Is wage labor kind of like "slaves for rent"?

No, because the laborer gets to negotiate his own price and to decide whether or not he will work for that wage.

That’s pretty much exactly what it is.

what is wage labor?
you mean paying someone to do the heavy lifting?
then no, cuz they can say no
don’t think slaves are allowed to say no

I think slave labor is:

When the person has no choice to work elsewhere, as in a sweat shop, or child labor.

I recently have come to think that fiat currency and fractional reserve banking is slavery by another name.

No. A slave has no rights, outside of those proscribed to him/her by the master. Working for a wage is an entirely voluntary thing. Failing to see this difference is really rather silly and not a good indication of critical thinking.

@TheIowaCynic – do I know you?
you seem familiar.

This is actually a pretty loaded question, in my opinion, that takes into consideration more than people will probably think about, immediately.

As others have already pointed out, it wouldn’t seem to be, because people choose where to work. They don’t have to take the job. That said, are some laborers severely underpaid? Absolutely, but again, they have a choice as to whether or not they work there.

Now… On the other hand: If someone is undereducated and doesn’t have much of a choice to work any kind of job other than hard labor, well… It kind of seems a bit more unfair and a lot more like slavery. If someone never gets the opportunity for better schooling (lack of money, mostly. Unable to qualify for Financial Aid, etc), then you start viewing it a little differently, because they don’t have as much of a choice.

Ultimately, that’s what it boils down to, though: choice. Which is something true slaves don’t have. Thankfully, in a lot of countries these days, people have multiple options to try and fix their current situations.

With most traditional forms of slavery, the ‘owners’ would be sure to care for them enough to keep them able to work. Today, with so many people desperate for jobs and many willing to work for less than most can life off of, employees are often discardable… if they have trouble feeding themselves or their kids, or doing something about a major health problem, either the government’s is supposedly left to provide (not always the case at all), or insurances (which don’t cover nearly as much as they should – if you’re terribly lucky to have a job and then have one with insurance), or a non-profit, or someone other than the employer. If someone needs, say, stable enough housing to avoid the major insecurity > and hence, decreased productivity – they’re more apt to be canned and replaced rather than given support.

@cwilbur Er, where do employees get to negotiate their wages? Not everyone has the privilege of in-demand technical/academic skills which tends to grant more leeway in negotiating price. A significant number of people either work for the price given (which is usually lower without those advantages), or the boss would tell the to ‘find another job’.

If you beat your wage laborers for disobedience, you would get charged for assault.

@resmc: a worker that can potentially choose among several jobs, or choose to have no job, with no further repercussion than not getting paid, is not a slave.

Many people don’t have sufficient skills to negotiate higher wages, or don’t have the sort of skills that mean they can choose from multiple jobs simultaneously. Many people have responsibilities that mean that they must work some job or risk homelessness. Neither of these things makes them slaves.

I think the solution to this is to make education freely available to people of any age. A lot of people have no motivation and no goals in high school, and then don’t go to college, and enter the work force, where they find they have minimal skills. But at that point they have to support themselves, and it’s difficult to pay for post-secondary classes and training while holding down a job, and it’s often impossible to pay the cost of living and the cost of tuition.

But equating people who work for money and slavery is just asinine, because it shows a lack of comprehension of what slavery actually is and a contempt for the freedom that people actually have—even if they can’t use it because of the repercussions.

@Qingu That’s very thankful. However, slavery – even though our view of what that is is, understandably, heavily influenced by historical United States slavery of African Americans – is primarily characterized by exploitation, primarily not allowing people the full fruits of their labor, and often by nor giving them much ability to affect even the most fundamental aspects of that labor (eg. their wages, what work they do, under what conditions).

Wage slavery is not exactly voluntary. It’s either work for less than your work is worth under the conditions determined by your employer, or be basically guaranteed to be even less secure economically. That’s hardly a free contract between individuals.

@cwilbur Also, as i said, slavery can mutate over time. In Rome, slaves could be so powerful they were rivals to senators. Thus they weren’t always powerless. We can’t define slavery as one thing, and even if we set a definition, we can’t just ignore anything that meets major characteristics of it, like systemic economic & even social or politcal exploitation and marginalization (being left out of the dominant culture, and the access to resources those granted to those with certain, at least partly-unearned status).

