The internet has a serious issue with managers, upper management, and even landlords nowadays. It's so weird to see people slip back into blaming anyone but the real grifters who provide no benefit but take a dollar for no real benefit, or the wage inequality with CSuites. Even people here are falling back into blaming people in their own wage bracket rather than looking at people who provide nothing or paid too much.
As someone who's worked the peon doing the shit to management, so much of the issue is rooted in insurance and government mandated oversight.
People love to hate on their manager making $20,000-40,000 more than them, but they're basically the same as you to everyone grifting or the 1%. Quit blaming them for living in a society that both WANTS and REQUIRES massive oversight.
Running a business ethically takes far more money than anyone wants to admit.
Running a business while making sure you follow all government regulations, codes, is insurable, and is cost efficient is even harder.
First, get rid of for profit insurance. They should all work as collectives.
Get rid of for profit healthcare and go single payer. Remove middlemen who provide no benefit. Quit overpaying shit like salesmen because they're a clear tick that shows more $$$$ and pay people nicely. A housekeeper making $40,000 shouldn't be $50,000 away from their manager and shouldn't be $400,000 or more away from their President. Quit overvaluing and paying a rich person to what amounts to having to have someone dedicated to sucking up to other rich people to stay alive.
Understand that the stock market only works with infinite growth. You will need to save up exactly what you plan to use in retirement without the magic of it or compounding interest and redistribute the wealth through unionizing, and collective bargaining.
Understand that all of it takes someone to lead and do it that will need to be paid as well. People want to live their lives happily, not sacrifice themselves and their life out of some noble goodness of their heart. Pay them appropriately and understand that if you're in these positions, you shouldn't be paid double what other people make just because you do important work. We all do.
Remember that it takes more people to run anything that we like to admit, and that often these regulations are there for a reason. Find the real fat, and cut it while you can.
Seriously though, blame for profit businesses that should just be government run if they're a requirement. Insurance/public health, safety/audit oversight, infrastructure, utilities, public health.
Push for cooperatives for things that can be more privatized but get sketchy when it's all government or full on for profit, like private land ownership, private schools, banking to credit unions.
If you went 100 years back in time and told people that school teachers would be dead broke despite making the best financial decisions possible and be nearly homeless despite working long hours they would be fucking shocked.
Being a school teacher, even one for elementary school kids, in the late 19th century was not only a respectable profession, but also decently paid. I think Horrible Histories said that the average school teacher in the 1880s and 1890s in the UK made around 60 pounds sterling a year, which was a fairly decent wage at the time.
This is generating the typical anti-capitalist hate, but we should also consider that this is also a reflection on the kinds of unpaid work that women have been doing for generations. The problem isn't necessarily profits or middle-men, it's just that some things are always going to be expensive if people are actually paid for the work they do.
Take daycare. In the US the government says that one adult should care for no more than 3 infants, no more than 4 toddlers and no more than 7 preschoolers.
Take someone working at the US poverty line at about $15,000 per year. That's $1250 per month. For 3 infants that's $415 per month each, for 4 toddlers that's $312 each, for 7 preschoolers that's $180 each. That's the absolute cheapest you could possibly go, where a worker is at the poverty line, and there are no costs for rent, supplies, and also zero profit.
But, as a parent, you probably don't want the absolute lowest "bidder" to take care of your kids. You probably want someone who's good with kids, kind, gentle, patient, etc. So, let's not even go all the way up to the lowest possible teacher's salary of $34,041 in Montana. Let's say the daycare worker is great with kids, but doesn't have the teaching background to get even the least well paying teaching job available in the country. Let's say you'd be willing to have someone who makes $24,000 per year for easy math. That's a wage where the caregiver is going to struggle to make ends meet in most of the country, but maybe it's worth it for them because they like working with kids. That's $2000 per month. For infants it's $667 per month each or $8000 per year, toddlers it's $500 per month each or $6000 per year. preschoolers it's $285 per month each or about $3500 per year.
