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Everyone forgets the essential worker heroes of 2020 and no one gave them a better wage since
But they have increase the col dramatically for those heroes and everyone else.
Because people misunderstand what ‘essential worker’ meant. The work being done was essential, not the specific person doing the work. It wasn’t so much ‘essential worker’ as much as ‘(essential work)er’.
Sick to death of this word game.
There’s jobs anyone can start with minimal training - and there’s jobs where you need a six-year degree to avoid killing people.
None of that is why everyone deserves a living wage, or why assholes with money say anyone doesn’t deserve a living wage. Confusing these ideas does not help. Please stop spreading this denial of a gradient in complexity and risk. I want the guy at McDonalds to afford a home and groceries, and that doesn’t require pretending he’s qualified to design a bridge.
If you don’t want to pay a living wage, hire something that is not alive.
stop tempting them
That’s why so many are pushing AI so damn hard.
If that’s how capital worked and you could generate profit from machinery alone, they straight up would. Too bad that human wage labor is the only part of production where profit comes from
Maybe in 1850, where all machinery required human operation, but we don’t live in that world anymore. AWS alone is just Amazon owning a shitload of computers. It’s mostly autonomous. Sparse human labor only steps in when something goes wrong. They could buy twice as much equipment and hire no additional people, and it’d roughly double their revenue, while nobody does more work and the service stays nearly as good.
No, the value comes from human labor even within your example. Remember that Amazon isn’t just some collection of autonomous servers, there’s warehouses with thousands of workers, many engineers in different locations maintaining the servers, amazon factories where workers are creating branded commodities, vast logistics networks transporting goods with lots of drivers, etc. All of these workers are having surplus value extracted from their labor and is what ultimately generates profit for the company, with the ‘machinery’ acting as an enabler and amplifier of this extraction.
Even within strictly non-value producing businesses such as rent seeking ones (Amazon partly does this too through seller fees) or those that do flipping, the way they make profit is not by creating value and extracting surplus from human labor, but through redistribution of value that was created precisely like that but in some other firm. In other words, they still heavily depend on human labor, as without it they don’t have anything to “redistribute from”.
Nothing has fundamentally changed tbh
AWS is primarily a collection of autonomous servers. They’re what generate profit for that business. The thin layer of human beings occasionally touching the hardware are not somehow responsible for the bazillion operations between those interactions. If robotics get a little better then Amazon could manage the same servers with one-tenth as many people, and that does not mean those workers are creating ten times as much value. They just fix robots that do stuff to the computers that make all of the money.
Automating away ninety percent of a workforce is not increasing the value of human labor.
