Stronger Than You

no, spotify, i don't want to use ai to "turn my ideas into playlists". i already fucking do that with my brain and hands and i do it for fun. what, should i get ai to pet my cat for me? to play my silly games for me? to spend time with my beautiful wife for me? how about i rend you asunder

will the ai listen to the music for me too? will it listen to the lyrics and think about the song for me? shit man, ai can do anything. why even bother paying for your service if your ai can just replace the human impulse to listen to, analyze, and find patterns in music and collect favourites for fun to share with friends. like should i leave? if you're just gonna jack yourself off? like i can go, seeing as you don't need me to engage with what you're doing at all.

like what are we fucking doing here. yknow?

I used this post for practicing constructing an argument (I teach English and I'm prepping this person for essay writing) and was in utter shock when my student just said 'yeah some people are so scared of new things, they need to get with the program'. I stg keeping a straight face then and there ranks in the top 10 biggest challenges I've faced in my career as an English teacher.

i'm literally so flattered by this. i wish i'd come up with a more thought-out argument so i could properly fight your student. i can do the counterargument now if you'd like.

i'm not scared of generative ai. i'm genuinely concerned for the impact it'll have on the neurological development of young people if they become overexposed to the instant gratification of "bringing their ideas to life" and never practice or develop the skills and labour actually associated with creating something from nothing. it means that if the ai gives you dogshit (and it will), you don't have the ability to fix it, because you're so alienated from the process of creating (writing an essay, drawing a picture, organizing a playlist, composing a song, listening to and analyzing and summarizing the art you're examining) that you don't know what isn't working or how to make it work correctly. if you don't learn how to analyze, if you don't train your brain to do these things, they don't stop needing to be done. you will be dependant on ai, or on others to do these things for you. others, you can sometimes trust, but it really helps to be able to really grok the difference between a grifter, an ignorant person, and a person who knows what they're talking about -- and again, the more you alienate yourself from the construction of their arguments, the less you are able to take them apart and see what isn't adding up. and ai is dogshit, frequently incorrect and incapable of doing the small calculus the human brain can do (if you train it to) to tell the difference between quality of sources and reliability of data, so it should never be trusted, period.

the only part of this "new technology" that i'm scared of is based on a history of ideas that i have actually studied. historically, the more we alienate ourselves from the process of labour, the less we are able to grasp it as a reality, and the more people are able to use that fact to exploit us. if you look at, say, the paper coffee cup on your desk, really look at it. where did that come from? it didn't spring fully formed from someone's imagination. someone had to design the shape of that cup, engineer it so it could contain a hot beverage and keep it hot, come up with the sleeve to make sure the drinker could actually hold it, but there's even more to it than that. someone had to make the cup. someone had to source the paper (or the compound) for the body, the material for the lid, the glue that holds it together. someone had to harvest those materials, in whichever country they were sourced, and someone had to package them and transport them to the company responsible for assembling the cup. someone designed the logo and the pattern on the outside, and someone is monitoring the machine that prints those images on the cup. someone will be responsible for picking up the waste and transporting it to a recycling plant, or to the landfill where it'll end up. let's not even start on the drink inside it. farming, harvesting, shipping, receiving, assembling, serving. it takes time to manifest something, and you are in a position of immense privilege to not have to think about where it all comes from on a regular basis. but what happens when the supply lines get shut down? what happens when there's a failure of irrigation or something in the paper mill and the glue holding the paper together doesn't work? do you know? i don't, personally. but there is someone along the line whose job it is to know, and i appreciate the work they (probably aren't paid enough to) do so that i can grab a coffee on my way into my own work. i have to appreciate it because i know that if the process goes wrong somewhere, i have no fucking idea what to do about the problem.

