Unfortunately, unionization is not “coming back with a vengeance” in the United States and it is not allowed to by our laws.
Our laws ban: sector unionization, sympathy and general strikes, and secondary boycotts.
On top of that, we have a very narrow definition of employee, an employers can permanently replace striking workers. The right to strike can even be taken away with a mandated cooling off period.
Even having one of those factors can hamstring unionization in a country, so they’re pretty much never going to “come back with a vengance” here
It'll only come back if folks get desperate enough. union activity wasn't exactly "illegal" in the old days but it wasn't exactly protected by any laws, either, as attested by all the private goons that the mining companies hired out to break up strikes and murder striking miners
> union activity wasn't exactly "illegal" in the old days
Having a union wasn't, on its own, illegal but it gave no special status, but most union activity was illegal, and as soon as the union jointly planned that activity it became a criminal conspiracy.
I never understood this. How can boycotts be banned? Seems inherently unconstitutional to me.
Not that it really matters to me in the sense that it's definitely an area where I'd do as I pleased regardless of the law. But I've always found the headlines that I see from time to time odd.
> Section 8(b)(4)(ii)(B) of the National Labor Relations Act
(NLRA)¹ makes it an unfair labor practice for a union to
"threaten, coerce, or restrain any person" with the object of requiring that person to cease dealing with another.² In NLRB v. Retail
Store Employees Union Local 1001 (Safeco),³ the Supreme Court
held that this section proscribes union picketing designed to influence consumers to boycott a struck product whenever such picketing "reasonably can be expected to threaten [the picketed retailer]
with ruin or substantial loss."'⁴ Although the Court noted in passing that peaceful picketing is entitled to some first amendment
protection, the Court found it "well-established" that Congress
had constitutional power to prohibit "picketing that predictably
encourages consumers to boycott a secondary business."⁵
I'm not sure whether NLRB v. Retail Store Employees is still valid law. But "secondary boycotts" are often understood as something much more coercive as simply "union picketing designed to influence consumers to boycott a struck product" (https://digitalcommons.du.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=46..., "Secondary Boycotts Under the
Taft–Hartley Act"
Philip Hornbein, Jr., 01953):
> The distinctive feature of a secondary boycott is that it is
directed against a neutral party rather than against the employer
directly involved in the labor dispute. The target of the secondary
boycott is a third party who is engaged in business dealings with
the employer as a customer, supplier, or otherwise. The object
of the secondary boycott is to cause the boycottee to cease doing
business with the employer.
Consider disputes other than labor disputes. Suppose Phyllis believes that, because you are gay, you are so immoral that she won't sell groceries to you in her grocery store. This is deplorable but not really threatening and coercive; you can still buy groceries from Chad's grocery store down the street. But suppose Phyllis convinces Chad's employees to strike unless Chad refuses you service as well. Suddenly the situation has taken on a much darker cast; Chad may have nothing against gay people, but he may start refusing you service simply as a matter of self-preservation. If this goes on, you may rapidly find yourself without sources of food or employment unless you recant your homosexuality.
The whole point of collective action at large scale is to be able to say, "fuck your laws".
After all, the laws were much more hostile towards unions a century ago, and strikes would often be dispersed with outright violence using both paramilitary organizations (like Pinkertons) as well as police and military. But if doing so just means that the strike gets bigger and broader, it's not a winning strategy for the capital.
> United States and it is not allowed to by our laws.
Yeah. Because at one point unions got so powerful they formed their own union towns.
They even got infiltrated by the mob.
Plus Europe union laws and US union laws are separate things. For example in France, whatever concessions union gets, are applied to all employees. Which isn't the case in US and is iirc considered anti-union. However then you remember that US union depends on participation for union healthcare.
The biggest problem for unions today isn't the laws. It's ironically the free trade (lack of laws). Don't want to do this job for peanuts? We'll ship it overseas for someone willing to work for half a peanut.
> unionization [...] is not allowed to by our laws.
Ok sure but laws can changes, right ? And that previous sentence is itself protected by the law ? I understand your pessimism but that's not to be confused with fatalism.
Marshall Brain, who recently committed suicide, wrote a book in 02003 about this; it's called "Manna". Unfortunately, before he killed himself, he removed it from his website. Fortunately, he didn't remove it from the WABAC machine: https://web.archive.org/web/20040903175746/http://marshallbr...
