Maybe we shouldn’t be taking advice on lower income workers from billionaires who got rich by stealing their worker’s wages
While I don’t think any just society should allow anyone to be a billionaire, at least Bill Gates is giving away a lot of his wealth.
These “Foundations” are tax shelters.
Well that’s a dumb thing to say. That money was stolen from other people to start with. This is like robin hood, but the rich guy steals from the poor and then gives part of it back to them so he pays less tax, which would have meant he gave more back to them…
You got conned bud
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I’m curious about this “stealing wages” idea. How have their wages been stolen?
The idea is all those profits should be fairly distributed among the workers rather than being taken by the capital that owns the company.
I absolutely agree, but it looks like the folks who work at Microsoft get compensated way better than the average worker: https://www.cordantwealth.com/microsoft/microsoft-compensation/
This isn’t necessarily what the commenter was talking about but wage theft is estimated to be at about $50bil per year which is more than all other forms of property crime combined and it is rarely punished even when reported.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/jun/15/wage-theft-us-workers-employees
While Bill is right that AI could offload a lot of work off humans, it will never be used for the good of workers. EVER.
Companies will use AI to replace workers, not make the lives of their employees better.
This is what every technological advancement, from electricity to automation, has resulted in, and I expect nothing less from a capitalist society. Companies always win, CEOs always get richer, and everyone else loses.
People far too often argue “Communism/Socialism/Capitalism/etc. is the best economic system, because blah blah blah”. Anyone that has played Civilization and has half a brain cell can tell you that there is no single best economic system, as it’s so heavily dependent on the structure of a country, current levels of development, and many other factors.
I have always said, that capitalism is very probably the best economic system for rapidly developing countries in a state of industrialization (there was obvious horrific cons to this, but the complexity of discussing the use of slavery, child labour, land repossession, genocide, etc., is a conversation beyond the scope of this simple remark on economics. Consider the dominance of France, Britain, and Spain in 1800 and compare it to the juggernaut that the US became in the next 100 years by 1900, and the benefits of relatively unfettered capitalism during industrializing periods, should be readily apparent given that colossal level of growth from a sparsely populated and undeveloped country in it’s infancy in the late 1700s-early 1800s) and is probably the best economic system for this, BUUUUUUT commensurate with the level of automation, and computerized work roles within a society, a more and more heavily socialized economic system makes sense to stymie the accumulation and sole ownership of the automated systems by the wealthy few who profit off of it, while job opportunities dwindle for the rest.
The world needs to socialize more heavily, and fast, the US is in a particularly precarious spot. The number 1 job in nearly every state is truck driver, and there are already autonomous trucks on the road today. Between AI, and autonomous vehicles, we will see what happened to jobs in the automotive sector from 1950-2000, in industries like taxis, truck driving, coding, graphic design, journalism, and much much MUCH more in the next 50 years, and the US is not ready for it’s job market to do country wide, what happened in Detroit. The wealthy owners of these automated machines, and AI systems filling these job roles will become richer off of them, while the rest of the country struggles. Heavy socialization, alongside reduced work weeks and either subsequent massive increases in minimum wages, or guaranteed basic income will be a necessity for coming generations to not exist in poverty.
Also reduced pay, cuz “AI is doing all the work”. They’ll hold that over your head every time you mess up.
This isn’t necessarily true. Our company is leveraging AI to take a process that currently takes 18 months down to a few weeks.
Yes, the people who do the 18 month process think it’s going to replace them, but it’s actually going to let them do all of the other things that get shoved on the back burner and never get done.
You’ve just said the same thing but you don’t understand.
Reducing that job from 18 months to a few weeks frees up workeder for other tasks. That means nobody gets hired to do those other tasks and people who would otherwise have good jobs have nothing.
It also means the people Stoll there can be easily coerced into working for lower wages because there’s a line of people at the door who will happily work for less since they’re currently unemployed.
That’s what replacing workers means and that’s the effect of labour reduction. It puts power into the hands of the owner of the tool instead of the people who use the tool to generate cashflow.
This is capitalism - the one with capital exploits the many without, all backed up by the exclusive right to violence of the state which is owned and run by the capital owning class.
Do you think farmers should not use any tractors and pick their crops using manual labour?
That would also create a lot of jobs.
The problem is that better wages, better working conditions and fewer hours were never a result of technology freeing up workers, but strong labor movements. The technology only allows capitalists to keep increasing productivity without letting it cost them more.
So tech isn’t bad. Farmers produce more food, which is good as we need that. But yeah, as a farmer you’re not looking at a growing labor market.
Yeah I think that industrial agriculture is a horrifically destructive activity for the environment and humans, and less tractors and more small scale local sustainable agriculture would be great. The UN agrees with me on that one too BTW.
Yeah I think that industrial agriculture is a horrifically destructive activity for the environment and humans, and less tractors and more small scale local sustainable agriculture would be great. The UN agrees with me on that one too BTW.
I think you just proved my point.
18 months down to a few weeks. That’s great, for the company.
But, did anyone get 17 months off or get paid 17 extra months for doing the same work that would have taken 18 months? I don’t think so.
You got extra work but didn’t get paid for the extra time it would have normally taken to complete the task.
See, what Bill said can’t actually happen, because people are paid for the time or work they produce.
How would an employee be paid for something that AI did? Capitalism won’t let this happen.
I did not prove your point at all.
I’m not sure why you think employees should be compensated for the productivity increase that’s created by products the employer is paying for. AI is just a tool, like Excel.
