Here's what FDR said about the minimum wage law that was passed in 1933:

> It seems to me to be equally plain that no business which depends for existence on paying less than living wages to its workers has any right to continue in this country.

> By business I mean the whole of commerce as well as the whole of industry; by workers I mean all workers, the white collar class as well as the men in overalls; and by living wages I mean more than a bare subsistence level-I mean the wages of decent living.

Ah, the one that was declared unconstitutional?

And that had an inflation adjusted earning potential of $4.81/hr (approx, in 2021)?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_wage_in_the_United_Sta...

If you think working and living conditions are worse now than they were in 1933, I'd love some concrete examples.

I'm not saying things couldn't be better. I'm saying that most people talking about this seem to be completely devoid of context about life at all, and most proposed solutions just come across as strong arguments that they have no clue about the world at all, or why anything is the way it is.

Which is a solid vote in the column of 'changes proposed won't accomplish the stated goals, and will cause way more problems'. In my experience, anyway.

In my experience one of the biggest issues is that no one reports companies doing shitty things, and the labor orgs in the gov'ts get away with ignoring shitty things, because no one holds any politicians accountable on labor issues because most of the population is super complacent about everything.

Hell, Amazon and a number of other companies are super blatant about their ACTIVELY ILLEGAL ANTI-LABOR ORGANIZING, and not a peep seems to be coming from the appropriate labor departments.

And since everyone is super complacent (barely any protests even), then of course nobody cares. Because nobody is making them care.

If everyone really feels so badly about it, make it known by making them feel badly about it. Instead everyone seems to go back to candy crush after posting complaints online about how terrible things are.

What is the 'minimum' when every single corporation is working to de-skill jobs so that they can cut wages, limit onboarding etc.

We all work on or adjacent to embedded software for robots to replace people in these jobs so that they can go on to be 'free' to have a higher skill job doing....no one ever seems to know what. Except maintaining said robots.

It's literally always been that way. Every business tries to cut costs, or they become unprofitable. Every organization tries to mechanize/create repetitive process where they can to minimize the amount of skilled workers they need as part of it. Every organization tries to skrimp where it can.

I literally never worked for a company with an onboarding or training process until I got to a FAANG. At that point I had been in industry full time for ~ 13 years, and worked at everything from startups to established 200+ employee companies.

Everyone has been worried about 'automation' nuking the jobs since I was born, and outsourcing killing all industry too. First it was Japan that was going to own the world though. Then Outsourcing to India. Then China. And they had impacts. But somehow, everyone who is useful keeps working, and everyone actually seems better off. Hell, the 'maintain the robots as the only jobs left' was a 90's thing with worries about car manufacturing automation.

Back then, a lot of jobs were things like secretaries, gophers (task runners)/delivery workers, retail shopping workers, postal workers, etc. Now people use email and write their own documents, uber or ubereats what they want, have things shipped to their door. Quality of life is dramatically higher in every objective way I can see.

And if anything, there are waaaaay more jobs now, and people seem to be doing better everywhere. But they seem to hate everything and everyone way more, and FEEL poorer.

Yet you don't see that "gopher" / shopping jobs are alive and well in the very service workers you use today (Uber/eats, "items shipped to your door", etc.)

I think you’re making my point for me?

I hear you on 'always' and say - while strenuously protesting that I am not a luddite - that many jobs required apprenticeship. Some in the US still do and in places like Japan its a requirement. In France you can still make a living as a butcher and if the Great Pottery Throwdown is to be believed you can be a successful scrub nurse or elder care manager in the UK and still own a home and have the wherewithal to be a fantastic potter, in a home pottery studio. (that last bit is tongue in cheek).

Capitalists gonna capitalist.

But they are limited to differing degrees due to policy. Our current state isn't inevitable.

Statutorily for sure. Most don’t require apprenticeships as a part of the job/role fundamentally though. Electricians (classic apprenticeship setup there) for instance could be made through formal trade school + probationary period, and it would likely be even better than it is now. If it works, it works though.

Generally, It’s a means of locking in stasis in a particular field in general, or restricting competition to the ‘have’s’, just like the old Guild setup before that. Still very much a thing for MD’s in the US.

There is a reason why France in particular is notorious for not getting anything done.

German’s do it too of course, but in their own way which is focused more on results, so it tends to be less sclerotic and more productive.

It’s always a trade off - more protectionism, or more churn/chaos/competition. If they can provide good labor protections while maintaining economic growth enough to ‘lift the tide’ overall, hard to fault them. It’s easy to go so far that it strangles the economy and locks everyone into a pointlessly inefficient setup in favor of the protected classes though. (And they won’t necessarily be rich protected classes either).

Europe’s tide hasn’t been rising very rapidly for awhile, and many EU countries are clearly insolvent overall (Greece, Italy, etc), so we’ll see how long they can sustain it.

And housing wise - to be somewhat on topic - very unlikely those Nurses in the UK are doing so in London.