I had a shower thought the other day that if more CEOs were shot dead, there’d probably be less Return to Office.
People are sometimes like “oh but violence is bad!” but ignore all the casual harms inflicted on people by capitalism and friends.
They also ignore all the freedom of the lower classes which was won through violence against the upper class.
When the people in charge refuse to listen, the only tool left is violence.
One dead CEO caused so much unity on health reform. Never seen anything like this in my life time.
And let’s not forget all the freedoms that were granted because we asked nicely while tugging our forelocks.
Those are easy to remember because there are none.
They also ignore literally all of human history when they say shit like that. Hell even the civil rights movement only worked because of Malcolm X’s threat of violence.
They weren’t just threats, there where riots all over the country.
Malcolm X was a fringe figure: the NOI got lots of press but didn’t really do all that much besides indulging in infighting and encouraging local Black businesses. Their approach to politics was separatism. H. Rap Brown, Stokely Carmichael, the Panthers, and many others were more closely involved in direct action.
Nah CEOs will mandate RTO for workers while they themselves stay remote.
They can be killed in their homes, too.
So no change?
The (attitude) Adjuster goes blam.
You had me until you distilled everything into “capitalism”… Life isn’t black and white.
Inb4 the intellectually dishonest response of “but I said ‘and friends!’”.
Where would you lay the blame?
And how is that hypothetical response “intellectually dishonest”?
So brave
I am sorry calling out the fake capitalist regime we have, got your panties all bunched up
The regime we have is made up of real capitalists, who behave as capitalists often have throughout history. The kind of capitalism that’s fake is the Chicago-school free maket kind, which has never existed in real life, because it embodies a contradiction in terms. The market is either “free” as in freedom from regulation, or it’s “free” in terms of no oligopolistic barriers to entry. It can’t be both simultaneously. Tuly free markets have a lifetime comparable to free hydrogen atoms: they quickly settle to an equilibrium state that’s less free (by either definition).
I’m in management now but I say go get ‘em please.
most management I would assume would be with the workers. If your not c suite your nothing.
Tech is a bit different because a significant portion of your compensation comes as stock when you get higher up the ladder but yeah.
Stock options and grants are a tool to trick you into accepting lower pay and conflating your interests with those of the capital class. (Speaking as someone who has received both!)
Yeah I’m speaking from experience here in that about a third of my pay is in stock.
I wouldn’t say my pay is low though, for what it’s worth.
Only idiots confuse owning some stock with being part of owner class lol
Same type of idiot who sold out the country for 401k and a McMansion
Yeah I would say that is high enough but its pretty up there for stock to be all that significant.
You’d think that, but a depressingly large percent of middle managers identify more with the bosses than with the people doing real work. They believe that if they toe the line and work hard at enabling the sociopaths, they might eventually get the promised invisible handjob.
Interestingly, I’ve known more senior managers than middle managers who are radical. I’m one, and I’ve known many others. I think that those who really understand how the system works end up advancing, but they’re also the ones with no illusions about how the sausage is made.
Capitalism has made me moderately rich (and I started from near-destitution), but that doesn’t mean I am unaware of its many toxic side effects. You have to live within the system that exists. People who don’t know how to do anything make shitty revolutionaries and incompetent reformers.
yeah I get that. Im unemployed currently but I know that my rate is much higher than the large majority of folks so I feel kinda guilty in a way but at the same time I have a sickly wife and our household income puts us in the average. My ability to earn more just offsets her inability to earn one. Of course though medical expenses make our expenses higher and as I looked for work I went through the excersise to see how much I needed to make and it just blows me away mainly because medical expenses are a third of the budget. as high as housing although we have about as cheap a housing situation as someone could have nowadays. We have such a topsy turvy crazy society were one can go from being comfortable to destitute or vice versa at practically the drop of a hat but the direction and pressures are downward. Ugh. I do find middle managers tend to work relative to metrics they want to look good and they want the people under them to focus on them. the people under them usually just want to have their stuff working and to clearly know which thing to concentrate on and higher levels also looking to have stuff working but from a larger perspective.
Nothing will meaningfully improve until the rich fear for their lives
Why do you think the mega rich are so keen to invest in robotics? With AI and robotics, there is no palace guard that’ll turn sides when everyone’s had enough.