but i'm not pretending to know. i'm not applying for a job at the papermill to work for pennies instead of someone who does know the perfect chemical makeup of coffee cup cardboard because i can order a ton of coffee cups online from amazon in bulk. that's why generative ai offends me. the work that goes into creating art and writing still has to be done, because all generative ai knows how to do is steal, and it doesn't steal like an artist. artists look at the works of others and think, oh, i see how they did that, i want to try doing that, and then they can, because they learned how to appreciate the process. they've actually worked, and practiced, and spent time engaging with the process step by step to create something they find pleasing. generative ai looks at art and spits out a copy by comparing one image to another and assuming based on Uncredited Data that sometimes, pictures have hands in them, and hands sort of look like this. and the computer doesn't have a goddamn clue how many fingers the hand has, or how to translate that data into a visual. you know what does? the human brain. you know what you can do instead of bemoaning that you, a high school junior, can't produce a rembrandt on your first try? you can actually try drawing something.

you can actually try to turn your ideas into a drawing. you can do research into how to make it look the way you want it to. who knows? you might actually have fun doing it. because the creative process can be fun! it isn't for everyone, but unless you actually sit down and try, you won't find out, and if it's not for you, you'll never grasp on that physical experiential level that the creative process is actually a lot of fucking work, and we should respect artists for being able to sit down and do it so we don't have to, same as we respect the farmers who grow our food or the plant workers who mix the slurry that becomes our coffee cup cardboard.

i'm not scared of spotify for pushing ai bullshit down my throat. more than anything, i'm kind of offended, because i do put a lot of work into my playlists, and i have a lot of fun doing it, because i like listening to music and analyzing lyrics and relating the themes of songs to my little characters. i took it so personally because i Want to be involved in the process. i'm paying spotify a lot of my real adult money to have access to music and the tools i can use to entertain this pastime of mine, and it's kind of fucked up that they're raising their monthly fee to fund a tool that makes me, the user of their product, motivated to use their product less. insulting, even. why should i pay more for a computer to do a worse job than me at Having Fun? making a playlist isn't even that fucking hard.

i'm just tired. stuff takes work to make. it takes care and time and effort to create something from nothing, and a lot of the time, the process is necessary to make the thing good, because it forces you to take the time you need to spot and fix mistakes. i hope by now that it's self-explanatory why i don't want an entire society run by a dipshit program that doesn't know how to do what it's doing and doesn't know how to solve the problems it creates faster than human hands could ever manage, and i hope the dipshit machine and the grifters who push it are inextricable from each other in the minds of anyone who's read this whole post. i don't want them to run society either, because they Know that generative ai sucks and can't do anything right, and they're still trying to tack it on to everything to devalue the labour of artists and make a quick buck for themselves.

the best quote i've ever seen about generative ai is "why should i bother reading something nobody bothered to write".

we are a social species. alienation from labour alienates us from each other, from our communities, and makes us feel alone. when we're alone, we're vulnerable down to our core psychology, and there are a lot of people out there who know better who want to take advantage of vulnerable people to manipulate society at large. they want to make money off of your suffering. they want to reduce you to a number for their own convenience so they can use the One Life You Have On Earth to play their own personal tycoon game and get a slightly higher score. they want you to spend less time having fun, creating art, spending time with your family, thinking about what they're Doing to you, so you don't ruin their good time. i'm not scared because it's new, i'm pissed because it's the same old late capitalist shit i've already been dealing with, and i'm sick of seeing it everywhere because it stands a very real chance of turning everyone's brains to even more detached-from-reality mush than late-stage capitalism already has already.

And, on top of all of that, spotify's algorithm sucks shit already, so why on earth would i want it to make my playlists for me. the other day i saw it put zombie by the cranberries on a halloween playlist. she doesn't know dickety shit about my ideas or vibes or anything. so

i do care if someone hires someone to clean though like you can’t just throw that out there as if it isn’t well known that those people that are hired to clean your home exist because they’re poor. wash your own dirty dishes

I understand what you’re saying, but you also seem to be ignoring the fact that people who are hiring these poor people to clean their houses are giving those people jobs. If they weren’t hiring them to clean their houses, these people may not have a job at all.