History has shown that this will not be the case. I remember watching an ancient black and white TV news reel clip interviewing a factory owner about automation being introduced. He said in future that automation will allow people to work 4 days per week and still allow the company to be profitable and employees happy and well paid. Of course, companies just used such innovations to turbo boost their productivity and therefore profits. Won’t be any change this time around.
Won’t be any change this time around
Get out of here with that defeatest attitude. Labor fought hard to get a 5 day - 40 hour standard workweek, you can do so too
Because robots are better than humans.
This is the tech bro answer, but at some point there is no point to enjoy humans to do tasks anymore.
Until then automation will just increase profits roughly within legal limits.
No shot that capitalist are gonna let us work less. Productivity has been going up for decades but work hours and pay have been stagnant. What this actually means is that the bourgeoisie will create higher demand for jobs by raising unemployment (through cutting staff and replacing them with ai) so that they can treat you worse and profit more.
And that’s not even to mention how keeping us tired and working prevents the proletariat from worrying about or even being able to put effort into anything anything that might hurt their bottom line.
You don’t have time for revolution if your too busy and tired to read theory and develop class consciousness. You will not have time or energy to organize labor or do any non-profit work if your free time is so limited that you have to spend it just recovering.
Honestly if you enjoy your work you will never work a day in your life… Unless you are working more than 45 hours a week
this is such bullshit advice. This is the quickest way to destroy your passions and end up as a boring drone with no hobbies
I don’t think OP was talking about working in with their passions. My job isn’t my passion, but I enjoy it and I rarely have a bad day just because it’s “work” like I used to have at my last job. OFC some days can be harder than others, but that’s anything.
Your passion might wear off. Don’t make it your full time job if you want to preserve it.
3 day working week will more likely mean companies cutting staff by 50%. Can’t imagine most people being able to live when only working 3 days.
Yeah, the chance employers naturally just start paying the same # of people the same amount of money, for 2 days less work, which feels like the implication in this post, is functionally 0.
They said the same about electricity in the past. But here we are, forcing people to have 2 jobs to pay for their basic necessities. While rich people get their taxes slashed and social programs get gutted, because “welfare queens should pull themselves up by their bootstraps”
And I know this is more of an “America problem”. But it’s not like other places aren’t trying to do the same (or are doing worse).
Electricity and industrialization in general did change a lot. You do not have to work 12 hours in fields under the sun anymore. Life expectancy is significantly longer too. Industrial Revolution helped to fuel lots of social progress which would be impossible if 90% of population were agricultural field workers.
This is a friendly reminder that medieval peasants had more freedom of movement, worked significantly less hours/days per year, and had stronger and richer community and family loves than anyone in our advanced modern society.
I do love modern medicine though
The image is literally that another place is doing it worse than the US.
It’s stuff like this that makes me really glad that I live in Scandinavia 😂
Your regularly scheduled reminder that Mr 70 hours is the
step-father in law of Britain’s prime ministerFather-in-law. But yeah.
Oh, look… a dishonest parasite and an honest one - but both are stil parasites.
Well, Infosys bills their clients by the hours, so of course they want their employees to work long hours. On the other hand, Microsoft basically (almost) own OpenAI, so of course they want people to offload more works to AI.
Remember, Infosys doesn’t do anything in the hours they bill for.
They just bill hours. That is their business commodity. Poor Indians sitting in meetings, accomplishing nothing, and billing for the hours spent in the meetings.
Now, that’s not true. They also provide freshies with no relevant work experience sitting in meetings. At least until they jump ship to a company with better pay and/or conditions.
There have been broad discussions in the upper echelons of my workplace, and they generally talk about AI replacing all of the entry level type jobs that give young people a start, things like phone support/service desk becoming AI chat bots. I don’t know what the future holds for people born in the last couple of years, but it isn’t looking good unless you want to do a trade.
Technology definitely had the ability to make human’s lives easier and make it do they don’t have to work as much. Unfortunately that would require people in power to be willing to offer alternative sources of income and they tend to be allergic to that, so all we’ll be likely to get is the unemployment part and not the alternative income options unless a lot of sociopolitical change is enacted.
Something being “possible“ doesn’t mean it is likely or a certainty.
I wouldn’t mind a 4 day work week. IMO, it’s a better balance
I take all my vacation days to give my self several months of “4-day work weeks”, and it’s honestly so much better than working 5 days a week.
During those four days, I get the same or more work done, but it also gives me more time to work on my self-improvement, do more around the house, and get errands done. It also gives me an extra day to relax, if I need it.
I couldn’t imagine how my life would improve if a 4-day work week was the norm.
I’ve done the same in the past, it feels weird going back to 5 days
People on the internet are so quick to jump on the “I can be just as productive working one less day out of the week” bandwagon, but communities on Lemmy/Reddit are filled with much more programmers and people working a standard office job than the average population.
For a very large portion of career fields, it is physically not possible for you to do as much work while working 8 less hours a week.
A tradesman cannot do as many jobs working one less day a week, a nurse cannot care for as many patients working one less day a week, a firefighter cannot put out as many fires working one less day a week, some working tech support cannot fill as many support tickets working one less day a week, a chef cannot make as many meals working one less day a week, the warehouse worker cannot move as many boxes working one less day a week.
Look, I would more than advocate for everyone working less hours a week. But Lemmy/Reddit always seem to forget that there are a zillion other types of jobs out there that are different from their own. You physically just cannot be as productive working less hours for a lot of types of jobs because there isn’t “filler” in the day like many on Lemmy/Reddit describe. I have a job without filler where I physically cannot do the same amount of work in less hours. It would be fantastic, but it’s not something that I could see employers going for for any of these types of jobs.
Demand 3 or we’ll get 6.
I demand 8
