On our town’s social media page, someone posted that they witnessed an employee working the drive up window “coughing their lungs out” and heard her tell co-workers that she was not quite over a bad stomach bug, and felt awful. The numerous posts that followed were outraged over this and several added that they see this “all too often”. Someone did contact the business and shortly after, the original post was taken down by the author with the explanation that the company was taking measures to correct things and asked that the post be taken down.
How dare these people come to work sick and cough all over my coffee and breakfast sandwich! Why, I could get seriously ill. This company needs to correct this issue!
I wanted to comment on the post, but again, it was taken down before I could ask all these outraged suburban homeowners in a well to do town the following questions:
- What sort of health insurance do you think this company provides for its employees?
- Assuming there is some sort of insurance, how high are the deductibles and co-pays and so forth?
- How much per hour do you think this person makes, and how much of that can they afford to spend on the aforementioned?
- How many paid sick days do you think this person is allowed each year?
I will assume that the replies would be that theses are low skilled jobs, meant for high school kids, and these people need to better themselves if they want a job that allows for good medical care and paid sick leave..
If that’s the case, how can any of them demand a coffee and breakfast sandwich be served by a healthy and well employee? How much are they willing to spend to not get sick themselves?
Won’t have to worry about it in the future, quite shortly actually. Last cruise I was on had robotic bartenders, very efficient, well made drinks. Zume robotic pizza makers will take humans out of the equation, soon adapted to other foods. Papa Johns has remote controlled warming ovens which hold the pizza you ordered on-line with your phone, paid for with your phone, and when you walk in the store you wave your phone at the oven door, it opens, you leave with your pizza.
Kiosks are replacing clerks all over and are often easier to deal with than workers who feel they’re underpaid.
Then we have more worries. Last time I noticed, kiosks do not shop or eat or all the things that make an economy move. Kiosks are not consumers. If you and I own all the kiosks in town to run our businesses and effectively eliminate the 70% of jobs that require a college education, who will our customers be?
Further, with no means to earn a wage, how will the displaced workers survive?
The saying goes, give a man a fish and he lives for a day. Teach a man to fish and he eats for a lifetime…..but if one corporation owns all the ships, processing plants, logistics, and market and automates them all…….who is going to have money to buy fish?
It sounds as though you’re beginning to understand what I’ve been writing here for several years now.
The robots in these kiosks do not need health care, public transportation, sick time, vacation, or wages. Whatever wealth they create will belong to their owners.
This is why we need a mechanism to distribute wealth that does not rely on labor. Once that mechanism is in place, the answer to your final question is “each of us.”
We have plenty of wealth. We create plenty of wealth. What we lack is an equitable and sustainable mechanism for distributing that wealth among us.
No argument from me, never has been on that point. However, when Democrats reach out the working class and keep harping on “education and job skills” as a solution to the inequities in our country, maybe you should as them why they have not understood what you have been writing here for years.
I just started reading “The Value of Everything” by Mariana Mazzucato. In the first chapter she brings up the fact that historically, things were valued at what it cost to make them and we lived in a time that put real value on human labor. She points out that this has changed and we now value something at what “the market” tells us it should be. Markets do not care about sustainable mechanism for distributing that wealth among us. Until we have a political system that does, much less a political party, we’re stuck in a downward spiral.
Please don’t repeat your first paragraph again. Nobody but you has ever claimed that education and job skills are a solution to wealth concentration.
My issue with your second paragraph is that I think it is a non sequitur. Value has always been a function of “the market” for as long as we’ve had economics. In micro-economics, the key principle is “supply and demand”.
The “real value” that was placed on human labor has always been determined by supply and demand. If making more widgets requires more human labor, than an increase in the demand for widgets will drive up the value of that labor.
The impact of automation is that makes the cost of labor be effectively zero. That means that other factors dominate the marginal cost of making more widgets. An increase in the demand for widgets has no measurable effect on the value of the labor required to run the automated factory (the same robot operator sets the dial for 100 or 10,000 widgets per hour).
I agree with you that the market does not care about a sustainable mechanism for distributing wealth. It never has and never will. The market provides a mechanism for creating wealth, pricing widgets, determining how many widgets to produce, and so on. That has always been its role.
