While I agree that wages, employee treatment and benefits stand to be much better, Im having trouble understanding the argument. At the end of the day someone needs to do work to get anything
Correct. And if we were paid proportional to the generated value, we would have a lot more middle-class people… working… providing value…
But instead, we work, sometimes one, two, three jobs, and still can’t afford to see a doctor, or do anything besides exist, go to work, pay rent, sleep from exhaustion.
The exchange is for that labour is extremely disproportionate to the value produced, especially in our modern environment of record breaking profits and runaway wealth gaps.
That’s not an inherent trait of the concept of labor though. That’s a direct result of exploitation. The solution isn’t to ban hiring a person for a wage; it’s labor regulation and unions.
The issue isn’t that someone needs to do work, it’s that some people are forced to do more than their share of work so that other people can do less. There’s a class of people who get money without having to lift a finger just for owning stuff (land, residential buildings, companies, etc.). When there are people who get money without having to earn it through work, that means there must be other people elsewhere in the system who are paid less than their work is worth. And there’s not a damn thing they can do about it, because the owner class can simply refuse to pay them more, so the workers’ choice is between being exploited or starving. The workers can’t just go and find some land to claim as their own, it’s all owned already.
There exist people at the top who are obscenely wealthy, despite doing zero work. In contrast, workers who produce everything of value are badly underpaid, entirely due to the fact that all the surplus value goes to the few fabulously wealthy.
The proposal is that of all the unnecessary, overpaid, worthless positions in society, there are none more worthy of elimination across the entire market than CEOs, executives, and shareholders. There is no reason for a scant few to gorge themselves upon all the resources and money. Instead, we ought to make all businesses the equal and collective property of the people who work there, with management positions promoted and removed by worker elections only, with term limits. One worker, one vote.
While I agree that wages, employee treatment and benefits stand to be much better, Im having trouble understanding the argument. At the end of the day someone needs to do work to get anything
Correct. And if we were paid proportional to the generated value, we would have a lot more middle-class people… working… providing value…
But instead, we work, sometimes one, two, three jobs, and still can’t afford to see a doctor, or do anything besides exist, go to work, pay rent, sleep from exhaustion.
This is prison.
The exchange is for that labour is extremely disproportionate to the value produced, especially in our modern environment of record breaking profits and runaway wealth gaps.
That’s not an inherent trait of the concept of labor though. That’s a direct result of exploitation. The solution isn’t to ban hiring a person for a wage; it’s labor regulation and unions.
The issue isn’t that someone needs to do work, it’s that some people are forced to do more than their share of work so that other people can do less. There’s a class of people who get money without having to lift a finger just for owning stuff (land, residential buildings, companies, etc.). When there are people who get money without having to earn it through work, that means there must be other people elsewhere in the system who are paid less than their work is worth. And there’s not a damn thing they can do about it, because the owner class can simply refuse to pay them more, so the workers’ choice is between being exploited or starving. The workers can’t just go and find some land to claim as their own, it’s all owned already.
There exist people at the top who are obscenely wealthy, despite doing zero work. In contrast, workers who produce everything of value are badly underpaid, entirely due to the fact that all the surplus value goes to the few fabulously wealthy.
The proposal is that of all the unnecessary, overpaid, worthless positions in society, there are none more worthy of elimination across the entire market than CEOs, executives, and shareholders. There is no reason for a scant few to gorge themselves upon all the resources and money. Instead, we ought to make all businesses the equal and collective property of the people who work there, with management positions promoted and removed by worker elections only, with term limits. One worker, one vote.