client's that project their having built is meat grinding their laborers.

You the end laborer, hold the power in this case. A manager cannot knowingly force you to conduct your work in such a way as your rights to a safe workplace are jeopardized. You have the power to expose it, and make it unequivocably known to your higher ups that these violations are happening. You can report your employer to your local OSHA enforcement arm.

A law on paper but never enforced is no law at all, and a workplace where everyone lets the boss abuse one another is the only outcome if you won't stand up for you, and sometimes, encourage someone else to stand up for themselves. I did it for my people damn it. You need to do it for yourselves and your peers. This is why labor organization is important. Businesses can abuse you because people don't act in concert to the degree the business does.

No work is so important it cannot be done as safely as possible. No one has the right to conspire to put you in harms way. An employer who provably does is not entitled to be an employer in the United States. That is a privilege, not a right.

Fight, damnit! Fight! Or vote with your feet by finding something else to do! If you don't set the bar for people to not work for, and refuse to make their life more difficult by making them accountable for their own malfeasance, you're passing the buck to the next crazy motherf'er who will, and we are in short supply.

Have you tried offering $2,500 per hour? The market exists. There are babies that need babysitting, and people capable of babysitting.

What does not exist is an intersection of the supply and demand curves of people willing and able to pay what people capable of babysitting want to get paid for babysitting.

Are we talking about nannies or a sitter for a random single night? Are there no teenagers in the neighborhood who want an “easy” 4 hours work? That’s what we did with my son (late 90s). Same as my parents did with me and my sister (early 80s).

PMC is pretty much exclusively bourgeoisie and petit bourgeoisie.

The exercise of control over capital/means of production (what defines PMC) isnt exactly the same thing as ownership but it's closer to that than only being able to offer labor.

It's not uncommon for it to be better. PMCs (e.g. C level execs) of major corporations a often make out better than shareholders.

Many rights that everybody enjoys were won by unions and applied to everybody. You are generalising to all unions some hypothetical case.

Better job opportunities for a part of the population means that all employers need to improve conditions to compete for employees.

Better off in Jassy's pockets then?

Their example was only a single person cutting salary, so practically meaningless. And I would also argue, in bad faith with the design of proving a point with bad data.

Source? What are the incentives? Why do the most highly valued companies in the world report much higher profit margins?

I would need a good reason to believe the executives and owners of retail businesses do not want to report higher profit margins.

The trick means real net income is larger than what’s on the books/10-K filings. Misclassified investments are not wasted money, simply hiding how much money is available for other expenses.

It’s like the old trick of paying an offshore subsidiary in a tax heaven licensing fees to use your own IP with the added advantage of being able to directly profit from the use of these investments. Nobody looking at the books would think such things are actual expenses, but companies must pretend they are.