Of course education is important, but focusing on that can distract from equally vital factors. For instance, there’s been a number of very motivated people born in relative poverty who worked to get a high level of education, followed every possible rule for advancement, and found themselves unable to feed their kids.

An underlying cause of the culture of poverty is lack of employment, or even hope of stable employment. If you grow up surrounded by that, aside from the very substantial way the resulting poverty affects one’s development and education, it seriously affects a whole neighborhood’s motivation. It takes so much effort just to survive, to do well academically is something hard even for the very talented, motivated and lucky born into that. Add in both institutional racism… one example of countless of those i know (not even knowing much about that) is that a study found that employers (of all sorts of jobs, skilled, unskilled, &tc.) were more likely to hire a white male former convict than a black man with no prison record… and the problems caused by that, and then often blamed solely on those who are affected by it (like high rates of single motherhood – has a lot to do with an informally & institutionally racist and classist law enforcement system, and is somewhat negated by the likelihood of such families being supported by extended family) and then the huge disadvantages of being poor, of any color, in this society even back when the economy was strong, and there’s way less freedom in the lives of those we abstractly consider as living free lives.

Also, both poverty today as well as racism… and even how those two are deeply related… make a lot more “sense” (not at all satisfying sense, of course) when viewed as both due to the same root causes of “traditional” US slavery, as heavily shaped by it.

@resmc, yes, Roman slaves could grow powerful. But they could also legally be beaten. You could also beat your slaves according to the Bible.

Slavery has always entailed physical violence. So-called “wage slavery” does not. I think conflating the two really diminishes the torment and humiliation that actual slaves have experienced throughout history.

I think it’s really similar. If I signed a contract to work for someone 40 hours a week 8 hours a day for the rest of my life, I’d basically be a slave. And that only really differs from “regular” wage slavery in that you have job security.

@cwilbur Isn’t “with no further repercussion than not getting paid” the same as “with no further repercussion than starving to death or dying from exposure to the elements?”

@Qingu Agreed. Though, there is still, if perhaps not so much, systemic violence against the economically marginal. Often by those ostensibly there to protect them. Sometimes by employers. Sometimes by another person who’s similarly marginal – but that’s not likely to be treated seriously, except to illustrate how violent and thus somewhat deserving of their poverty that whole group is. Sometimes by thugs hired by their boss, because you asked to be paid enough to feed your kids (which happens, not here that i know of, but certainly in the sorts of places like where most of our stuff, including what i and probably you are currently wearing).

Maybe this isn’t exactly slavery in the exact sense it has existed historically, though wage slavery has been around for a long while. But it’s still bad enough, if different, that this is a direly serious aspect of our society and world today, and isn’t known about and certainly not discussed enough. Of course we need to recognize the severity of each person, each generation of people’s suffering. But i think we’d do a lot more to do dignity to past crimes against any even minimally moral standard to learn from the past yet focus more on current suffering rather than on, as bad as this will sound, doing justice to label given to the horrors inflicted on people long dead.

@DrasticDreamer but do they really have a choice? I mean if they decided not to work at this low-paying job what else would they have? They would probably be homeless and hungry and if they have children, that would leave the kids homeless and hungry too. They can work a piddly job to keep a roof over their kid’s heads or live on the street or in a homeless shelter. What kind of choice is that?

Most of the wage earners Jimenez is referring too (correct me if I am wrong Jimenez) don’t have any kind of medical benefits, sick leave, or vacation time. They are either on the job or they are not being paid. Sure they have the choice to work or not, but as I stated above, what kind of choice is that. These jobs are leaving our country in droves as manufacturing is dying out and employers know that they have a huge work pool full of minimum wage workers who really have no other options. If it wasn’t for our labor laws these people would probably earning about $1.00 an hour. @cwilbur I disagree that people seeking these jobs have a pool of jobs to pick from. In this economy where bachelor’s degree holders are working as bank tellers or in the drive through at McDonalds any job is hard to come by.

When I first looked at this question my reaction was “of course not!” But the more I think about it, the more I think Jimenez asks a very valid question.

@SuperMouse Well… That’s just it. I looked at it from both perspectives because I realize that it’s definitely not as black and white as people make it out to be. I’m torn and I don’t have a solid opinion yet. :-/

@Lefty_the_space_monkey: In practice, yes—but the fact that there are no other direct repercussions other than not getting paid means it’s not even close to slavery.

