The owners take advantage of our commons, tear up our roads, and succeeded because of domestic infrastructure, only to refuse to pay full price for labor and allowing even those wages, in lieu of the taxes they bribe our government to enact loopholes to dodge, to "trickle down" domestically as their always bullshit yay market capitalism talking points lied?
It's absolutely clownshoes that outsourcing labor/manufacturing is allowed, not because of domestic shortages for a skill, but to explicitly pay pennies on the dollar for the employees you need and screw the country you don't want to pay taxes to despite record profits even harder.
It's insane. But we let the owner class dictate whatever they want here, and our well bribed government will even sell it for them by calling it "something something freedom" while never mentioning social consequences, accountability, or responsibility. We aren't so much a country as a piggy bank and cudgel for the global owner class.
Here, for certain industries (might be all but I don't have first hand accounts of that), the contractors must make sure that the companies/freelancers they employ pay their taxes, otherwise, they are on the hook for it.
Do the same. If a company outsource work, they should prove that they pay the same as they would in their region, and if it not, be hit hard by fines and/or jail time.
Should apply to that as well if they're interacting with the US market. All the way through subcontractors to the end employee. No hiding behind contracting local companies.
We may not agree with it, but this is exactly the same thing as an overseas call center. They're not physically located in the US and are not subject to any laws here.
Also, y'all are thinking of what $3 buys in the US. The purchasing power is far different. $3 buys a lot over there.
You misunderstand. We aren't unaware or ignoring the purchasing power difference, that's obvious, everyone knows currency differs. The issue is and always has been the outsourcing to increase profit in general, regardless of country or purchasing disparity. There is no reason to use a teleconferenced cashier for a retail location other than minimizing employee pay, not just by paying the minimum required here but literally taking a local job and shipping it overseas so you can instead pay what would be a clear poverty wage here, while undoubtedly having record profits like all these companies end up with.
Depends on the region, lowest is about 350 php or 6 usd per day. Most of the call centers are in the big cities however where wages are a bit higher and they well enough to be thought of as a decent job.
adding that she splits tips with her manager and kitchen staff at the restaurant.
They don't even let her keep her entire tips. The whole situation is fucked. Somebody mentioned in the article also brought up a great point...
“Today, this is a Filipino woman behind a screen, controlling a POS system — but it’s not crazy to believe that probably in the next six to twelve months, this could be an AI avatar doing all the same things,” he said.
Well yeah. When you eat at a restaurant, and tip, generally you’re not intending to tip the solely the cashier.
Before chanting along with the hate chant just think for a second. When’s the last time you tipped a cashier, with the intention of the tip going to the cashier and none of the rest of the staff?
They are not physically in the US, and probably work listed as some sort of overseas contractor. Whatever wages they earn are from their employer who contracts for the restaurant.
I would rather use a POS terminal than try to talk to someone over zoom with no headphones. If it's not a human in person who can just say "hmmm the computer is broken here's your sandwich" then it's worse.
I know you are being cheeky.. But you are using their lingo. It is strategic as it skips the the perp ie the rent seeker looking to underpay for labour.
You know how fake teevee always got NYC migrant bussing story?
But we never hear about migrants being bussed into the heartland to work in meat packing or some other hard work.
This shit has got to be outlawed. Companies are doing this across the board. Literally skirting labor laws, outsourcing jobs that should be going to us citizens, all to just continue pouring more money into the tops pockets. When will we have all had enough?
It's a simple enough solution in this case. They are performing the work of employees, so for all intents and purposes, they are employees. They are directly interacting with US customers at a physical location within the US. Their place of work is that physical location, even if they are not physically present. They need authorization to work in the US, and the minimum wage laws applicable to that location applies to these workers.
All that is missing is the lawsuit under existing labor laws, which they will probably lose.
Sounds like something the Department of Labour could legislate... Or could have.
But the supreme court just ruled that this falls under the courts jurisdiction and there's a snowflakes chance in hell that a case pushed high and far enough will result in those ghouls will rule in favour of labour interests.
It's usually impossible not to, because we have no visibility into the supply chain or there's no other options. In this case, it's impossible to ignore.