Again, this is before you consider any profits. That's money straight from the parents to the caregiver's salary. That's before you consider rent, before supplies, before snacks, etc. That's no reading nook, no library, no arts and crafts, that's presumably just using someone's living room.
Now, if the daycare worker is going to be able to take sick days or vacations, you'll need to pay part of another person's salary who will cover. So instead of 1 person watching 7 preschoolers, you have 10 people watching 70 preschoolers plus 1 who rotates in to cover when the main workers are unavailable, so make that another 10%. We're up to almost $9k per year for an infant, and we still don't have cribs, baby food or a cent in profit, and we have a worker who is barely scraping by.
The point is, any job that involves a lot of human supervision is going to be very expensive. Caring for babies and old or sick people involves a lot of human supervision. Much of this work used to be done by women who didn't work outside the home. Now that women are working outside the home, even when they have young children, we're realizing how expensive it is. None of what I've talked about involves capitalism or profits, it's just purely paying someone to do child-care work while the woman does other work.
But, this is where the capitalism / socialism aspect comes in. If we want women to be able to work outside the home, and we also want kids to be something that isn't financially ruinous, society needs to help pay for those things. In a purely capitalist, no socialism, winner-take-all world, having kids is a major liability. Having an option to not have kids is great, but in the long term society is doomed if nobody is willing to have kids anymore.
This is a very interesting thing to point out, but I believe you are not realising how intrinsically tied the generations of women unpaid work is to the economic system.
"mainstream economic theory is obsessed with the productivity of waged labour while skipping right over the unpaid work that makes it all possible, as feminist economists have made clear for decades. That work is known by many names: unpaid caring work, the reproductive economy, the love economy, the second economy."
"the household provision of care is essential for human well-being, and productivity in the paid economy depends directly upon [the core economy]. It matters because when – in the name of austerity and public-sector savings – governments cut budgets for children’s daycare centres, community services, parental leave and youth clubs, the need for care-giving doesn’t disappear: it just gets pushed back into the home. The pressure, particularly on women’s time, can force them out of work and increase social stress and vulnerability. That undermines both well-being and women’s empowerment, with multiple knock-on effects for society and the economy alike."
Doughnut economics - Kate Raworth
Capitalism thrived and keeps thriving in concentrating capital because it is able to get away with not accounting for the value it extracts. This is true for this example of unpaid labour as well as for natural resources extraction, ecosystem damage etc(we are beginning to realize this with carbon tax). That's the cornerstone of the system function, not just a side effect. The unpaid labour may be starting to be dealt with in the West, but this just means it is aggressively outsourced in third world countries. Without these so-called economic externalities there is no profit (or extremely little of it).
This is a really good point. Historically communities have always relied on unpaid/underpaid labor in some capacity. Even mowing your neighbors lawn once in a while could be considered a value of a few hundred dollars (fuck lawns btw) - there has always been this invisible layer of communal support that is now becoming commodified.
Marginalized groups being fairly compensated is an objectively good thing, but the financial stress is real. As society continues to grow even more individualistic, we will probably see additional pressures mount until another fundamental shift happens. I have no idea what that will look like, but it is interesting to think about.
A very interesting and well-written post.
Two words:
Record Profits
Yeah baby!!
Line goes up, grandpa and kiddo can just go to the crappier nursing home and daycare and you can work a little harder can't you!?
Now if you'll excuse me, but I've got some senators dicks to suck
Now if you’ll excuse me, but I’ve got some senators dicks to suck
You got it backwards...
Line must go up.
True. I used to teach at a technical school, oh, a quarter century ago now. Seats were something like $500 per person, and I would have a class of 14 to 18 students. So $7,000 to $9,000 worth of tuition per day.
I was making $18 an hour, IIRC? $144 a day?
OH! AND I had to wear a suit and tie every day. So in addition to the usual expenses, there were also drycleaning bills.
