> @employers of HN
That sounds all nice but why would they do that when they can find people who accept to work longer for less?
That sounds all nice but why would they do that when they can find people who accept to work longer for less?
UNIONS
The nefarious angle of the work culture myth is that it perpetuates by our own hands, or rather, it is supposed to. Anyone who speaks out against it is a "unionist commie" or "lazy". It is self-reenforcing, where one group of workers is scared of losing their jobs so they attack the ones who want to unionize for better conditions.
FEMINISM
There's a similar analogy in feminism, where women who have internalized misogyny actively work to make sure other women don't try to upset the status quo in the name of liberation. It is why you sometimes read about women tearing each other apart because one might chose to not shave her legs or armpits, or wear makeup or heels to work: why should THEY be free of oppression when I'M NOT. Self-policing is very effective for the upper classes to retain control.
RACISM
It goes even further. Read "The Invention of the White Race". The idea of pitting poor white people against poor black people wasn't intentional: the hierarchy was constructed because wealthy land owners needed help policing their slaves, so they created the notion of white / black superiority which led to former white slaves earning their freedom becoming slave masters. (I'm simplifying, but that's the gist.)
Self-policing is highly effective way for those in power to leverage fear and keep the oppressed classes at war with each other and not the people exploiting them. Your comment is spreading that fear.
It's the same reason why most of the chocolate sold isn't fair trade and there's often modern slavery produced beans in mainstream products.
Calls for voluntary improvement are great, and may be heeded sometimes, but aren't uniformly reliable when there is no effective legal requirement and financial incentives point the other way.
If this isn't a defense then what is the point of adding this?
We are aware it's par for the course. But "controlling costs" doesn't necessarily mean "paying the absolute minimum of what the market will bear." That thinking may as well belong to a cartoon negligent fool, one who ignores the impacts of their actions simply because those impacts are not immediately obvious to them.
The reality is that businesses don't just pay people because they need the money to support themselves. They don't see underpaying employees as a "problem", not necessarily at least.
So they're not carefully accounting for their employees personal needs so they can provide sufficient pay. That's probably not going to change, at least not much. There's other things that can change.
OP: > @employers of HN: Compare your wages with the cost of living in the location you expect your employers to be. Ensure that their rent plus fixed expenses is at most a third of their wage, and ensure that they need to work at most 40 hours a week to earn that. If you do not meet that standard, you are underpaying your employees
> That sounds all nice but why would they do that when they can find people who accept to work longer for less?
> Because not everyone thinks like Gordon Gecko.
Simply reducing the players to cartoon characters that think greed is good doesn't help the problem. I'm not defending our current system, I think that we need to change policies, tax incentives, minimum wage, and real estate policy. I'm also wary of wealth disparity among management and executives, but am even more pessimistic there.
I don't think expecting corporations to be altruistic or else calling them villains, fools ect. is the answer. At the end of the day they're concerned that they will get out competed, or about their responsibility to shareholders, and that's how budgets get set. Saying "come on, have a heart" doesn't help.