It’s being able to make a meaningful choice that makes you free. There’s no requirement that all the choices available to you be good ones, or that there be even one good option. You get to choose anything you want, as long as you also live with the consequences.

This is not to say that I think it’s good that workers with few options are stuck with dead-end and miserable jobs, and are open to exploitation by employers as a result. I think it’s a terrible thing—I just don’t think it’s slavery.

And I see the rhetorical ploy in the initial question. We can all be presumed to agree that slavery is bad, and if our erstwhile querent can get us to agree that working for an hourly wage is slavery, he can then “prove” to us that working for an hourly wage is bad.

@SuperMouse: it’s not the variety of options that makes it not slavery. It’s the fact that the only direct consequence for not taking a job is not getting paid by that job. You aren’t being compelled to work except by your own needs for money—slaves are owned, and are compelled to work by their owners.

They do have a choice; they just prefer the job to being homeless and hungry. That is a meaningful choice to make.

And the people working for hourly wages are not just the people in the drive through at McDonald’s; there are people in my office who submit time cards and work for $50/hour, plus benefits. The repairman I called when the dishwasher died worked for $80/hour. These are hourly wages too, and if you’re going to give your assent to Jiminez’s notion that wage labor is slavery, you’re going to have to call those people slaves too.

@Lefty_the_space_monkey and @resmc, again, I think the comparisons you are drawing are spurious.

Have either of you ever been physically beaten? Maybe as a child? Try to imagine your employer physically having you beaten for disobedience or lack of quality in your work. According to the Bible, you could beat your slaves to any extent as long as you didn’t knock out an eye or a tooth or break a bone (or kill them).

Then compare this situation to the so-called “systemic violence” of being forced to flip hamburgers.

Which is to say, give me a break. Things are not perfect today, but they are much better than slavery.

@cwilbur

All slaves can make a choice.

Obey or die.

I don’t see how you can draw a line between dying from being beaten, and dying from being starved to death.

@Qingu

I didn’t say that employers regularly beat employees.

That isn’t a necessary component of slavery.

@Qingu: I’m not sure that the conditions are necessarily much better than slavery at some times in the past, unless the only axis you’re determining things on is freedom.

Roman slaves, for instance, tended to have their physical needs taken care of—food, clothing, shelter. This is not always a given among the modern poor.

@Lefty_the_space_monkey: And I don’t see how you can equate working at a miserable job that pays you peanuts with being the actual owned chattel property of another person, so I guess we’re even.

The question implies all wage labor.
That’s a big line to draw when you’re equating it to slavery.

I had plenty of choices of where to work before taking salaried jobs.
Did some of them feel like forced labor, sure.
Those I quit, built my skills and kept opening up my choices.

Sure, there are definitely people in dire circumstances who don’t have those choices and there are employers that do treat their employees like property.

But to the question as stated, no.

@Qingu. I’m not talking about merely employment, whether of out-of-luck college grads of those with barely a high school education. I’m talking also about sweatshops, which give out wages… and about the lives outside employment for those with no hope of a job above minimum wage, despite barely making ends meet.

There’s mostly exploitation, marginalization and lack of freedom in those… obviously much more in some instances than others. But there’s violence, and even though violence isn’t the definition of slavery (if there is one), giving someone no choice but to die of an early age due to constant stresses we couldn’t even imagine, lack of decent/enough food, shelter and health care, and often the physical labor – and environmental conditions, and social/psychological effects of this all – is pretty damn violent in my book.

In perhaps too much honesty, i’m not interested in continuing to argue about this, for the reasons stated, if you focus on the past violence (which, no one can argue wasn’t horrific in ways most of us can’t even fathom) to the point where you won’t recognize that things haven’t progressed overall as much as we’d all love to believe… if it were true.

@Lefty_the_space_monkey, yes, obedient slaves were not (necessarily) beaten. You are missing the point. Physical violence is absolutely a necessary component of slavery. It is what defines slavery. You keep your slaves in check by threatening them with physical violence.

You cannot beat your employees. You cannot threaten them with violence. In fact, the only people you can threaten with violence or beat are (1) your children and (2) if you happen to be a police officer or prison guard, criminals.

The biggest reason why slavery is so dehumanizing is because it sanctions treating grown adults like children or criminals. Whatever your complaints are about “wage slavery,” they simply do not address this issue. At all.

@cwilbur Because they are equivalent.

