Everybody would be working sooooo sloooowly…
Good, maybe we wouldn’t be such a bunch of wastrels if we weren’t running around because a website might go down or meeting might be delayed if we don’t rush
My job involves fixing machines that unload container ships.
If one breaks down mid vessel it needs to be up and running, my poor performance has a massive flow on effect around the world
Or maybe Just-In-Time supply chains should be heavily regulated. Companies using cargo freighters as warehouse space inevitably leads to everything grinding to a halt when anything gets delayed during shipping. Know how companies used to avoid short-term supply chain issues? They had enough stock in their warehouse to last more than a single fucking day at a time.
But manufacturing companies realized that instead of paying for warehouse space to store excess raw material, they could just throw massive fucking hissy fits whenever a shipping container gets delayed. And the MBAs gave it a nice pretty name (JIT) to make themselves feel smart. And now shipping companies get blamed when manufacturing grinds to a halt, instead of blaming the manufacturers that failed to plan for a single day of shipping delays.
And manufacturing that has the potential to cascade into critical/infrastructure delays shouldn’t be allowed to use JIT. Very little would be impacted when a popsicle stick manufacturer has a JIT delay. But a lot of people would care if chemicals used in water treatment plants got delayed, and they suddenly had no clean drinking water.
Yeah but a day here then the ship leaves late, a day at the next port and the next its never good.
Things tend to always run behind as is. We get notified ships in from 21 to 24ty etc then 2 days before its thr 22nd to the 25th a almost every time
Does it though? Where does the “need” in your sentence come from?
How come the supply chain has no slack to allow for (inevitable) hiccups and accidents? The answer is two part. It used to have them but they were optimized away. It still has them, but you are led to believe they aren’t there because putting this pressure on you allows your bosses to extract more work out of you.
And how come the supply chain is so stressed? Is everything that goes through it so essential that a single late ship is a catastrophe? The answer is obviously not, we are shipping gigatons of drivel across the world that gets immediately forgotten in a drawer or tossed in the bin once it reaches its final destination.
If you are shipping essential goods then there is a safety net of supplies at the destination to absorb any issues in shipping (if there isn’t, clearly these goods were not essential). If you aren’t shipping essential goods, then it’s already factored in global insurance markets, and late shipping is merely someone’s bank account getting bigger at a lesser rate.
I live in a port city everything comes by boat or train at the same place.
Food everything.
If the boat over stays its time someone pays for the demurrage.
It can get up to 100k a day to have a ship sit there.
Congratulations, you’re one of the few.
Op’s post is a very simplified rendering of Marx’s Labor Theory Of Value. Marx says that the value of a commodity isn’t just determined by the labor time it took to make, but rather the socially necessary labor time.
In short, the average amount of time that a society uses to make a given commodity. So of you, as an individual, were really slow at the widget factory, your widgets don’t get more expensive just because it took you longer. You just get fired for being lazy.
Instead, value is determined by this Socially Necessary average, and that average is augmented by technological advancements in production. By extension, Marx says, those technological advancements in turn influence the way production, and therefore society itself, is organized;
slavery cannot be abolished without the steam-engine and the mule and spinning-jenny, serfdom cannot be abolished without improved agriculture, and that, in general, people cannot be liberated as long as they are unable to obtain food and drink, housing and clothing in adequate quality and quantity.
The reason people lack access to the necessities of life is because they labor for, say, 8 hours a day, and only recieve a fraction of the value they produce by their labor, in wages. The solution isn’t necessarily to give those workers all the money, though pay raises are often a good thing, but to take the surplus value that would have previously been hoarded by a capitalist, and have its use be put towards the betterment of society, and be democratically decided upon in some way.
A house costs a year? There’s a house being built near me and it’s been under construction for about a year by several teams of workers plus the owners every afternoon and weekend. (this is in Germany so it’s not made of matches and paper). And that’s not counting the hours needed to extract the raw materials and process them into bricks, insulation, glass, cables or pipes. There’s a TON of labor to build a modern house.
