Not a fifteen dollar minimum wage… A UBI big enough that the employee wouldn’t be facing homelessness if they just quit. Truly the power to walk away from the negotiating table.
I’m being misunderstood here I guess. Minimum wages are nice, but are themselves pretty antiquated imo. They only help you if you secure employment. Absolutely having to have a job to survive isn’t ever going to produce 1v1 parity at the negotiating table between employers and employees where a union is effectively obsolete.
You seem to just keep rambling and ending back up at ‘unions are obsolete’ without it ever being clear how you got there. Underpants Gnome union abolitionist shit.
How does it stand if you erase the power disparity?
There are a great many employees in America whose services are in significant demand who are not unionized… And they don’t need to be. They have adequate leverage at the negotiating table to secure a fair, or in some cases better than fair deal.
There’s no inherent power disparity between workers and employers other than that at the low end the employer can refuse to negotiate with anyone but the low bidder for a task which creates a race to the bottom.
UBI is happening in our lifetimes because in our lifetimes there won’t be enough jobs to go around. We are going to have to pay a decent chunk of the population to not seem employment.
It’s that or things get very very dystopian very quickly.
There’s a nearly infinite amount of jobs, just not good jobs by which I mean jobs that, relatively, pay well and have a relative amount of power to the employee. When you say “run out of jobs” you mean those jobs. In reality I think more people will just shift to sh*ttier jobs.
This is utter fantasy. The disparity is impossible to erase. The only way to ameliorate it is collective action. You know, unions.
UBI is a good idea imo but we will always need people to do stuff and most people will always want to do better than the minimum. There will always be employers and employees.
Even with 100% ownership of every company won’t eliminate this imbalance.
The idea in Russia was that there were to be democratic worker’s councils (called Soviets) that would represent workers. Lenin disbanded some in 1918 and disempowered the rest essentially making the USSR neither Socialist nor Soviet.
It was inevitable though. Too much concentrated power.
“Technology will create mass unemployment” has been long promised, and has never happened. Labor gets put to more productive use and economic growth ensues. Of course the displaced workers often suffer and the government can and should mitigate the fallout (with cash money, lol telling fired steel workers to code), but the idea those without skills will simply not have jobs is dead wrong.
As I reflect on it, I think the derail is a good example of Online Brain. If boredsocial had said his thing, gotten pushback and been like, Chill guys, I’m obv not a big union fan but I was just emphasising how big a fan of UBI I am then I don’t think anyone cares. Only online does he instantly triple down like THERE CAN BE ONLY ONE.
The fact that technology isn’t making for less work is a problem. It’s a problem with capitalism generally because people have to work in order to live and with the amount of inequality we have the poor people are going to end up just getting paid to wipe the rich people’s asses. It’s also a problem because it creates a lot of bulshit work that is unproductive. And it’s also a problem because there’s way too much production and it’s destroying the Earth.
