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My workplace sometimes has a slow day and the bosses will give workers two options: Go home unpaid, or stay at work for your entire shift and get paid. If you stay, you don't have to do any work, since there is no work to be done. People mostly sit in the cafeteria on their phones for 8 hours.
I asked why we can't choose to go home and get paid and they said it's because then we'd be getting paid for nothing...but we're all sitting in the cafeteria on our phones. We're not working. We are literally being paid for nothing. Why can't we go home with pay? What's the difference?
The difference is that labourers must trade their time for pay. You are selling an hour of your time to the company. That hour doesn't need to be productive, but you can't use it freely. It's the company that makes money by selling a product or service, not its workers. A worker who produces $10,000 of product in an hour is paid for the hour, not for the product. The owner is paid for the product.
On-call pay needs to be more of a thing. At a certain point workers are selling their availability instead of their time and labor.
I think that's a problem in itself.
What about the accountant who keeps track of the finances and ensures compliance with the laws? He doesn't produce anything but still needs to be paid. There are a lot of jobs which are essential for the operation of a company, but aren't producing anything.
Being paid by the hour is fine. What's not fine is upper management and shareholders hoarding all the profits for themselves while the people below are struggling to pay their bills.
Correct!
And some people's time is inherently more valuable than others - this makes sense in a deeply twisted way. A emergency brain surgeon for example, would be exceedingly difficult to find, and even more valuable to have, let alone utilize. I think a lot of us can agree that the surgeon being able to save a life in ways almost all of us cannot is valuable.
But some people's time isn't valuable at all. Any middleman - salesman of every type, healthcare insurance, stock brokers. They have been made artificially valuable because they are significantly better at producing income for the already wealthy.
No broker, salesman, or healthcare insurance provider (or hell manager even) is going to help 95% of the country make more money.
Now, if we got compensated based on the finished product we deliver - that would make the hardest workers a lot more fucking money. But corporate America would never allow that - the employee didn't purchase the parts before assembling it, or the ingredients, or the network infrastructure, etc.
The problem, at its core, is that it all ends up tying a price to a human life. Until we can separate cash value from life, we will be stuck with this system.
It's possible to do on a small scale, but inevitably it ends up recreating itself as the community doing it grows.