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Corporations set the wage, you apply, and if you tell them you need more money to work there they tell you to get lost*. Job postings receive hundreds, sometimes thousands of applications. Why would they lower their profitability by giving you the wage you set if the next person in the very long line will work just as hard for cheaper?
Like any market, supply and demand does determine price. If you want to be a forest ranger, you’ll be competing against a whole lot of people who like the idea of getting paid to hang out in the forest all day. You’ll get much better pay as a garbage man, since fewer people like the thought of taking that job. But as individuals, we can choose whatever kind of job we want to work, balancing our skills and aptitudes with our personal tastes and how much we value monetary remuneration compared to other measures of job satisfaction. And if you’re clever, you can figure out how to spend all day in the forest and make well over $100k (start a logging company).
Corporations tell their workers what to do and therefore control their workers. Same goes for hours. If I told my boss that I will only work Sundays-Thursdays from now on, I would be fired. That is a form of control.
Depends on the type of work. Personally I don’t care when people work, as long as they show up for meetings and get their jobs done well. But sure, if you’re a gas station attendant then you’d better show up before the start of your shift.
place of employement - Corporations quite literally have been forcing people to return to offices or face dismissal. There are other kinds of this action, but that’s just one example.
If you like remote work, and your manager doesn’t understand that you’re productive working from home, then the job’s a bad match for you and you should find a better match. That’s not anyone having control over the other party; it’s just conflicting values.
type of employement - Corporations are the one who decide if you’re exempt, non-exempt, a contractor, what the job responsibilities are, etc.
I’ve known people to negotiate their status when getting hired. Everything’s on the table in a negotiation. You just need to recognize it as a negotiation, and learn to negotiate well.
hours - If you refuse to work the hours you are told you are fired.
Again, this is very much dependent on the kind of job. Many jobs just require you to get a certain amount of work done.
how money is distributed - At no point does your average worker control this. The higher ups decide this and almost universally decide that the majority should go to them. If businesses were truly democratic, then you’d never see a single company giving a CEO the money for a brand new yacht every year.
You lost me here. First off, we wouldn’t want a business to be democratic any more than we’d want our country to be. A democracy is two wolves and a lamb deciding what to eat for supper. It’s a tragically terrible idea, under almost all circumstances. So no, of course businesses aren’t democratic.
If you’ve ever tried to hire a CEO (and it’s obvious you haven’t), you’d know it’s extremely hard to find someone qualified to do the job well. Again, their compensation is a function of supply and demand. There’s almost zero supply. And if you want to be cheap and hire an inexperienced or second-rate CEO, you’re taking a big risk with the life-blood of the company.
With both of those points established, I’m lost as to your overall point about how money is distributed. You get a paycheck or direct deposit. Some businesses pay cash. A few will pay in bitcoin or other cryptocurrency. You don’t seem to be discussing any of these things, but they’re how money is distributed.
the media (narrative) - Virtually all media companies are owned by the rich, and they do not allow news articles and the like to be against them. For example, the Washington Post is owned by Bezos, and you’ll never see an article from them criticizing Bezos or Amazon.
Yes, well that’s true if we’re only discussing the mass media. Most of the conservative media outlets are tiny operations.
But that’s not evidence that companies seek power over people. It’s just evidence that the personality type of journalists tends to be leftist, and while that’s not true of all journalists, they’ve banded together with like-minded people.
Even in the worst case examples, big tech silencing conservatives, which is a very real problem with examples far too numerous to count (Why do my mailings from Team DeSantis keep going to spam, no matter how many times I click “not spam”?), that’s not corporations trying to control people. It’s just employees with personal political preferences who work alongside like-minded people, and who believe they’re making the world a better place.
Like any market, supply and demand does determine price.
Agreed. And with today’s huge population, the supply is so huge that it depresses everybody’s wages. The internet only makes it worse with how easy it is to apply to hundreds of jobs.
The end result is that the average person has no control over wages.
Personally I don’t care when people work
And that’s you, which is great. But most places aren’t like that and instead control it under threat of termination.
That’s not anyone having control over the other party
I think we have a difference of opinion over what constitutes control.
Everything’s on the table in a negotiation. You just need to recognize it as a negotiation, and learn to negotiate well.
You can’t have negotiation without leverage, and you can’t have leverage when the market is oversupplied.
Many jobs just require you to get a certain amount of work done.
This is pretty much the same issue as above. So I’ll move on.
we wouldn’t want a business to be democratic any more than we’d want our country to be.
You might not want our country to be democratic, but the vast majority of people do.
A democracy is two wolves and a lamb deciding what to eat for supper.
