Iâve been a casual fan of David Sirota for years. Now, Iâm a bigger fan of his wife, Emily.
This bill would set boundaries for employers, requiring them to respect their employeesâ time or pay fines.
I hope it doesnât get watered down.
A solid 3 minute story about how a woman attempted to tell her mom how she canât keep workers without a decent wage for a landscaping job that caters to millionaires (video on reddit)
Remember when bosses were saying, âeveryone who was working from home needs to get back to the office. With WFH, we donât get the interaction and collaboration that we did when we had spontaneous conversations around the water cooler or coffee machine?â
Now they are saying, âquit talking around the coffee machine! If you donât have work to do, I will give you some!â
Driving to work every day requires me burning five gallons of gasoline per day, almost 100lbs of CO2 every day! Iâve also put on 18lbs weight and my back hurts again from my commute.
Surely they could use that money to, you know, pay their workers more.
bUt shAreHoLdeR vaLUe!!!
IN CONFIDENTIAL MEMO, TREASURY SECRETARY JANET YELLEN CELEBRATED UNEMPLOYMENT AS A âWORKER-DISCIPLINE DEVICEâ
We need a Fed discipline device.
I have to take this with a grain of salt. The economy, government, politics, trade, corporate tactics/classification of workers, and peopleâs worldviews have changed a lot since 1996. There are a great deal of lessons learned from administration moves made since then to speculate about how something that old has great significance now.
I hope youâre right, but I suspect she was just saying the quiet part out loud. Things have always been set up in US capitalism so that itâs ownersâ interests (in profit) first, workersâ interests second.
As for Yellen having changed, as that piece says at the end,
)does increased worker power necessarily lead to higher inflation? Perhaps firms could avoid increasing prices by reducing profits or executive salaries. Maybe employees would be willing to forgo higher pay in exchange for a voice in how work is organized. Certainly theyâd be concerned about raising the price of their companyâs product if they owned the company. Everyone would also be worried more about inflation decreasing the value of financial assets if they had more such financial assets.
But Yellenâs conventional mind will never ask such questions, and no one with a more flexible imagination will ever sit in the Treasury secretaryâs chair. (Tellingly, here in 2023, she is expressing no interest in creative measures such as minting a $1 trillion platinum coin to prevent the GOP-controlled Congress from driving the U.S. government into a pointless, catastrophic default.) Her memo is a compelling demonstration that there are people at the top who are trying to make this the best of all possible worlds, but the best world they can conceive of is still terrible.
