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http://www.forbes.com/sites/neilhowe/201...19090c673c
Quote:If there’s something that convention attendees in Philadelphia and Cleveland both agree on, it’s that America needs higher middle-class living standards. But we won’t have to wait until 2017: The Obama administration last month promulgated a new regulation that will make millions more Americans eligible for overtime pay. The regulation, which will take effect in December, doubles the annual salary threshold under which employees receive time-and-a-half after logging 40 hours a week. Labor groups are hailing this move as a victory, but many businesses are trying to avoid forking over any extra compensation. Their resistance, however, may not hold under a rising tide of laws and regulations aimed at protecting workers.
Under current law, most salaried workers who are not executives, managers, or administrators have the right to overtime pay. Workers below a certain salary level (now $23,660) are entitled to it regardless of their job duties. The new regulation extends these protections in two basic ways. One provision raises the nonexempt salary threshold to $47,476 and provides a formula to update it automatically every three years. The second provision offers more specific descriptions of job duties to determine which employees with salaries above the threshold qualify as exempt...
http://www.forbes.com/sites/neilhowe/201...19090c673c
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(07-30-2016, 10:10 AM)Dan Wrote: http://www.forbes.com/sites/neilhowe/201...19090c673c
Quote:If there’s something that convention attendees in Philadelphia and Cleveland both agree on, it’s that America needs higher middle-class living standards. But we won’t have to wait until 2017: The Obama administration last month promulgated a new regulation that will make millions more Americans eligible for overtime pay. The regulation, which will take effect in December, doubles the annual salary threshold under which employees receive time-and-a-half after logging 40 hours a week. Labor groups are hailing this move as a victory, but many businesses are trying to avoid forking over any extra compensation. Their resistance, however, may not hold under a rising tide of laws and regulations aimed at protecting workers.
Under current law, most salaried workers who are not executives, managers, or administrators have the right to overtime pay. Workers below a certain salary level (now $23,660) are entitled to it regardless of their job duties. The new regulation extends these protections in two basic ways. One provision raises the nonexempt salary threshold to $47,476 and provides a formula to update it automatically every three years. The second provision offers more specific descriptions of job duties to determine which employees with salaries above the threshold qualify as exempt...
http://www.forbes.com/sites/neilhowe/201...19090c673c
Does anyone know what the aftermath of this has been? Did it ever get passed in full form, or even a diluted one? Workers' rights has been among my soapbox issue especially after an incident I experienced back in 2009. Three years later I wrote a fictionalized account of what went down in a self-published book which I titled JUDAS TIMES SEVEN. A psychic had told me that I was the victim of betrayal and she saw that seven people were involved, hence the title. This is one of the issues that has been largely been put on the back burner, even before the current Ukraine crisis broke.
Have often said that there should be a bill of rights of sorts for salaried workers so that companies would no longer be able to get several hours of week of free labor from them. It seems as though the PTB find anything proposing improvement in standard working conditions to be scary. And some, such as Amazon, have become near monopolies by treating their workforce as livestock at best, vermin at worst.
At the very least we should cancel the strict at-will employment model and replace it with one where a grievance procedure would be required which in turn would mean that in most cases a just cause would be required for employee termination. Mass necessary layoffs would not be included in such. Isn't it time to release what isn't working, and the model we have been under for the past four decades certainly qualifies.
Many if not most members of the current society have been overly focused on work for those four decades, which I have often pointed out has produced a near society-wide "I don't have time" syndrome, which in turn made liars out of many futurists who had predicted that the technology most of us now kneel at the feet of would produce a world of ever increasing leisure. Isn't now a good time to find the balance between our work-life and following one's dreams? And, isn't this at least part and parcel of the current so-called Great Resignation?
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$23,660 goes much further in Columbus, Mississippi than in Columbus, Ohio. $23,660 is poverty in any high-cost urban area. If one earns such as an hourly worker one at least can get a second job and still be poor. If one gets that as a salaried worker in New York City has an open end on hours worked, then one lacks even that solution. Much of the prosperity that America enjoys depends upon people being both sweated and starved. The neoliberal economy is tantamount to economic fascism. It has allowed arrogant and rapacious elites to wax intensely off the suffering of multitudes in the names of 'growth' and 'prosperity'. Such was the rationale for slavery back in its day.
Employment at will seems on paper as the reasonable assumption that one can be fired for misconduct, a reasonable assumption. Heck, I would be quick to fire someone who violates safety standards, does sexual harassment (which can be as costly a judgment as the cost of a large-scale embezzlement), does any irregularity of accounting, pilfers property, or rips off vendors or customers. Management by fear is how such people as Hitler and Stalin, people widely reviled in America, did things in the furtherance of prosperity. After a certain point, even with "milder" villains such as Pinochet or Castro, it breaks people down.
Sure, one can get work elsewhere -- starting over at the ground floor. If one never advanced far in the bureaucratic chain, like a truck driver, one might lose little accept not getting a vacation. If your first job fresh out of college required you to work 60 hours a week for starvation pay (you still lived with your parents) at odious, sol-crushing tasks, then such might not be so easy if one has family obligations and no support from parents when one is 35.
