Did they forget? Or did the workers? Maybe everyone forgot. Maybe workers forgot that to gain those agreements and gain those concessions it took suffering, blood, hard work. People took personal risk to try and gain what they wanted instead of making calls for others to fix it for them. It was a long and brutal struggle to collective bargaining that saw many fired, in jail, beaten, killed- not just the rich, but the workers who were risking it all because they truly had it so bad, that it was worth it. So then, where are the stoppages, the sabotage, the strikes? To gain something means to risk something, and the more people have to lose, the more they will risk. It would be nice if companies would just listen while we are on the way there but it hasn’t booked over yet- but things don’t change until people act, and people don’t act until they feel they have more to gain than they do to lose.
For fucks sake find another fucking job if it's so bad. You're not forced to work anywhere and if a job or boss is so terrible people don't work for him. Things change or he goes out of business. If he has plenty of employees it's obviously not so bad and you're just a whiney little bitch. Get over yourself. The world doesn't owe you a fucking thing!
This is something I hear often. I think it’s sweet and cute that some people still think this way. It’s a wonderful small town mentality and it would be very nice if we could all live in a world where this was true. Sadly, as you travel with eyes open to other places, you may see that everywhere isn’t like that. Sometimes, it’s not feasible or even possible to just “find another job.” The idea that “plenty of people aren’t complaining so maybe you’re the problem” is an interesting one. I believe that not too many people were complaining in the USSR openly either, and yet when it fell it sure seemed a lot of people were very happy. So maybe “not complaining” isn’t a good metric for happiness- maybe it can equally be a metric for a feeling of powerlessness? It is the nail that sticks up that gets hammered isn’t it? It’s harder to hammer any one nail when they are all standing up though. So while some people do moan, some people take it too far, and unions maybe aren’t the best answer-
I can only speak for the US. But here, with presumably very few exceptions, there is a better way. Usually the thing that needs to change is the aditude of the person working.
Matthewg, most people live their whole lives as a victim to the world around them. The truly happy people figure out that the key to happiness has nothing to do with identifying some of the endless injustices in the world so that you can tell them to as many people who will listen about them
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Happiness comes from self improvement, achievement, and helping people. So if living a rewarding pleasurefull life means nothing to people, by all means give up all of your power and continue doing the same things you've always done. Do it untill you feel bad enough to complain to the biggest microphone you can get your hands on.
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Or you can take your power back, look for the opportunity (that i all but guarantee is there if you live in the states) and go improve your own life.
What you say is not false, but it also isn’t really true. If you’re treated badly in a relationship, would you not complain? About your parents, your romantic partner, your landlord, your siblings or friends? If someone did complain, would you respond: “then shut up and end that relationship. Find a new one, move if you have to,” or would you maybe agree that their relationship shouldn’t treat them that way? What if they left, each time starting over anew, and each time being treated the same, is the problem with them, or the world? I suppose it depends on how many people are complaining or feeling the same doesn’t it? Now-if you feel a person has acted morally wrong, would you stay silent, just move on, or might you tell others so they can decide and if it’s agreed, action can be taken to remedy it, or they can hopefully avoid being put in the situation you are in? What you speak of is survivalism. In the end, we all must do whatever we feel necessary to survive....
in the extreme, morals are no longer a consideration. If we must, you eat the guy next to you or they eat you, and whoever will do what they need to, no matter how hard, how repulsive, they get to live on. But who says we have to live like that? We make society. We define the way we live within it. “The natural order” “Darwinism” we steeped away from those. The natural order doesn’t have police, climate control, stock markets and airplanes. We are carving out the world we want to live in, and as humans “the way things are” isn’t a huge concern, we work to change them so things are the way we want them to be. We don’t have to just survive, just take what we can get, or fight for everything- if we decide it shouldn’t be that way. Personally, I’d rather live in a world where people didn’t need to do whatever necessary to survive in daily life. Fridges, grocery stores, so much has been devoted to making survival a simple thing. If you’re productive in society, why shouldn’t that be enough?
You'll get no argument from me that a utopian world where everyone contributes as much as they can in whatever field they want and it leads to 100% happiness and 0% conflict is the ideal way of life.
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But the fundamental problem is that this utopian world cannot allow for true freedom. True freedom means that you have to have the free will to be able to both seek whatever makes you happy AND the freedom to make mistakes.
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ANY attempt at eliminating all lifestyle inequality, or completely removing all things that might make people feel sad or offended is a world of zombies. There are multiple examples in world history of attempts to remove all of the bad in a society and they ALL end up with the freedoms of the masses being slowly removed until they have to stand up and overthrow the people in power. It has literally always started with the masses believing that this is what they want, then the people in power always grow full to the brim with entitlement, and eventually revolt.
In each case, the "leaders" believe the reason it's never worked is that their predecessors weren't as smart as they are, or that they lacked the tools or means.
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The only society is one where the people have the freedom to both make a better life, and make mistakes.
