So slavery as indentured servitude is the American future. Way to “new model” the old model.
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I think in a other timeline I’d be very happy working in a factory for my career. Building something or maintaining the systems. Putting in a hard days work and going home feeling proud I did a good job.
Supporting my 2 kids, stay at home wife and owning my own home with only my income.
My kids needs were all met. All utilities paid up, school supplies and toys, fridge always fully stocked.
My job was secure. 20+ years at the company with a competative salary. My job is secure and safe with my union protecting me. Might retire in 30 or so years with a solid pension and a cool 50 at the factory.
No need to get a job after I retire. Just enjoy my time with my new grandkids my children are happy to have in a strong economy.But. We’re not in the fucking twilight zone.
The American Dream was taken from the masses and they want us “back on the line” for pennies on the dollar in profits.“I make a penny while the boss makes a dime. That’s why I sit on company time.”
No. We now make a penny while the CEOs make thousands and were left hungry, homeless and sick.
Get the fuck out of here with that shit.
And while you’d be OK with one job for life, for many of us, that’s a vision of living hell, no matter how good the working conditions might be. And those working conditions would be shit. Nutlick’s “vision” is of multigenerational wage slavery, with no environmental or safety protections, no constraints on abusive employment practices, nothing but immiseration.
Are you taking orders? Or are you taking over?
Since the New Deal the goal of the capitalist class has been a slow crawl back to slavery. Couldnt do it too fast. Had to take it slow.
No taxes for the rich and businesses. No rights for workers. And eventually No pay or choice for them either.
That beyond all the other myriad failures of this country is why I hate it so much and why I long to see it fall.
And it’s all been fully Bipartisan. Republicans advance the goals of oligarchy by leaps. Democrats are the vanguard that protects the rich and the corrupt. They stop all of us from making things better. Social and cultural issues are ephemeral at best. Ultimately unimportant to the oligarchy beyond their utility as a tool of control and coercion. There is no morality involved. There is just greed and corruption.
The Children Yearn for the Mines!
Bold of you to assume that I’m having kids. Actually, not having kids is probably the best way to give these assholes the middle finger.
Seems that they want to repeat the USSR of 70s, just capitalist and without the revolution and industrialization and mass repressions preceding stages, and rather right-wing.
Maybe they want that to avoid the same fate due to avoiding state capitalism and overregulation combined with politics inside the bureaucratic machine. If they are moderately smart.
Or maybe they just want to repeat the same track with modern technologies. Then it’ll suck.
Seems that they want to repeat the USSR of 70s
State capitalism with nationalist elements.
I’d say inheritable professions are more pre industrial revolution than Soviet.
Yes, I missed that part, meant more the “working all your life on the same plant” thing.
Tat used to be not so uncommon under capitalism as well.
The big, old fashioned manufacturing companies often had livelong employees.And that’s also what Trump crowd promises their voter base.
The issue is how they are going to achieve that. The Soviet way was very inefficient, led to many unprofitable plants in the system and budget holes being closed with selling fossil resources to “capitalist” countries. And eventually tanked the USSR.
Succeeding in creating such industries in the first place and making them work is more likely with Soviet approaches. But making that a stable, efficient system is just impossible with Soviet approaches.
So they have to spend enormous funds at creating humongous processes and plants and logistics, and then prevent those owning said processes and plants and logistics from creating a bureaucratic-political deadlock which USSR was usually in. Any change would reduce some party’s power and increase another’s, so most ministries would oppose any change of status quo, and that is why all Soviet attempts at creating, say, a country-wide computer network to increase production and planning efficiency, or at optimizing military industries, or at standardization were killed.
USSR could have personal computers common enough, and not clones of Western successful designs, except clones were the only thing that wouldn’t cause such a deadlock. Domestic designs meant some ministry losing to some other.
There was a de-facto college ruling the country, with every party in that college having a veto right. Better than today’s Russia, of course.
Same even with fossil fuels export dependency, frankly - big companies today are not so different from USSR in terms of internal structure, yet they are efficient enough. It’s just that such a way of getting value would be, again, less likely to cause deadlocks.
The more intelligent (thus requiring standardization and competition, not just controlling land or oil and gas reserves) always lost to the more basic (sell something abroad, or choose a foreign design and clone it).