It's a disturbingly prescient read, and unfortunately I don't find the optimistic ending plausible.
I came here to post the Manna story. I've read it multiple times and found it eerily prescient. (It reminds me a bit of what L. Bob Rife[0] was trying to accomplish as well in Snow Crash.)
I didn't know Brain had committed suicide :( . More details about that[1].
> In labor circles, “chickenization” refers to exploitative working arrangements that resemble the plight of the American poultry farmer. The U.S. poultry industry has been taken over by three monopolistic packers, who have divided the nation up into exclusive territories, so that each chicken farmer has only one buyer for their birds.
> Farmers are “independent small businesspeople” who nominally run their own operations, but because all their products must be sold through a single poultry processor, that processor is able to exercise enormous control over the operation. The processor tells the farmer which birds to raise, as well as what the birds are to be fed, how much, and on what schedule. The processor tells the farmer how to build their coops and when the lights are to go on and off. The processor tells the farmer which vets to use, and tells the vets which medicines to prescribe.
> The processor tells the farmer everything…except how much they’ll be able to sell their birds for. That is determined unilaterally when the farmer brings their birds to market, and the payout is titrated to the cent, to represent exactly enough money for the farmer to buy birds and feed and vet services through the processor’s preferred suppliers, and to service the debts on the coops and light and land, but not one penny more.
In my experience, the processor is actually the one who owns the chickens (broilers). The farmer is essentially a baby-sitter for 6-7 weeks. The processor also owns the feed and the farmer gets paid on a feed-to-poultry conversion efficiency.
Variables like temperatures, lighting, ventilation rates, chicken house construction, and access/
density have well-established bounds to maximize pounds of poultry. The farmers have leeway to deviate from the recommendations, but they take on all of the risk in doing so. From the outside, it looks like a pretty oppressive relationship.
I've seen this referred to as a treadmill before. They get the farmers on a treadmill (loans for co-ops, equipment inputs) and once they're waking, they don't let them stop.
The craziest thing is this is well known trick, historically. In the 1800s there was a company run by a man that was both wholesale buyer of fish from fishermen and also supplied the mortgages for fishing boats. He was the only one for both in many small fishing communities and was universally hated for it.
The obvious thing to do is for the farmer to learn how to package their own chickens, then sell it themselves. The hard part of this should be the however-long-it-takes a chicken to grow + feed for the bird.
Since that isn't happening I'd assume that doing so has been made illegal by the regulators for some reason. Or that "chicken packaging" is wildly misnamed, because it sounds like something you can ... just do. People ate chickens for millennia without relying on 3 chicken packers.
I've had neighbours who keep their own chickens (curse them for the mice). It didn't look so hard a quasi-monopoly could form naturally.
Meat packaging isn’t something you can “just do.” The hard part is the equipment and manpower to disinfect a meat packing plant, which is done several times a day when in operation.
The reason regulators made it illegal is basic food safety. A meat packing facility - whether that’s an industrial plant or a small group of farmers in a commercial kitchen or whatever - is a hot and humid environment that is an ideal place for bacteria to grow. Now that’s going to happen anyway, but the public safety goal here is to minimize the bacterial load that transfers to the meat so that by the time it reaches the kitchen, the pathogens haven’t reached dangerous levels. That means an entire facility that’s designed to be sprayed down with a foaming disinfectant from wall to wall and crevice to crevice. Small groups of farmers simply can’t afford that and be competitive unless they’re already selling high end organic/free range/etc meat.
Before refrigeration, people ate meat right after slaughter or cured it. They grew the animals at so low an intensity that >80% of the population were sustenance farmers that lived a precarious life prone to starvation at any time. It just makes no sense to compare the infrastructure to feed hundreds of millions in a single country to small scale pre-industrial agriculture.
One word: “Distribution.” (The Graduate reference).
Distributors hold the most powerful hands in selling physical goods. You can’t sell something, if you can’t get it to market. These cartels (and you are hearing about them, all over. See "Big Potato"), are getting strangleholds on distribution. Amazon has turned distribution as a goad into a dark art.
