The inverted salary pyramid
Published by marco on
The following video was quite interesting and not just for observing the sartorial style of the San Fransisco author set. They are very thoughtful and passionate revolutionaries for a sane and just society.
'Chokepoint Capitalism' How to take back the arts from Big Tech | Rebecca Giblin and Cory Doctorow by The Real News Network (YouTube)
At 36:20, Rebecca says,
“People’s passion is being weaponized to facilitate their exploitation.” These are the so-called “thankless” jobs where the pay sucks, but it’s morally and/or societally important: health-care, education, old-age care, care for the poor. All of these need to be done. Capitalism decides to pay them as little as possible—as usual—but, in this case, as little as possible is even less because the job has to be done.
Like when my mother-in-law worked for decades in old-age homes. Those ladies were her friends and they needed her to show up or they would suffer and die. A capitalist society, instead of being thrilled that someone is willing to do that work, pays less because of that “weird premium we assign to labor that means something” (Cory Doctorow citing David Graeber).
At 36:45, Cory says,
“[…] where we say to people who have a meaningful job, ‘why do you want to get a fair wage for it? Isn’t the satisfaction of doing the job enough? Surely, a fair wage should be reserved for people who have to do the soul-deadening work of representing a box and a dotted line in an org chart for a princeling in a Fortune 500 company. […] Those people need incentive for showing up to work! But if you get the intrinsic satisfaction of helping toddlers, you should be OK with going to the food bank twice a week.”
That’s how capitalism works. It minimizes outlays. If it can convince workers to produce for less, it will. If it needs workers for shitty jobs, it has to pay more.
This is an amoral and stupid way to run a society, of course.
It makes everyone bitter. It makes people bitter who just wanted to do something useful. It makes people miserable who take jobs that they hate in order to make more money. This is a clusterfuck and we should knock it the fuck off.