It’s a bit similar to how Byzantine empire killed itself, actually. Inviting foreign power to help in internal affairs became normalized. They didn’t even feel, apparently, slow and steady conquest by Turks whose help they’d employ against each other.
One of my statistics professors at college (this was real statistics, not teaching psych majors how to abuse SPSS) had been a Soviet planner. Along with the problem of fiefdoms (which is common to any large enterprise), there was a problem of measurement. As business-school dweeb will tell you, any metric that becomes an objective ceases to be useful as a metric, since it’ll be gamed.
Now try collecting 10,000 metrics used as goals. Everybody’s lying to the boss in order to look good. Everyone’s got a side hustle because they’re barely paid enough to survive. And the penalties for non-compliance with orders from on high are brutally severe but spottily enforced. Anyone who’s worked under a micromanager will know what this is like. Now imagine when the state is itself a micromanager. From an information-theoretic point of view, the effort to collect and validate the data needed is many times greater than the effort to do the job itself. So it doesn’t get done and quality and resiliency of the production system suffer.
YOU AND YOUR FAMILY FIRST, ASSHOLE.
Whether you want them or not.
Cool. You go first, asshole. >:(
(Not you, OP, you’re cool.)
Well, we do not know. OP may actually be the new secretary of commerce.
The factory jobs that existed in post-war America would be a vast improvement over the current service economy, but those jobs don’t exist anymore. Union jobs with high pay, benefits, retirement after 20 years, etc. Those are not the factory jobs they’re looking to create.
Factories are mostly automated now anyway. Rebuilding US manufacturing will not only take years but it will be done in a way that minimizes the actual jobs created. They’ll also still have to compete with factories all over the world where the currency is worth much less and the global price of the end product reflects that.
Post-war America had a strong domestic market and middle class that could afford to buy all the things American manufacturing built. Americans are now buying groceries on layaway and waiting for the sickness or car trouble or new Trump policy that makes them homeless.
The reality is that the job is kind of irrelevant. We had a manufacturing economy then, and a service based economy now, but the real difference between today and back then were wage strength and social parity. Of course pensions existed too, but still.
Back in the day one man could make enough to support a family on a relatively entry level skill level income. Today one person can hardly afford rent by themselves anywhere in the US for the same skill level of work.
Instead of paying people any more than absolutely necessary, we pay shareholders. No pensions, let alone benefits for a lot of people.
We need taxes on the wealthy and higher wages, if not legally mandatory profit sharing schemes for all businesses
Preach! I have an advanced degree in a technical field and I earn (adjusted for inflation) about 75% of what my father did in the same industry doing similar work without even a GED. The real punch to the gut is I live in a high cost of living area while he worked in a very low cost of living area. Thanks, capitalism!
And those jobs weren’t good because they were in a factory, they were good because they were union.
Still, safety standards were far from ideal at that time
Factory jobs used to consist of one person being able to move about and do various jobs. I may be misremembering, but I believe it was Ford (who was not exactly a great person, go search) who stuck each individual in one place doing one minute part of an overall job. Having worked in a couple of factories, one of which was very well paid, it was mind- crushingly boring. And 1/2 hour meals with coworkers was sniping and backbiting other coworkers. I liked repairs better because it was variable, and I got to go to storage and look for things so I could move away from my station.
QA was probably the most soul-crushing, except for that one factory, that didn’t pay well, had everyone on mandatory 7 days, 8+ for about two months at the time my supervisor tried to write me up for being absent the days with the flu, with a doctor’s note. I walked off the job that day and was hired at a nearby competitor the next day, and given a start bonus, told to come in the following Monday. I loved that super, the pay was great, but it still was not great.
Want more than 2 minutes to poop? You’re fired!
Yes ma’am.
They say factory jobs but really they mean mining/oil towns, where everything is controlled by the mining/oil companies that still exists in some parts of Africa and Latin America.
The USSR had lifetime factory jobs, too.
The USSR didn’t have any limits to choosing an employment since shortly after WW2, what are you talking about? By the late 70s, around 10% of positions in the economy were vacant and there was full employment, and people weren’t forced to work anywhere. The average unemployment duration was 15 days.
Please, what’s your source on your claim?