What is different is that until automation, there has always been a market for labor. We have, until now, depended on the operation of the labor market to distribute wealth.
The labor market is now irrelevant to most aspects of our consumer economy. That’s why we need to invent a sustainable mechanism for distributing wealth — especially newly created wealth.
I suspect we largely agree about most of this.
I guess we’re at an impasse here. It’s what every Democrat running for office cries out to impress the working class and give them the idea that they can improve their lot in life and increase their share of the economic pie. . Yes, even Bernie Sanders. He was wrong too.
Here we go again, around and around the same rhetorical circle we’ve been running in for years now.
Every real Democrat wants to make education and job skill training available to every American. That has nothing to do with wealth concentration.
Your insistence on this canard is the primary reason I so vigorously argue with you here. You use this canard to oppose each and every proposal for such programs — and then falsely reject the accurate observation that you oppose government support of education.
On this subject, your commentary has more in common with the extreme right than with ANY Democrat.
We agree that wealth concentration is our most important and most urgent issue. We agree that raising taxes on the wealthy is the only way our obscene wealth concentration will be reduced.
I find it striking that on this thread about wealth concentration, a thread where we largely agree, you toss your education hand-grenade.
It leaves me feeling that your desire to bash Democrats — yes, even Bernie Sanders — dominates your desire to actually do anything about wealth concentration.
We HAVE skills, more than most any other state in the nation. We HAVE education, more than any other state in the nation. What we DO NOT have is an economy that is equitably shared by all the citizens of the Commonwealth because they think that it will raise the price of their steak bomb or dry cleaning an level that they do not wish to pay.
You are the one whining about the price of the steak bomb…not me.
Mass is one of the states with the most progressives. Years of control in the legislature. Why don’t you get your candidate for governor to come out with a plan to limit wealth to say 5 to 10 million per person. All the extra money will be spread among those poorer.
Then we’ll see how the people vote.
Progressives do not control the Massachusetts legislature. Not now, not ever.
I hope that our candidate for governor will, in fact, come out loud and strong to:
– Increase the gift and estate tax for estates above a generous ($1-2 M ) threshold
– Dramatically increase the capital gains tax for capital gains in excess of some generous ($1-2M/ year) threshold
– Dramatically increase the personal income tax for joint income in excess of some generous ($500 k- $1 M) threshold.
The extra money should be used to dramatically expand the goods and services that are now in crisis — and that benefit every Massachusetts resident.
I certainly hope that we’ll do that, and I respect my fellow residents enough to hope and perhaps even expect them to cast their vote wisely.
What we are doing now is not sustainable, and the evidence of that is all around us.
Yes I realize the real left, left wingers have never controlled things, but here’s your chance to define yourselves. Go Bernie Sanders-like all-in and see what kind of a reception you get. No way is Charlie Baker losing to a vanilla flavored Democrat, so you might as well. See where you really stand.
Same for Elizabeth Warren going after Trump.
Let’s say Democrats go all in with a candidate in the style of FDR (or Sanders or Warren who are of that sme mold)….are you saying that this country will reject it? As I recall reading about it, FDR was quite popular.
Try it. Many on here say wages are too low except for the wealthy. Recently went to a wedding in Maine. Portland is booming. Talked to electricians, auto repair guys, HVAC, construction, etc. Businesses are booming and they need help. Pays are going up ( ya, ya it’s anecdotal) usually the HVAC guy bids a month or two out, he’s 4 months booked.
Maybe it’s just the blue collar guys doing great but I talked to no one who was unemployed at the wedding (150+) We are not in a depression which is where FDR shone. .
@ Try it: I’m very confident that if the wedding you attended had been in Alabama, Mississippi, Kentucky, Tennessee, West Virginia, western Maryland,large portions of Pennsylvania, and pretty much everywhere else across America you’d have walked away with a very different impression.
There are a few pockets of prosperity among a suffering and declining nation.
It is true that we’re not in a “depression”. That is not because the economy is booming, it is instead because we’ve adjusted our measurements to minimize the impact of the devastating changes that have happened since 1930 and the enormous suffering that results.
