this post was submitted on 18 Jun 2024
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Work Reform
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A place to discuss positive changes that can make work more equitable, and to vent about current practices. We are NOT against work; we just want the fruits of our labor to be recognized better.
Our Philosophies:
- All workers must be paid a living wage for their labor.
- Income inequality is the main cause of lower living standards.
- Workers must join together and fight back for what is rightfully theirs.
- We must not be divided and conquered. Workers gain the most when they focus on unifying issues.
Our Goals
- Higher wages for underpaid workers.
- Better worker representation, including but not limited to unions.
- Better and fewer working hours.
- Stimulating a massive wave of worker organizing in the United States and beyond.
- Organizing and supporting political causes and campaigns that put workers first.
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The owners have been painfully clear they believe they can sustain an economy only they can afford to participate in, but still somehow powered by and on the backs of everyone else that can't afford to live within it, let alone be active consumers/participants.
Honestly at this point the 95% should just tell the 5% to keep sucking eachother off buying eachother's space tourist rocket yachts (Edit: sorry, AI powered space tourist rocket yachts) only they can afford while we go off and make cooperative, interconnected socialist communities. Maybe start compeeeeeting on what cooperative, humble members of a shared society we can be.
This is prosperity being stolen from us!
50% of the worlds wealth stolen from us by the 1%.
Is it only 50%?
I wasn't clear enough:
Top 1% owns about 43% of global wealth, top 10% controls roughly 76% of global wealth, bottom 50% holds less than 2% of global wealth.
https://wid.world/ https://ourworldindata.org/economic-inequality https://ourworldindata.org/the-history-of-global-economic-inequality https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/wealth-share-richest-10-percent
Here is how I like to think of it: if your total assets are less than $10,000, you are much closer to being in the bottom 50% of the global wealth distribution than the top 1%. Our prosperity is stolen from us each and every day. Our miraculous achievements and discoveries consumed by a system that only cares about funneling the largest portion of that prosperity to a few.
It sure does feel like more...
Overt slavery was hard, and got harder at scale.
The owners figured that out after Jim Crow fell. Overt slavery leads to resistance, and gets harder to maintain at scale.
Since then, they stumbled upon a solution born of modern technology.
Just propagandize your labor pool using the media you own and the education system you inform through your captured government into enslaving themselves and believing it was their idea, and just as importantly, propagandize them into hating and blaming the minority of peasants who didn't fall for that propaganda as the reason for all their owner caused misery.
"If you work really hard and do everything we tell you, you will prosper!.. At some undisclosed point in the future. Just keep working our machines, it'll happen, you'll see! You stupid fucking sucker peasants🖕🤑💰"
Have you heard of Holocracy? It's one of the more popular of set of flat, self-organizing management structures; it's been tried at a few big name companies, with limited success. I think failures at this point are easily attributed to sheer novelty and lack of experience, and good guidelines for avoiding pitfalls, more than a fundamental flaw in the concept. One of the big issues I see needing to be addressed is ego; we will never get rid of self-proclaimed alpha types, and extroverts will always have an advantage in rising in the ranks regardless of competency. These sorts of issues can sabotage - even without malicious intent! - these flat structures. Some people will simply tend to accrue influence and power. But another issue is overcoming the tendency to bikeshed. Companies who've tried, and failed, to execute Holocracy, Sociocracy, Matrix Management, and Lean Management (there are a few of these styles) have been pretty good at documenting the weak areas that causes struggles and failures.
Anyway, I'm quite keen on these approaches; companies employing them are just hard to find.