“Owned” doesn’t mean anything. The point of slavery is that you do what your master says, and don’t have teh ability to do otherwise.

A wage slave has the same problem. He does what he’s told, and can’t do otherwise. (he can choose a different master, but that’s not a big advantage and is offset by the fact that chattel slavery are advantaged in that their masters have invested in them and therefore have a vested interest in their basic well being at least.)

@Qingu

Personally, I view the threat of destitution as something that is just as bad as the threat of physical violence.

@Lefty_the_space_monkey, that’s pretty easy to test. If your boss physically beat you, would you quit?

@Qingu

If my options were starve to death or keep working there?

No.

@Lefty_the_space_monkey: Except that they’re not.

When you’re a slave, you’re property. Your owner can treat you well if he likes, or he can beat, rape, or kill you. His call. You have no legal rights. If he wants, he can sell you—or rent you to someone else, who gets to rape, beat, or kill you. If someone else kills you, it’s a property crime—he deprived your owner of valuable property—and not really a crime against you.

When you’re working in a miserable job for low wages, you are still not property. You can quit, and hope you can get welfare funds or find a family member to help you out. You can take night classes and improve your skills, and once you’ve done that, find another job. If your employer beats you, you can call the cops, because you have rights.

@Qingu – you can beat your children? Is that what you just said?

@cwilbur I’d have to call myself a slave as I clock in and out and I am paid by the hour. I think the people who are paid very low wages to perform very difficult labor with very little job security and zero benefits. Bosses cannot beat their employees, they do get away with this.

@Lefty_the_space_monkey, you are conflating “destitution” with “starving to death.”

You didn’t say you thought starving to death was as bad as physical violence, you said destitution was.

@fireside, isn’t it still legal to beat your children? To a certain extent, at least? But I guess you’re right, the government even regulates that nowadays

@SuperMouse—spurious argument. They “get away with it.” People also get away with real slavery, that doesn’t mean such behavior is tolerated, let alone legal, in modern society or is the norm. In actual slavery, violence was the norm and was constantly being threatened.

@cwilbur

I think that our problem might just be that we’re defining slavery differently.

You say “slavery” and you talk about what I think of as “chattel slavery” and I say “slavery” and I’m talking about something broader than chattel slavery.

@Qingu

At this point aren’t you arguing semantics?

Destitution leads to death if you don’t end it.

If I’m getting beat, and the only way to stop that is destitution, then I can only stop it temporarily anyways, because eventually I will starve. I have to go back to this theoretical abusive employer before that happens.

So really I have a few options.

Starve.

Get beaten.

Almost starve and then get beaten.

@Qingu I think such behavior, while certainly illegal, is tolerated in our society. I’m sure there are many, many factories where managers push the limits and take advantage of their employees.

@Lefty_the_space_monkey, semantics? I’m not the one trying to redefine slavery more broadly so the word tautologically encompasses what he is complaining about.

Destitution does not lead to death in modern society. There are always soup kitchens. Homeless people survive. My best friend from high school is currently homeless. I doubt very much he would choose to work at a job where he was beaten, or even risked being beaten, instead.

Frankly, I don’t believe that you actually believe what you are arguing. If you worked at McDonalds and your boss beat you for not cooking the hamburgers right, I think you would obviously quit and risk being poor.

@SuperMouse, first of all, who tolerates it? People don’t know about it, or they ignore it and pretend it doesn’t exist. That’s different from tolerating it.

Secondly, “pushing the limits” and “taking advantage of your employees” is different from “denying your employees access to bathrooms and water.” It is also different from “beating your employees.”

@Qingu Question: are you defining slavery as requiring at least the distinct possibility of the owner/employer physically abusing their slave/employee, and thus discounting any other form of violence, whether inflict by an individual easy to blame who isn’t the owner, or a whole huge and ridiculously complex & evolving social and economic system as it relates to those we’re potentially defining as experiencing a form of slavery?

@Qingu – I’d agree that not knowing is different from tolerating. But ignoring and pretending it doesn’t exists is pretty much the same as tolerance.

@resmc, the problem with your broad definition of slavery is that you’re definining it in a way that is indistinguishable from “laborer.” If all laborers are slaves then it negates the need for the word “laborer.”

I define slavery as a violently enforced relationship where one person is considered the property of another person.