Freedom is important to consider, an as you say, the level of control and homogeneousness required for any utopia we can picture would result in at best a bland world, at worst a distopian totalitarianism. However- there’s no mechanism that makes it so that providing some basic assurances of life results in facism. the idea of absolute freedom has been rejected by 99.9% of people. We aren’t free to murder, to take slates. We identify those feeedoms that extend beyond simply a matter of opinion about “being a jerk” to those that undermine what we define as human rights. The quality of basic human rights has increased dramatically in just the past centuries. What we consider a luxury versus what simply should be available to any person, and as technology improves we should continue to expand that definition, the scope, and depth.
True freedom only exists in anarchy, and where there is true freedom- there are no laws to protect the weak from those who would prey on them. That is the limit of freedom. The place we have decided one should not have freedom- the freedom to impose will, to take or away freedom from others, to restrict the freedom of another one sidedly or take advantage of those most unable to oppose that. We as a society take a dim view of bullies and do not wish to allow others to bully people. So true freedom doesn’t exist here humans exist, only the maximum freedoms which can coexist for the greatest and most varied groups of people.
I agree. But we're getting off track.
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Guest, a few posts ago you asked if i would complain if my relationship, job, parents, etc. were bad. To answer you honesty, i would have to admit that i probably would, at least a little. But i shouldn't. The healthy thing to do is communicate and try to come to an understanding on what a win-win looks like. If i were the factory workers, i would do exactly that with my boss. If the boss and i cant come to terms i would absolutely leave in hopes of a better opportunity. Maybe i'd find a better opportunity or maybe i'd find that what i had at the factory is the best opportunity out there for me. And then i should be grateful that the owner has shouldered the all the risk of owning/starting a company and become appreciative of their willingness to give me money in exchange for my talents, time, and or effort.
Well, that’s certainly a healthy outlook- and a good reason why analogies aren’t the best tools beyond superficial details. You’re argument is sound in principal. I myself am often upset by people’s attitudes towards a job. You signed a contract saying you agreed that your labor was worth a certain amount, why sign it otherwise? But there is a line where that isn’t the case, where you are essentially under duress. In an industry there are rarely get outsiders. There are formulas for success. Once in awhile a new entry will come with a formula that suits the times and shakes things up, but before long... their competitors who remain successful at that level will mimic the same formula- and repeat. It happened with the department store, the chain retail store, the so called “big box retailer,” and then the online retailer. So by and large, whatever industry you are in, the most successful, most prevalent and available jobs will have differences but largely be the same outside the people.
So with that, we look at the unskilled, I’m experienced, and uneducated, they NEED work, so they have no choice than to work for who will hire them, and not a lot of jobs pay $50-100k a year for high school or junior college grads with no experience or skills, and those jobs certainly aren’t everywhere. There certainly aren’t enough for everyone or else why would people complain and not just work there? You can say: “should get a skill...” but what do they do in the meantime? How do they pay their bills and have the time and money to pursue and education, and have a life of some sort? They should be able to have a life right? And what if you agreed to that contract but your employer wasn’t honest? What if they based your salary on 40 hours a week but work you 60+ regularly? What if they promised other things they don’t deliver? What then?
If we assume it takes time to settle in to a job, prove yourself, take on more responsibility, and get promotions and raises, what, 3-5 years for any real appreciable advancement? How many jobs can you donate 3-5 years of just to find out you need to go start all over because you won’t be able to make a wage there after all? How many can you? We have laws and rules about the basic standards a human should be treated as far as work responsibility and rewards. Doesn’t it seem simpler, more prudent even, to require the company take responsibility for its employees than to have employees be responsible for how an employer behaves? If we want to make employees responsible for doing honest work and looking out for the companies interests, shouldn’t the company be responsible to return that investment by looking out for its employees? The employees have said that they do not feel this is the case, and companies have responded that they are disposable. How can you have a healthy relationship?
Are you saying that the employer should absorb that 3-5 years of low quality employees?
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I get that life is hard, that growth is difficult and that none of it is fair. But why should the difficult parts of some peoples lives be transferred to someone else's just because they took the risk to step up and start a company that creates opportunity for others. What you're suggesting sounds like a punishment for the people who create these jobs.
Not sure one of us understands the other. You can’t “absorb” the passage of time. Time passes, then it is gone. It passed at the same rate as it does for the worker and the company. A worker who takes a job and gives it fair effort, and a chance will need to stick around a little while to not just learn the job, but learn how the company treats employees. It’s not fair to start most jobs and then cry about how lame the company is after only a few weeks or months, I think we an both agree on that? But if you’ve busted your butt, been praised and recognized for your good work, and then after a year get a .35 can’t raise along with everyone else even the people who didn’t.... I dated someone who worked at target for years. There cake a point they discovered new hires were bein paid more to start than them or other long term workers who had been told how great they were and less than a dollar off the ones who had been given promotions. They had invested years of hard work and diligence...
to a company that in all ways had said they were good and model workers, only to find out their worth was less to the company than that of new and untested workers. Of course many left for other jobs. But the point is that they had put years in to building something just to find out it was a relative waste. Now, what happens when you do that over and over? What happens when it is endemic to an entire industry? Do you think Walmart, Checkers/Shucks/Oreilly, whoever- is much different? If retail is your career, what are your options? And before we bash retail workers and say they should go to school or get a “better” career, maybe we should consider that retail worker last are necessary to our society. That we all shop at retailers and benefit from their work, be it stocking or helping find things etc. we like to say people like Janitors and fast food workers should “get better jobs” but we don’t need a whole society of MBA’s or engineers. No corporation needs every warehouse worker...