Are they working all through the night? One man working 40 hours a week with no sickness but including 5 weeks holidays per year works 1880 hours. A year of hours is 8760.
No, they work during the day, Monday through Friday and the owners on weekends too. Usually they get 6 weeks of PTO and about 13 more days of public holidays.
Skill issue. They build houses out of concrete here in China in like a month, in Japan they use wood and do the same, tho they lose all value after 30 years.
Yeah, but we have Ethernet in every room, filtered ventilation systems, heat pumps, solar with storage, water acconditioning systems and in winter we can heat it up by a fart.
Plus our workers don’t do 996 and have sick days, vacation and others.
Amazing chauvinism. Also 996 is not real commentary.
Anything critical of China is fake news, I know.
There are so many other lines of propaganda you could have employed. It’s not my fault you chose one as laughable as believing 996 is a real thing Chinese citizens experience as a whole.
Straight on the train with you.
Fake news!
A top liberal mind.
All those things exist over here and doesn’t account for yall taking 12x+ longer.
Maybe so this doesn’t happen?
With >10x the population of Germany, we should expect >10x more collapses. In any case, what exactly are you against? Using central planning to keep prices low by ensuring the necessary amount of concrete and steel are produced while enough builders are educated? Or is it just because it’s chinese?
Japan has more people than Germany and doesn’t take a year to build a single house.
Paper walls do that, yeah.
Harry Harrison’s Stainless Steel Rat features a planet like this that was initially governed by a computer. Such a good series, highly recommend as anarchist entertainment.
Anyone who thinks about it for a second longer than it takes to read it will see the problem - this rules completely devalue skilled work. An hour of sweeping the floor is valued the same as hour-long operation on sick patient. Except cost of becoming a doctor is countless hours paid to teachers, professors etc. while cost of becoming a cleaner is just a broom. Rewards is the same, so why bother? Why take risky job or something that requires upstart investment? In fact you would need to work years as a menial worker before you afford learning any skilled job… unless we add loans but with loans we explain why there are billionaires “I never did 10 000 hours of work, but I loaned my hours with interest”
Also - anyone who does farming will most likely notice that a daily intake of food necessary to survival will probably cost you a week of work or so…
I’m all for treating everyone fairly, but this idea is the kinda shit that starts dystopias.
Everyone should be paid the same, no matter the field they work in. Doctors and engineers require huge skills and long careers, but they wouldn’t be there if nobody took care of their pipes, waste water, trash, cleaned the streets, built their house or served them fast food.
Education should be free, same as housing, so it shouldn’t be a problem to spend more time studying.
Capitalism told you nobody would bother getting a more “skilled” job, but that’s just not true. When people are allowed to freely choose what to learn and work in, without needing to think about money, they will follow their vocations and interests. The only difference will be that more people will be satisfied with their jobs, and happy to work them.
Education should be free, same as housing
Probably the only thing I agree with you on. Both should be just human right, not something you need a loan for. Except… if they are free - how do we pay those who work in it? Does it make teacher’s hour worth 0?
When people are allowed to freely chose what to learn and work in, we will get a lot of artists, youtubers, gamers etc. Not doctors…
I am confident that many people would choose to be doctors.
If people felt connected to their community, many would also do the unpleasant jobs needed to run it.
So… we replace money with peer pressure and social coercion?
Forget skilled work, think about terrible work. Why would I break my back digging trenches when I can get the same amount of time credit for doing something that won’t destroy my body.
You’re right, but also not really factoring all the minutia. How many more hours went into all the parts of the home? It’s not a month when you have to make the screws and nails, cut the wood, polish the tile, mine the metal, etc. It’s far higher.
Other than that, I agree.
In Marx’s labor theory of value, which OP’s post is pulling from, the human made tools one uses to labor, to make a thing, is called Embodied Labor.
