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New Study Confirms That American Workers Are Getting Ripped Off
- Thread starter ZiprHead
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The OECD has rigged the results before. (Their evaluation of UHC as superior uses a fudge factor of having UHC is 20% of the score.) Fool me twice, shame on me.
Jimmy Higgins
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Yeah, shouldn't it be higher?
steve_bank
Diabetic retinopathy and poor eyesight. Typos ...
The system is free market capitalism. The economy is driven by profit and return on investments, period. Jobs and rising standards of living are side effects. Wages and labor demand vary with supply and demand.
You will have to elaborate on what you mean by ripped off. Of course there are systemic inequities.
What does the typical American worker have today compared to 50 years ago? Computers, multiplr family cars, a motorcycle, wireless devices and so on. The medical technology available today was unheard of in the 50s.
In 1950s buying power middle class was a small house, a car, washer, dryer, black and white TV, and a two week vacation. The variety of goods people can afford today was unthinkable in the 50s. The food 24/7 in supermarkets is staggering in context.
Workers are getting ripped off...yea tea yea. Get out your Castro beret and man the barricades.
You will have to elaborate on what you mean by ripped off. Of course there are systemic inequities.
What does the typical American worker have today compared to 50 years ago? Computers, multiplr family cars, a motorcycle, wireless devices and so on. The medical technology available today was unheard of in the 50s.
In 1950s buying power middle class was a small house, a car, washer, dryer, black and white TV, and a two week vacation. The variety of goods people can afford today was unthinkable in the 50s. The food 24/7 in supermarkets is staggering in context.
Workers are getting ripped off...yea tea yea. Get out your Castro beret and man the barricades.
zorq
Veteran Member
Your argument seems hollow. Identifying a benefit earned as part of a deal doesn't make a deal bad. I have a pack of chewing gum today after painting my whole neighbor's house last week. I guess I can't complain about a bad deal because at least I'm 1 pack of chewing gum richer!
If worker productivity has increased by 500% in X years but worker standard of living has only increased by 100% in the same time that still means workers are being ripped off.
The simple fact that median people have more luxuries today than they did before doesn't affect the fact that they might actually deserve to have quite a bit more under a different (or previous) economic paradigm.
Underseer
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Look at how quickly the various rightists around here rush in to defend the economic elites for screwing over, well, nearly everybody.
It doesn't matter that they're using bad arguments. This is religion for them. We must step on the necks of the regular guy as much as possible so that the elites can benefit as much as possible. Nothing you can say will convince them to do otherwise.
It doesn't matter that they're using bad arguments. This is religion for them. We must step on the necks of the regular guy as much as possible so that the elites can benefit as much as possible. Nothing you can say will convince them to do otherwise.
DBT
Contributor
The system is weighed heavily in favour of the Fat Boys, as lobbied/mplemented by the Fat Boys themselves. There is no defense.
barbos
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Workers usually have nothing to do with productivity increase (engineers, scientists have.)
And increase in productivity does not always mean more product, usually it means less workers and/or different products.
Don2 (Don1 Revised)
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Scientists are getting ripped off.
barbos
Contributor
Could not agree more.
Apparently you misunderstood.
Their report basically said that UHC is better because UHC is better. They just prettied it up with a supposed scoring of the merits of the various systems--but one of the five factors was "fairness"--in effect, whether they had UHC. Either they're too stupid to be playing with statistics in the first place, or they're not honest enough to be playing with them. Either way, don't bother.
Lets look at those numbers because that's pretty close to what I saw at my previous job.
Except for the little detail of whether they were being ripped off. It's not that the workers were working any harder. (If anything, I think the reverse was true as many jobs changed from actually doing work to assisting the machine doing the work.) Rather, that 500% increase was due to automation. Millions of dollars worth of machinery, I think 4 of us on staff whose job was building stuff we couldn't simply buy (And plenty of tools for us, also.) (I'm not sure of the exact number because as a purely software guy I had basically zero contact with the purely machinery guys.)
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Are you saying that coverage that applies to every citizen of a UHC country should not be counted as a good thing?
Harry Bosch
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Yea, a lot of the productivity gain is automation. But American companies have also almost universally adopted lean manufacturing. They are all trying to become more efficient. When owners/managers get together at networking events, that all that we talk about. It's not that workers are working harder or longer hours. Most of the time becoming more efficient makes it easier for workers. We have a very defined process of continuous improvements. Most of the improvements that we fine are discovered by our workers. As we are becoming more efficient we are rewarding our workers and with gain share. However, we are doing this because we must. The world is flat today. My competitors are companies in China, Taiwan, Denmark, Canada, and etc. We always have to find ways to become more efficient.
arkirk
Veteran Member
Some "typical" American workers now have a tent or cardboard box under the freeway on ramp, and a shady place to take a dump. Our economy for working people is virtually in the toilet. Let's stop bullshitting ourselves. We are in a terrible fix and we have last years rotting Holloween pumpkin guiding our Titanic nation on its merry way.
Jimmy Higgins
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It isn’t armageddon, but automation, computers, and algorithms have definitely killed jobs. At work, I can easily do the job of two maybe three people.
To the UHC, being not stuck to a job you hate because of the freedom provided by UHC, yeah that is extremely valuable!
Harry Bosch
Contributor
This is the kind of thinking that gave us Trump.
DBT
Contributor
It is simply the reality of minimum wage employment in the US. An utterly shameful situation for what is supposed to be the richest, most advanced Nation in the World.
zorq
Veteran Member
So you are okay with 4/5 of all the benefits of automation going to padding the CEO's/shareholders' pockets instead of the workers' and there is no way that we could ever call that a bad deal?
Do you think the CEOs are working harder now than they did in a previous era? Guess what. Their job has probably gotten easier with technology too. Making good decisions is easier when you have more pertinent information.
SimpleDon
Veteran Member
I take it that you have a competing study that proves the opposite, that American workers have never had it so good, that the institutions and the very structure of our economy are so biased against the bosses and the shareholders that they are barely getting by. If so please present it and we will read it and be able to judge your objection to this study. Otherwise, we will just have to write this off as another comfortable lie that you have to believe to justify your fantasy of how the economy works.
You are one of many neoliberals here who have a lot of memorized, single sentence responses to anything that challenges your most closely held beliefs. Surprise me and prove me wrong. Present your evidence that this study is flawed.
I find it to be not very damning that the OECD considers it to be important whether or not a nation is trying to provide healthcare to all of their citizens or if they are are trying to run their healthcare as a profit-making business and thereby dramatically increasing medical costs and pricing the poor out of the system as you neoliberals want to do. Your belief that the profit motive can blindly make better healthcare decisions than doctors make is, frankly, quite insane.