That’s one reason that the Internet has upended so many industries. It’s democratized distribution of digital goods, and digital goods have become a lot more valuable (sometimes, because of the Internet). With digital goods, advertising and promotion are the new Distribution. You can’t sell your apps/music/images, if no one can find out about them.
Big box stores want high volumes of a standardised products. This is hard to do for a lone farmer. It would be easier if they could sell to smaller supermarkets and butcher shops. Smaller supermarkets and butcher shops require walkable neighbourhoods and a vibrant down town; I call it the walkable neighbourhood theory of everything.
> Since that isn't happening I'd assume that doing so has been made illegal by the regulators for some reason.
the lack of antitrust action and the price of entry in the market are a market failure modes that could bring in the same final result. Especially, if the packagers are forming exclusive deals with the distributors to prevent new entrants from achieving market share.
setting aside regulatory issues (and not commenting on whether any of that is good or bad), there is no universe where independent chicken farmers, solo or in a group, are going to compete with a group like Perdue in the industrial foodstuff space. maybe you get a cottage industry farmer's market business going or whatever but you aren't going to see Farmer Bob's Foghorn Leghorn Boneless Breasts on shelves in the local Wally World any time soon.
My impression (partly from reading Zephyr Teachout's excellent book Break Em Up) is that a farmer cooperative would not find the big grocery stores willing to carry their products. Those stores are intimidated by whichever of the big-3 processors is active in their region. Selling at a farmers market or mom & pop store may be totally feasible, but the grower had better be sure that was a long-term solution, because the big processor will blackball them for trying.
The only winning move is not to play. My grandfather tried his hand at chicken farming about 100 years ago (didn't go well). It was a bad business then and it’s a bad one now.
Yes, for some reason the term "monopsony" is little known, so much that the autocorrect tried to turn it into "monopoly". Maybe for not having a famous board game named after it.
But here it looks even worse as workers have to invest into equipment from the company that is of little use besides working for that company, making it borderline slavery.
Reminds me of the 1947 "Sixteen Tons" song. From German Wikipedia, translated by DeepL:
"According to Archie Green, the lyrics contain several key passages that Travis took from quotes from his family members. When asked about his health, his father reportedly replied that he couldn't afford to die because he owed his soul to the grocery store[7] where he had debts.
Sixteen Tons is a socially critical song about the sometimes inhumane conditions that American miners and their families had to live under in the past. This included wage slavery:
US miners were mostly paid not in cash but with tokens (scrips), some of which could only be redeemed in company-owned stores, as there were no other shops in the area;
local food supplies could only be obtained in these stores (company stores), which had a virtual monopoly and could therefore charge excessive prices;
The income and expenditure situation in the company stores, which was deliberately controlled exclusively in favor of the mine owners, resulted in unavoidable debts for the workers (Another day older and deeper in debt), which created a relationship of dependency similar to serfdom ("I owe my soul to the company store").
By the time the song was written, the miners' living and working conditions had already improved significantly, partly as a result of numerous strikes. Payment with tokens had been banned in 1938 by a federal law, the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938. However, working conditions remained harsh and the memory of exploitative practices was still fresh in the minds of the families and communities affected."
I'm not sure why you transllated the german entry for an american song, but FYI, there's an english wikipedia version. "I owe my soul to the company store" is one of the greatest lyrics ever.
[nitpick] I think it's more the natural result of capitalism that is well-regulated only on the consumer side.
There are very few poultry processors largely because it is difficult and expensive to comply with consumer regulations and maintain food safety standards. That, in itself, is fine. But once you have very few (or only one) processor(s), there needs to be regulation on how they pay and treat both their workers and their suppliers. For the most part, there is neither.
Even regulated capitalism exploits. Surplus labor theory easily shows that even in the best of intentions, businesses absolutely must exploit the worker.
Even the local artisan bread-baker must pay workers less than their economic output. This isn't to say that the owner is exploitive and treating people with subsistence. But the pay/surplus split is still there as exploitation.
Reforming capitalism also doesn't work either. Hell, people can't get past page 30 of Adam Smith's treatise that discusses all the 'reforms needed' to instill capitalism. Turns out monied interests has always wanted to strip controls from the get-go.