After 9/11 class size shrunk to 2-3 people a day and the school went out of business.
I used to work as a building superintendent in a condo. I did the math and the corporation brought in around half a million a month in maintenance fees and the operating costs aren't anywhere that high. I used to get paid minimum wage. I did the math on the amount of units in comparison to my paycheck. It was something like a dollar per unit was going towards my pay. So whenever anyone acted like I should bend over backwards for them, I remembered that their particular issues and complaints were only worth $1 to me
In the condo and building maintenance industry, the less you do the more you make, the super and cleaners do everything and get paid shit, the manager and offsite manager's boss make a fortune
So whenever anyone acted like I should bend over backwards for them
In theory, there should have been a dozen of you with what they were paying. That's something they failed to understand (or refused to understand) as tenants. It is - at some level - something they needed to be made more aware of.
Renters can and do unionize. And when both renters and apartment workers realize they share economic interests, they can exert a ton of leverage over a building that has effectively been abandoned by its official title holder.
the super and cleaners do everything and get paid shit, the manager and offsite manager’s boss make a fortune
It's all a pyramid scheme.
Hospitals will ruin your life but most of the staff lives paycheck to paycheck.
Not just the staff either, providers are making significantly less every year.
I work in orthopedics and rehabilitation, and even though the cost of school, licensing, and insurance has skyrocketed. My field is basically being paid the same amount they were 30 years ago, and that's not even accounting for inflation.
In some ways it's nice, as medicine doesn't attract people who are just in it for the money any longer. But, hospital organizations now know that providers are basically locked in a sunk cost fallacy to pay back their loans, and on top of that they have a calling for it.
Admin and c-suite taking huge salaries and sucking companies, schools and agencies dry.
It's almost like there's greedy fatcats in every industry stuffing all of the profits down their fat gullets while everyone else barely holds off starvation.
Worker and Consumer Cooperatives should be the only way to form a business. Fuck external and unequal capital ownership by shareholders.
Germany has the right idea with their co-determination laws
Girlfriend works in childcare and I work in elder care. Fuck me double
Elder care wealth is extracted using service companies as services. E.g. they hire their for-profit cleaning service for astronomical money while their non-profit elderly care facility claims to make no profits. Since the service takes the money and the elder care facility is paying for a known cost (cleaning, supplies, whatever) then they can still claim to be non-profit. The non-profit pays no taxes so they aren't doubly taxed either.
This is a widely known scheme in the north east, combined with the fact that when it's inspection time to see staff levels the business owners mysteriously are given a heads up before they show up so they can make sure just enough staff is there. They routinely understaff these facilities because each person there is just another wage to pay.
Bottom line, for profit healthcare is appalling and corruption is everywhere.
How do you know all of this?
<notices username>
Ah, checks out.
This scheme is just an example of how entire economy operates.
Hey there and solidarity from the disability care world. We need a damn union, I heard like 25% of the millenials are in human care positions, so I'm hoping we do something soon, we got the people for it.
I would join an care workers union in a heartbeat
Most definitely... This sort of job is ripe for it.
This union should have a board seat too since can't trust corporate for anything
Damn y'all must bounce from flu to flu every month of the year lol
My immune systems is jacked SpongeBob
This person is soooo close to figuring out that the problem is capitalism. This is capitalism working as intended.
As we all know, you can't make a critique of capitalism without including "capitalism bad" in your critique.
Similar to Poe's Law I guess... I couldn't tell if the post was intentionally making a point, or if the person was just making observations. Given the average level of intelligence that I usually see on the internet, I assumed the latter.
I do volunteer office work for a non-profit childcare center, and have looked at their budget and their books. It's basically impossible to efficiently do at the scale of a single center in a high cost of living city.