Here are some tools to help see under the surface of today’s economic statistics:
1. What portion of households are one paycheck away from poverty?
2. What is the household formation rate among Americans aged 21-30?
3. What is the debt burden, including student debt, of today’s Americans?
4. What is the current wealth distribution, by age, for Americans?
Life may be good for a few HVAC technicians in the vicinity of Portland ME, and I”m glad for that.
Each of the above four indicators reveals the extent of the cancer that is destroying our consumer economy. Americans are working harder with less to show for it. Americans are waiting much longer to start their own lives independent from their parents. Americans are taking on unsustainable debt levels — in particular, student loan debt is crushing two entire generations of young people.
The fourth item above is perhaps the most unsettling. For the first time in America’s history, our youngest people are also our least affluent.
Our young people were most susceptible to the GOP lies of the 1980s. The young people of that time are now paying the price for their naivete. America’s eagerness to embrace unrestrained greed as a formula for distributing wealth has caused nearly all that wealth to be concentrated in the hands of a handful of the most wealthy.
The rest of us suffer ourselves, see our children suffer more than us, and our grandchildren suffer more than our children.
I certainly hope we do “try it”, because the result of continuing what we’re doing now will be a literal blood bath.
This is the epitome of white privilege. Not all of us have education. You have it, I have it. Too many of our minority brothers and sisters want to go to college and can’t because they can’t afford to.
Your white privilege is showing.
We agree that the economy sucks. We agree that that taxes should be raised on the wealthy and very wealthy. We agree that the minimum wage should be immediately raised to $15/hour, and I have no problem with raising it $22/hour.
Increases in the minimum wage, like government funded education, are urgently needed.
They won’t solve the wealth concentration issue and they won’t change the economy.
Goodness gracious gentleman. Wages currently are too low, for everyone but the wealthy, regardless of the education or skill level of the person working a shift. Secondly, Tom is correct that as more jobs go away we will be left with even more wealth inequality.
Seems that increasing worker power and increasing the generosity of the safety net-maybe through basic income-maybe through a broad based support for universal health, education, and affordable housing-we can help drive costs down and wages up. It will require taxing the wealthy and corporations a whole lot more than we currently do.
I have never and will never see the idea of increasing workers bargaining power as somehow being mutually exclusive with a more progressive safety net. If anything, they are mutually reinforcing ideas.
Sigh, back to attacking me as a “white guy”….let’s not go down that path again, Tom. This “privileged white guy” is currently, at the age of 63. working in retail for less than $15 an hour. And I am working shoulder with many like me, all different skin tones, men and women alike, all with college degrees and years of experience and skills from past jobs.
I’m fighting for all of them. I’m one of them. Each week, I meet another one. We all went to college, We all have a top notch education. But you want to single out the white males among us and call us privileged.
That dog won’t hunt. Please knock it off.
@ white guy: I attacked your comment, not you.
I’m familiar with your biography as you’ve shared it here. I understand that you believe that you’re fighting for all of your colleagues.
I’m observing that when you write “We HAVE skills, more than most any other state in the nation. We HAVE education, more than any other state in the nation”, you ignore the reality of your minority colleagues. If all of your minority colleagues went to college, then you’re hanging out with a very unrepresentative set of minority men and women in Massachusetts in 2018.
The plain fact is that minority men and women in Massachusetts do NOT all have college degrees. The plain fact is that a significantly higher number of working-class minority men and women lack college degrees in comparison their white counterparts.
I don’t care whether this dog hunts or not. So long as you steadfastly deny the objective reality that is all around us, your attempts to “help” are likely to fall short.
The data is available if you are willing to look at it. Consider, for example, The Neglected College Race Gap: Racial Disparities Among College Completers published in May of this year. From that piece (emphasis mine):
Your attempts to deny the stark racial and gender disparities that are well-documented and pervasive make your commentary specific to white privilege, whether or not you admit that.
Not ‘we‘ John, but you and you alone can’t seem to get passed your own talking points. The very fact you term it a mutual problem is further proof that it is nothing of the kind.
Petr, as a Democrat, do you or do you not agree that a working class citizen in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts with nothing more than a high school diploma, working full time should be able to support a family with their wages?
I’d much rather interact with a human.