No, its time to relegate capitalism to the dustbin of history. It was tried. As it lifted some up, more and more were ground into a gritty paste to feed the machine.
I don't know what to replace it with either. But whatever it is has to not have weird effects of infinite or 0 cost breakdowns (like copying software and data), and also aware of how to handle algorimthic labor (LLMs), amongst other concerns.
There's not much else around. They don't know what else to do. Education/job training expensive. They've got loans to pay back, so they can't stop working to look for another job. They're on some government assistance program they can't afford to lose, but it comes with work requirements, so they can't retrain. The pay (including government subsidies) make it just bearable enough to keep from revolting. Etc.
Like what? Farm another product that has the similar problems? Row crop farm where generating a 2% return on investment over a decade span is considered a success? The response has been farmers dropping out of the business entirely, which ends up with some few people doubling down into larger operations, which only makes the problem worse as it is harder to pivot and makes processing and distribution even harder to divert away from the big controlling players.
It both sounds and is exploitive and bad, but to add color to this:
- poultry farming dictated by the big guys like this has been going on for decades.
- it’s provided structure for entrepreneurs in rural areas that had land, some money, and a willingness to work.
You could similarly say some fast food franchises or businesses can result in some form of exploitation, because not all result in good conditions and opportunities for growth of their workers.
Some may then extrapolate to say “all business is bad”, but it’s a spectrum; it may be providing work and income where there was none before, and that could be seen as a good thing. Or maybe the risks are too high and/or conditions are terrible, and that’s a bad thing.
I’d argue that finding that balance in business is why religion and capitalism spread together.
Hundreds of years ago, slaves kept spirits up through their religion and those exploiting them were more likely to keep working conditions better than they would’ve been because of their beliefs; slavery was pure evil, and religion didn’t enable that. It did improve a terrible situation, though I know the Marxists may say the opposite.
Today, religion is waning. If the people exploiting others do so without morals, we risk evil beyond what’s discussed in this article. We feel like technology must be there to save workers from being exploited, but it’s an uphill battle, and money/power may win.
I worry about this stuff a fair bit, of all the net-negative AI outcomes I think perhaps the most likely group is some variant of this combined with dystopian techno-feudalism that drives society into an attractor state that’s hard to get out of.
It’s by no means certain though, and i think the article takes an over-pessimistic take.
It’s true that uber drivers and doordashers get bid down, but this is the bottom rung of the ladder of unskilled labor; there is currently massive demand for this job.
If you look at restaurants I believe post-covid you see a different story, where workers are not racing to the bottom and instead employers need to offer way above minimum wage to fill roles. Trades would be an even better example, where skilled carpenters and mechanics are so in demand that it’s a comfortable six-figure job.
Personally I think all these low-skilled jobs are quite likely to be automated soon. How society responds to the influx of unemployed unskilled workers will be the crux. And of course the skill bar for automation will increase; in the long term many (most?) jobs are going to be automatable.
UBI or similar is the obvious solution, but Capital will of course oppose this vigorously. A new social contract will be needed; the slippery slope that the US is currently on does not end in a pretty place.
I really wish we would stop using this term. Not only is driving very obviously a skill, and one I'm grateful for everytime I get in a car, but jobs that are labeled as "unskilled" often emphasize skill to a higher degree.
Furthermore, as someone who has worked many "unskilled" jobs (picking crops, working in a kitchen, working front of house), the skill you have makes a massive difference to your happiness and, many times, your take-home pay. We're going to see many, many types of office work get automated long before we have automated crop pickers or cooks or (actually usable) waiters. It seems to me that office work has the highest concentration of the low-skill workers.
What people really mean with the term is "engages in physical labor", I think, but that should also expose how silly it is to expect these jobs to be automated anytime soon.
I now work as a software engineer, which obviously takes enormous experience aka "skill", and I'd estimate that i'm on the "thickest of ice" outside of HR and the executive suite. It's the customer service people, designers, PMs most at risk of being replaced, although I think the outsourcing trend will continue for a long time before this is successfully productized in a general case. People managers tend to be replaced (or rather, not rehired) as productivity per capita goes up. I worry far more about being forced into contract work than I do of layoffs.