We tend to, through a process called Commodity fetishism, look at object purely in terms of its monetary value, rather than the labor processes that it took to make. That labor process, in the case of your house, is more than just the construction workers who put it together, they’re tied, by the labor process, to the people in the screw and nail factory, to people who grew the trees, chopped them down, processed the lumber. They’re tied to the people who drove the trucks and boats and trains which got the materials to the construction site.
So the workers who made the house might have done 8 hours worth of socially necessary labor to take the materials they had and turn them into a house. But those materials represent the embodied labor of all the people who labored before them to add successively more and more value to the base raw materials.
Beautifully put
That’s confusing division of labor with pricing
different jobs have different values
a doctor should objectively be paid more than a salesman
but he isnt
the salesman social engineers society into thinking hes important
he is the definition of a parasite
“I as a CEO provide job opportunities and “hours” to spend for TEN THOUSAND people. Obviously my time should be considered worth more than a doctor who does only one person’s hours”
There’s many reasons why one would claim that their job is more important, but essentially there’s 2 kinds of jobs: those that are valuable to the society, and those that are not. Plumber’s job is just as important as doctor’s
Ok I accept they’re equally important. We don’t want either to be in short supply. But if your plumber or doctor dies, isn’t it harder to get another member of society motivated and trained to become a doctor?
There’s surely people who choose their field because of the pay, but I honestly think it’s simply because your net worth is your worth in this fked up world
different jobs have different values
No, fuck that line of thinking. We live in an interconnected world where every worker does something useful for society, and they all have a right to a happy, fulfilling life.
There is no reason for skilled work then.
Why be a doctor who had to spend countless hours learning his job when you can just sweep the streets and get the same reward?
Because they want to?
Your unspoken premise here is people become doctors for the money
LOL. Some people’s 1 hour is worth more than other’s.
Are you going to pay them 1.5 hours for each hour worked?
If only there was a way we could keep track of how much value people earned in an hour of work.
Personally, I think some people’s work is worth more than other people’s work. If you’re job involves raw sewage for example, I think you should earn a premium. Or if you’re job puts the stress of life and death in your hands. Cardiac surgeons have way more stressful days at work than I do.
At most, only one order of magnitude greater seems fair. Nobody’s job is a billion times as hard as any job.
Yes, true. I don’t support Billionaires or the idea that different people in different jobs don’t work hard in their own way, or that management should make so much more money than everyone else. I just think some people should get gross pay, or danger pay, etc. I’ve had rough days at work but I’ve never had to insert a catheter or wipe a patient’s ass.
In our hypothetical world we’re envisioning here, I think a flat multiple would be inducement enough for some. To be able to retire 3x or 4x as fast for hazardous, stressful, or highly unpleasant jobs would be very attractive for a significant amount of the population.
As for education, you could just make it so students earn for studying (rather than paying for the chance) at a low multiple, and make more skilled labour a moderate multiple.
Greatly expressed!
I think this whole thing about evaluating how valuable our time is is bonkers.
Yes, but ftr, there’s already a film with this premise.
Some 2010’s pseudo-thriller with Justin Timberlake that had a super generic name like “On Time” that I can’t quite remember. I don’t know if it’s any good, because one really stupid line from the trailer I recall “4 minutes for a cup of coffee?!” with the most lackluster delivery still lives rent free in my head, and I couldn’t bring myself to watch it lol
Its a fun movie if you don’t take it too seriously
It was okay.
It’s not really the premise. Kind of the opposite.
I’d give all my money to turn back the hours…
deleted by creator
Close enough, welcome back Josiah Warren /s
“The problem with capitalism is that there’s billionaires who steal too much labor, and everything would be fixed if correct policy was put into place that turned everyone into a small business owner”
didn’t know we’re simping for Mussolini here
This is just capitalism with extra steps.
Anyone who needs, currently have a LaborToken backed by blockchain available freely for use.