i don’t agree with this logic. i don’t think we need to settle for a job or nothing, is the same to be said for women who work under slavery like conditions in clothing factories in poor countries? why can’t we fight for change instead of accepting that some people just have to be maids

Before she moved in to take care of her, my aunt hired a maid to come to my disabled grandmother’s house once a week to clean for like 2-3 hours and paid her $80 every time she came over. There’s no way my grandmother, who had a bum hip from a car accident and hobbled around with her walker (back when she could even walk), could clean her own house. Maids provide an invaluable service, especially for the elderly and disabled, and they shouldn’t be eliminated just because you think their jobs are somehow not good enough for anyone to be doing. Many jobs like housecleaners, gardeners, etc., are great for people who may not speak the local language, who may have had a limited education, or who came here as adults with limited opportunities. My grandfather, who could speak four languages fluently but his English sucked, became a janitor at the age of 58 to support his family when they first came to America, and his kids always advocated that you should treat blue-collar and traditionally low-paid workers with respect because those jobs are valuable and even someone who cleans toilets is a person who is trying their best. Basically, we shouldn’t try to eliminate these jobs; they should just be better compensated.

yes i agree! i think that disabled people should have help and that it should be easily available for them but to me that wasn’t what the post was talking about!! i read it as a wealthy people simply hiring help to clean just because they can not because they need to. in an altruistic society people who love to clean could become a maid without having to depend on it, if everyone’s basic needs where met and no one would be walking hungry without their job that’s a different story to me! so while yes we do need to bring respect and wages to these jobs i also don’t think it’s unfair to think about if people actually need their houses cleaned by someone else! some do, including the disabled, some don’t!

But here’s the thing.

By focusing our attention and wrath on people who might buy things they don’t really “need” (OH the wailing over AOC’s $300 purse) we lose sight of the actual problem (Uber and Lyft spending $200 million dollars to defeat legislation that would require them to treat their workers as employees).

Rich people hiring cleaners because they’re “lazy” is not the problem. It is a symptom of the problem. If all rich people started picking up their socks and doing their own dishes tomorrow, it wouldn’t increase the wellbeing or economic security of the rest of us one iota. No small cosmetic change will do that. Only fundamentally changing the legal and economic landscape will do that.

And in the meantime, people’s goalposts for who is “rich” and who is “lazy” will always be so flexible that it will inevitably hit a lot more poor people with disposable income than actual 1%ers.

I know as a disabled person that we are constantly put under scrutiny to prove we’re “disabled enough” to afford accommodation so you absolutely CANNOT say “this is the rule but of COURSE disabled people are excepted uwu.” If the rule isn’t built to accommodate disabled people in the first place, it WILL be used to treat us like shit unless we can meet whatever level of “disabled enough” a random unqualified stranger has decided is today’s benchmark, and meeting that will mean a constant surrender of our rights to privacy and dignity.

This is all probably useless when talking to someone named “70s lesbian” but I really truly promise you, policing people’s choices and “rescuing” people from immoral or “demeaning” work is not nearly as useful as focusing on improving societal and material conditions for workers and poor people.

As a disabled person, I don’t want to rely on someone being “altruistic” to do necessary housework I’m too fatigued and in too much pain to do  - and on people deciding I was “disabled enough” through some arbitrary standard to require help. I get enough of “you’re just lazy and your pain is made up” already, thanks. I’d love to be in a position able to pay someone a fair wage to help deal with housework that I can’t do without hurting myself.

In the same way, I don’t drive. If I need to go somewhere, I really like when I’m able to pay someone for this service! I don’t like having to wait for a friend or acquaintance to be available, and coordinate their schedule with mine, and take time out of their day, and possibly resent me for it (especially if I need to go several places), and have the option of withholding this help in the future if they decide to be an asshole. (I’ve been in abusive situations before where my basic needs have been used as leverage against me. e.g. “Well, you set boundaries I don’t like, so I’m not going to take you to your doctor’s appointment”.)

