Your biggest vulnerability is your shitty compensation

The 1830's reform of the UK, which begrudging wrestled power from the Lords and distributed voting power more evenly over the UK (rammed cities like Manchester had almost no voting rights), only happened when some of the Lords houses were close to being burned down.

Thankfully the UK didn't follow France into the anarchy that was the French Revolution, and Earl Grey could make them see reason. But damn did we come close.

The threat of violence that the worker wielded against their employer was indeed a good incentive to keep things amicable.

Nowadays, we don't know where the Lords necessarily live, the size of the Lords private armies don't need to be more than a handful of security guards, and AI/Robotics is diminishing the need for that handful of guards at all.

Ultimately, businesses offer poor compensation because they can get away with it and society has designed the economic model to support this. The economic model does not reward work, but rather ownership of assets, and this principle exists throughout every nation. It's a society modelled around protectionism of wealth, where the wealthy can hand wealth down to their children.

In the United Kingdom, a third of people claiming government assistance are in employment. Over 50% of those buying their first home get gifted money from their parents to do so. Starting from nothing means playing a rigged game. It's like playing Monopoly, where one player starts out with half of the cards and everyone else thinks they can win if they strategise well enough.

Many core economic theories that are taught about productivity and pay are wrong. Anyone living in the real world can see that marginal productivity and price theory are wrong. If the game was perfectly fair, these theories may have some weight, however there's a multitude of factors that skew the board. Poor compensation does have consequences, and they may be felt by individual businesses. However, by and large, these consequences are offloaded on to the rest of society.

This comes off as slightly on the entitled side. Yearly salaries at $100k+ is very high by Western European standards. I can only imagine what our Eastern European colleagues would feel about it. If you can live a comfortable life and send our children to school well fed perhaps broaden the horizons a bit before ranting off about how much better the world would be if you could be paid a bit more.

The pressures he describes seem correct and mirror what I’ve seen.

Think he’s wrong about this being close to blowing up. Think that’s coloured by his own personal situation. I suspect unfortunately the powers that be correctly read the situation as significantly more room to squeeze.

It might read as bad to usa ears but keep in mind there are people breaking down ships with zero safety, zero job security, low pay, bad equipment and certain heath impact etc. People will bear crazy stuff and still show up to work

Another part of the issue, as I can see it, is that paying your workers better is a prisoners dilemma:

If nobody pays their workers well: All companies suffer from a disaffected, burnt out workforce that is unable to consistently perform at the best of their ability. As well as many industries suffering from the fact that their products are non-essential. If you're paycheck to paycheck, barely scraping by rent, you're not going to bother buying a new board game, pick up a book, get the latest and greatest console, or its overpriced games.

If some pay their workers well, and others don't, the companies that do will be at a disadvantage financially against their competitors. A healthier and happier employee almost certainly directly results in higher profits, but not to an extent that matches or outpaces the increase in wages required to reach that point.

If all of them pay their workers well, workers become less financially stressed. They do their job better, because they are healthier, less exhausted, etc. This also results in the exact opposite of the first case above: People have more money, they can spend more, you make more profit from people spending more across the board.

This is part of the reason that minimum wage laws are actually really important, and why the fact they have stagnated for so long is such an issue. It breaks the prisoners dilemma game by mandating that everyone together makes the group-optimal decision over the individual-optimal one.

Or, you know, we could also try UBI! Or help free up discretionary spending power by nationalizing the most essential goods and services (targeting the ones that are the least elastic). It's not like we aren't lacking in options that would work to alleviate the issue here.

In ancient times, slaves didn't revolt because they were oppressed by weapons and violence. Instead of paying workers, resources were used to pay and feed the military. Slaves were considered "war bounty" and tradeable goods.

When the incentives of workers favour burning buildings rather than working for wages, the next step is either to use force/control or to rebalance wages.

Wages are set by economic rules, things like supply and demand, not median house prices. That said, people who are getting a low wages might accept to be in a low-down economy such as today, however, as soon as the economy goes up, they're going to be looking to move. Thus, even when you can get by with hiring someone for a very low wage relative to what they could have made in previous years, it is often best to assume that the economy will get better and those people are going to want to move if you're only offering low wages. But if you offer a good wage, that means that those people, when the economy picks up, aren't going to be looking for a new job and so you can keep them instead of having to hire and train someone new when the economy picks up.

I don't know why median house prices are even factor at all in what you think you wage you a wage you accept would be. If you can't afford a house, that means you have to lower your standard of living. There are lots of people who live in less than median houses. That's part of the way averages and statistics work. If you don't like the median house prices, you may have to look at what's going on in your city that the house prices are so high. There are certainly issues in Silicon Valley that need to be addressed, but they are not issues of wages. They are other issues that they need to address. You are always welcome to live in a house that is lower than the median wage and that may be what is needed in order to afford something.

> I'll just be blunt: wages are also protection money. They're not just compensation for doing your job, they're compensation for not burning down warehouses, not going on strike, not sabotaging workloads, and not unionizing in the first place.

I'm interpreting this as venting, but the attitude on display here is madness. It is totally unreasonable to throw these sort of temper tantrums because an employer isn't adding crazy high wages to what is already a quite pleasant and comfortable desk job. One of the issues tech workers have is that even at a slightly lower wage than median it'd still be a much better deal than what an average worker is being offered.

People do far more work for far less money to a high professional standard. And trying to burn down a business because the person offering you the best deal you can find isn't what you imagine yourself to be worth is entitled to an undignified extent.

Author thinks that companies have infinite sums of money to pay any salary, but just don't want to do that.

He either worked for federal government for too long or just thinks world owns him something. Probably the latter, based on him being 4 months in unemployment and stating "Employment inquiries should check the TXT record on job.spacedino.net for contact info."

Don't care, stocks are up

Signed, Anyone who you'd like to care

Hold on you can't be throwing around such perversely high numbers like 81,680$ for your European readers.

Today is international workers day and we are sharing a capuccino with my colleague.