The Reality of Working for a Supermarket in 2009/Return to Victorian Britain

fc123

Checkout girl chosen to be new face of Tesco is arrested for being an illegal immigrant

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1216429/Checkout-girl-chosen-new-face-Tesco-arrested-illegal-immigrant.html?ITO=1490#ixzz0SLaPpF8n

nearlynew wrote: »

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1216429/Checkout-girl-chosen-new-face-Tesco-arrested-illegal-immigrant.html?ITO=1490

You couldn't make it up.

treliac

fc123 wrote: »

You couldn't make it up.

But narrowly beaten and at Number 1 in the unbelievability stakes :-

Attorney General Baroness Scotland who, not only employed an illegal immigrant (having been involved in writing the relevant legislation) but is also accused of having fiddled expenses -

http://order-order.com/2009/09/20/baroness-scotland-accused-of-170000-expense-fiddle/

dopester

andygb wrote: »

The whole point of trade unions was to stand up for workers rights, unfortunately things changed in the seventies and eighties, and as a result employees are facing an unfair challenge in the work place.

Things didn't 'just change' in the 70s and 80s, because of some change in mindset.

Unions became weaker because of a transition from large scale enterprise to smaller scale enterprise with more competition.

Unions couldn't apply as much industrial blackmail on employers as they had in the past.

However I've got some sympathy. We've sort of reached a system point. Not all of us can be top level artificial-intelligence computer programmers, rockstars, creative authors, or whatever else, to command a liveable wage. Income is at risk for even for many well-educated skilled people because of the global situation and credit expansion unwinding.

What is happening is not that capitalists are suddenly succeeding in exploiting the workers, but rather that technological change is making it more difficult for the workers to exploit the capitalists.

The advent of large-scale enterprises in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries enabled labour unions to extract higher wages for their members - higher than would be justified by their true economic contributions. They did this by threatening to strike, or, in many cases, sabotage the operations of the enterprises in which they were employed.

Since companies operating on a large scale tend to have high capital costs, which make even temporary losses of output costly, management in most cases found it prudent to pay workers more than would have been required by the strict economic costs of replacing them. In essence, industrial workers received a political payoff in addition to their economic wage - a legalised shakedown payment.

The economic change of recent decades has been from the primacy of manufactures to that of communications, from machine power to electronic power, from factory to office, from mass production to small teams.

As the scale of enterprise falls, so does the potential for sabotage and blackmail in the workplace. Smaller-scale operations are much more difficult to organise by unions. Partly, this is because they tend to be smaller, more footloose targets. Many deal with services or products with negligible natural resource content. In principle, these businesses could be conducted from almost anywhere. They are not trapped at a specific location, like a mine or a port.

If operations become uncomfortable because of union demands, a firm operating on a small scale can move. Such firms also have an added inducement to escape monopoly wages. Smaller firms tend to have more competitors. If you have dozens or even hundreds of competitors tempting your customers, you cannot afford to pay your employees more than they are worth. If you alone tried to do so, your costs would be higher than your competitors' and you would go broke.

The decay of union power as economies move into the Information Age is hardly a random development. It is a predictable consequence. It is a predictable consequence of the declining scale of enterprise and therefore the increasing costs of redistributing income through disguised blackmail.

Because unions can no longer extract political blackmail from employers as readily as they used to, it is hardly surprising that the share of income earned by essentially unskilled workers is falling while the percentage earned by the well-educated and the capitalists rises.

dopester

bendix wrote: »

Let's be blunt. These type of roles are low value and low skill. Pretty much anyone can do them - that is why they are low paid. They are NOT a passport to a middle-class lifestyle.

bendix I generally agree with much of what you post in this thread, on this subject.

What I think you are overlooking is the middle-class income lifestyle is also being challenged by certain market forces, and the unwinding of the credit boom. Even for many well educated, talented people.

Yes many can still earn good money...but the unwinding is already hitting tiers of the bankers, mid-level IT people... deflationary forces on their incomes.

Perhaps less so if you have exceptional or highly creative unique skills.

Sir_Humphrey

dopester wrote: »

Paying workers more so they can afford to buy your products is part of Fordism.

And since it corresponded (in the 1950s) with the higher economic growth ever in countries such as Germany, it was a very successful. In fact, trade unions were an integral part of the success of the German Wirtschaftswunder.

However now a large proportion of people are not paid enough to afford to buy a lot of the output of Capitalism, what happens to Capitalism?

StevieJ

dopester wrote: »

bendix I generally agree with much of what you post in this thread, on this subject.

What I think you are overlooking is the middle-class income lifestyle is also being challenged by certain market forces, and the unwinding of the credit boom. Even for many well educated, talented people.

Yes many can still earn good money...but the unwinding is already hitting tiers of the bankers, mid-level IT people... deflationary forces on their incomes.

Perhaps less so if you have exceptional or highly creative unique skills.

The best paying jobs (in the mainstream) were mostly where the labour costs were a small portion of the overall costs ie capital intensive.