- cross-posted to:
- unions@sh.itjust.works
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I can’t believe they pay doctors more than dishwashers, what a nasty capitalist scam
/s
Yeah but in 2024 dishwashers don’t need to be hungry. I think this is the point.
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Every fucking time:
It’s a distinction between “on-the-job training will suffice” and “no chance without years of prep.”
No shit anything worth paying a human for involves human skills. But some jobs are open to just about anyone who can put up with it, and some jobs kill people when you try to muscle through on sticktoitiveness. A fast food restaurant can bring some rando up-to-speed in a couple weeks. An ER cannot. The distinction is necessary.
Nitpicking the label misses the point:
All labor deserves a living wage.
It doesn’t fucking matter how difficult or complex a job is. If your business wants people’s time - you had better fucking pay them enough to be there next month. Otherwise, you don’t get to be a business.
Unskilled labour should be replaced by machines and robots.
Since we tax the income of workers we should also tax the economic output of those robots and use that to fund UBI. We shouldn’t give tax breaks to robots.
How would that work in practice? You can say that a whole factory is effectively one single robot, or dozens. Is self checkout a robot, but in this case still employs somrone?
And what’s the difference between a cashier, who operates a checkout line, and a self-checkout attendant, who operates multiple booths at once? The tax law would have to codify that. And any time you codify something like that, you get people designing to optimize for tax law instead of making the best machines possible.
There are supermarkets where you don’t even check out. You bring the scanner with you and leave the store.
What about self service laundry mats? Those exist for ages. Do we need to tax them because they don’t hire people?
I like the idea another user have that you just have normal corporate revenue tax and then if you hire people you get a tax break. But other than that you can’t really tax “robots”
But why male models?
It wouldn’t necessarily be as simple as an income tax but I’m sure we can figure it out. One idea off the top of my head is you could create a VAT that assumes a product is completely created by robots and then companies can deduct a workers salary from that tax. Not saying that’s perfect, just one example off the top of my head.
Service industry is trickier, but you could come up with a minimum wage tax per machine for machines that directly interface with a consumer, so a self checkout robot would be treated like a minimum wage employee or something with the special factor being that the consumer directly interacts with it. The POS industry is already regulated so I think there’s a natural place to target that tax on.
I don’t think it would be simple or easy, but our tax system was designed around economic output of humans and didn’t take robots into account so if we don’t try to make changes to it we’re giving an unfair advantage to robots and punishing humans for being human, which is not a good situation and I don’t think it’s sustainable into the future. Hard or not, it’s a problem I think is critical to be solved for society to function as automation becomes more and more versatile and ubiquitous.
IMO it would be better to fund a UBI with some simpler tax on companies, don’t think it’s actually a good thing for them to end up making people do work that robots could be doing as a way to avoid taxes.
But the opposite is already true today. Companies can make robots do work that people can do as a way to avoid taxes. Adding a tax on robots simply levels the playing field.
What if there was a lightbulb changing robot that cost $30 and lasted ten years? But because they would have to pay taxes on it as if it was a minimum wage employee, its use cannot be justified and an existing employee has to still spend extra time changing lightbulbs. That seems broken to me. Work that doesn’t need to exist shouldn’t.
Robots don’t earn money, there’s nothing to tax.
Sometimes machines just fall short. Machines can automate some types of repetitive tasks, true. But others are tasks that are more difficult to truly automate, like busing tables. Most people can bus tables, but it would be tricky for a machine to do so reliably.
Edit: Oh, well, maybe I spoke too soon about busing tables.
Machines and robots remove unskilled labour and provide skilled labour opportunities instead. Back in the days farmer was just a dirty peasant with a shovel and barely any skills. Today farmer is a highly skilled managerial role.
But some people decide to never get any skills, the society doesn’t need such people.
To a point, but again some things are just really hard to mechanize. I don’t see cashier or janitor disappearing anytime soon. Sure, a single person can clean an area much faster now than a hundred years ago using tools, but something fully automated like the Roomba can barely do a half-ass job on a single floor.
Ever been to an Amazon Fresh shop? Zero staff inside. You just walk in, take what you want and walk out.
Ever ordered groceries from Ocado? They’re fully automated until delivery process.
Hard or not - everything is possible.
I have not visited an Amazon Fresh shop, but from what I’ve heard they’re not doing so great. Maybe it’s just a pause in their inevitable takeover, but their already paltry number has been reduced as of late.
Read chapters 15 and 16 of capital on automation.
Why should I read sick delusions?
Lol you have been taught to be scared of shadows.
Its literally just a book on economics, and a lot of it is providing more solid proofs for earlier theories of Smith and Ricardo
The answer to your question is
“So you don’t say ignorant things like “just replace all unskilled labor with automation””
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How would you know you haven’t read it lmao
This is trying to ride a thin line and I don’t think it hits the mark. Sure, there are skills involved in any labor. But “unskilled” is just shorthand for not having particular requirements that are rare enough that labor gets to charge more for them. It’s not a myth that there are jobs where a large enough group of people can do the job and it pulls down the price you can charge for your labor when you are doing the job.
If anything this is an argument for a higher minimum wage, not a union.
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The myth is that the numbers represent an objective value of a human. That is false. Supply and demand aren’t a myth. They aren’t the only way wages are determined, sure. But try to hire an accredited dentist for minimum wage, you can’t because there aren’t enough of them. That is a supply constraint that increases the prices dentists can charge.
That’s not objective and not even a free market, a good amount of the price is because we have decided a certain group of people set the standard for what constitutes an accredited dentist and they decided on including X amount of schooling that costs a certain amount of money etc. But it is a supply constraint that raises the cost to hire a dentist, there is a supply and demand component in there.
It can lead to morally bad results and be something that needs to be fixed (via, for example, the minimum wage I mentioned or…naming and shaming as you imply to be the fix) while not being a myth. Supply and demand exist.
Surely farming and construction aren’t considered unskilled labor? It looks like the left middle square is at a sewing machine which I also wouldn’t consider unskilled
which is why its a myth, ungrounded in reality
Ok but why does the amazon guy have his dick out?
See a doctor immediately
Supply > demand --> price decrease
Unless you control supply, then you can create artificial scarcity.
There’s also the common way where large corporations kill smaller companies or local businesses by predatory pricing techniques, then when those are under, they absorb the business and hike prices.
As manual labour goes, if your market is controlled by a single entity, then even if there’s large demand for you, you won’t have a chance in getting good conditions.
The same goes if you’re a contractor or a small company where your client controls the market.