Slavery is different from serfdom. Serfs were also violently kept in tow, but they weren’t considered a master’s property—instead, they were considered “bound to the land,” like trees (you can take slaves with you if you leave the property, but not serfs).

Modern wage-laborers are not either slaves or serfs. They are not “property”—they have the choice to leave a relationship of employment (or, like serfs, the setting of their employment). And even if this choice is ultimately illusory in practice, their protection from violence as punishment for disobedience is not.

People shouldn’t conflate the words “slave” and “serf”; conflating “wage-laborer” with “slave” seems even stupider. You can compare certain aspects of slaves and wage laborers but I think it is absolutely ridiculous to say they are “the same.”

@fireside, eh. Maybe. I do think there’s ultimately a slight moral difference. You might know your shoes are made by oppressed child laborers and ignore it. But in an ideal world, you would not want oppressed child labor to be legal.

So I see that as morally different from people in, for example, ancient Rome or the pre-Civil War South who did want slavery to be legal in their ideal world. They didn’t just ignore the bad aspects, they believed it should exist and was a worthy and acceptable institution. Or at least a lot of them did.

@Qingu – Well, I would call that embracing, not tolerating.

@Qingu Okay, so you’ve made a good point and convinced me of it that it’d be better to call them wage serfs than wage slaves.

However, first of all, to some other people’s perspectives, slavery isn’t as discrete a thing as your definition would imply, and it also has always evolved and will continue to do so, which means what you define as slavery may mutate into something very bad but not fitting your definition. Language itself isn’t discrete and fixed.You could also argue that whatever it is some call wage slavery doesn’t fit the label serfdom, either.

Now, assuming we both agree that it’s more important to something – however little – about wage serfdom/slavery/whatever, there may be a choice between retaining our current definitions of slavery to fit our different conception of it, or to make use of the connotative power of that word to undermine whatever this is.

Personally, i do agree that, considering how our schema of what slavery is is so dominated by the US’s historical slavery of African Americans, and that our legacy of racism is so significantly with us today that we shouldn’t appropriate that word, at least without much more consideration… even moreso considering how racism, both against people of color in our society, and how non-Westerners are very disproportionately affected by this, and white Westerners disproportionately benefit from it (even if morally they oppose it).

But right now, i’d rather focus on whatever it is we decide to call it rather than what it is we call it. (That may be what struck some as “mere” semantics, though can’t say) What is it, what social factors support it, how do we – as society, as individuals, relate to those factors which allow/cause/benefit-from it? It’s way easier for all of us to sit and debate what we call it, or even what individual(s) to point fingers at, rather than to do that last bit, look at how we or at least our society (which we have more control over than others, in many ways) maintains or allows for this to happen… but, though it’s better than viewing it as acceptable, viewing it as inevitable without looking to be sure, or as beyond our control to change without trying in a sense functions the same way the disgusting view that slavery is acceptable did – to legitimize it, and keep it from being changed.

Wait. Why did I convince you to call them wage serfs? They aren’t serfs either!

Calling laborers “serfs” or “slaves”—both things that have historically meant a specific relationship that simply does not exist today—is just rhetorical. It’s not a valid description and it doesn’t actually further the conversation about working conditions or the economic climate today.

@Qingu You didn’t convince me that, either, if you’ll look at the last paragraph which especially says what you just said, but also brings up some stuff i’d like you to at least read, if not consider.

Not in this economy.

or

In this economy?

@resmc, I agree with your last paragraph. The semantics are less important than the actual labor policies.

So, now that we’re agreed, we can explore these questions (feel free to modify these or add new ones in);

What factors/forces cause this (aside from cheap labor being desireable to many, and resources being few and thus the tendency for people to get/hold onto as many as they have the power to, which we’ll take as givens unless you disagree; not that this doesn’t discount other potential givens like the tendency for people to want things to be fair, or to be altruistic)?

We can start there, but the most important part is seeing how those relate to us (or even how we relate to It, the thing we can’t decide what to call – lol).

Well, Marx covered a lot of it. Too much capital concentrated in the hands of too few. People become alienated from their labor and function like machines on an assembly line. All of Marx’s criticisms of capitalism are still quite valid; they’ve been mitigated a bit by labor unions, though.