If you're paying teachers an average of $30/hour and maintaining a ratio of 4 kids to 1 teacher at all times, and covering 50 hours per week of operational time (for example, operational hours between 8am and 6pm 5 days per week), and you actually have enough staff to not pay overtime, that's $1500/week in wages per teacher, or $375/week per student. Throw in taxes, healthcare, paid vacation, and staffing in redundancy so that you can handle illness and the unexpected, and each kid might be at $400-450/week in labor costs of the direct work of watching and teaching the kids.
But in reality, childcare is in crisis now because a qualified worker could probably get a higher paying nanny job for 1 or 2 kids at a time, so there's a severe shortage of workers even at that $30/hour average wage. And so there needs to be overtime, and that creeps up to $450-500/week for workers.
And then you have the ongoing overhead: rent, utilities, furniture/equipment, toys, books, other supplies, etc. Most centers provide food, and have to contract out for that, too.
And then there's the cost of management. Someone needs to run the place, there might need to be something like a receptionist, and these centers often have to contract out their bookkeeping, electronic records, or even basics like running a website. Most have extra features like electronic reports and maybe even pictures/video for parents, and that costs money, too.
So even on the non-profit side, without a profit motive or distributions to shareholders, the industry as a whole has a mismatch between the prices parents are able to pay versus the bare minimum acceptable cost of providing that service. (In fact, the nonprofit I'm thinking of has donations coming in to cover things like tuition assistance for parents who need it, or a lot of the supplies, and volunteers like me who can provide specialized labor for no cost to the center.)
Childcare should be subsidized by the government, and there's basically no way this industry can continue to exist based purely on revenues from parents alone. Otherwise the industry will enter a death spiral and the number of people simply unable to afford kids will grow out of control.
MBA consultant:
Increase the ratio to 35 kids per teacher, add in a minimum wage helper to assist, and have an intern work reception while building the website. Extra services are subscription add ons.
Boom
You would need to change federal law to do that. In other words: that would literally take an act of congress.
How could we possibly subsidize child care? We've got genocides to fund, and that's WAYYYY more important /s
Or, hear me out here, fix the economy so that people don't need between 2 and 3 incomes per household to survive.
Childcare should be subsidized by the government
It is. Ever heard of TANF and other CCW programs?
You mean the programs that Republicans defund every chance they get, and are constantly trying to eliminate? Those programs?
If only ~30% of the population was able to learn something (or oftentimes simply admit they're wrong) and stop voting against their interests, we wouldn't have to be constantly worrying that these programs are going to go away and/or get starved.
People literally voting in the people who will (and have in the past) taken food directly from their own childrens' mouths. It's infuriating to see. Then when it happens, they'll find a way to blame "liberals."
Those programs are income limited and don't really provide much support compared to the cost of child care.
Cost of child care
I my state, child care runs between $1,500 and $2,200 per month ($18,000 to $26,400 per year) per child (I pay about $1,800 per month).
TANF benefits
TANF benefits are income based. They decrease as income increases and end at $75,000 household income.
-
The maximum possible benefit of $592 per month ($7,104 per year) is provided for a family with one parent and two children with zero income.
-
If that single parent earns $1,000 per month ($12,000 per year) their benefit drops to $330 per month ($3,960 per year).
Availability of care
To top that off, child care facilities are not required to accept TANF because it places limits on how much they can charge. Most place limits on the number of TANF recipients they will enroll and some simply don't accept TANF.
-
It seems that they do understand this economy. It's capitalism.
Well, something does trickle down, it's just not money/wealth...
Corpos have figured out the things people actually need and are gouging
"Pricing according to market conditions"
Yeah, but if the people actually contributing the work and services to make the business any money at all, what would all the executives do for a living. Why is nobody thinking of them?? /s
Seriously though, it's one big legalised pyramid scheme - all the people doing the hard labour that actually make the world go round get paid the least while some guys get paid stupid money to sit in a board room and talk about strategies.