If I can just say “Here, have money in exchange for doing this thing I can’t/don’t want to do”, things are a lot simpler. Relying on other people to help out of the goodness of their hearts isn’t practical or realistic for longterm, day-to-day survival stuff. (If it was, disabled people wouldn’t be in the shitty situations we’re so often in, and so many of us wouldn’t live in poverty.) It’s a nice IDEA, but it doesn’t tend to happen on a large scale. Cleaning is unpleasant! I’m sure there exist people who enjoy some aspects of it, but if I had to wait for someone to clean out the cat box because they want to, it would never get done. Because cleaning up another animal’s bodily functions is gross and stinky, and if it’s not your cat you really should be compensated in some way for this. I want everyone to have UBI, too, so that they’re not in a position where they HAVE TO do it or starve, but that’s a separate issue.

Hi, I’m employed part-time by a cleaning service, and I also work full-time as a janitor, and I gotta say, I’m not loving some of the takes in this thread.

1. First of all, there is absolutely nothing inherently wrong with employing a service to make your life easier, whether you need it or not. I feel like we should start with that. A person who hires the services of a maid or cleaning company is well within their right to do so, whether it’s because they can’t do it themselves or it’s because they just don’t want to. That’s their choice! They are paying money for a service! Except in cases where they are hiring someone directly, they do not control how much the employees who clean their homes/offices/businesses get paid!

2. That said, maid/cleaning services may get tipped, but they are still beholden to minimum wage laws. If you want to talk about paying us more, THAT’S how you’re going to do it, not by policing who is and is not “allowed” to hire these services. That said, it might be a good idea to actually do some research into how much a maid or cleaner actually gets paid. I think it’s going to surprise quite a lot of you. Obviously not every person who cleans is going to make a fair wage, but like. Quite a lot of us do, actually. For example, at my part time job, I make $17.50/hour. At my full time job, I’m salaried at $34k/year, with full benefits–and I mean full, including full health, eye, and dental coverage, retirement plan, accruing PTO, the WORKS–and a yearly raise, because,

3. Anyone who cleans in state- or federal-owned buildings are state or federal employees. I’m not sure if the same can be said for municipalities, but I know at the very least, public school janitors are… I’m fairly certain ALL employees of the city in which they work, if not the state. I work as a janitor at a state college, which makes me an employee of the state, which entitles me to the benefits and union protections of literally any other employee of my state. So, like, to make my next point,

4. Please get it out of your head that we need to be pitied for our “demeaning” work. First of all, that is incredibly condescending. Second of all, our work is extremely important! We perform necessary services to society across the board! Please stop looking down your nose at people who clean for a living!! Third of all, I obviously can’t speak for every person who cleans for a living, but from my own personal experience, I have been treated with significantly more respect by my clients at every cleaning job I’ve ever worked than I ever had working retail or food service. Obviously you’re going to get an occasional client having a bad day or who is generally unkind, but even then, they’re almost always appreciative of the work we do. I do not feel demeaned for my work. The only time I have ever felt ashamed of my work is when people TREATED my work like it’s something to be ashamed of.

5. Maybe some people “just have to be a maid,” but like. A lot of us enjoy our work? We take pride in it?? We get a sense of satisfaction seeing something that was dirty and gross NOT BE dirty and gross anymore??? Like, yeah, if I had the choice I’d prefer not to clean strangers’ houses or a bunch of classrooms, but that has nothing to do with the work itself, and everything to do with the fact that I’d just? Like not to work?? But even if UBI were instated tomorrow, I’d still want something to do with my time, and if I, with my level of experience and education, had to choose between the types of jobs available to me, I’d still pick what I’m doing, just because I enjoy it more! I don’t have to deal with vast hoardes of the general public! In fact, most of the time I’m alone! I work at my pace! Nobody’s standing behind me, rushing me or telling me to smile or docking my hours because I’m not up to some arbitrary standard. I LIKE MY WORK!

