Work Reform

I think someone wrote a manifesto about this once.

The solution is this: every sector of the economy has been optimized to extract as much money from everyone as possible. This is the implicit role of government--to help the rich get richer. Have an idea that makes money? The government will help you make it happen. Does it materially harm the public, like sports gambling? Then you better make a lot of money to pay off the politicos!

This through-and-through corruption means that we now graduate in lifelong debt, working jobs that don't cover the rent of places we can never own and spend money on health insurance we can never use because we can't afford the co-pays. We are forced to finance expensive car because that's the only way to get to work because the bus routes have all been purchased by car companies and liquidated long ago while regulations keep out cheaper foreign cars for "safety" while massive trucks and SUVs are killing pedestrians and cyclists at record rates. Forced to work longer hours and with less money in our pockets, our third spaces disappear. Now stuck at home, we are forced to buy electronics now at inflated prices because of the AI bubble and use oligopoly internet that should have long ago been regulated as a utility but for the massive campaign contributions those companies make to politicians to have a shadow of a social connection with each other.

We are no longer citizens. We are livestock.

This is unsustainable.

Thats the billionaires squeezing profits out of every transaction, not just the enrollment fees, the rent on the property, the Healthcare and insurance premiums for the staff and the operation.

Everything they do is being optimized to squeeze wealth Into the mouths of billionaires.

Tax wealth not work.

I skimmed the comments and didn't catch this, but don't forget about all the PRIVATE EQUITIES buying up nursing home facilities, banking on SSI, Medicare and Medicaid funding, upcharging perscriptions, "maximizing efficiencies" (aka paying as little wages as possible), and the revolving door of customers...

This makes me think of an issue we had around here recently. We have a public company running the majority of school buses in our area. They receive funding from the government that should be enough to pay their drivers around 24$ an hour. Yet, they've been paying them 18$ or less for years.

This year the drivers tried to negotiate for a higher wage and the owners weren't even willing to go over 19$... So they went on strike and buses stopped; parents had to make alternative arrangements. This went on for weeks, the employer just kept playing hard ball and not budging.

Surprisingly, parents were overwhelmingly on the driver's side which I was happy to see. It reached a point where the owners almost had their contract taken away. After about 2 months, they finally gave in and agreed to an increase to about 21$.

What kills me is that in another town nearby with a different company running the buses, divers are being paid 23-24$ an hour like they're supposed to. So the employer still came out ahead after everything was said and done. Apparently, the owners are from Toronto (about 3-4 hours away from us) and are just using this company to make money which explains their unwillingness to increase their workers pay.

Unrelated rant: Typical big city rich assholes fucking over people in smaller communities. It happened during covid with housing, they came over and scooped up every house they could just to rent them out for profit. I was paying 1000$ for a 3 bedroom apartment and some asshole from Toronto came over and bought it. Then when I moved out, they increased the rent to fucking 2500$....

The USA is just 3 Corporations in a trench coat. And corporations are just pyramid schemes.

People will lose their minds if you suggest giving someone medical care for free, but they keep ignoring all the landlords and CEOs and private equity groups and all the middlemen extracting the vast majority of all the wealth out, while also contributing the absolute least.

The fact that we have a system where one person works every waking minute of their life and still can't afford basic food and housing and another person sits around all day on their 3rd yacht sipping one of a kind wines and rakes in billions is insanity.

Labor $200 Land $150 Materials $800 CEO pay and profits $1,000,000,000 Utility $150 someone who is good at the economy please help me budget this. my family is dying

It adds up...

It adding up is the problem.

Because it means "job creators" who do nothing but posses titles to land and company stocks are syphoning off money.

If they need 3 staff for 21 kids, they're going to pay as little as they can to keep 3 staff. And charge as much as they can to keep 21 kids.

There's no correlation between what staffing costs and what prices are charged, why would there be?

Both are just line items, and the person in charge just wants the profit line to have the biggest number.

The larger the company is, the worst that becomes. Or if the company is small, but owned by someone with a dozen other companies.

Expecting salary to match what people pay is toddler logic, sure it would be great if it worked like that, but any adult thinking more than 2 seconds can see why that's not related in the modern age. Hell, its been decades since the "if we pay workers a living wage a value meal goes up $0.02!".

Americans literally all said they were fine with that, almost zero companies increased pay, and all of them.increaswd prices anyways

There's obviously no correlation

Sadly this math adds up. In my country those are public services. So no corporate greed is involved and no significat ammount goes to corruption or overpaid management.

Sadly this formula for example in daycare is true:

("Huge payment from us" x "number of kids") / " number of people getting paid" = "low number"

We usually just do not account for cooks, cleaners, janitors, administration in our intuition.

It's rent, and advertising. Shit costs so much and yet the landlord's and advertising industry makes ya think it's the cost of labour. I know alot of restaurant owners who work 5 days a week(alot close two days a week) and only vacation once a year just to visit family. they have steady business but still struggle due to costs. Only places I know are doing well are ones who own their building.

Same with universities and overworked, underpaid professors without tenure, doctors getting minimum wage out of medical school. Really any industry parasitized by Wall Street.

We were paying double daycare until recently. While it was never inexpensive, it was more manageable when our daycare center was locally owned. Then Kindercare came in and bought 80% of daycares in my major city. When we tried changing daycares we found that many daycares not explicitly named Kindercare were still under the Kindercare umbrella but retained their old name. I guess they caught on.

As SOON as the corporate takeover was complete they started increasing rates 8% per year BEFORE we had high inflation, instituted mandatory annual fees just to enroll, and mandatory fees for supplies that we use to be able to bring but now they charged us MORE than the supplies cost and they were super shitty quality items. So if you wanted to bring in supplies for your kid, you still got to pay the fee for supplies but then also had to buy the non shitty quality ones and bring them in.

To the point of the topic though, what pissed me off the most was that even though we paid 3k/month for two our center started bleeding employees because they simply wouldn't pay them anything. So what this meant is veteran teachers left for more pay and new ones were only there long enough to get experience.