I was offered a job to teach at a college. Was a life long dream of mine (to teach). But the massive pay cut forced me to pass. Students should pay less, teachers should be paid more. I can't say for certain where the money's going, but it's not anywhere to the benefit of students that's for damn sure. And this is now becoming a problem with these for profit colleges. It's costs too much for students to go, and they pay to little to keep teachers. If you don't have teachers, you can't have students. If you have no students, you have no use for teachers. And since the bottom line is the only thing that's important, you lose entire departments. The college that was interested in me, is the one I went to. And they have maybe 25% of tech department left from when I went there. When I was there, there was networking, programming, server administration, desktop/server support, web design/e-commerce, etc. We had a new building and took up most of it. Now they have high turnover in teachers because they can't/won't pay them enough. Now they only have a general IT course to give you exposure to various things for the purpose of transferring the credit to a bachelors degree. And a Cybersecurity, Virtualization, & Networking course.
Fuckingcapitalists
they want the peasant class to remain desperate and buried in debt, so they're forced to take shitty jobs with shitty pay just to get by
So the money comes from being a middle-agent. I’d need a lot of capital to open a business where I could exploit my workers. Guess I’m not the target market for this economy.
Unionize or cut out the middle man by collectively walking out, and forming a new daycare (microcredit,... the parents will flock towards the experienced staff with brand new equipment, selected by competent people).
It should be that easy. In the left spectrum (unions) and the capitalist spectrum (new competition). If it's not, then you don't live in ether system.
where are college professors living in their cars?
Community college professor here. I'm lucky enough to be tenured at this point, but when I started teaching, I was making just enough money such that if I had been paying the going rate for rent edit: and health insurance, I would have been losing about $100/month, before taking into account other expenses like food (
or health insuranceor gas or utilities...) (edit: I went back and checked numbers, my memory was a little off). And that was with me teaching 75% at two different schools (so, a total of about 24 units per term when full-time is usually 16 units per term)I was privileged enough to be able to live with family while I pursued a full-time position and extra work, but many are not so lucky.
So, yeah, college professors are drastically underpaid, on par with K-12 teachers
Everywhere unless they're tenured
It's a little more complicated than that. I think the factors are:
- part-time adjunct vs full-time
- research vs non
- type of college (prestige, size, focus)
- what you do in summers
- field
So for example you could be a machine learning Research Professor (non-tenure-track) in a first-tier university and bring in a lot of money through grants. Or you could be a tenured teaching professor at a smaller college and not work in summers and make a mid-level income. Or you could be a part-time instructor (e.g., adjunct faculty) in the humanities and make very little.
everywhere there are professors.
It's very common in the US.
https://fox59.com/news/national-world/ucla-professor-says-hes-homeless-due-to-low-pay/amp/
https://www.nea.org/nea-today/all-news-articles/homeless-professor-who-lives-her-car
There was an article about a UCLA professor recently.
I don't know, tenure track professors doing research, probably not. But the cost of living here is kind of insane. If we didn't have a double income, my wife would have to take a pretty substantial downgrade in where she lives. Cost of living is getting out of hand everywhere regardless, and the point still stands I think.
There's really a two tiered structure to academia that seems to be hidden from most students. Maybe even 3 tiered. There's the tenure-track research faculty who might teach one class per semester (often less) - they're still underpaid relative to industry equivalent jobs, but they get their research freedom and low six figures after a few years while bringing in seven figure research grants for the university. Mid-six-figures if they're upper admin. There's non-tenure-track adjuncts & academic professionals who teach 3-5 classes per semester, often at multiple universities because no one will give them enough classes to live on, doing the bulk of a university's teaching, especially at 'tier 1 research' universities, and they're lucky to get median salary. There's also a set of tenure-track faculty at universities without big research programs who teach 2-3 classes, maybe do a little bit of research or literature review, but probably without any significant extramural funding. They get paid somewhere in between.
