What does a BIDEN Presidency look like?

[Grey Fox]

Right, or to put it another way, you have to make X deliveries in Y hours, and some people will need to cut corners to make quota. 

I don't think that's exploitation.  I think that's a worker who is a bad fit for the job.

Change the quota?

[HVC]

The main sticking point, I think, is that you believe a system can't be exploitive if a person can get another job. Is that correct? To get personal, have you ever been in a  position where losing a shitty job makes you homeless or severely in debt?  If all your options are shitty jobs then it's easy for the system to exploit workers. Their options aren't really options.

[Admiral Yi]

I believe there are hypothetical work quotas that are physically impossible and I believe there are hypothetical quotas that are so high that only a few applicants would be capable of meeting them, and you would therefore be forced to pay a premium to attract them.

If someone offered me an Amazon driver job and I had to stop at 1,000 doors in an eight hour day I wouldn't take the job.

[Oexmelin]

About some of the employees of that candle factory. From the St Louis Post-Dispatch

Brooklyn Woolfolk was excited to see her dad.

The 18-year-old from Mayfield, Kentucky, hadn't seen Francisco Starks in at least five years. Starks has been serving a state sentence on low-level felony burglary charges. He limped up to Woolfolk, leaning on a crutch, the morning after deadly tornadoes whipped through Arkansas, Missouri, Illinois and Kentucky, killing dozens in their path.

Starks was one of the survivors of the devastation at the Mayfield Consumer Products candle factory, where at least eight employees died. Starks worked there, in a manner of speaking. He was one of seven detainees from the Graves County Jail who worked at the factory to help pay off their fines and fees heaped upon them by the criminal justice system.

The jailer responsible for the men — Deputy Robert Daniel — died in the tornado, after helping make sure Starks and his fellow detainees were somewhat protected as the factory was collapsing around them.

"The deputy probably saved his life," says Madison Leech, who is Starks' attorney. "The deputy was a hero. But the system shouldn't have had him there in the first place."

The system Leech is referring to charges defendants thousands of dollars in fines and fees, including pay-to-stay fees for the privilege of being in jail. In Graves County, the charge is $15 per day. Kentucky is one of several states, most of them in the south, that lets defendants who can't pay off their court debt serve extra time in jail, with each day counting $50 toward their debt, or $100 if on work release.

Graves County touts the program through which detainees work for low wages at the candle factory as a way to teach them job skills and prepare them for a return to the workforce. Leech sees such programs as something else.

Slave labor.

"The jail is making money off this system," she said. The company pays what Leech calls "garbage wages," and then sends a portion of that money back to the county. "They aren't teaching them any skills that are getting them out of poverty," Leech said.

This is not just a Kentucky problem, or a Missouri one, where until 2019, poor, rural defendants were regularly jailed over their inability to pay the pay-to-stay bills charged to them by cash-strapped counties. Every state in the country has a problem with excessive fines and fees, and the very existence of such court debt, and the judicial system's willingness to allow itself to be used as a tax collector, creates a divided system — one for people who can buy their way to freedom, and one for people like Starks, who pay off part of their debt by sitting behind bars.

"Every day, people who owe fines and fees are forced to make impossible choices, whether to pay their rent, pay for food or medicine or pay their fines and fees," says Joanna Weiss, co-director of the Fines and Fees Justice Center. "Tragically, when government preys on the poorest communities in the country to balance their budgets, often in collaboration with private companies who profit off of those who have no choices at all, people are put in harm's way as they try to pay for their own freedom."

Starks, like many survivors of the candle factory collapse in Mayfield, was injured. His daughter says he has leg and neck pain. When he was triaged at the hospital, there was no police officer to take him back to the jail. So he hitched a ride to his daughter's house, traumatized from the tornado and its aftermath. His daughter called Leech, who ended up taking him back to jail, but not before a new warrant was issued for his arrest, allegedly for "escape."

He didn't escape, his daughter says. He didn't wander away. He was sent away by a hospital in the middle of a triage crisis. "He came to me for help," Woolfolk says.

Now he's back in jail, with injuries suffered in the tornado that are going untreated, according to Leech.

In Kentucky, while other workers at the candle plant are filing worker's compensation claims for their injuries, that avenue won't be available for Starks and his fellow jail detainees, Leech says. So they'll face even more financial pressures, cementing them deeper in the poverty that the county claims it was trying to alleviate. Next fall, when Starks is scheduled to be released, he'll start the long, slow slog back to life outside incarceration, likely with a bill from the state for court debt that will continue to weigh him down.

"We have to eliminate fees in the criminal justice system," Weiss says, "and reform the use of fines if we want communities to be safe and to thrive."

[Sheilbh]

I agree that over the long run, bad businesses and bad business practices are weeded out by market pressures, but I think there is a lot more dumb luck in the short term that most people give credit for, so this process is more like a slow evolution rather than a brutally efficient optimization algorithm. 