Post-labor unions, a lot of jobs (such as steel and auto industries) organized as heirarchies. Your pension was your reward for staying at the job, which encouraged worker loyalty but also meant you didn’t move around your career much. That changed during the 80’s when everyone started doing 401(k)s, which were not tied to your career. Unsurprisingly, people started moving their careers around a lot more. In today’s job market, it’s normal to change jobs several times in a decade.

This flexibility has weakened the power of unions, though, so workers have fewer protections when their labor is not in demand by the capitalists.

That’s my overgeneralized and likely inaccurate explanation, anyway.

Am prone to agree with most of that, not to discount the distinct possibly of other factors being relevant. Not aware of enough nuts & bolts to delve into more.

One thing, though. Maybe people moving their careers around was sort of like the influx of women in the workforce in past decades. It began as a relative few (with working women, not sure if this, they were in very privileged positions, tho it was legitimate for them to want not to be restricted to the domestic sphere) making a novel choice very voluntarily. At some point, for whatever reason, it became more ‘efficient’ – for companies looking to make money, for our whole economic system, whatever – to expect all families to be supported by 2 incomes, thus making it very difficult for many to survive on one. Of course, the prosperity of the 5o’s era was highly rare – so maybe we can’t expect that & the arrangements it allowed to be easy to achieve.

Anyhow, with less permanence, workers became more expendable, more interchangeable. The travel required for many jobs, the consolidation of workplaces and even businesses [for a very narrow type of efficiency, discounting many human concerns] really destabilized many communities, made us less likely to put down roots. We must change that if we’re going to get through our economic and ecological crisises, not to mention our social/political ones (related but not reducible to those)

There’s a strong need for some sort of representation for workers in service sectors, which is where most jobs have migrated to. Ideally they’d be less bureaucratic & hierarchical. Of course, those who think the sole measure of the health of the economy is how well-off employers are will cry heresy at this suggestion, and freak out about everything being torn down by that. Considering the instability of our economy, it may even – purely from a long-term perspective detached from the human costs of continuing marginal working conditions as currently exist – be risky to do much on those lines now, since of course if the economy falters even more entirely independent of this, plenty will leap to pin the blame on this self-organizing and increased representation.

Also, there are still some jobs here which are under risk of – should employers be inclined to – be shipped overseas where people are even more desperate and thus able to live and willing to work for what no one can live off of here. Any sort of union, especially a non-moderate one (which were, i gather, chosen by employers are preferable to more wildcat, grassroots ones) seems to be an anathema to most employers, and even if they could do fine living with more empowered employees, the potential for unions to spread to other businesses really scares many enough that it’s better to close a franchise than to risk it being unionized.

Limitting the exploitation of those in the Global South is vital, too, because as long as there’s a bottomless floor, all of us are standing on lower, less stable ground. The less possible extreme exploitation is, the more likely other exploitation is able to be countered. (Of course, those attached to the profits from exploiting many others will try to compensate for what’s lost by less ability to exploit.)

People do what they perceive to be in their own best interest, and when organizations pass a certain size it’s almost impossible to see the people involved in them as anything other than cogs in a machine: large corporations are dehumanizing. If you take these two axioms, you can predict all of these behaviors.

A manager in a company sees that if he closes the American manufacturing plant and opens a plant in Mexico, the costs of construction of the plant will be paid for by the first three years of savings, and then after that costs will be 10% of what they were, which increases corporate profits. Because he’s made the decision to do this, he’ll probably advance his career considerably, especially if it goes well. He’s acting in his own best interest, and the hundreds of people who will lose their job are just numbers on a balance sheet to him. That’s why manufacturing moves overseas.

But it’s not just him. Consider a pair of sneakers that are entirely American made, where American workers are paid a fair wage and receive benefits. How much is that pair of sneakers going to cost? Probably upwards of $300 by the time all the middlemen take their markups. Is your average American consumer going to buy the $300 pair of sneakers that are made entirely in America, or the $60 pair of sneakers made in a sweatshop overseas somewhere? And given the answer to that question, how can a company that insists on paying a living wage to American manufacturers stay in business?

