California and New York are not the whole world, and things are really great for raising a family in the Midwest. Both of those places seem like a dystopia borne of the city councils own design and people’s willingness to live in a bad environment.
And billionaires aren’t going to treat everyone super terrible because any billionaire knows if the peasants aren’t getting their bread instead they want the riches heads. That’s not really a great gambit if you’re ultra rich.
Unfortunately not all of us live in America :( 100k USD for a run of the mill web-developer is just not going to happen where I am (New Zealand), and housing is much more expensive too.
And, history shows pretty conclusively the supremely rich have no problem keeping the peasants from their bread, so to speak. The rich either crack the whip and the peasants knuckle under, or, the wealthy delude themselves in thinking all is well right up to the guillotine.
US $100k a year salaries are not the norm world wide.
I know it's pretty ridiculous for me to run out in the street and start chanting the end is nigh over a little change in our culture. But it's not just one little change. It's a sum of many changes which have added up over the last few decades and the trend that it represents. It's not about now, it's about where that trend is going in the near future. Believe it or not, things will not remain this good if we are apathetic about it. That is not the default state of society.
If you have read up on the history of what people have been through in this country and the world as a result of the first industrial revolution, you would also be wary of the second which is coming about right now due to automation. It's worth extreme vigilance.
For the record, I don't live in New York or California either. I'm in an industry which was once full of steady salaried jobs, but now it's entirely shifted over to gig-economy contracting. Getting insurance is a nightmare and eats up my margins. What was once a very livable job now hardly pays for an apartment. It's specialized work that requires technical skills. I work very long hours and practically every weekend. I am not proud of that, and I know I need a change of career, but once again--it's not about me, it's about statistics. It's naive to expect that everyone can change their career to whatever the best career is at the moment. You are being obtuse if you think everyone can get your job and be in your living situation, which I am happy for by the way. That's fantastic.
The United States was once a country about building physical things, manufacturing and construction and mining. People made a good, dignified living off that for a while. That time is obviously gone, and contrary to what certain political parties think, it just won't be coming back. You can't put the toothpaste back in the tube as they say--or rather you could if you had a toothpaste packing machine, but they're on the other side of the world and they're automated now anyway, so it wouldn't matter if we did bring them back. That work is gone.
I think what people don't often consider is that making software, networks, apps, content, websites, etc. is our new labor. A huge portion of our society is now doing this, as everyone here knows. A few decades ago, it was super-specialized, highly educated, protected work. That is changing.
We are the new labor, and our work is the weft and warp of the middle class in several cities and communities in this country. But that shouldn't be taken for granted. We are soon going to be treated as laborers are traditionally treated if we don't take steps to secure a dignified living.
I thought we were talking about the big silicon valley companies that are talking about building housing here? at those places, a guy without a college education can pull down more in two days than your fast food worker makes in a month. And these jobs come with better food, a sweet gym, and a bunch of other perks.
I mean, I'm all for unions for the oppressed, but when you start saying that the facebook engineers are being oppressed... well, you kinda lose some credibility.
If we let it slide for members of the middle class then it will eventually lead to an ever greater portion of the population unable to earn a dignified quality of life for their work.
Engineers, web developers, etc. are paid very well now, sure, but as more and more people enter that industry and those skills become more commonplace, do you really think things will remain that way? As more of the industry is able to be automated, do you think as many people will be able to stay in the middle class?
And when people in the middle class start accepting things like company housing, contractor jobs over salaried employment with benefits, longer working hours, etc. what do you think that will do for the lower classes of society? I think we're starting to see that now with pseudo-jobs like Favor and Uber, which have even less security than the service industry has traditionally had.
It's not just about facebook engineers or whatever, it's about society as a whole. The problems faced by society are largely the same, different only in degree; we shouldn't separate them up and devolve into infighting because these yuppies or whatever can afford something like the quality of life an average worker a couple generations ago could have, and that's considered fabulously well-off now. If industry starts treating middle-class people badly, they're treating lower-class people worse for the same reason. The whole scale slides.
A strong middle class with strong labor rights helps all of society. We can't do this crab bucket thing where we say it's foolish to defend people with some amount of privilege because there's people over there who are worse off--what is the ultimate end of that strategy, a search for the most downtrodden person on earth and delay all progress until we work our way up the list?
How about we start with someone who is below the 50th percentile?
There's no evidence at all that industrial revolution era working conditions can return.
The dominant force shaping working conditions was and is labour productivity.
Before industrialization, low labour productivity meant short brutish lives.
The 12 hour work days of the industrial revolution were a relative improvement, because they provided a more reliable source of sustenance than the substitence farming of previous eras.
As productivity increased, the number of hours of works, especially very dangerous and streneous work, declined, as the risks of such work started to outweigh the risks of foregoing the additional income of taking on that work.
This decline had next to nothing to do with any concerted social effort.
Just because our productivity has risen doesn't mean industries wouldn't demand even more production from an increase in hours. Publicly traded companies in fact must continuously grow and increase productivity endlessly so as to increase shareholder value. It's almost a tropism. It's not somebody's conscious conspiracy or mustache-twirling evil plan, it's just the nature of these societal mechanisms we're living with.
