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  #76  
Old 02-04-2015, 05:33 PM
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Default Re: General Labour Issues Thrad

I didn't take that affront to the commercial. I pretty much just was angry that McDonalds is willing to give away food but isn't willing to pay its workers a better wage.
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  #77  
Old 02-04-2015, 05:49 PM
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Default Re: General Labour Issues Thrad

I'm gonna be mad about both. Forced socializations like that always end up having unintended consequences. I mean, it's pretty obvious that there are a lot of ways that call your mother thing could go wrong, but I also get a bit of the well-I-nevers at some corporation directing their employees to mimic intimate types of social interactions that go so far beyond just basic courtesy and respect. There's something horrifically cynical about it to me. Boundaries are important for everyone, and interactions like that should be genuine, not scripted or coerced.

Plus this sort of thing has been going on a very long time, so they know this kind of thing can get their employees harassed: For Clerks, Smiles Can Go Too Far - Chicago Tribune
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  #78  
Old 02-20-2015, 07:16 PM
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Default Re: General Labour Issues Thrad

If Kansas Jumped Off A Bridge, Would Other States Do It Too? Apparently Yes!

This piece discusses how the Republican policies that result in worse outcomes for poors are a feature, not a bug. The liberal mantra that "Republicans do not care about the poor" is not true, exactly: they care about making sure poors are as poorly compensated as possible in order to strengthen the position of business leaders. This is why they oppose welfare, minimum wage laws, unemployment, Medicaid, unions, and anything else that improves the relative position of labourers; these get in the way of cheap labour.
Quote:
So it makes sense that companies and executives of companies that rely on cheap labor to generate profits give overwhelmingly to Republicans, and it makes double the sense when those companies are where the poor shop and eat. For them, more poor people means more cheap labor and more customers. It’s like a double-ended dildo of capitalism.
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  #79  
Old 02-24-2015, 05:22 PM
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Default Re: General Labour Issues Thrad

Cash wage for tipped workers has been raised to $7.50 in New York. This is a pretty huge development. Now other states need to follow suit.
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Cēterum cēnseō factiōnem Rēpūblicānam dēlendam esse īgnī ferrōque.

“All for ourselves, and nothing for other people, seems, in every age of the world, to have been the vile maxim of the masters of mankind.” -Adam Smith

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  #80  
Old 03-05-2015, 09:59 PM
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Default Re: General Labour Issues Thrad

The war on workers' comp.

Quote:
It was exactly the sort of accident that workers’ compensation was designed for. Until recently, America’s workers could rely on a compact struck at the dawn of the Industrial Age: They would give up their right to sue. In exchange, if they were injured on the job, their employers would pay their medical bills and enough of their wages to help them get by while they recovered.

No longer.

Over the past decade, state after state has been dismantling America’s workers’ comp system with disastrous consequences for many of the hundreds of thousands of people who suffer serious injuries at work each year, a ProPublica and NPR investigation has found.

The cutbacks have been so drastic in some places that they virtually guarantee injured workers will plummet into poverty. Workers often battle insurance companies for years to get the surgeries, prescriptions and basic help their doctors recommend.

Two-and-a-half years after he lost his arm, Whedbee is still fighting with North Dakota’s insurance agency for the prosthesis that his doctor says would give him a semblance of his former life.
ETA: Pierce has more on this, as well as the Republican effort to dismantle health care reform.
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Cēterum cēnseō factiōnem Rēpūblicānam dēlendam esse īgnī ferrōque.

“All for ourselves, and nothing for other people, seems, in every age of the world, to have been the vile maxim of the masters of mankind.” -Adam Smith

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Last edited by The Man; 03-05-2015 at 10:16 PM.
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  #81  
Old 03-20-2015, 09:26 PM
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Default Re: General Labour Issues Thrad

Report on the unsafe working conditions in the fast food industry. From LGM's summary:
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79 percent of fast food workers were burned in the last year and 58 percent received multiple burns. Given the relatively open kitchen of the fast food restaurant, it doesn’t take a genius to figure out why as there is a lot of open vats of oil and not a lot of protections for workers. 67 percent of workers were cut, 34 percent were hurt lifting heavy items and 23 percent fell. Perhaps more disturbingly, a full 12 percent of workers claimed they were assaulted on the job last year, although the report does not explore this in much follow up detail. Moreover, employers do a terrible job of dealing with these injuries, especially the burns, where employers give the equivalent advice of “shake it off and keep working.” 33 percent of burn victims reported managers suggested rubbing condiments on the burn instead of getting burn cream.
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Cēterum cēnseō factiōnem Rēpūblicānam dēlendam esse īgnī ferrōque.

“All for ourselves, and nothing for other people, seems, in every age of the world, to have been the vile maxim of the masters of mankind.” -Adam Smith

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  #82  
Old 03-30-2015, 09:57 PM
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Default Re: General Labour Issues Thrad

Hotel employee fired for talking to Washington Post reporter. Welcome to right-to-work-be-fired-for-any-reason-your-boss-feels-like America.
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Cēterum cēnseō factiōnem Rēpūblicānam dēlendam esse īgnī ferrōque.