They all get called "professor;" they all have PhDs; there's infighting to keep the faculty as a whole from rising up. I used to tell my students they (or someone on their bahalf) paid about $200 for each of my lectures, and they're free to skip them if they want, but even in a tiny seminar, 10 students, $2000/hour revenue, the highest paid professors are only getting 5% of that (not accounting for out-of-class effort).
And yet my most professional teachers were not paid for teaching.
I'm not advocating lowering the paycheck to increase the professionalism; just highlighting how phantom money are in this equation
Can you elaborate? What phantom money? How was your teacher not being paid to teach? Finally, what makes a teacher more professional than another?
Private equity
Can’t help but notice this person mentioned three extremely regulated industries where the government provides money to help people afford it.
Three industries we’ve decided are “too important to leave to the free market”.
Three industries where the government (a) restricts supply and (b) subsidizes demand, three industries where costs have skyrocketed, three industries where middle men take massive shares and leave nothing to the workers.
Free markets don’t do that, because in free markets there’s competition. If we had a free market, then anyone could take care of old people, take care of children, and teach courses on philosophy and engineering.
But none of those markets are open. The government maintains tight entry barriers that require enormous sums of money and legal effort to overcome.
They’re too important to be left to the free market, so they produce endless misery.
Oh, of course! We should just let whomever open up a child or elder care center wherever they want with whatever conditions. The Invisible Hand will stop any abuse or neglect that occurs. That will solve prices, like how it has worked on uhhhhh... well, it has worked on loss leader technological devices that demand subscriptions to our own property or harvest our personal data. Everything else seems to have undergone "inflation" while companies boast about record profits.
I hear that guy in the van down by the river is willing to do daycare super cheap, if only the government would stay out of his business.
you can stop paying corpos for services that people you know can render
yeah you just have to not work so you can take care of your kids and elders yourself. of "people you know" will just do it for free? how about teachers? how about daycare?
what the fuck are you talking about, no, you just pay the people instead of the company that doesn't pay them enough (home care workers make like 11.50 an hour in the USA rust belt)
why would you assume something that doesn't make any sense
Yes, thank you. I understand you are privileged.
Crabs in a bucket
I suggest voting with your feet and living in cheaper countries with better infrastructure.
Why give broken US systems more money if you weren't getting anything in return?
It's not like you can just up and move when you don't have money. There's also the little issue of not being a citizen wherever you go, and then add in the culture shock, and family being far away. It's no wonder people stay.
"It's not like you can just up and move"
yes, you can.
you need a few hundred bucks and a job that makes you $500 a month(there are many), or if you're fine with teaching fundamental English a few hours a week, you don't need any savings.
with that much, you can live at the level you're living in the US right now or far above it, and then build off of there pursuing what you're interested in because you don't have any financial stressors.
"There's also the little issue of not being a citizen wherever you go"
this is far more of a benefit than a liability.
do you mean a positive issue? I can't really think of any liabilities of being a non-citizen.
"culture shock"
"culture shock" is an absurd debilitating elitist promise and symptom of jingoism.
it is a flimsy term with laughable connotations.
"you all ride bikes? but I'm used to a car, im so confuuused!?"
this is like saying people should never exercise because they might hurt themselves.
or that people should never eat food because they might choke.
Americans get "culture shock" because they are taught to be afraid of non-american cultures.
"oh no. chopsticks. however, will I overcome this barrier? "
"It's no wonder people stay."
it is truly a wonder how much Americans complain about their shitty, expensive livelihoods ( rightly so), and how much they're getting screwed over by the education, employment, healthcare systems in the US and can't afford to live, but absolutely refuse to engage with the simplest alternative.
in the same breath condemning their government and the systems that abuse them, they haughtily defend that abuse.
" what am I going to do, leave my abuser?"
Yes, that would be a savvy alternative to being abused.
I’m going to just roll into Canada and see if they kick me out? You can’t just show up in a country and roll the dice. American is not a desired nationality in developed countries.
