Ok , more mental masturbation on my part , about joblessness

[UndertheOcean]

Why is modern society so averse to mitigation of hardship through collective means.

80% working , 20% jobless : why not cut the pay of working people by an amount enough to hire the jobless as "helpers" or assistants to those already employed.

That way :

1) Working people get a pay cut , that is right , but on the other hand their work load becomes less stressful due to the help they are getting. Well-being in not only about money.

2) Unemployed workers get a chance to keep their skills honed , benefit financially , until the economy improves enough for them to decouple from their dependent work relationship.

3)That way , whatever hardship introduced by tough macro events that are beyond the individuals control is spread and shared between everyone . Therefore the suffering is much less.

Say Society MUST ingest a vial of poison, if only 20% of people swallow it , many will suffer and some may die , but if ALL of society shares the vial that will dilute the poison and humanity as a whole will be better off.

[DoBotherMe]

1. I think there was a proposal in Congress

to help small business employers hire new employees through wage sharing. Employers pay half and the government pays half or something like that. I think this is a great stop gap. I know that I would hire additional staff if this plan were available. Those of us who remain are feeling the stress of overwork and could use some relief. Dana ; )

[UndertheOcean]

2. There you go ! n/t

[notadmblnd]

3. but where's the profit in that?

:sarcasm:

[Dappleganger]

4. There's just one itty-bitty problem with your proposal.

There's a very large percentage of those who are working who are either 1) severely underemployed or have already taken drastic wage cuts and 2) not making ends meet due to the rising costs of everything (healthcare, housing, inflation, energy costs, etc.).

Why not more appropriately tax those who own most of the wealth in this country and make their money off the backs of us plebes?

[hfojvt]

5. that would be ridiculously hard to implement

Where would the 20% go? I suppose if you cut the pay of the four on my crew, you could hire a part-timer for 12 hours a week or something by taking 4 hours from each of the full timers and two from each of the part-timers, but then that person would need another job for 28 hours a week in order to make a living. Also, you cannot really get people to fill in and "ease the workload" of skilled workers like airline pilots or surgeons. Heck, even a simple janitorial job like mine involves some training in knowing where things are and what is expected and even how to do some tasks, even relatively simple ones like stacking chairs and vacuuming. Getting two hours of help from a newbie is not going to make up for my lost time since I know more about the job. So I would have to do more work to make up for the slack and I would have lost pay on top of it. I'm not going to like it and I am going to resent the hell out of this newbie.

Not to mention that, if employment is not long term, it's hard to get serious effort out of lots of people.

[HereSince1628]

6. Foreseeable difficulties...

Where does the training to do the jobs come from? Is there a 20% surplus of trained people for every job?
Drop below full-time and lose your benefits.
For employed people getting by on multiple part-time jobs, which job do they sacrifice?

Not to say that these things couldn't be overcome but they seem problematic.

[The2ndWheel]

7. "Why is modern society so averse to mitigation of hardship through collective means."

Energy is still cheap enough.

Why do more people not move in with friends or family? That certainly can mitigate hardship through collective means. But nobody really does it unless they absolutely have to.

The cheaper the energy, the less other people are needed.

[UndertheOcean]

9. You buy that peak oil speculation ?

[Newest Reality]

8. You go first!

:)

Seriously though, I appreciate your idea, but it appears to buy into a victim's sacrifice ethic.

Your recommendation rests on an assumption that most corporations and companies are unable to pay well, (living wages) and hire more people. Large corporations are, generally, sitting on large profits. The belt has been tightened and workers are expendable commodities. In fact, they are so cheap and relatively valueless that fodder is more apt a term than commodity -- coffee and chocolate have real value!

We have a vial of poison right now that many people are waking up to with stomach pains after already having ingested it. Our free market capitalism, to put it simply, is betraying its "everyone benefits if you give it time" jargon and we are seeing the results of its ideology; many of us see it first hand.

No, I think enough poison has already been taken in by the masses, (in the form of empty rhetoric and false hope) and a concession like the one you propose is more akin to a surrender to the bloody carnage that is leaving homeless bodies strewn in the streets, working employees to the mental and physical bone, and placing more and more hardship on vast numbers of people for the sake of someone else's overwhelmingly HUGE, to the point of nauseating, profits. Consider how emboldened the owner's would feel if we were willing to work for even less than what is already not enough? That gesture would be like a puppy whimpering for food.

We are at the threshold where this is going to get very confrontational and traumatic only because the current system is deeply entrenched and unwilling to allow the kind of change that will meet the dire needs of growing numbers of people. We have already made an immense concession in the sense that vast amounts of wealth have recently, (and in the last few decades) been transferred from public trust and our hands into the hands of a few. How can you make a sacrifice to mammon like that? It's not altruistic to enable the wealthy to continue to manipulate and control us to the very edge and dregs of our sustenance and existence. Why make it even easier to drain our personal resources and dis-empower the people economically?

As you see, this is not personal and I appreciate your views and your ideas, though I disagree for many reasons.