I'n much less bullish on UBI than other people are because I see the demand for it coming from fueling the consumer economy rather than any sort of collectively-rational approach to divvying up resources and funding development of services and infrastructure. Sure, maybe there is a role for that—I'd love to rework SSDI (without pulling the rug out from under it, as neoliberals are bound to try to do) so my disabled friends don't live so vicariously, but delivering UBI before increasing democratic control of the economy that funds it feels an awful lot like putting the cart before the horse. But that's another story。
Edit: oh one last thought: I do think we are more likely to see people getting paid to play video games long before we "bring back manufacturing" or whatever. It's going to be much easier politically to directly subsidize the bottom of the economic pyramid than it will be to basically go through another economic revolution altering the pyramid structurally.
It’s all relative. While there is skill, pretty much anyone can learn it in short order. Vs “skilled labor” like trades which require many years of apprenticing.
And no, it’s not a proxy for “physical labor”. Trades are highly skilled, picking groceries from a list is not. (To be clear, not being pejorative here. These jobs are needed.) The key difference is the supply of workers; the lower the bar for entry, the more supply and therefore the bid is lower.
(Or in the other direction from the workers perspective, demand is much higher for jobs requiring less training/certification.)
I don’t think working class jobs are going to go first as a group; I bet paralegals will be automated before plumbers.
Obv the American chicken industry is a nightmare for farmers. Where can I read a comparison to the EU, which presumably takes better care of both farmers and chickens altho I would not bet my life on it ?
EU has obliterated the small African farmers by dumping cheap unwanted cuts (legs) there.
(Also, while there are regulations on how badly egg-producing chicken can be treated, that doesn't extend to most eggs : those sold to businesses to be used in recipes.)
There's a bill to provide some relief for poultry processors, but despite bipartisan support the bill hasn't gone anywhere.[1]
The dairy industry in the Northeast has managed to get into a strange situation. The dairy operators are suing their own cooperative for creating a monopsony and holding down raw milk prices. Milk is a shrinking market, but dairy farmers have a lot of political clout, which leads to some very strange situations.
Readit News
Our laws ban: sector unionization, sympathy and general strikes, and secondary boycotts.
On top of that, we have a very narrow definition of employee, an employers can permanently replace striking workers. The right to strike can even be taken away with a mandated cooling off period.
Even having one of those factors can hamstring unionization in a country, so they’re pretty much never going to “come back with a vengance” here
Having a union wasn't, on its own, illegal but it gave no special status, but most union activity was illegal, and as soon as the union jointly planned that activity it became a criminal conspiracy.
I never understood this. How can boycotts be banned? Seems inherently unconstitutional to me.
Not that it really matters to me in the sense that it's definitely an area where I'd do as I pleased regardless of the law. But I've always found the headlines that I see from time to time odd.
You'll probably be interested in reading https://chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?arti..., "Secondary Boycotts and the First Amendment", in the University of Chicago Law Review, by Barbara J. Anderson:
> Section 8(b)(4)(ii)(B) of the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA)¹ makes it an unfair labor practice for a union to "threaten, coerce, or restrain any person" with the object of requiring that person to cease dealing with another.² In NLRB v. Retail Store Employees Union Local 1001 (Safeco),³ the Supreme Court held that this section proscribes union picketing designed to influence consumers to boycott a struck product whenever such picketing "reasonably can be expected to threaten [the picketed retailer] with ruin or substantial loss."'⁴ Although the Court noted in passing that peaceful picketing is entitled to some first amendment protection, the Court found it "well-established" that Congress had constitutional power to prohibit "picketing that predictably encourages consumers to boycott a secondary business."⁵
I'm not sure whether NLRB v. Retail Store Employees is still valid law. But "secondary boycotts" are often understood as something much more coercive as simply "union picketing designed to influence consumers to boycott a struck product" (https://digitalcommons.du.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=46..., "Secondary Boycotts Under the Taft–Hartley Act" Philip Hornbein, Jr., 01953):
> The distinctive feature of a secondary boycott is that it is directed against a neutral party rather than against the employer directly involved in the labor dispute. The target of the secondary boycott is a third party who is engaged in business dealings with the employer as a customer, supplier, or otherwise. The object of the secondary boycott is to cause the boycottee to cease doing business with the employer.