Maybe over time and in certain sectors but I feel like the bigger drivers of weeding out bad business practices and bad businesses are unions, political campaigns, government regulation.

I think that's the case with many manufacturing sectors, predatory lenders, bad landlords - hell even super modern things like banks selling complex hedging products to small businesses. And issues in a lot of industries weren't solved but exported - so the bad practices are in the garment factory in Bangladesh, or the forced labour in China. Again the push against that doesn't seem to be to do with the market - but with activist consumers and local organising (in Bangladesh).

In some cases there have been genuinely effective disrupters - in my experience, especially with banking - but a number of the most prominent disrupters just have a business model of not following the law and have discovered that is lower cost than following the law. At some point I think that gap needs to be/is being closed.

[Admiral Yi]

The main sticking point, I think, is that you believe a system can't be exploitive if a person can get another job. Is that correct? To get personal, have you ever been in a  position where losing a shitty job makes you homeless or severely in debt?  If all your options are shitty jobs then it's easy for the system to exploit workers. Their options aren't really options.

I've been paycheck to paycheck for good chunks of my life.

To fit your sermon into our hypothetical, the delivery driver who can't meet quota and pees in a bag: how is Amazon exploiting them?  Amazon is not making extraordinary profits off of them.  Their other drivers are making quota without peeing in bags.  They can presumably replace them with someone who can do the job.

Is exploitation just a job that *you* don't want?  Is exploitation being fired from a job you're not good at?

[crazy canuck]

The main sticking point, I think, is that you believe a system can't be exploitive if a person can get another job. Is that correct? To get personal, have you ever been in a  position where losing a shitty job makes you homeless or severely in debt?  If all your options are shitty jobs then it's easy for the system to exploit workers. Their options aren't really options.

I've been paycheck to paycheck for good chunks of my life.

To fit your sermon into our hypothetical, the delivery driver who can't meet quota and pees in a bag: how is Amazon exploiting them?  Amazon is not making extraordinary profits off of them.  Their other drivers are making quota without peeing in bags.  They can presumably replace them with someone who can do the job.

Is exploitation just a job that *you* don't want?  Is exploitation being fired from a job you're not good at?

Good example of why Americans can never have nice things - like labour laws that actually protect workers.

[alfred russel]

I get 5 weeks vacation and 6 weeks of paid paternity leave. Also have a pension plan. We are having tons of trouble though with employee retention right now so we aren't really above market.

[Berkut]

I just cannot reconcile this image that seems so common on the left of an America of exploited workers working in horrific salt mine conditions while they are treated like complete trash by greedy capitalists cackling with glee at their control over when they get to pee with, you know....reality.

I know lots of people with jobs. I have had lots of jobs, both skilled and unskilled. I hire skilled workers myself, a lot of them.

If these treated like trash exploited workers exist, I cannot seem to actually find any outside the clickbait media.

[Oexmelin]

If these treated like trash exploited workers exist, I cannot seem to actually find any outside the clickbait media.

They exist outside the clickbait media.

[Solmyr]

How about Activision Blizzard? Another very successful business. Given what has come to light in the last few years, do you think they've treated their workers well?

[Berkut]

How about Activision Blizzard? Another very successful business. Given what has come to light in the last few years, do you think they've treated their workers well?

From what I've seen, not really.

Which is why I would never do that kind of work. However, some people really like game development, and apparently are willing to work in pretty crappy conditions - that appears, from all reports, to be true in Canada as well though.

But again, the argument here is not there is some particular place that treats their employees like shit, but rather that this is the norm - so much so that employees simply have to accept it because there isn't anywhere else for them to go. If they left Activision because the job sucks, they would just go get another development job that treats them the same way, because that is how they ALL are.

If that is true, I want to see actual data. Not anecdotes from the worst examples (which I've already said certainly exist).

If we want to play the anecdote game, I hire a lot of software developers myself, and I think we treat them very well. Judging from the feedback I get from my employees, including exit interviews with those who have left, we are overall very good employers. And I happen to know exactly how *I* feel about my employees - I think keeping them happy, sane, and as low stress as I can is my primary job function. I don't think I am some crazy outlier in that view.

[The Brain]

Sweden has very strict work environment legislation, and obviously many employers who are genuinely good employers. There's still a whole school of thought that people, especially young people, should be told that all places are bad, and that they therefore shouldn't vote with their feet. It's a school of thought driven by a will to be destructive.

[crazy canuck]

If these treated like trash exploited workers exist, I cannot seem to actually find any outside the clickbait media.

how hard have you looked?

[Berkut]

If these treated like trash exploited workers exist, I cannot seem to actually find any outside the clickbait media.

how hard have you looked?

Nice cut job of my post.

I've looked hard enough that if it was as ubiquitous as you claim, I think I would have little trouble finding it.

But YOU are making the claim. Provide me data.