And unionizing. Legally, what it takes to form a union is for a certain percentage of workers at that company or location to sign a petition calling for a vote, and then for a simple majority vote. This is all it takes, and there are legal penalties for interfering with this process. And one of the things that unions do is transfer profits from management salaries and benefits to worker salaries and benefits, which I think is a very good thing. But management does not think it is a good thing, and so they go to great lengths to convince workers that unionizing is not in their best interests—either by saying that they’ll close that location if it unionizes (a tactic successfully used by Wal-Mart), by using propaganda to portray unions as lower-class and vulgar (a tactic successfully used by my former employer), or by emphasizing costs rather than benefits (a tactic unsuccessfully used by a different employer of mine, when someone responded to their accurate statement that the union would hurt workers because it would require all workers, even ones that didn’t support the union, to pay 3% of their wages to the union by pointing out that the union was likely to negotiate a 5% increase in wages in the first year of its existence).

@cwilbur So what can we do, if we take for granted that everyone will use the means available to them for the benefit of them and those they care about – and that a few have way more means than most, and more power over the means others have?

@resmc: We recognize that it is in our best interests to help each other out, but not to the point of being taken advantage of. We offer people resources they can use to better their means. We put restrictions on what people with a lot of means can do to people who have lesser means. We make the laws so that they treat everyone equally. We raise the baseline so that people who are working crappy jobs for very low pay still have access to health care, nutritious food, and safe housing.

Some people will always have more than others. It’s a combination of luck and hard work—being born into the right family, having a trust fund, being at the right place at the right time; working hard in school to get a scholarship, putting in 80-hour weeks to get a business off the ground.

As a result of this, though, I think the proper solution to these problems is not transfer payments, because they do nothing to address the root cause of the problem or actually get people out of poverty, but free education and free healthcare. The long-term benefit to everyone, even the very rich, from things like these is much better than the cost. And then, if a good education is accessible to all, the person working a crappy job for no pay can afford to take night courses and find a less crappy job for more pay. Or, with the issue of health care taken care of, can try to get a small business off the ground without having to worry about crippling health insurance premiums.

One of the major differences between the turn of the last century and now is the notion that you need an employer. You don’t—that’s just the path of least resistance, because it lets someone else take all the risk and reap all the rewards. What you need is a skill that someone will pay you for, and if you have that, you’ve got all you need to start a business. Of course, you are taking on all the risk, but you’re also benefiting from all the rewards.

@resmc, here’s an important point that often gets missed in the “globalization” debate.

As long as we’re not protectionist, it is always going to be cheaper to send manufacturing jobs offshore… UNLESS the people in the countries’ standards of living increase, and they demand more money for their work.

Protectionism doesn’t work, and the global marketplace seems like a scary place. So it seems like we’re between a rock in a hard place. But that’s only because people are so used to viewing the global market as a zero-sum game. It’s easy to see “wealth” as a limited quantity across the earth, and that people getting richer in other countries means people in America will get poorer. But Adam Smith showed this wasn’t the case; the whole point of The Wealth of Nations was that economic activity is NOT a zero-sum game—that if people in one country become wealthier, it actually very often makes people in other countries wealthier as well.

So Americans need to accept that they are connected to the global marketplace, and that the living standards of workers in India is just as important as the living standards of workers in Detroit. If engineers in Detroit want to keep their jobs, then they should hope that engineers in India get wealthier and can demand more money for their hours—thus disencentivizing American companies to hire Indian engineers.

Fortunately for us, the standard of living across the world seems to be accelerating on a trajectory similar to what the West went through. We just need to make sure we do something about running out of an actually limited, zero-sum resource—fossil fuel.

Heartily agreed that we must raise the baseline. Even for those who take issue about making these rights universal, it’s ridiculous for anyone to disagree with the right of those who work to have access (not just theoretical, but actual) to to healthcare, quality education, a source of stable and nutritious food and safe/stable housing. Hopefully most will, if asked, voice support for this right. However, from my uninformed, limitted view, it seems it may be helpful to recognize that some are apt to give lipservice to this, but even given the ability to contribute to people enjoying those rights, will instead choose not to for their own self-interest.

Maybe you’re with me in being unlikely to ever be given the power that allows a decision between your own profit/career advancement and the rights to basic necesities to those who work without recieving enough to afford them (under current arrangements, at least). Hopefully you’re also apt, at least assuming this decision will never be yours to make, to find the right to basic necessities more important than the right for whoever decides [to allow the right to be reality or not] to make a profit. If so, how can people like us put pressure on those making these decisions to place the right to housing as at least equal to their much less vital ‘right’ to make a profit [off of the work of those thus without basic necessities, i might add]?