And people lived brutal lives for many more reasons besides low labor productivity. I feel like that's a correlation fallacy on your part or something.
I'm a TA in advertising who specializes in motion graphics, rigging, and 3d rendering. My work has shifted from permanent employees to contractors over the last few years, along with the loss of protections that implies. Predictably, working hours have expanded vastly. It's very stressful work and I have virtually no security. This is happening to steadily more people in more industries, including ones that were thought to be too highly educated to be vulnerable. It's a trend that will continue if nobody does anything about it.
You say there's no evidence those conditions can return, but that's a weird negative proof situation. What kind of evidence am I supposed to provide for that, a crystal ball? Trends are already moving in that direction. The decay of the middle class is already happening. Even with all our increases in productivity, people on average just can't afford the benefits that previous generations had, and are less likely to be upwardly socially mobile. And it's only getting worse.
That, combined with the fact that society often defaults to immense wealth divides in multiple cultures all throughout history--transforming the vast majority of people into paupers and serfs--should be proof enough. The secure, prosperous lives we enjoy in the developed world are not the default state. The privileges we take for granted are the result of blood and toil from labor and civil rights movements over the centuries.
The mandated 8 hour work week came as a result of concerted political effort, but the reductions in work hours were happening anyway, due to independend economic forces.
Just to give one example, Henry Ford instituted a 5-day work week in 1922. He instituted an 8 hour work day in 1926:
https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/ford-factory-wor...
Moves like this had competitive implications, which forced other employers to do the same.
Today employers are exploring 4 hour work days. None of this is driven by top-down mandates imposed through legislation.
>>Just because our productivity has risen doesn't mean industries wouldn't demand even more production from an increase in hours.
This comment belies a basic misunderstanding of the leverage held by employers.
First of all, their profitability declines if their employees are less productive per hour of labor as a result of longer work days. That's saying nothing of the health implications of longer work days, and the higher rates of worker turn-over.
Second, employers are competing with each other for a limited pool of workers. They have to offer attractive terms to recruit quality employees.
They are not in a position to demand anything they want.
We would be in a sorry state if the only force that improves labor conditions and compensation is top-down mandates that regiment the range of acceptable employment contracts.
Fortunately it is not the only force. In fact, such laws are worse than useless, in removing options from the market that would otherwise be in everyone's best interests to exist.
>>And people lived brutal lives for many more reasons besides low labor productivity.
It was almost solely down to low labor productivty, as a consequence of the economy having very little physical capital.
The United States economy in the mid 19th century had per capita GDP comparable to some of the poorest countries in the world today.
The story of development is one of private investment generating capital, which boosts output, which enables higher volumes of investment. It's a long-term process that can transform a society from a state of extreme primitivity, to one of great opulence over the course of a few generations.
>>I'm a TA in advertising who specializes in motion graphics, rigging, and 3d rendering. My work has shifted from permanent employees to contractors over the last few years, along with the loss of protections that implies. Predictably, working hours have expanded vastly. It's very stressful work and I have virtually no security.
That's a consequence of an increase in the supply of people with your skillset relative to demand. Restricting work hours and mandating long-term employment in your field would greatly reduce the demand for the services you provide, because it would cost employers more to procure said services.
The second order consequence of this would be less of these services being consumed by society, meaning the price paid by consumers increasing, and fewer people being able to make a living from providing these services.
But company housing, tenements, indebted servitude, working hours from can't-see until can't-see, is all a spectre from our not-so-distant past which we have mostly forgotten about. Well it's coming back. A labor revolution gave us such amazing leaps in dignity and basic humanity which were sorely lacking after the eruption of the industrial revolution. We take that entirely for granted now, like it can't come back and get us. It can.
People in America are just not educated enough about the horrors of the labor revolution. Our own, not the communist's overseas. Unions exist in this strange historical agnosticism, and people only know them as some kind of cartoon, a mob-ruled bureaucracy that enables hilariously lazy laborers to cite ridiculous rules and get in the way of progress. Well they weren't always that way. It is not common human decency that stops the captains of industry from merely hiring private police forces to mow bad workers down with rifles and artillery. That's our past as well as our cyberpunk future. That stuff can come back if we don't keep maintaining the levee between it and us.
People have an instinct to normalize and rationalize things which happen slowly compared to a human lifetime. Well there's a very real and disastrous difference today in how people work and maintain a decent living. It's becoming more and more like back when a decent living was only reserved for the insanely wealthy, the richest of the rich. Everyone else toiled in disease and squalor fourteen hours a day, breaking their bodies, without any possessions of their own; everything belonged to the company, and they worked just for the privilege to live a week at a time. It really wasn't that long ago. We like to hope that if it comes back we'll still be behind the fence of the upper-middle class, safe from the horror. But the vast majority of us won't.
Working is taking up more and more of our days. Gone is the 8 hours work, 8 hours rest, 8 hours leisure. It's going back to "as many hours as you can physically go without sleep" once again. No benefits, no retirement, no healthcare, no affordable higher education, no affordable family housing aside from company closet tenements with communal utilities, next to a corporate campus but far from a town center. Out in the suburbs with one company store. That will come back in our complacence. Fewer opportunities than our fathers.