
New Study Confirms That American Workers Are Getting Ripped Off - clumsysmurf
https://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/07/oecd-study-labor-conditions-confirms-that-u-s-workers-are-getting-ripped-off.html
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jamessantiago
My thought here is that there is a significant lack of outrage in weak wage
growth and income disparities because the data is not relatable enough.
There's certainly some protest at the most abhorrent levels of minimum wage
meeting acceptable levels for a living, but shouldn't everyone from the upper
to lower class be up in arms if there is such a favoritism toward executives
and shareholders? Maybe something along the lines as showing what normal wage
growth in tangible quality of live areas (e.g. this is the home you could
afford) would look like for certain income levels might be a better way to
explain this.

~~~
pmoriarty
_" shouldn't everyone from the upper to lower class be up in arms if there is
such a favoritism toward executives and shareholders?"_

Most people are just too tired, too busy with their own lives, too
disillusioned with idealistic promises of change, and too fearful of
repercussions to try to rock the boat unless they're starving and have nothing
to lose.

As long as they've got their bread and circuses, nothing will substantively
change.

Even if/when it does change, history shows that we'll probably just wind up
with a new boss who's the same as the old boss.

~~~
msbarnett
> Even if/when it does change, history shows that we'll probably just wind up
> with a new boss who's the same as the old boss.

But history doesn’t show anything of the sort? History instead shows a clear
path to how Europe ended up with the bottom 50% ending up with a much larger
portion of wealth than the top 1%.

What’s remarkable here is not how impossible change is, but how Americans have
utterly resigned themselves to the supposed unchanging inevitability of their
current situation despite clear evidence that alternative modes of operating
aren’t just _possible_ but clearly _exist_ right now.

America’s primary problem with change seems first and foremost to be its own
fatalistic delusion that being any other way is impossible.

~~~
dmoy
s/bottom 1%/top 1%/ ?

Otherwise that's trivially true for all countries, no?

~~~
msbarnett
Whoops, top, yeah.

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ChuckMcM
I sometimes ask people how their employer justifies operating a bus service to
take them to and from work, but not the additional real-estate cost of giving
you a bit of personal space in the workplace.

I'm guessing that they do this because it is "easy" to take away lifestyle
benefits if the numbers aren't working but it is "hard" to reconfigure real
estate to stuff more people into the same space.

High end, class A office space is $10/sq foot per month in Silicon Valley. An
open office plan allocates roughly 15 square feet to each employee ($150/month
or $1,800/year). That employee is typically generating more than $10,000 of
net income per year to the bottom line for all of the top tech companies). It
took Ford nearly 100 people to develop a new automobile feature that could
differentiate their cars in the market, it takes Facebook about three. And
Ford gave every engineer in that group of 100 an office of their own to work
in.

So yeah, times have changed and the employees aren't benefiting as much as
they used to. The only question is whether or not they will do anything about
it.

~~~
rhizome
_That employee is typically generating more than $10,000 of net income per
year to the bottom line for all of the top tech companies_

I think your math is a little off: [http://www.businessinsider.com/revenue-
per-employee-at-apple...](http://www.businessinsider.com/revenue-per-employee-
at-apple-facebook-google-others-2016-2)

...even if you're only talking about profits:
[http://www.businessinsider.com/apple-facebook-alphabet-
most-...](http://www.businessinsider.com/apple-facebook-alphabet-most-
profitable-companies-per-employee-2017-12i)

Not to promote Business Insider, they were just the top hits with the charts.

~~~
ChuckMcM
Apple is pretty extreme and yes, I was trying to focus on just net revenue so
after everything else, free cash flow on a standard accounting basis.

It just makes the argument stronger in my opinion, if you're bringing the
company more than $1M/year in free cash flow why can't they build you an
office everyone can enjoy working in?

~~~
rhizome
Absolutely.

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tfehring
As a partial rebuttal to the article’s points about income inequality, it
seems worthwhile to quote one of PG’s better-known essays [0]:

> _Variation in wealth can be a sign of variation in productivity. (In a
> society of one, they 're identical.) And that is almost certainly a good
> thing: if your society has no variation in productivity, it's probably not
> because everyone is Thomas Edison. It's probably because you have no Thomas
> Edisons._

> _In a low-tech society you don 't see much variation in productivity. If you
> have a tribe of nomads collecting sticks for a fire, how much more
> productive is the best stick gatherer going to be than the worst? A factor
> of two? Whereas when you hand people a complex tool like a computer, the
> variation in what they can do with it is enormous._

Now, the middle-class and upper-middle-class do subsidize the wealthiest
Americans as a result of the US’s tax structure, and that’s a problem. But
aside from that, the fact that the top quantiles in the US are wealthier than
their equivalents elsewhere is not fundamentally a bad thing.

[0] [http://www.paulgraham.com/gh.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/gh.html)

~~~
lend000
I am surprised by how infrequently I see the arbitrary progressive tax bracket
levels being brought up in these debates. The fact that you are considered
ultra wealthy and paying at about the top bracket at ~200k per year is absurd.
Meanwhile there is no progressive taxation for capital gains. The highest
brackets should be stretched into the tens of millions (or even in the
hundreds), and taxes should be significantly lower for the upper middle class
(for whom it is increasingly difficult to become upper class through hard,
good work and a somewhat standard career directory).

~~~
tfehring
Better yet, tax wealth instead of income. The value derived from government
services is more closely proportional to wealth than to income, and income-
based taxation is inherently regressive compared to wealth-based taxation. The
only significant wealth-based tax in the US is property tax, and even that is
somewhat regressive because the share of income and wealth spent on housing
decrease as income and wealth increase.

~~~
dahdum
Inflation is the tax on wealth, and much easier to administer and harder to
avoid than a wealth tax program would.

~~~
tuesdayrain
Inflation is a tax on cash, not wealth

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minikites
>Further, the OECD finds that only Turkey, Lithuania, and South Korea have
lower unionization rates than the United States, a fact that can be attributed
to the myriad ways American policymakers have undermined organized labor since
the Second World War. And a government that discourages unionization — and
alternative forms of collective bargaining — is one that has decided to
cultivate an exceptionally large population of “low income” workers, and an
exceptionally low labor-share of national income.

I continue to wonder why technology workers (some of whom write article after
article about how poorly they're treated) approach unionization with such a
sour attitude and instead magically expect things to improve.

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s2g
because they can negotiate a better deal despite the illegal no poaching
agreements.

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asdsa5325
Yet, American workers keep voting for the people that rip them off. If you
never learn, things will never change.

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vinceguidry
Time to trot out my favorite quote: "Socialism never took root in America
because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat, but as
temporarily embarrassed millionaires." \- Ronald White, paraphrasing John
Steinbeck.

The prideful are painfully easy to rip off. But just like any con, a little
vigilance goes a long way. It's not hard to see rising trends, and the trend
has been towards the trades for at least a decade now. It's not hard for
plumbers to make more than lawyers these days.

~~~
sharemywin
I wanted to create a new party called the middle. As the poor and the rich are
arguing over who gets what the middle class is getting gutted.

~~~
derekp7
I always thought that the 99 percenters should become the democrat counter to
the republican tea party.