I ask this because it takes at least those basic necessities for people to get through the education – technical, formal, or on-the-job – required to be able to have the luxury (as difficult as it is) to be self-employed… not to mention much motivation and hard, persistent effort, easily also against strongsocial/economic headwinds.

Also, there’s ways our wider society can make conditions less hostile/more conducive to small businesses and the self-employed, which need to be looked at.

Further, yes, there may well always be inequality. Yet right now the levels of it are beyond obscene. In pretty much any other period of history, if the degree of inequality remained the same, significant social/political turbulence would be happening solely because of that. With mind-boggling amounts of wealth hoarded at the very tiny ‘top’ of the human population, there’s far less wealth to work with for most of us, in our efforts to allow minimum wage workers what’s required to live decently and which they earn, we’ll be apt to have to choose between that and maintaining access to as many resources as we do, potentially to the point where it dissuades us from doing anything but retain that access they do not have. So it’s apt to wonder how to lessen the very top wealthiest people’s firm grip on both a significant proportion of our whole society’s wealth.

And it’s not as if this is asking for something that’s not ours. We’re all in this society. Most people work, or otherwise contribute to the material wealth of our society. Thus it’s about ensuring not just us, but those with even less access to opportunities/resources/power than us are able to assert at least collective claim to some our society’s total wealth we currently don’t have.

The basic problem is, you and I cannot secure livable wages for others by our own actions. As long as there is someone desperate enough to work a miserable job for low pay, there will be someone willing to pay that person that little to do that miserable job. As long as people look at the $200 shoes and the $60 shoes and buy the $60 shoes, without considering that the $200 shoes were made by people paid livable wages with benefits while the $60 shoes were made in a sweatshop, there will be no incentive for companies to produce those $200 shoes. It requires collective action, both on the parts of the employees and on the parts of the people who buy those products and services.

If you could get all the Wal-Mart employees to unionize, the discrepancy between the managers’ salaries and the employees’ wages would diminish sharply. But this requires a legal environment where unionizing is possible, which we have, for the most part. (On Obama’s agenda is some legislation that will make it easier. I think it’s a well-intentioned idea, but given how easy it is now, I think the problems lie elsewhere.)

And the principal issue with small businesses is the cost of healthcare. Businesses can pay upwards of $1000 a month per employee to provide healthcare; this may sound like a benefit, but that applies to the owners too. That means a business with three founders has to net $3000 a month on top of salaries to be viable, and that’s an enormous hurdle to jump. Also, given the way healthcare and employment are tied together, the small business will have a really difficult time attracting employees, and will pay more to provide benefits for those employees it does hire, than a comparable larger business, because the larger business gets what amounts to a volume discount.

And one final underlying problem is that these things can’t be fixed by fiat. If you set the minimum wage higher, you create other problems, and the net result is that the poorest workers suffer. If you subsidize housing, you create other problems, and the net result is that the people who can least afford housing have the most miserable time. What you need to do is address the underlying issue—in many cases, the disparity of educational opportunity and living environments—and then watch the problem work itself out over time. But this is not satisfying—we have a problem now, so we want a solution now, and we are uncomfortable waiting a generation for the problem to be resolved. Not to mention that there are always wingnut elements who think that the problem is something else who insist on their solution being treated as if it had equal merits.

Let me put it this way: If you have a job to complete, and you need someone to help you do it, would you be willing to pay them to help you, or would you force them to help you whether they wanted to or not.

@YARNLADY Wouldn’t the job you have to complete be the other person’s job, too? Why wouldn’t it?

@Jiminez: Suppose I need to put new siding on my house. That’s my job. Why would someone else put siding on my house without being paid?

So I have a job to complete, and I need someone to help me do it. Should I be willing to pay someone to help me with it, or should I just expect that someone will decide that it is his or her job to put new siding on my house, and wait expectantly?

@Jiminez No, my job is to fix up my yard, but I can’t do it, so I have to wait for someone who loves digging up yards and pulling weeds and planting grass, and will come over and do it for me. He probably will do it out of the goodness of his heart, or maybe he will want me to pay him for it so he can pay his rent and buy food, since his landlord does not let him stay in the house free, and the grocer does not give away food to everyone who walks in.

In fact, the landlord, the grocer, the utility company all expect to be paid, just as the lawn worker does. He can choose to come to my house and get paid, or go to the house down the street and get paid, or where ever he wants to go, or he can choose to not work or get paid, and live on the street.