Nothing will change until the rich take a big haircut.
Fingers and toes crossed, get’em for every last penny!
luck is not gonna help. Only action and organizing can save us. Join a union too.
Oh, I would if I lived in a place which had such movements, believe me… As it is, all I can do is wish for Lady Luck to smile upon those who have the chance! Sure, it’s a bad idea to bank everything on luck, but it can never hurt to have some on your side!
where do you live? The tech workers movement is reaching pretty much everywhere there’s tech production.
Romania. There haven’t been any significant developments in this sense around here, at least not as far as I know. Each company around here has a Wagers’ Rep of sorts and they gather with other such Reps and discuss wage related stuff, but it’s nowhere near as elaborate as a Union, nor has it ever felt significant in any relevant way.
Most people have kinda’… given up on this country. Everyone scrambles to eject themselves abroad as soon as humanly possible. Can’t say I blame’em.
Are you aware that Romanian IT sector has the highest rate of unionization of any IT sector in the world? SITT is a case study studied all over the world. https://transform-network.net/blog/interview/the-romanian-it-workers-labour-union-showed-that-everyone-can/
It might not be the sexiest, most modern radical union, but it is a case of success with numbers to show. Maybe you can start from there.
Huh, I honestly had no idea, thank you! I’ll certainly start looking into it! Perfect timing, too, quit my job so I could focus on trying to get into stuff like this!
I sure hope the fact that it isn’t common knowledge (at least not among most of the people with whom I’ve worked during the past decade) is down to them being effective and not it being a hopeless cause, though… Speaking from personal experience (and I leave room for doubt because I have notoriously bad luck in general), it sure didn’t feel all that grand working in this industry. Not about the work in itself, but the practices…
Pretty much anywhere outside the USA, the communication of tech workers unionizing is pretty much absent and expecially news about it. This is a big deal, but it doesn’t say much about the actual penetration of unions in a given sector. It’s a complex topic, but I explain it with the fact that the topic is pretty much uninteresting, unless it’s a well-known brand is unionizing. Since most famous tech companies are American, there’s enough mass of news there to actually push media outlets to cover news.
In Italy, where there are very few “well-known” IT companies, the topic is completely absent, to the point where IT union organizers from a city don’t know about big wins by other IT unions organizers from another city. Nonetheless the narrative is not the thing, and there can be big impacts that become visible to the general public only after sociological studies.
So, long-story short, the fact you never heard about SITT doesn’t say much about its effectiveness, just about their ability to communicate.
True, but for those of us laid off in the past couple years and spent months looking for a new job, I’m not really super eager to stick my head out and rock the boat.
This was the hardest job search I’ve had to do, even as far as multiple rounds of leetcode, and kind of reminds me of how annoying finding my first dev job as a recent grad. Not really looking to do that again any time soon lol
Though if my company tries to RTO us, it’ll be a constructive dismissal for me (I spoke with a lawyer already before) and then I’ll have to job search again anyway.
We probably won’t get RTO’d though, we’ve been doing WFH for years here thankfully.
Meanwhile Accenture has 1400:1 CEO-to-worker pay ratio.
Yeah, then they lose all their best and brightest who are disappearing off to work on their own things.
All these idiot C-suite trash will wind up holding is a bag of yesterday’s technology, a mass of obsolete infrastructure and a bunch of brands they’ve helped destroy.
It is by design. Pool a bunch of money, buy companies to bleed them dry. Wait for new companies to take their place, rinse and repeat.
Eh… You can run a company without the best or brightest nowadays. Mediocrity gets the job done, mostly.
It’s always been that way. Otherwise General Motors wouldn’t exist. Neither would Microsoft.
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Do you think every company out there is stacked with the best and brightest? By definition, only a minority of employees can be considered that. Many companies run just fine on mediocrity, it all depends on how they intend to make money. Mediocrity can in many cases be an advantage for a company, if that allows one to set aside any shred of integrity at a shot of accomplishment and praise from executing on the many bullshit and unethical things many corproations bring in cash from.
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Stacked, no. But they have several people who are best and brightest.
Every company has this you think?
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So a lot of times those C-levels will be pretty average people eh?