I know my experiences are not universal. I know there are plenty of cleaning companies that aren’t going to treat their workers with respect, and I know there are even more clients out there who are going to look down on us for the work we do. I know full well that we deserve better wages and better benefits and better treatment for the important work we do (and the fact that none of us qualify for the covid vaccine despite consistent exposure to everything from hospitals to public schools to private offices to private homes is definitely one thing that boils my blood when I think about it too hard).

But, again, this is not demeaning work. This is not shameful work. And there is no line to say whether or not the work I do is justified. I am being paid to perform a service. Whether that service is in the home of someone who can’t clean up after themselves or someone who just wants their time at home not to be interrupted by chores isn’t my business, and it certainly isn’t the business of someone who’d see me out of a job just because they don’t like that fact.

I hire a house cleaning service once a month, simply because cleaning is a skill I do not have. And yes, it is a skill–I can pick up my dirty clothes and empty the dishwasher and all the other basic adulting things, but really getting into corners and sweeping and scrubbing and all the other minutae? If it were up to me it would happen maybe three times a year. So I pay someone else to do it–not because I’m above doing it myself but because they’re much better at it.

Glad to finally have a version of this post with someone who actually does this kind of work chiming in. Cleaning is absolutely skilled labor. It would take me two days to accomplish what a professional does in three hours and they’d still do it better than me.

Leftists who think the solution is to eliminate certain professions they’ve been taught to look down are literally buying into capitalist propaganda. “Play the game or you might have to become one of *those* people.” Instead we should treating all workers and all types of labor with dignity and respect and make sure everyone earns not just a living but a thriving wage.

I have someone clean every other week. She helps me clean and she cleans (she can give me a task and I can do it but I get overwhelmed if I clean on my own). Thank you to all the cleaning people, food delivery people, and mail and FedEx drivers who make my life so much easier.

Also, getting into the original point, there is still a gap between having disposable income and being middle class. Not rich, just middle class.

People can have disposable income because of their saving or spending habits or their living situation, even if they make very little money. And it is not your place to judge their priorities and what they choose to spend their money on.

Someone with a higher income may choose to put all their money in investment, may choose to retire early and become a full time homemaker, may clean to relax, someone with lower income may decide that cleaning is too overwhelming for them and hire someone to do it. You simply cannot judge someone’s financial situation based on how they choose to spend their money. (Excluding things like rigging the market or buying up multiple investment properties.)

For example, I make much more money than I did 3 years ago. However, I have less disposable income than I use to due to having a mortgage. I also have the spare time and energy to truly enjoy doing chores because I am working in a less stressful job. My past self, who was overworked and overwhelmed, needed to hire cleaning service. My present self do not.

When you shame people for their individual financial decisions, you shame poor people for enjoying nice things and getting the services they need, you shame people who aren’t “disabled enough” from taking necessary steps to improve their quality of life.

IF EVERY JOB WAS PAID BETTER, MORE “DEMEANING” JOBS WOULD HAVE MORE PEOPLE WILLING TO WORK THEM.

SOME PEOPLE LIKE CLEANING

SOME PEOPLE LIKE GARDENING

SOME PEOPLE LIKE MANUAL LABOR THAT LETS THEM WORK WITH THEIR HANDS

How fucking condescending is it to act like people working in service industries are inherently exploited by those horrible evil people who want to… pay them for the services they’re selling. Comparing being a janitor to slavery? Really? If you think hiring a cleaner is immoral but, say, commissioning artwork isn’t, then it’s your attitude to service workers that’s the problem.

I already have people judging whether I am disabled enough to receive what little help I get from the government. I don’t want to have to fucking prove how disabled I am to obtain services I am going to PAY FOR FROM MY OWN POCKET so people won’t judge me. Leave disabled people the fuck alone. You can’t know who is or isn’t disabled. And you can’t act like we are the pitiable exception, and it’s okay if WE can’t do our own dishes, WE aren’t like THOSE lazy fucks over THERE, we DESERVE help. That kind of judgment is exactly why we struggle so much as it is.

