There's no money for public investments, but there is always money for wars. There's no money for raises and bonuses for workers, until workers show there's no company without them.
So, if there's no money for public investments, it's time to show there's no public for their wars and exploitation.
These finance jobs are low paid because they're not that skilled and many people can do them. Same basic reason as why fast food temp worker is low paid.
No billionaire is forced to break up a public company to pay taxes, the same as no average Joe is forced to sell his clothes to pay taxes. The idea in common is that if one knows that one must have cash at the end of the fiscal year, then one sets aside the money and simply avoids buying clothes or investing in assets.
“Public investments” besides are heavily spent on. The majority of the US federal budget goes to welfare. If you want new infrastructure and so on, the primary blockers are the universal veto powers we hand normal people.
Even if a rich person reinvests everything, the control over large amount of money is what makes it problematic.
Also the idea that welfare doesn't go to investments is wrong. When you buy groceries (or anything really), there is a decision made by the management of the company you buy these things from to reinvest part of it to maintain or build productive capacity.
There is no need for a "capitalist" (owner of the enterprise) to insert themself into the process, they are useless middlemen who get a cut, essentially. (They are not so useless when they do actual managerial work, but then they can be just an employee like everyone else.)
That's certainly an opinion that some people have, but as the parent comment stated, companies don't run without employees, so the idea that the value created is solely attributed to the founders or other executives is not an empircal fact like you're claiming it is. There's no scientific formula for "how much of this result of a bunch of actions that multiple people took over the course of a few years is attributed to each of the people"; the only way to have any sort of objective delineation of that like you're describing is if you already bake in assumptions of how valuable each piece is before you've started, which just moves the opinions one later deeper.
I can't prove you wrong any more than you can prove the parent commenter wrong, because what you've said is based on so many premises that I fundamentally agree with that seem like universal laws to you.
Without billionaires, money stays in the community where it circulates (workers and small business owners make money and they spend it). With billionaires it is extracted from the communities and hoarded in investment accounts a thousand miles away.
I appreciate that this is a flippant remark, but there are crypto billionaires proving that there are exceptions to this assertion.
I guess one important nuace is that it's not all billionaires for whom this is the case. You have lots of Carlos Slim style 'get a government monopoly and collect the rents'. So it's a bit messy.
There's also all the various shenanigans they employ to avoid paying a fair share of tax, so they're mainly "stealing from society".
The level of wealth hoarding by certain people would be classed as a serious mental illness if they were hoarding something else, but it's actually far more damaging to the rest of the world that they hoard wealth.
I truly cannot believe that anyone with an ounce of empathy or integrity could possibly believe a statement as absurd as this.
I don’t think they will be allowed to retire.
I’m just a dumb blue collar worker, but I’m going to go with “No” here.
They were only ever owed what they agreed to work for.
Now, that’s changed and they negotiated a different agreement.
They were never owed this until both parties agreed they were.
[GIF of Woody Harrelson wiping tears with money]
Also the fact that people in group $X are getting screwed more than people in group $Y is no reason not to fight to not get screwed if you are in group $Y.
Now, using the leverage is the difficulty to unionize. Athletes are a tiny group, pretty easy to organize. Pilots are a small group, also pretty easy to unionize. The fact they have to be licensed means there is a record for all the people needed pull in. Software engineers seem to be 5x-20x larger population than commercial pilots (quick/rough searches). They have no certification or registry organization and have no common affiliations. It's incredibly difficult to organize this group. There's also no regulatory capture requiring developers to be US citizens so, if you did unionize and tried to negotiate too hard the industry would just move away from the US so there's just not a lot of leverage this profession has.
For unions to be as effective in tech as for say pilots or doctors, you'd have to agree on a way to restrict supply (H1B restrictions, more licensing and credentialling etc) to give the union leverage. You have to control the supply taps and rate limit entry to the field.
I think it's hard to say if this would net out better for workers than the current arrangements, which are already the best in the world on nearly every metric.
It also seems like there's a timing issue - if tech workers DID successfully unionise enough to withhold a meaningful fraction of labour, the gains might ultimately end up in the market cap of AI companies via substitution.