The best and brightest in an area for the pay the companies are willing to pay is not the same as the best and brightest (you are adding a lot of constraints). A lot of times those people will be quite average (or mediocre). By definition, most people are average or close to it. If a company is not willing to pay to attract and retain the actual best and brightest (as many will not), they are left with mediocrity. The companies will often still be able to make a lot of money, because companies in general do not need the best and brightest just to avoid failure and bankruptcy.
Will once innovative companies become worse companies and provide worse services/products? Absolutely. Will they be left behind by better companies who do attract the best and brightest? Sometimes, depending on the industry and the depths of the moats they have built and the number of aligators guarding their monopolies (e.g. regulatory capture and other monopolistic behavior). Will they go bankrupt? Sometimes, but in general it takes more than to just settle into a mediocrity.
Ever heard of the term “Code-Monkeys” ?
It’s generally used to refer to programmers by people who have no idea of what programming entails.
Yup & honestly that should be changed
Lmao what?
Thousands of companies are out there doing just fine. Maybe 10% if people can be the best and brightest. It’s impossible for every company to have them.
The math just doesn’t math.
Average performers are just fine.
Ah I see what you’re saying. Yes I agree, with the caveat that innovation requires the best and brightest.
H1Bs are fine with coming into the office and won’t put up a fight with any corporate policy….
Yup every time I see H1B I replace it in my head with tech slave. They’re paid, but the deck is so stacked against them they effectively cannot refuse anything. ANYTHING. A well informed H1B worker might score a chance at permanent residency for some of the abuse they suffer. But mostly it’s just years of abuse with very strict rules to get their residency.
That’s just market forces, then. I suggest domestic workers adapt or retrain in a new industry.
Or they could unionize and lobby their government… That’s how democratic processes work on civilized countries
Oh, yeah you’re absolutely right. I just kind of left the best option out because it is the topic of the OP. Thanks for mentioning it!
Unions lobbying the current US government isn’t going to happen. Nothing short of a general strike will make them listen.
I suggest they unionize, demand seats on the board for their unions, and crush excessive C-level compensation. Moving on just moves the exploitation to a new kind of job.
Look, I’m kind of an outsider on this conversation because until we get a DaVinci for mechanical work, I’m never going to be WFH, but there’s something interesting I’ve noted with all my programmer friends.
The industrial world, that’s where unions are, they’re getting pulled out but that’s the places unions live. The people working in stores are starting to push hard on unions. My industry, biomed, hasn’t really gotten unions off the ground, but it’s rumbling. We’re a small industry that’s so short on people it’s just easier to move jobs than start a union, but we’re a mix of tech and industrial backgrounds. But the programming tech backgrounds, at least here in the midwest, is apparently so anti-union I don’t know how it’d get off the ground from what I’m hearing from my friends. Their coworkers who are mad about RTO will immediately turn around and say the corporate lines about unions. I’m honestly kinda baffled and hope your industry gets it figured out.
They’re just trying to scare the Americans out of the office so they can replace them with cheaper H1Bs who won’t talk back.
Unions will not increase the average wage. They will only even-out wages across the economy. Which means they will increase the lowest wage.
Unions will not solve the social problems in the US. UBI (Universal Basic Income) will solve them.
You need to advocate for UBI. There is no good reason not to have it.
UBI doesn’t cost the economy anything. That’s no “donating money to poor people”. Poor people will immediately spend it on food and housing/apartmenting, which means the money stays (better yet, flows) within the local economy.
The reason the US doesn’t have UBI yet isn’t because it isn’t affordable. It is. The reason UBI wasn’t introduced so far yet is because they wanted to scare the people into working harder. It’s for psychological reasons, not for real (financial/technical) reasons.
If there is 1 homeless person sitting by the street, people will say “they’re lazy and deserve this because they didn’t work hard. So i need to work harder”. If there’s 100 homeless people sitting by the street, people start to realize it’s not their fault and the system is at fault; and will demand drastic dramatic changes. UBI is an effective way to prevent that. UBI isn’t a choice - it’s a necessity for a stable society.
