Comment by biztos | Hacker News Reader

Comment by biztos | Hacker News Reader

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Where I’m from (in California) the garbage collection is done by a private company, and it looks like a pretty nice job if you’re physically fit. And it’s not looked down on at all, people there know what hauling their own garbage is like.

Snow removal is very high status and pretty, er, cool because of the big machines involved, and its government work with the pay and benefits you’d expect. Probably only the postmaster is as universally appreciated up there.

I’d happily drive the snowplow if it paid half what a software job pays. The only downside is you can’t really drink in the winter.

Plumbing is very entrepreneurial, especially the emergency “unblock my pipe” kind. That person could easily be making more than you and I.

So while surely there are some jobs that are miserable, many of them connected to factory farming of meat, I don’t think “office job” is automatically enticing to everyone. And there is still plenty of social status in necessary jobs, if done in an actual community.

You're making my point. Today, under a capitalist economy, these undesirable jobs can be made desirable because of privatization or high or stable income that is offered as renumeration. But under a socialist system that simply assigns these jobs to people, "according to society's needs", with no other distinction offered, then you will find few takers.

They're not exactly making your point. Today those incentives are required because individuals are raised to glorify wealth and success. It doesn't stand to reason that a different environment wouldn't lead to different results.

In Japan students are expected to clean their schools. It's not looked down upon; everyone has a shared responsibility for spaces they utilize. Cultivating that kind of environment leads to a cleaner society in general. One could easily imagine rotating janitorial/firefighter/etc shifts for able-bodied citizens the way we expect people to answer jury summons.

There are ways to motivate people beyond the purely economic, even if it runs counter to our upbringing.

> Today those incentives are required because individuals are raised to glorify wealth and success.

Nobody becomes a janitor to become wealthy or successful, so wealth and success are not what motivates people today to become janitors.

> Japan

In the army, we were required to clean our own barracks; the janitorial work wasn't contracted out. Shared spaces were on a rotating shift. It still sucked. Believe me, nobody was volunteering for extra shifts of the shared spaces.

What you're getting wrong is thinking that socialism would assign random jobs to random people, or somethng alike. Instead, a socialist system would probably consist of self-managed work where the benefit would be helping your community and getting to live in such a community where everyone works towards the benefit of the community. The surplus value of the work you do, and the work you need to survive like food production and distribution, would be distributed among the workers, not the owners.

> self-managed work

My argument is that society has some needs that are unfulfillable if you simply expect that ordinary people will pick up the slack, because it's the kind of work that people find distasteful.

Consider when garbage collection worker unions go on strike, and garbage starts to pile up and up because it's no longer being hauled away. Surely people are motivated to solve that problem because having piles of trash everywhere is disgusting. Surely people would be respected by their neighbors for solving the problem. But does anyone lift a finger and say, I'm happy to volunteer my time taking my trash and my neighbors' trash to the dump so that our streets will be clean? Does anyone say, oh I wish I could do that for myself and my neighbors', and the only reason I'm not is because I respect the union's strike?

It's the same thing in companies, by the way. There's no such real thing as self-managed teams. Anywhere that tries, if you inspect the work put out by those teams, you will almost invariably find that people have cut corners on the aspects of the job which they think are boring or stupid or otherwise distasteful. It is incredibly rare to find people who have the integrity to not only have a standard but to hold themselves to that standard.

Is the concept of "you get X more holidays for doing task Y" not a concept under socialism?

No. Fundamentally, in a socialist system your compensation is relative to your need, not to the value of the task at hand, regardless of whether that compensation is cash, vacation days, or something else.

Who decides whether there is need for a receptionist that watches TV all day and occasionally yells at teenagers smoking in the hall? How is such job compensated? How do you measure consequences if such job disappears?

There have been and still are socialist economies. Jobs pay differently and people choose them. Central planning incentivises necessary but unpleasant jobs.

The main feature is that workers collectively run workplaces, municipalities, regions and ultimately the state. The rest of the details are up to said workers to work out among themselves.

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