.... to quit the warehouse and become a VP or an analyst. Who would actually ship the product? Yeah- we could replace them all with robots or something, but then we have a bunch of unemployed people and what jobs do we offer? Robot maintenance? Like any field only so many robot engineers are needed, robot salesman. You’ll need floods of people to build and maintain robots though, and like any job at that point it becomes the new low skill, over crowded market where people will say “they should get a better job than robot repair man if they want to complain.” The cycle repeats. We built a system where we need to have these mass deployed, “entry level” jobs, but at the same time where we don’t care about the people who do them and their lives. They do these jobs so we don’t have to, so we can live our lives without the hassles and worries. Companies like target expect the turn over, they are built like meat grinders, so that with 15 minutes training anyone off the street can take....
.... over the job. They know going in- it isn’t the intention of most modern companies to retain employees, it is their intention to use an employee for as long as they can, then discard them for the next employee that will replace them. The employees lose by having unpleasant and low wage work, society loses by having a large percent of people’s labor and overall lives devalued, and we all lose because you end up with employees who aren’t around long enough to really master a position, who often don’t care about the quality of their work or the outcome as they will be uneffected by it for good or bad. People forget the whole reason for minimum wage laws and worker protections. They forget that when we lacked regulation on companies less than 100 years ago that companies would almost consistently put profits above actual lives. Employees would regularly be crippled or killed through work, wages withheld, child labor, was banning these things “punishment” to those paying wages?
Was demanding that some basic standards be established that put a value on human lives a punishment? Is it punishment to ask that we redefine the basic standard of living to match that expected in the 21st century? Today the poorest Americans live better than a serf in medieval England, better than the average American even in the last century. Is that the standard we want to judge life on, or should we say that things have changed a bit since then, and that it isn’t too much to ask for more? If companies are more profitable than ever, bigger than ever, is it too much to demand more from them? Maybe think of it this way: if you can’t afford to pay your workers a living wage, maybe you can’t actually afford to stay in business? We wouldn’t let a company paying billions in executive and corporate salaries withhold wages because they need workers but can’t afford to pay their checks would we? Companies can’t legally use slave labor can they? Why? Because it is wrong. Is it not...
... also wrong when you define the pay of an entire industry, to pay a person less money than you know you could live on yourself? A good friend works for a Swedish company with a rule: the total pay of any executive abbot be more than that of their highest paid position of non executive employee, and each position beyond that must have pay based off those numbers as well. Not a perfect system, but an admirable attempt to ethics. People like to say that capitalism is free from ethics- these people are morons. Capitalism is a system that exists only by human imagination, through humans. Capitalism is no more or less ethical than those who participate in it. It is our decisions as individuals what ethics we want to hold the world to. It comes down to simply wether you feel all the shiny toys of our time are worth someone else’s suffering to you, if you would trade places with the people who are complaining?
Princess is Kellyanne Conway.
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Happiness comes from self improvement, achievement, and helping people. So if living a rewarding pleasurefull life means nothing to people, by all means give up all of your power and continue doing the same things you've always done. Do it untill you feel bad enough to complain to the biggest microphone you can get your hands on.
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Or you can take your power back, look for the opportunity (that i all but guarantee is there if you live in the states) and go improve your own life.
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But the fundamental problem is that this utopian world cannot allow for true freedom. True freedom means that you have to have the free will to be able to both seek whatever makes you happy AND the freedom to make mistakes.
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ANY attempt at eliminating all lifestyle inequality, or completely removing all things that might make people feel sad or offended is a world of zombies. There are multiple examples in world history of attempts to remove all of the bad in a society and they ALL end up with the freedoms of the masses being slowly removed until they have to stand up and overthrow the people in power. It has literally always started with the masses believing that this is what they want, then the people in power always grow full to the brim with entitlement, and eventually revolt.
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The only society is one where the people have the freedom to both make a better life, and make mistakes.
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Guest, a few posts ago you asked if i would complain if my relationship, job, parents, etc. were bad. To answer you honesty, i would have to admit that i probably would, at least a little. But i shouldn't. The healthy thing to do is communicate and try to come to an understanding on what a win-win looks like. If i were the factory workers, i would do exactly that with my boss. If the boss and i cant come to terms i would absolutely leave in hopes of a better opportunity. Maybe i'd find a better opportunity or maybe i'd find that what i had at the factory is the best opportunity out there for me. And then i should be grateful that the owner has shouldered the all the risk of owning/starting a company and become appreciative of their willingness to give me money in exchange for my talents, time, and or effort.
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I get that life is hard, that growth is difficult and that none of it is fair. But why should the difficult parts of some peoples lives be transferred to someone else's just because they took the risk to step up and start a company that creates opportunity for others. What you're suggesting sounds like a punishment for the people who create these jobs.