If you don't need to buy a product to make a product, or when you have to that's typically pennies on the dollar you can share a lot more of that.
The real difference here is that when the market is favorable you CAN share more. And Samsung is doing so. In the US you probably wouldn't be able to do this because the shareholders will cry and will happily give a 100M bonus to whoever will 'lead' the company better. Where better means diverting as much as possible to the shareholders
The number of people making "moon money" is very, very small compared to everyone else in the industry.
Developers don't set EE wages. It's always the management class that is the source of your woes, not your fellow workers. We're in this together.
-- A proud programming union worker in South Korea since 2018.
You have a point. But on this precise topic it’s pretty hard to make. A tiny handful of companies who are winners beyond anyone’s expectations simply do not matter.
There is exactly zero percent chance this profit sharing contract would have been negotiated by either party as it is if this had been remotely predicted in advance. Same as the retrospectively extremely lucrative RSUs granted to nvidia employees just five years ago.
Tech folks employed by the top tech companies have been fine. I do not cry even a minute for them. The fun part of the Korean memory worker compensation is that blue collar folks finally are getting just a little bit of the taste the laptop class has been part of for so long. And it is likely to be comparatively very fleeting.
(It sounds like the union got a great deal for these workers, though.)
You seem surprised? Do you know how things (sometimes) work in Silicon Valley?
If you do not feel gratitude to your employer I suggest you find a different one. If you cannot find such an employer over an extended time frame, perhaps the problem is you.
Tech pulled a great trick here: equity.
America as a whole pulled a similar trick: 401k
It’s hard to fight the billionaires when all your money depends on not fighting them.
Most of the unionize workers still left in America get a better share of the pie than the non-Union workers not even close. It’s always good to work together in a union had to be footloose and fancy free by yourself.
No not a gift but they sure do align incentives
First, the general public would have more disposable income if we shift more of the tax burden on the ultra rich.
Second, people like Elon Musk won't be able to give themselves massive bonuses that are essentially paid by diluting common stock.
Also, with regard to the U.S., the U.S. could wipe out its national debt with a one-time wealth tax, and also pass a balanced budget const. amendment so it never ends up deep in debt again.
Lastly, perverse and extremely greed-based exploitative businesses might become less common, since there aren't ultra fat executive paychecks. Although it might still happen if a large group of people are able to make a somewhat high salary off such schemes.
I think I am making a shrewd decision here if my math and equine knowledge holds.
The average person on hacker news is easily in the 90th percentile of software engineers, so yeah, I wouldn't be surprised if the most people here make somewhere around there.
The biggest confounding factor is the other fact that most HN users are startup founders living off ramen in Peter Thiel's garage, so that probably brings down the average some.
Of course I'm late to the game. My colleagues who have been here ten years are either extremely wealthy and bored or sailing the Caribbean at this point. Every other week someone is taking a sabbatical
I remember thinking like this when i was younger (hes older than me). Then here i am working nearly half as many hours as this guy, for 5-10x the pay.
This is a widespread, pervasive train of thought in America. Yet i wonder as the houses and healthcare stay expensive, food and fuel too... at some point this mental model breaks right?
That is, a US tech worker is taking much more for their own from those billionaire employers, compared to what Samsung's workers managed to do after a lot of haggling.
Just the average doesn’t say enough.
This is not standard thing. This is response in situation where company has generated massively more profit than any time previously and likely any time in future after market stabilises. Expectation that at least part is shared with employees should not be unreasonable.
I remember when I had these kind of takes. I blindly believed in "equal treatment, including billionaires". Now I get frustrated reading them, but I have empathy from understanding where they come from (for now, at least).
> cost centres
What?
In what way are manufacturing workers a cost centre?
They aren’t call centre workers.
You pay them the bonus, it shows on the pay cheque, like every salary bonus. What about this is something you'd expect in an article?
product regulations and antitrust as examples
EDIT: just realized I'm not sure what a "chip worker" in this article is. Someone doing digital design? Someone working in the fab? Hmm
Almost 6x the base, not bad.
How about TSMC or ASML?
Are you being sarcastic?
It's literally mentioned in the first sentence of the article, as well as the subheading.