If I am to suffer for something, then it should be something noble (unusually high, and highly-compensated achievement) or a very good meal-ticket. If it is simply drudgery for bare and precarious survival, then I am likely to have the attitude of "Burn in Hell!" to "Suffer for (elite power, profit, and privilege). Most of us reasonably expect prole reward for prole efforts and entrepreneurial rewards for competence in entrepreneurial effort. Elites capable of compelling entrepreneurial efforts, risk-taking, and competence for proletarian rewards deserve ruin or overthrow.
Neoliberal economics is mirror-image Marxism, acceptance of extreme inequality and harsh terms of employment and survival as desirable ends in themselves.Mirror-image Marxists recognize and accept a plutocratic order as a norm for capitalism, differing from Marxists only in that Marxists condemn such as objects first for excoriation and then overthrow. Any capitalist order is tolerable to the extent that it does not fit a Marxist stereotype.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.
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(03-18-2022, 11:58 AM)pbrower2a Wrote: $23,660 goes much further in Columbus, Mississippi than in Columbus, Ohio. $23,660 is poverty in any high-cost urban area. If one earns such as an hourly worker one at least can get a second job and still be poor. If one gets that as a salaried worker in New York City has an open end on hours worked, then one lacks even that solution. Much of the prosperity that America enjoys depends upon people being both sweated and starved. The neoliberal economy is tantamount to economic fascism. It has allowed arrogant and rapacious elites to wax intensely off the suffering of multitudes in the names of 'growth' and 'prosperity'. Such was the rationale for slavery back in its day.
Employment at will seems on paper as the reasonable assumption that one can be fired for misconduct, a reasonable assumption. Heck, I would be quick to fire someone who violates safety standards, does sexual harassment (which can be as costly a judgment as the cost of a large-scale embezzlement), does any irregularity of accounting, pilfers property, or rips off vendors or customers. Management by fear is how such people as Hitler and Stalin, people widely reviled in America, did things in the furtherance of prosperity. After a certain point, even with "milder" villains such as Pinochet or Castro, it breaks people down.
Sure, one can get work elsewhere -- starting over at the ground floor. If one never advanced far in the bureaucratic chain, like a truck driver, one might lose little accept not getting a vacation. If your first job fresh out of college required you to work 60 hours a week for starvation pay (you still lived with your parents) at odious, sol-crushing tasks, then such might not be so easy if one has family obligations and no support from parents when one is 35.
If I am to suffer for something, then it should be something noble (unusually high, and highly-compensated achievement) or a very good meal-ticket. If it is simply drudgery for bare and precarious survival, then I am likely to have the attitude of "Burn in Hell!" to "Suffer for (elite power, profit, and privilege). Most of us reasonably expect prole reward for prole efforts and entrepreneurial rewards for competence in entrepreneurial effort. Elites capable of compelling entrepreneurial efforts, risk-taking, and competence for proletarian rewards deserve ruin or overthrow.
Neoliberal economics is mirror-image Marxism, acceptance of extreme inequality and harsh terms of employment and survival as desirable ends in themselves.Mirror-image Marxists recognize and accept a plutocratic order as a norm for capitalism, differing from Marxists only in that Marxists condemn such as objects first for excoriation and then overthrow. Any capitalist order is tolerable to the extent that it does not fit a Marxist stereotype.
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Paragraph by paragraph response:
P1: Very true but more often that not, in lower COL locations, wages and salaries are also lower, so do you really come out ahead. The ones that would benefit might be retirees as they can probably live fairly comfortably on their SS income so long as they can do without all the expensive trappings of urban areas such as super theatrical productions and hotsy-totsy restaurants. I have often contemplated moving to some as you often refer to as hick town at the end of life. Just a few days ago I heard that the percentage of folks who live paycheck to paycheck is in the high-60s/low 70s range. Being that we hear relatively little from them, we can refer to them as the Silent Majority. Today's world definitely isn't set up well to address the plight of these folks.
P2: The incidents that you mention here are just causes for being fired and would stick under a just cause model. But what that would eliminate though are frivolous firings just because, for example, you look at someone the wrong way, or that you were accused of something because a coworker may have had an argument with a spouse the previous evening. And a reason would need to be given. Most firms would do so but there still are a lot of mind games played, especially where temp agencies are concerned.
P3: The thing about this point is that very few if any jobs that I have been made aware of require one to work 60 hours a week. After all, didn't our forefathers shed blood for the 8 hour day, 40 hour week. Many futurists actually predicted that advances in technology would result in further reduction of standard working hours. We're still waiting for this one. What's needed is a Bill of Rights for salaried workers so employers would no longer be able to get 60 hours for the price of 40.
P4: This one I find a bit confusing unless at the end you are referring to companies such as Amazon which became near monopolies while treating their workforce as livestock at best, vermin at worst.
P5: Not a student of Marxism but wasn't his writing the original expose of the potential evils of capitalism dressed up in a different system and name?
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