A democracy is the way in which the social contract is maintained. The alternative is the wolves just slaughtering the lambs. In reality, there are 10 lambs for every one wolf.
it’s extremely hard to find someone qualified to do the job well
That’s because today’s corporations are bloated. If everything was small to medium business it wouldn’t be a problem.
I’m lost as to your overall point about how money is distributed.
I’m talking about the percentage cut of what each person gets, and how CEOs get overpaid.
Why do my mailings from Team DeSantis keep going to spam, no matter how many times I click “not spam”?)
As somebody who works in tech, I can tell you the answer is likely just that they send our so many emails that it trigger’s your email host’s spam filters. It’s often a case of quantity instead of content. Either that or a really stupid bug. The whole field of tech is littered with them.
Reply to “built a system”, part 2 of 2:
Like any market, supply and demand does determine price. If you want to be a forest ranger, you’ll be competing against a whole lot of people who like the idea of getting paid to hang out in the forest all day. You’ll get much better pay as a garbage man, since fewer people like the thought of taking that job. But as individuals, we can choose whatever kind of job we want to work, balancing our skills and aptitudes with our personal tastes and how much we value monetary remuneration compared to other measures of job satisfaction. And if you’re clever, you can figure out how to spend all day in the forest and make well over $100k (start a logging company).
Depends on the type of work. Personally I don’t care when people work, as long as they show up for meetings and get their jobs done well. But sure, if you’re a gas station attendant then you’d better show up before the start of your shift.
If you like remote work, and your manager doesn’t understand that you’re productive working from home, then the job’s a bad match for you and you should find a better match. That’s not anyone having control over the other party; it’s just conflicting values.
I’ve known people to negotiate their status when getting hired. Everything’s on the table in a negotiation. You just need to recognize it as a negotiation, and learn to negotiate well.
Again, this is very much dependent on the kind of job. Many jobs just require you to get a certain amount of work done.
You lost me here. First off, we wouldn’t want a business to be democratic any more than we’d want our country to be. A democracy is two wolves and a lamb deciding what to eat for supper. It’s a tragically terrible idea, under almost all circumstances. So no, of course businesses aren’t democratic.
If you’ve ever tried to hire a CEO (and it’s obvious you haven’t), you’d know it’s extremely hard to find someone qualified to do the job well. Again, their compensation is a function of supply and demand. There’s almost zero supply. And if you want to be cheap and hire an inexperienced or second-rate CEO, you’re taking a big risk with the life-blood of the company.
With both of those points established, I’m lost as to your overall point about how money is distributed. You get a paycheck or direct deposit. Some businesses pay cash. A few will pay in bitcoin or other cryptocurrency. You don’t seem to be discussing any of these things, but they’re how money is distributed.
Yes, well that’s true if we’re only discussing the mass media. Most of the conservative media outlets are tiny operations.
But that’s not evidence that companies seek power over people. It’s just evidence that the personality type of journalists tends to be leftist, and while that’s not true of all journalists, they’ve banded together with like-minded people.
Even in the worst case examples, big tech silencing conservatives, which is a very real problem with examples far too numerous to count (Why do my mailings from Team DeSantis keep going to spam, no matter how many times I click “not spam”?), that’s not corporations trying to control people. It’s just employees with personal political preferences who work alongside like-minded people, and who believe they’re making the world a better place.
Agreed. And with today’s huge population, the supply is so huge that it depresses everybody’s wages. The internet only makes it worse with how easy it is to apply to hundreds of jobs.
The end result is that the average person has no control over wages.
And that’s you, which is great. But most places aren’t like that and instead control it under threat of termination.
I think we have a difference of opinion over what constitutes control.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/control
I’m more or less using definition 1a
You can’t have negotiation without leverage, and you can’t have leverage when the market is oversupplied.
This is pretty much the same issue as above. So I’ll move on.
You might not want our country to be democratic, but the vast majority of people do.
A democracy is the way in which the social contract is maintained. The alternative is the wolves just slaughtering the lambs. In reality, there are 10 lambs for every one wolf.
That’s because today’s corporations are bloated. If everything was small to medium business it wouldn’t be a problem.
I’m talking about the percentage cut of what each person gets, and how CEOs get overpaid.
https://www.epi.org/publication/ceo-pay-in-2020/
It absolutely is. If you control what media people consume, you control what they think, and that is power.
Here is an example of the Sinclair stations using that power:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZggCipbiHwE
I’ll leave you with this:
https://www.npr.org/2020/10/05/918520692/facebook-keeps-data-secret-letting-conservative-bias-claims-persist
As somebody who works in tech, I can tell you the answer is likely just that they send our so many emails that it trigger’s your email host’s spam filters. It’s often a case of quantity instead of content. Either that or a really stupid bug. The whole field of tech is littered with them.