“All for ourselves, and nothing for other people, seems, in every age of the world, to have been the vile maxim of the masters of mankind.” -Adam Smith

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  #83  
Old 03-31-2015, 03:39 AM
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Default Re: General Labour Issues Thrad

Darden Restaurants, owners of Olive Garden, Longhorn Steakhouse, Bahama Breeze, and formerly Red Lobster not only sourced their Sea food from a company using actual slave labor but gave them multiple internal awards for excellence.
Darden Restaurants Knowingly Sourced From Slave Labor
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  #84  
Old 03-31-2015, 05:24 AM
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Default Re: General Labour Issues Thrad

It's even worse than I expected from your summary.

Quote:
The conditions detailed are particularly brutal, describing 20-22 hour workdays (not a typo), no days off, and regular beatings.
Twenty-two-hour workdays. How the fuck is that even humanly possible? This goes beyond the sort of thing that needs a severe fine. The government should immediately nationalise Darden Restaurants and all its holdings, and probably imprison its board of executives for complicity in slavery for good measure. People who continue to eat at Darden restaurants after the release of this report are the worst kind of filth.
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Cēterum cēnseō factiōnem Rēpūblicānam dēlendam esse īgnī ferrōque.

“All for ourselves, and nothing for other people, seems, in every age of the world, to have been the vile maxim of the masters of mankind.” -Adam Smith

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  #85  
Old 03-31-2015, 12:40 PM
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Default Re: General Labour Issues Thrad

At least do something about it, not let it happen. In the last year, I've stopped buying seafood except from the gulf coast or Atlantic seaboard, and I check that none of my seafood comes from any place in Asia or the Pacific coast, since this issue is so horrifying to me.
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  #86  
Old 08-19-2016, 10:34 PM
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Default Re: General Labour Issues Thrad

It turns out Ivanka Drumpf doesn’t pay her interns because of course she doesn’t. This Wonkette piece contains some absolutely beautiful ranting about how absolutely fucked people of our generation are, as well as how much we’ve been holding up the economy. (Median income for people born between 1981 and 1997 in my state is $20k, and we’re not even in the bottom tier. Even the highest tier of such wages, $43k in D.C., is hardly adequate giving the costs of living there, as anyone who’s ever looked at moving to the District would be able to tell you.)

tl;dr: Ivanka Drumpf is a bad person and should feel bad.
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Cēterum cēnseō factiōnem Rēpūblicānam dēlendam esse īgnī ferrōque.

“All for ourselves, and nothing for other people, seems, in every age of the world, to have been the vile maxim of the masters of mankind.” -Adam Smith

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  #87  
Old 08-19-2016, 11:12 PM
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Default Re: General Labour Issues Thrad

It's pretty clear by now that the rich, especially the Drumpfs stay that way by not paying anyone and leveraging their wealth to get away with it, often building an inflated ego that the peons should be honored to work for such genius.

Reading the no longer Trump reddit thread its amazing the number of small businesses Trump has destroyed by stealing their services and then using legal protections to get away with it.
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  #88  
Old 08-20-2016, 01:45 AM
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Default Re: General Labour Issues Thrad

Quote:
Originally Posted by Ari View Post
It's pretty clear by now that the rich, especially the Drumpfs stay that way by not paying anyone and leveraging their wealth to get away with it, often building an inflated ego that the peons should be honored to work for such genius.

Reading the no longer Trump reddit thread its amazing the number of small businesses Trump has destroyed by stealing their services and then using legal protections to get away with it.
I wonder if a class action lawsuit would be a good idea...
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  #89  
Old 08-20-2016, 06:01 AM
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Default Re: General Labour Issues Thrad

Not really. He's gotten away with it by having his projects declare bankrupcy which wipes his dept to the small companies even if they took him to court and won.

This is of course why Trump considers himself a great businessman. He convinces others to take risks and then shafts them to make sure *his* business doesn't pay.
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  #90  
Old 04-09-2017, 01:51 AM
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Default Re: General Labour Issues Thrad

College Grads Stuck With Low Wages as U.S. Hiring Heats Up - Bloomberg

So, I have a pet hypothesis, and it may not be entirely accurate, but I suspect part of the reason this is occurring is that our generation had it drilled into our heads that we wouldn't be able to have functional lives without a college degree, and at the same time wages and available positions have stagnated due in part to regressive government policies, in part to business 'leaders' who have no desire to pay employees what they are worth, in part due to the reduced bargaining position of labourers, and in part due to increasing automation that has reduced the number of available positions overall and thus created more competition for available employment. There may be a few other factors as well, but basically: it's structural.

I'm really tired of my generation being slagged off for our position in society when most of these problems aren't of our creation. To be fair, this piece isn't doing that. I've seen far too many of them that have, though. I've gotten to the point where whenever I see the word 'millennial', I twitch involuntarily. I wasn't consulted about having the name of my generation changed, and I'm tired of seeing it in print. Generational analysis is often excruciatingly shallow, anyway, but when it comes to the economy (and in several dozen other cases) we're being screwed over and there's really nothing we can do about it.

And as long as we're talking about labour's reduced bargaining power, this piece from Loomis is worth reading:

Simplistic Solutions to Organized Labor's Problems - Lawyers, Guns & Money

And there's also this, which I'm not sure I possess the vocabulary to condemn adequately at this particular time.

The Trump Child Labor Agenda - Lawyers, Guns & Money
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Cēterum cēnseō factiōnem Rēpūblicānam dēlendam esse īgnī ferrōque.

“All for ourselves, and nothing for other people, seems, in every age of the world, to have been the vile maxim of the masters of mankind.” -Adam Smith

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