We can’t rely on altruism. We do right now and it isn’t working, and we know better than to think we are anywhere NEAR the top of the list as far as allocating resources is concerned.

Why someone does or does not hire a cleaning professional is way less important than them finding a company that TREATS their employees like human beings providing a valuable service and PAYS them as such.

There’s nothing inherently moral about doing your own dishes. Hire someone if you can. I wish I could. Just fucking pay them well. It’s hard and dirty work, and a lot of folks are assholes about it.

working full time is terrible why do we just accept that having 8 days off a month is normal and okay........ being alive could be cool but we waste it at our JOBS.... sorry i’m just heated about capitalism again i’ll be fine

not to be dramatic but the amount of people commenting on this post that I should stop whining and be grateful for having two days off a week when they only get one or none is...... literally proving my point that we’re all brainwashed ghfjhddjfk... thats like if someone cut off your arms and then only cut off one of mine, you focus on how much worse you have it instead of the fact that we’re still both fucking bleeding out 

I love how "you get what you pay for" goes right out the window when it comes to purchasing labor.

Revolutionary French Unions on a strike now???? Revolutionary French unions???? Where are my navel gazing western leftists at?????

I don’t think you’re ready to have an adult conversation about politics until you’re able to admit that there are things you love and enjoy that would not and should not exist in a just world. $8 billion dollar budget movies every other month don’t exist in a just world. New 900 GB AAA video games every year don’t exist in a just world. Next day delivery doesn’t exist in a just world. 80 different soda brands don’t exist in a just world. 

All of those things come from exploitation on some level, and if you wouldn’t trade those for a world where everyone can eat and have a home no matter who they are or what they do, I don’t know what to tell you. 

Man, this post makes me feel conflicted, because on the one hand, of the things listed, next-day delivery is the only one that DOES actually exist in the world today. The others are exaggerations, and while I understand the point being made, they do detract from it.

I understand—and agree with—that sentiment of, “I want slower deliveries by drivers who are paid better,” as one recent tumblr post put it. I absolutely agree with the idea that we need to produce and consume less as a culture, and that an actual substantive conversation about politics should involve willingness to relinquish the many modern luxuries that are built on exploitation.

I don’t think these are good examples of those luxuries, though.

Large budget movies are possible because consumers (and investors) are willing to pay for them. A large budget is actually a necessary component in making sure workers are being adequately compensated; the fact that they currently are often exploited by studios is a result of deliberate misallocation of resources, not anything intrinsic to the size of the production. Same thing goes with high-quality video games. As for releasing a new film/game every month/year, that’s only unsustainable because there’s only a handful of monopolistic studios doing it. In a well-regulated industry that encourages growth and competition, we could see tens, if not hundreds of studios producing big-budget films and games. And, with a well-compensated and socially-supported citizenry, consumers would have enough disposable income to support it.

Similarly, the problem with soda isn’t that we have 80 brands; it’s that we have two. And those two brands each own 800 different labels. In a healthy economy, these monopolies would be dissolved, and we could support well over 80 moderately-sized independent beverage companies producing their own sodas.

Same-day delivery, again, could be easily supported with proper allocation of resources. Currently, we have huge centralized distributors like Amazon exploiting gig-workers with slave-wages to ferry cheap mass-produced crap to people, and that’s what makes it bad, not the speed at which they do it. If instead, we had something like a super-robust USPS, with well-compensated deliverypeople working reasonable hours within a decentralized network of independent-but-cooperative suppliers, there would be absolutely no reason why you couldn’t get something delivered to you from the distro ten miles down the road within a day.

When we critique capitalism, and they respond, “Yeah, well capitalism made the cell phone you’re using!” our response shouldn’t be, “Oh shit u right,” it should be, “No, capitalism made the cell phone I’m using break after a year so I’ll buy a new one, and they use slave labor to do it while they pocket the rest.”

