this post was submitted on 09 Jul 2023
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Antiwork/Work Reform
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A community for those who want to end work, are curious about ending work, want to get the most out of a work-free life, want more information on anti-work ideas and want personal help with their own jobs/work-related struggles.
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Date Created: June 15, 2023
Date Updated: July 17, 2023
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The Anti-Work Library 📚
Essential Reads
Start here! These are probably the most talked-about essays on the topic.
- The Abolition of Work by Bob Black (1985) | listen
- On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs by David Graeber (2013) | listen
- In Praise of Idleness by Bertrand Russell (1932) | listen
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Have any of you tried to run a business and hire people? It’s extremely hard to make a business profitable. Small business owners (which are the majority of business owners) don’t have infinite money to give their employees.
Yes, I have. And yes, labor is expensive. Running a small business is hard, and not always profitable. You should do it if you are passionate about the work, and can do it better than the big corporations. If you depend on cheap labor for survival, you're going to fail, and you should fail. Your larger competitors can afford to operate on smaller margins by doing larger volume. Beating them on price and margin is a losing battle every time. Exploiting desperate employees is not a business model, it's just opportunism.
If you can't afford to pay the people doing all the actual work then your business is a failure. Don't use people for your own benefits. Those people need to support themselves just as much as you do. If you can't handle the task of making a business profitable while still paying a fair wage maybe you just aren't cutout for this market and should start apply for a job you are suited to.
the cost of labor has gone up, because the worker needs more money to support a home. Companies who complain just don’t want to pay full price. If a drought increases the price of wheat, Kellogg’s still has to pay the higher wheat cost because the price stays fixed (adjusted daily) across a regulated market, labor just lacks the same protections and lobbying that things like wheat, beef and dairy get
Have you tried living today on the wages that people won't accept today?
Have I tried? No, I have not tried. I don’t see much benefit in trying to work at McDonalds.
You can try it even without working at McDonalds or changing your employment at all! You seem pretty smart though so I'll leave that to you to figure out how.
Yeh, I’m also not going to voluntarily refuse money that I earned with my labor so that I can learn about how hard it is to be you.
You also don't need to refuse any money. You're almost there.
I sit in the top 8% of US earners last I checked. It's really not hard to be me. I'm just cognizant of the unfairness of the system.
Exactly why they have trouble finding workers! You are not smarter than these people like you think you are. You are the same
And if they have trouble finding workers they'll be forced to pay more. That’s how markets work.
You realize that it’s the whole point of the post ? That renders your argument that small business is hard irrelevant. People don’t want shitty wages for the same reason you said regarding McDonald’s. So small business owners have to adapt or their business model will just die out.
Most employers might be small business owners, but that doesn't mean at all that they provide the most jobs. One reason why small business owners have such a hard time generating a profit is that big companies undercut prices to destroy smaller local businesses. So we are kinda in the same boat here and shouldn't be at each others throat.
If you can't afford to pay your employees you can't afford to run a business. Try again when you have the savings in place to do things right.
I have, and do. When the labor market started to go sideways, my solution was to fire my employees and rehire them as independent contractors. Now I have no employees, no insurance issues, no payroll issues, no nothing. The savings for me has been great, and this has enabled me to pay them more. They have to deal with their own taxes now, and some HAVE had issues because they’re spending Uncle Sam’s money right when they get it, but they learn to sock it away or make quarterly payments after messing that up once or twice. Pay less, get lower quality help. Period.
They may be getting paid more but what about benefits? Do you still give them vacation time, health insurance, paid holidays? When I was independent, I didn't get any of that and on top of that I had to pay for general liability insurance.
Between all the extra costs, lack of benefits, and paying taxes, I found a new job much more profitable.
Benefits went out the door. We had a modest insurance policy that the employees benefited from, yes, but after the axing here, I just set up a computer with a HEALTHCARE.GOV sign over it and assigned someone to walk everyone through the signup, and almost everyone now has better, cheaper coverage than I could ever provide. That’s one. Two: I switched everyone to a salary, and eliminated excessive work hours that would qualify as ‘overtime’, even though they’re technically contractors now and don’t need to track their time. I judge their work by results, not how long it takes them to do it. I know most people wouldn’t go through all this, but I’m shit nothing if I lose these talented people. I DO NOT assume that i can easily replace them, most managers biggest mistake atm
Don’t you think it’d be smarter for the government to just make it easier for you to run your business rather than forcing you into using loopholes?
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Oof, are you ever in the wrong place.
The answer is most likely no. These threads tend to attract and are made by younger people who are likely struggling and have a bleak outlook on their future.
Unfortunately the answer isn’t “just pay more”. Because it causes further inflation if production doesn’t keep up with demand.
The deeper answer is looking at what is causing everything to be so damn expensive and building policy around it to create a better incentives structure. E.g. as a society, why do we value Influencers and Wall Street traders than teachers, nurses, and farmers?
Why are we powerless against lobbying and controlling our policies?
Why is our government not functional for us and is only two parties?
There’s many more questions that could help solve some of our deeper problems. Until then, even if we increase pay, our quality of life will continue to dwindle.
I’d like to test your theory. So, if I’m correct, you’re saying if I get paid MORE money, my quality of life will go down? That’s an interesting take
The flaw is that YOU aren’t the only one getting more money, YOU can do that by job hopping and getting promotions or improving your marketability through skills.
The issue starts when everyone gets a blanket pay raise across industries and communities for no reason.
Let’s say you live in an apartment building that charges $1000 month because it’s what most people can afford in the community. Now, let’s say everyone got a pay raise and production isn’t keeping up with everyone’s need for housing. Nothing is stopping that apartment from raising rent to accommodate people who have the money to pay $1400 per month. You now are getting paid more, but your quality of life is about the same with your high cost of living expenses.
A deeper question would be, why is production not keeping up?
Well paying more wage as a blanket, tanks the ability for new small businesses to start because it’s riskier and less incentivized for the owners. Why risk your life savings and work a much much harder job when you can make about the same money working a corporate job with much more financial security?
What you end up indirectly incentivizing is the mega corporation that can afford to pay more to their minimum wage workers (which most of them will know how to leverage the government to subsidize their care..like Walmart does today.) These corporations will also be able to swallow up competition who can no longer pay the increased wage and keep afloat. And, you now have disincentivized small businesses as a much riskier bet than a stable job at said mega corporation.
I appreciate your intellectualism, but this theory of yours is based mostly on conjecture. I think if pay raises were met with lowering CEO compensation and bonuses, things might just balance out
No worries, best of luck testing the theory of waiting around for people to pay you more.
lol I pay others well because I believe in people. I run the company
And this is the failure of your theory. The raise is not "for no reason", that's just capitalism apologia talk. it's because being in a community (aka: society) now costs more.
this is the thing that the HAVEs (and their apologists) won’t look at directly in the eye. When you can easily absorb rises in the COL, it doesn’t occur to you that it’s literally killing other people.
The raises in pay should mirror inflation. Period.
Actually, they should more-than-mirror inflation.
See, most people only have one job, so one source of payment. But they have N expenditures: health, food, electricity, transportation.
If inflation increases those general prices 20%, that's 4 (or 5, or 6, or...) 20% increases in cost. Since currently wages are already lower than the cost of living, a raise in pay mirroring inflation would allow it to cover for one of those increases, on average, so the employee now has actually become poorer than before.