Are there movements in the US or globally to force all business into worker coops? Unions are good but I think this is their ultimate limitation, that employers can just offshore their jobs
Argentina has somewhat of a history of workers seizing their factories. I think it would be extremely hard in the U.S. due to the well-funded police. Generally, I guess the movement would be "anarcho-syndicalism."
Edit: misremembered worker factory takeovers in the past as occurring in Venezuela instead of Argentina.
Thanks. I didn't know about Venezuela's history at all. But I meant not more on a policy level to mandate that all companies must be owned equally by employees instead of shareholders
By that hyper-simplistic "logic" people shouldn't be forced into prison if they murder someone.
Clearly some kinds of forcing in some situations are "good", and if some are good but other not, that means the real discussion is all about "when is forcing right and when is it not?" something that childlike "logic" of yours doesn't even begin to address.
Forcing is absolutely good. We force companies to do all kinds of things, in terms of corporate governance (publicly traded companies must have their finances audited, for example), ownership (banks used to be prevented from buying stock so that they would not avoid calling in bad debt), and how they do business (collusion between big tech to keep salaries down for example).
Having no actual person guarding your business is a recipe for theft. If this catches on it will be so much easier to steal from places. I'm ok with this
You shouldnt ever try to protect the cash register at your place of work. They give 0 fucks about you and will have a job posting up before your body is cold.
Fact but it does not negate that physically present employees deters some crime.
High traffic grocery stores who put in self check outs are staffing several guards now and put in some clown fences and gates...
But hey guy who put in self check and guy fired cashiers both got bonus...
Guy hiring security and putting fences also got bonus. These clowns will pay anyone any amount of money as long they don't pay the worker for the actual job.
I remember working in a store and a guy walked through the scanner at the door and it went off, the other employee looked at me and was like "that guy stole something, hey?" And I was just like "yep" and we went back to whatever we were doing lol
Can confirm, if they give any appearance of being human, even for years on end, it's a lie, they are complete psychopaths and will throw you into the fire not even to save themselves, just to feel slightly less insecure.
The recommended course of action in a robbery is to follow instructions and hand over anything they ask for. If they grab product and walk out of the store, don't try to stop them. This is actually less of an insurance liability than having an actual person there.
Yes but in general people are less likely to steal if there is a person standing in front of them watching. I'm not even talking about robbery just people stealing a candy bar or whatever. If it's just sitting out with no one around people will take it.
A 17 year old kid paid minimum wage who gives zero fucks about the company isn't a huge deterrent either. As long as you don't put them in risk steal from corpos all the time
Working as a graphic designer in the US since the early 2000's, every employer I ever worked for eventually used Fiverr to pay someone overseas a fraction of what they paid me to do the same work. This doesn't seem meaningfully different.
Not saying this is okay, just that it's not even remotely (no pun intended) a new problem.
I mean every time I go through a drive through I'm asked if I'm going to use the app to order by one person (or ai but I know about 20 years ago Wendy's tried to put all drive through orders through a remote facility too) and when I say Nope another person actually gets on and takes the order...so they are in many aspects. Hell you can't order in person from some of the rest stop fast food spots in Florida.
No, that is just a pre-recorded message. I once went through a mcdonald's drive thru that had just closed. They asked me for my order and after I gave it, I realized no one was in the restaurant. I pulled around and they asked me again every time I stopped at the order point, but there was no cars in the lot.
Not knowing the law in the US I guess it is fully legal. Given that there is no union or chain responsibility in the supply chain or similar to GDPR in EU you guys are fucked until someone abuse the system one way or another.
On the other hand it shows work from home is feasible even with these kind of things.
I hope it's just supplemental. Like have one cashier and when it's busy have one remote in to help for a period of time (card only payments) then log out. Could have a 3rd party company manage a group of online employees to rotate between places worldwide.
Still don't think I'm cool with it but seems inevitable unless AI just replaces all of them quicker than expected
I have bad eye sight...I read the screen behind her as "Japanese fried children" suddenly I knew I had misread that. Like there's no way New York would stoop that low and be that cruel to children. I corrected myself before any other thought occurred actually. But it was momentarily disturbing.