Consider disputes other than labor disputes. Suppose Phyllis believes that, because you are gay, you are so immoral that she won't sell groceries to you in her grocery store. This is deplorable but not really threatening and coercive; you can still buy groceries from Chad's grocery store down the street. But suppose Phyllis convinces Chad's employees to strike unless Chad refuses you service as well. Suddenly the situation has taken on a much darker cast; Chad may have nothing against gay people, but he may start refusing you service simply as a matter of self-preservation. If this goes on, you may rapidly find yourself without sources of food or employment unless you recant your homosexuality.
After all, the laws were much more hostile towards unions a century ago, and strikes would often be dispersed with outright violence using both paramilitary organizations (like Pinkertons) as well as police and military. But if doing so just means that the strike gets bigger and broader, it's not a winning strategy for the capital.
Yeah. Because at one point unions got so powerful they formed their own union towns.
They even got infiltrated by the mob.
Plus Europe union laws and US union laws are separate things. For example in France, whatever concessions union gets, are applied to all employees. Which isn't the case in US and is iirc considered anti-union. However then you remember that US union depends on participation for union healthcare.
The biggest problem for unions today isn't the laws. It's ironically the free trade (lack of laws). Don't want to do this job for peanuts? We'll ship it overseas for someone willing to work for half a peanut.
Companies did this too, but it wasn't bothering any policy makers.
Ok sure but laws can changes, right ? And that previous sentence is itself protected by the law ? I understand your pessimism but that's not to be confused with fatalism.
(disclaimer: am EU citizen)
It's a disturbingly prescient read, and unfortunately I don't find the optimistic ending plausible.
I didn't know Brain had committed suicide :( . More details about that[1].
0: https://villains.fandom.com/wiki/L._Bob_Rife
1: https://www.insidehighered.com/news/faculty-issues/academic-...
> In labor circles, “chickenization” refers to exploitative working arrangements that resemble the plight of the American poultry farmer. The U.S. poultry industry has been taken over by three monopolistic packers, who have divided the nation up into exclusive territories, so that each chicken farmer has only one buyer for their birds.
> Farmers are “independent small businesspeople” who nominally run their own operations, but because all their products must be sold through a single poultry processor, that processor is able to exercise enormous control over the operation. The processor tells the farmer which birds to raise, as well as what the birds are to be fed, how much, and on what schedule. The processor tells the farmer how to build their coops and when the lights are to go on and off. The processor tells the farmer which vets to use, and tells the vets which medicines to prescribe.
> The processor tells the farmer everything…except how much they’ll be able to sell their birds for. That is determined unilaterally when the farmer brings their birds to market, and the payout is titrated to the cent, to represent exactly enough money for the farmer to buy birds and feed and vet services through the processor’s preferred suppliers, and to service the debts on the coops and light and land, but not one penny more.
This amount of scumminess is mind boggling.
Variables like temperatures, lighting, ventilation rates, chicken house construction, and access/ density have well-established bounds to maximize pounds of poultry. The farmers have leeway to deviate from the recommendations, but they take on all of the risk in doing so. From the outside, it looks like a pretty oppressive relationship.
Actually, there are stages, e.g. some farmers just do chicks, someone then may pick them up and go to the next stage.
The craziest thing is this is well known trick, historically. In the 1800s there was a company run by a man that was both wholesale buyer of fish from fishermen and also supplied the mortgages for fishing boats. He was the only one for both in many small fishing communities and was universally hated for it.
Dead Comment
Since that isn't happening I'd assume that doing so has been made illegal by the regulators for some reason. Or that "chicken packaging" is wildly misnamed, because it sounds like something you can ... just do. People ate chickens for millennia without relying on 3 chicken packers.
I've had neighbours who keep their own chickens (curse them for the mice). It didn't look so hard a quasi-monopoly could form naturally.
The reason regulators made it illegal is basic food safety. A meat packing facility - whether that’s an industrial plant or a small group of farmers in a commercial kitchen or whatever - is a hot and humid environment that is an ideal place for bacteria to grow. Now that’s going to happen anyway, but the public safety goal here is to minimize the bacterial load that transfers to the meat so that by the time it reaches the kitchen, the pathogens haven’t reached dangerous levels. That means an entire facility that’s designed to be sprayed down with a foaming disinfectant from wall to wall and crevice to crevice. Small groups of farmers simply can’t afford that and be competitive unless they’re already selling high end organic/free range/etc meat.