There are luxuries, and there are artificially-valued, mass-produced, built-to-break trash that are marketed as luxuries. But we don’t solve the problems of fast-fashion by saying, “Welp I guess I shouldn’t wear clothes.”

I mean, there are things that I think people are going to have to give up to get the world they want, as much as I get the point made in the last two paragraphs I do think that’s ultimately unavoidable. You can’t be a socialist and be as attached to consumerism as a lot of people on this website are. But yeah the first post doesn’t pick the greatest examples, I appreciate that you made the same point that was going through my head about how movies are only that expensive because of the abundance of unions in the movie industry that ensure that their workers are fairly compensated – a good thing that more industries (especially in entertainment and most especially the video game industry) should have!

Full time work should entitle someone to enough pay for rent, food, bills, and leisure activities. Full time work for a full life wage. You put in your 8 hours a day, 5 days a week? You should be able to afford the basic shit you need in life, no matter where you work.

Working doesn’t entitle you to anything other than what was agreed to when you started in the employee contract

Yeah, and I think that’s a problem, especially in a work culture with week Union presence. The fact that full time work can pay you starvation wages is a broken system.

It’s actually more so the government’s manipulation of housing/rent, medical care, etc. while also manipulating the value of the currency as well as imposing taxes on gas, property, income, and other basic household items that cause prices to go up while also forcing lower skilled workers out of the market with labor price fixing making it harder for poorer people to get by. But if the position held is valuable or the person doing the work is invaluable they have a better opportunity for compensation than someone halfassing it. One must live within their means and/or find another career. Or create one.

All labor is inherently valuable enough to deserve life. No labor is so useless that the person doing it should starve. If a company need a work done, that work is worth a living wage. No company is entitled to your labor without fair compensation, and compensation that can’t sustain basic needs is never fair

If you’re working in a modern economy you’re not starving or dying due to what you’re earning. But no all labor is not equally valuable and no one is entitled to be taken care of unless the exchange is voluntary. Fair compensation is agreed upon by the employer and employee, or if you own your own business your compensation is consumers buying your product if they find it valuable even though you spent a year or two losing money to build it. If you’ve been working somewhere for more than say 2 years and you’re still making what you started with that’s on you. Value is always subjective.

I did not say all labor is EQUALLY valuable, nor that all workers should be paid EQUAL wages. But all workers’ labor is inherently worth at least enough to live on. The idea that anyone’s time and labor is worth little enough that they should starve is ludicrously unethical and proof of a morally bankrupt economic system. 

If a company need a work done, that work is worth a living wage. No company is entitled to your labor without fair compensation, and compensation that can’t sustain basic needs is never fair

Also, I’d like to address the bit about “you’re not starving or dying because of what you make.”

The last time I worked in the white market, I was making about $1.75 over minimum wage (which is higher here than in the US). I got a very solid deal on rent at the time, paying about 2/3 the going rate for a 1br, utilities included.

It was also 10 km from the nearest public transit, and not legally habitable, and it still cost a full paycheque, leaving me with one paycheque per month to not only survive but afford a car (that I could afford, in an extreme rust-inducing environment) on.

And then they constructively fired me when I tried to take parental leave.

From what I’ve seen, the legit job situation has only gotten worse for those of us in the margins in the years since then.

I’m glad you’ve never had to go hungry so your kid could eat, or literally calculate the $/calorie efficiency of your food purchases VS what you can actually prepare and eat while suffering from malnutrition-induced fatigue and working full time, @alwpoomau. Truly, I am. In a just world, nobody would. But these experiences not only exist, they’re widespread.

This is important.

It’s not a “loophole” it’s explicit within the text of the amendment

“Loophole” lmfao like it’s a fucking accident, like it wasn’t purposefully structured to reclaim and expand a source of free labor

We never outlawed slavery in America. We simply transferred ownership of slaves from individual landowners to the government and large corporations.

Other fun facts about prison labor corporations:

-Federal and state-run prisons usually pay their slaves minimum wage; some states, however, like Colorado, pay $2/hour.