UBI without worker’s power and strong unions will just become a leash in the hands of the state to enforce social compliance. Unions and UBIs are not mutually exclusive. Also without strong unions, who do you think will advocate for UBIs? Neo-nazi, billionaires, and other people that want to give the bare minimum to defend the status quo from its collapse. The first to talk about UBI in the USA was Nixon, and it’s not by chance. The élites see the UBI as yet another tool to maintain the status quo and their privilege, giving scraps to the rest and subduing the state to make their own interest. UBI is a technical tool and therefore, by itself, it doesn’t solve social problems or shifts power. The shift of power should happen contextually to the introduction of the UBI, otherwise, it will just turn into yet another way to oppress the working class.
I see your point. I think i understand the individual arguments and just for the sake of clarity i would like to list them again:
- UBI would make the people dependent on government approval.
I think this depends on whether it’s properly implemented. If it’s properly implemented, it’s Universal and does therefore not depend on social compliance.
- UBI is a technical tool and therefore, by itself, it doesn’t solve social problems
I disagree. Giving resources to people solves problems, including housing, education, and medical care. Maybe the details of where and how to allocate the resources need more elaboration.
Maybe this is a misunderstanding because what i mean by UBI is “give resources to the people that they can use for everyday life without expecting something in return”. In so far, public schooling or public healthcare are also a form of UBI for me.
- Neo-nazi, billionaires, and other people that want to give the bare minimum to defend the status quo from its collapse.
Actually, I would like to keep the system from collapsing. If it does collapse, it will cause devastating harm on not only you, but all of society, probably turning it into ruins and a state-beyond-return.
- The shift of power should happen contextually to the introduction of the UBI
Realistically, that’s not gonna happen. There’s not gonna be a “worker’s revolution” in the US. The rich take it all, leaving nothing for the poor. Dreams of a “revolution” are fairytales people tell themselves at night to sleep easier. If you really want change and to improve lifes, advocate for UBI. It really helps.
I think this depends on whether it’s properly implemented. If it’s properly implemented, it’s Universal and does therefore not depend on social compliance.
No system willingly surrender its power. Any implementation of UBI in the current power structure will just reproduce the current power structure.
I disagree. Giving resources to people solves problems, including housing, education, and medical care. Maybe the details of where and how to allocate the resources need more elaboration.
If this happens in a way that benefit people, it means the power shift already happened and the UBI is just the consequence of it, not the cause. The hard problem is the power shift, not the details of the UBI, that are reduced to a technical problem. Technical solutions follow from a rearrangement of society, not the other way around, despite what hackerinos and techbros believe.
Actually, I would like to keep the system from collapsing. If it does collapse, it will cause devastating harm on not only you, but all of society, probably turning it into ruins and a state-beyond-return.
The current system based on consumption, growth, and the industrial/post-industrial productive mode is unsustainable. It’s going to collapse regardless of UBI. Conservatives and reactionaries are so supportive of UBI exactly because it has the power to extend the “business as usual” a little longer, until bigger factors like soil exhaustion, climate collapse, biosphere collapse, oil EROI and other major factors will eventually make our mode of living unfeasible. That’s not an argument against UBI per se, but we should be wary of how it can be appropriated to make our life worse and this is a very concrete consequence. UBI as a starting step (good) vs UBI as a pacifier (bad).
Realistically, that’s not gonna happen. There’s not gonna be a “worker’s revolution” in the US. The rich take it all, leaving nothing for the poor. Dreams of a “revolution” are fairytales people tell themselves at night to sleep easier. If you really want change and to improve lifes, advocate for UBI. It really helps.
I’m not a revolutionary. I don’t believe revolutions have ever happened. I also don’t believe a major political change is going to happen in fascist USA anytime soon, unless Trump really fucks up his game. Sometimes there are just no good moves.
“The hand that lifts you up holds you down.” Yeah, that’s a risk.
But if it’s unconditional, it can be beneficial for many people, especially those in music and the arts, caregivers, and others who contribute to the economy now without receiving much in the way of compensation.
Unions will not increase the average wage.
Unions (and redistributive policies) can increase median, not just mean wages. That’s the figure that matters to the “average” (50th-percentile) worker. The trillions of dollars hoarded by billionaires do nobody any good but the billionaires themselves.
I thought they did not need a union because daddy google was a GOAT
Maybe up until they stopped having “don’t be evil” as their company motto?