Before refrigeration, people ate meat right after slaughter or cured it. They grew the animals at so low an intensity that >80% of the population were sustenance farmers that lived a precarious life prone to starvation at any time. It just makes no sense to compare the infrastructure to feed hundreds of millions in a single country to small scale pre-industrial agriculture.
One word: “Distribution.” (The Graduate reference).
Distributors hold the most powerful hands in selling physical goods. You can’t sell something, if you can’t get it to market. These cartels (and you are hearing about them, all over. See "Big Potato"), are getting strangleholds on distribution. Amazon has turned distribution as a goad into a dark art.
That’s one reason that the Internet has upended so many industries. It’s democratized distribution of digital goods, and digital goods have become a lot more valuable (sometimes, because of the Internet). With digital goods, advertising and promotion are the new Distribution. You can’t sell your apps/music/images, if no one can find out about them.
the lack of antitrust action and the price of entry in the market are a market failure modes that could bring in the same final result. Especially, if the packagers are forming exclusive deals with the distributors to prevent new entrants from achieving market share.
Deleted Comment
But here it looks even worse as workers have to invest into equipment from the company that is of little use besides working for that company, making it borderline slavery.
"According to Archie Green, the lyrics contain several key passages that Travis took from quotes from his family members. When asked about his health, his father reportedly replied that he couldn't afford to die because he owed his soul to the grocery store[7] where he had debts. Sixteen Tons is a socially critical song about the sometimes inhumane conditions that American miners and their families had to live under in the past. This included wage slavery: US miners were mostly paid not in cash but with tokens (scrips), some of which could only be redeemed in company-owned stores, as there were no other shops in the area; local food supplies could only be obtained in these stores (company stores), which had a virtual monopoly and could therefore charge excessive prices; The income and expenditure situation in the company stores, which was deliberately controlled exclusively in favor of the mine owners, resulted in unavoidable debts for the workers (Another day older and deeper in debt), which created a relationship of dependency similar to serfdom ("I owe my soul to the company store"). By the time the song was written, the miners' living and working conditions had already improved significantly, partly as a result of numerous strikes. Payment with tokens had been banned in 1938 by a federal law, the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938. However, working conditions remained harsh and the memory of exploitative practices was still fresh in the minds of the families and communities affected."
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sixteen_Tons_(Lied)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sixteen_Tons
It is, unfortunately, the natural result of insufficiently regulated capitalism.
There are very few poultry processors largely because it is difficult and expensive to comply with consumer regulations and maintain food safety standards. That, in itself, is fine. But once you have very few (or only one) processor(s), there needs to be regulation on how they pay and treat both their workers and their suppliers. For the most part, there is neither.
Even the local artisan bread-baker must pay workers less than their economic output. This isn't to say that the owner is exploitive and treating people with subsistence. But the pay/surplus split is still there as exploitation.
Reforming capitalism also doesn't work either. Hell, people can't get past page 30 of Adam Smith's treatise that discusses all the 'reforms needed' to instill capitalism. Turns out monied interests has always wanted to strip controls from the get-go.
No, its time to relegate capitalism to the dustbin of history. It was tried. As it lifted some up, more and more were ground into a gritty paste to feed the machine.
I don't know what to replace it with either. But whatever it is has to not have weird effects of infinite or 0 cost breakdowns (like copying software and data), and also aware of how to handle algorimthic labor (LLMs), amongst other concerns.
- poultry farming dictated by the big guys like this has been going on for decades.
- it’s provided structure for entrepreneurs in rural areas that had land, some money, and a willingness to work.
You could similarly say some fast food franchises or businesses can result in some form of exploitation, because not all result in good conditions and opportunities for growth of their workers.
Some may then extrapolate to say “all business is bad”, but it’s a spectrum; it may be providing work and income where there was none before, and that could be seen as a good thing. Or maybe the risks are too high and/or conditions are terrible, and that’s a bad thing.
I’d argue that finding that balance in business is why religion and capitalism spread together.