If a remote worker can actually do the job at a high enough level, then the writing is on the wall.
Globalization will eventually take over those roles and laws that try to prop up a local worker will end up like Oregon's old law that says you can't pump your own gas.
The only way to 'win' is to equip the local guy with skills that absolutely cannot be done remotely, or educate him to do things at a level unmatched by the remote worker coming from another culture.
Well, I bet the people doing those jobs in the Philippines are stoked. Probably a decent wage for them with currency conversion and the cost of living in the Philippines. Though of course, they could AT LEAST be paying them the American minimum wage :| 7.25/h in the Philippines would be pretty spicy. The work they are doing IS being done in America*...
Exploitation is a bit finicky to define. Unless a laborer gets all of the value of the labor they produce, or they're in a worker co-operative, exactly at point would you define a job as exploitation? Paying the lowest labor cost is just good business sense. Free market allocation of resources has been the most efficient system humanity has found for economic growth. China does have capitalistic attributes in its society, and they are the closest to a "communist" society that exists on the planet. Though of course, regulatory capture, and as it is called in Hamburgerland "too big to fail" corporations, implies that we do NOT have an actual free market, the Gamestop saga being a shining example of this.
So, at what point would you define something as labor exploitation? There are some obvious examples of it (child coal mine/meat processing/textile workers etc), but where is the line?
If my initial reaction is “that’s too bad”, does it make me greedy?
Like, I don’t think US workers are more deserving as human beings than anyone else… but a part of me knows hardcore globalization would hurt people geographically close to me… I’m like some national relativist or something?
I feel like I should want everyone to win regardless of where they were born. And $3/hr is huge vs. the $6/day min wage in parts of PH. Know friends’ friends are farming rice for six bucks a day.
the problem is it circumvents minimum wage laws. They're employing a person so they should be paying them the appropriate wages to do business in new york or the US. They're also benefitting from payroll/income taxes but not paying into the programs.
Are call centers the same way? And any company relying on Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) firms?
Would be a lotta layoffs overseas if we restricted all foreign labor making less than local minimum wage. Is that a fair trade off? (Not being facetious, genuine question again)
Oh one thing that’s kinda messed up is when tech companies go through consultancies to hire workers in India, the consulting companies take HALF!! Wild!
Everything in the US is already expensive, that "great wage going to a Filipino/a" is at the expense of a person in their own hometown not having a job.
Too bad? Put the shoe on your other foot. If we in the US ban imported rice to protect our farmers, would you and friends feel comfortable in that time things take to adjust? The loss of income?
How far does $6/day go in the Philippines? I can tell you how far it goes in NYC.
Things in america should be more expensive. We do not pay for the full cost of what all of our goods and services cost, mainly due to exploitative measures like in this post.
You can double down all you want but the real answer is that we just shouldn't be able to buy nearly as much stuff as we do. We love being consumers anf watching the trash heap grow, while we take advantage of anyone smaller than us in any remote corner of the Earth.
I don’t know what to think because I want everyone to win, but it’s hard to deny I’m biased towards my countrymen here stateside.
Re-reading my comment, did it sound like I meant:
it’s too bad this job is being outsourced
or
psh, too bad, this is the reality of a global world!
I did mean the first one.
I should want everyone to win but I’m biased towards Americans in situations like this - and I don’t know if I can justify it, if I can universalize the maxim.
Sure, it might be convenient, but our society is not structured in a way that allows this to work. We need deep, deep social support or people will suffer greatly
you: "Yeah I lost my job, but hey, now someone in India gets to earn a living...can you help me prop up my cardboard box to keep the rain out? thanks."
Jobs are not a finite resource. If there is a pool of people who want to work, someone will find stuff to pay them to do.
I seriously would love for my entire current set of job responsibilities to be automated. There are a couple of value-adding full-time jobs' worth of work I could be doing for my employer that are just being left on the table right now.
I agree it sucks that anyone would lose their job, but why is the default of people in the "west" having well paid, air conditioned jobs, and other people getting those jobs stealing from them.