-Private prisons pay $.17-.50/hour. The highest paying private prison is in Tennessee, which pays $.50/hour for “highly-skilled labor.”

-You think that hasn’t affected wages in the US? You think that hasn’t removed manufacturing jobs from the economy?

-Companies that contract with private prisons for their slave labor include: IBM, Boeing, Motorola, Microsoft, AT&T, Wireless, Texas Instrument, Dell, Compaq, Honeywell, Hewlett-Packard, Nortel, Lucent Technologies, 3Com, Intel, Northern Telecom, TWA, Nordstrom’s, Revlon, Macy’s, Pierre Cardin, Target Stores. Many, many products that say “Made in USA” were made in prison.

-Private prisons often have quotas with the states, wherein the states contractually guarantee that they will provide a certain number of prisoners to fill the beds of a private prison, and if they don’t then they owe the private prison millions of dollars. I’m not making this up. It happened in Colorado after they legalized weed.

-States have a financial incentive to lock up their citizens.

-All of the above corporations have a financial incentive to see citizens get locked up.

-This is why Jeff Sessions is going after weed. The prison industrial complex needs slaves.

-To the shock of absolutely no one, private prisons have even more disparate racial demographics than federal/state prisons.

-Where do you think they send undocumented immigrants who have been rounded up? That’s right, private prisons. That’s why so many of them are in the South. So they take immigrants who are earning some kind of comparable wage and paying income tax to the government, and put them in prison where the wages are absurdly depressed and the prison pays virtually nothing in taxes.

-Oh yeah: private prisons pay virtually nothing in taxes. Because they technically manage real estate (prison as housing), they get all sorts of tax breaks and subsidies.

Tl;dr the prison industrial complex removes jobs from the economy, depresses wages, cheats the tax system, and ENSLAVES PEOPLE, usually people of color.

Sources:

http://www.globalresearch.ca/the-prison-industry-in-the-united-states-big-business-or-a-new-form-of-slavery/8289

http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2013/09/private-prisons-occupancy-quota-cca-crime

http://mfgtalkradio.com/s7-e15-manufacturing-jobs-lost-prison-slave-labor/

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/09/19/private-prison-quotas_n_3953483.html?1379606057

http://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2014/03/13/289000532/why-for-profit-prisons-house-more-inmates-of-color

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2017/02/27/immi-f27.html

https://www.finance.senate.gov/ranking-members-news/wyden-introduces-bill-to-stop-private-prisons-from-exploiting-tax-incentives-for-profit

This is fucking sick.  Someone should show it to people they claim voted for Trump because of “economics.”

My gente💔

These are usually undocumented people who work here. Y'all asking “can’t they leave” “they choose to work there,” well these people often times have no other choice and would rather bring home $6 to their families. Yes, I understand being undocumented is a crime and whatever other bullshit y'all will throw at me (quite frankly look at the push and pull factors the u.s has created for that… but that’s a story for another day) when will y'all start caring about humans more than policies and laws. These are people just trying to survive.

THANK YOU. Manual labor is a noble profession, and extremely needed. And don’t tell me until you’ve worked as hard as many laborers do that a strong back isn’t as much a god-given blessing and talent as a sharp mind or whatever else.

I have a manual labor job. Because I choose to. I have worked in offices and such, but I absolutely HATE being cooped up. Unfortunately I do get self conscious when I meet someone and they ask me what I do. I hate that. I always hesitate because I don’t want them to judge me.

I really value what you do and respect you a great deal. Let’s eat portebello and swiss brats soon!

I recently got a job at Mcdonald's and can I just say that every single person there works hard and does their job with determination and a smile on their face. You have to be a fast worker there, and it's takes practice just like any job does. And there's no shame in having a minimum wage job or anything like it. You don't know what people's reasons are for having it. So don't you dare shame workers like that or say "anyone could do it". Because for a lot of those people, they're very lucky to be there.