Hundreds of years ago, slaves kept spirits up through their religion and those exploiting them were more likely to keep working conditions better than they would’ve been because of their beliefs; slavery was pure evil, and religion didn’t enable that. It did improve a terrible situation, though I know the Marxists may say the opposite.
Today, religion is waning. If the people exploiting others do so without morals, we risk evil beyond what’s discussed in this article. We feel like technology must be there to save workers from being exploited, but it’s an uphill battle, and money/power may win.
It’s by no means certain though, and i think the article takes an over-pessimistic take.
It’s true that uber drivers and doordashers get bid down, but this is the bottom rung of the ladder of unskilled labor; there is currently massive demand for this job.
If you look at restaurants I believe post-covid you see a different story, where workers are not racing to the bottom and instead employers need to offer way above minimum wage to fill roles. Trades would be an even better example, where skilled carpenters and mechanics are so in demand that it’s a comfortable six-figure job.
Personally I think all these low-skilled jobs are quite likely to be automated soon. How society responds to the influx of unemployed unskilled workers will be the crux. And of course the skill bar for automation will increase; in the long term many (most?) jobs are going to be automatable.
UBI or similar is the obvious solution, but Capital will of course oppose this vigorously. A new social contract will be needed; the slippery slope that the US is currently on does not end in a pretty place.
I really wish we would stop using this term. Not only is driving very obviously a skill, and one I'm grateful for everytime I get in a car, but jobs that are labeled as "unskilled" often emphasize skill to a higher degree.
Furthermore, as someone who has worked many "unskilled" jobs (picking crops, working in a kitchen, working front of house), the skill you have makes a massive difference to your happiness and, many times, your take-home pay. We're going to see many, many types of office work get automated long before we have automated crop pickers or cooks or (actually usable) waiters. It seems to me that office work has the highest concentration of the low-skill workers.
What people really mean with the term is "engages in physical labor", I think, but that should also expose how silly it is to expect these jobs to be automated anytime soon.
I now work as a software engineer, which obviously takes enormous experience aka "skill", and I'd estimate that i'm on the "thickest of ice" outside of HR and the executive suite. It's the customer service people, designers, PMs most at risk of being replaced, although I think the outsourcing trend will continue for a long time before this is successfully productized in a general case. People managers tend to be replaced (or rather, not rehired) as productivity per capita goes up. I worry far more about being forced into contract work than I do of layoffs.
I'n much less bullish on UBI than other people are because I see the demand for it coming from fueling the consumer economy rather than any sort of collectively-rational approach to divvying up resources and funding development of services and infrastructure. Sure, maybe there is a role for that—I'd love to rework SSDI (without pulling the rug out from under it, as neoliberals are bound to try to do) so my disabled friends don't live so vicariously, but delivering UBI before increasing democratic control of the economy that funds it feels an awful lot like putting the cart before the horse. But that's another story。
Edit: oh one last thought: I do think we are more likely to see people getting paid to play video games long before we "bring back manufacturing" or whatever. It's going to be much easier politically to directly subsidize the bottom of the economic pyramid than it will be to basically go through another economic revolution altering the pyramid structurally.
And no, it’s not a proxy for “physical labor”. Trades are highly skilled, picking groceries from a list is not. (To be clear, not being pejorative here. These jobs are needed.) The key difference is the supply of workers; the lower the bar for entry, the more supply and therefore the bid is lower.
(Or in the other direction from the workers perspective, demand is much higher for jobs requiring less training/certification.)
I don’t think working class jobs are going to go first as a group; I bet paralegals will be automated before plumbers.
(Also, while there are regulations on how badly egg-producing chicken can be treated, that doesn't extend to most eggs : those sold to businesses to be used in recipes.)
There's a bill to provide some relief for poultry processors, but despite bipartisan support the bill hasn't gone anywhere.[1]
The dairy industry in the Northeast has managed to get into a strange situation. The dairy operators are suing their own cooperative for creating a monopsony and holding down raw milk prices. Milk is a shrinking market, but dairy farmers have a lot of political clout, which leads to some very strange situations.
[1] https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/senate-bill/150...
[2] mhttps://vtdigger.org/2022/08/02/lawsuit-accuses-dairy-farmer...
That's what means to replace a manager with few lines of java (or with AI).