The USSR didn’t have any limits to choosing an employment
You were distributed to a place by the state after finishing your education. If you left that place too soon, you’d be frowned upon and that’d be mirrored in your labor book (USSR had such a document, basically a dossier documenting your whole history of employment with characteristics, you could get such a “flattering” characteristic by a superior not liking you that you’d never be accepted to a good place after, and you couldn’t refuse or lose a record in your labor book).
and people weren’t forced to work anywhere.
Being unemployed for too long was literally, seriously, illegal in the USSR. Google for “тунеядство”.
People with something really bad in their labor books (say, dissidents) or some other necessary documents (being German after the war, being Jewish in a wrong period of time) had problems finding a place that would accept them, and would sometimes be prosecuted for being unemployed (that was usually informal employment, because you still had to eat something).
But in general yes, some kind of employment was always possible. Dying from hunger or being homeless was almost ruled out. Most of the population lived in some sort of “acceptable poverty” - conditions very bad by US measure, but with the previous correction. That’s sort of one good thing that most people from ex-USSR agree on.
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And the US still has millions of slaves to this day, completely legally. We use slaves to fight forest fires. How fucked up is that? Hell, the modern US has managed to create the absurd phenomenon of the full-time employed homeless person. Oh, and and the peak of the USSR? The US trapped millions of people in a hellish nightmare of a legally induced racial caste system.
If you ignore the slavery, the homeless working multiple jobs, and the US’s historic racial caste system, you can make the US sound utopian.
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Youre not wrong, but the above proposal will make it worse not better. Born to a factory worker, youll have to work in that same factory your entire life.
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Come on man it took one google search to read about the centralized labour programs, liquidation of foreign ethnic groups, and militarization of labour. This isn’t even counting the estimated 10 million or so people in forced labour gulags.
And don’t forget the 20 million or so broken eggs needed to make that shit omelette in the first place.
So if I wanted to change jobs or quit a job to go into higher education, do you know if that was possible, how hard was it to do? Because available positions does not equal job mobility, as you need permission from the factory manager and the state and those are harder to get when qualified workers are scarce.
Higher education was free in the USSR as stipulated by its constitution.
In principle, that was true. In practice, some animals were more equal than others when it came to educational opportunities. Wrong class origins? Black mark. Wrong ethnicity? Black mark. Applying for a university place that’s intended to go to the local party big-wig’s nephew? Black mark.
And once in education, how you fared wasn’t just dependent on your academic ability. Political criteria and connections mattered just as much.
Are you sure you aren’t describing America’s education system?
I’m not talking about that. Read what I wrote. Could I leave my job at the factory to go to university? Didn’t I need permission from the factory manager and from the state to leave my job? Couldn’t either refuse?
Could I leave my job at the factory to go to university?
Yes… as is evidenced by an entirely free education program.
If you’re making the claim that “factory workers of the USSR had no freedom to go to college”, then supply some evidence please. Stop beating around the bush.
Fine…I’m going to ask chatgpt, since nobody knows and I’m not a historian of the USSR:
"In the USSR, while higher education was indeed free, the process of leaving a job to pursue higher education was not entirely straightforward. Workers, including those in factories, were required to obtain permission from their factory manager and the state to leave their job and enroll in university.
This permission was not always guaranteed, and the scarcity of qualified workers could make it more difficult to obtain. The factory manager and the state had some control over the mobility of workers, which could limit an individual’s ability to leave their job and pursue higher education.
It’s not that factory workers had no freedom to go to college, but rather that there were certain bureaucratic hurdles they had to navigate to make that transition. The availability of free education did not necessarily translate to unrestricted job mobility or easy access to higher education for all workers."
I also asked about the 1956 reforms:
"After 1956, the Soviet Union introduced some reforms that aimed to increase social mobility and access to education. The Soviet government implemented policies to encourage workers to pursue higher education, and it became easier for individuals to leave their jobs and enroll in university.
However, it’s still important to note that the process of leaving a job to pursue higher education was not entirely without restrictions. While the reforms after 1956 did increase access to education, the state and factory managers still had some level of control over worker mobility.
It wasn’t until the late 1980s, with the introduction of perestroika and glasnost under Mikhail Gorbachev, that the Soviet Union began to see more significant reforms that increased individual freedoms, including the ability to change jobs and pursue education with greater ease."
There. If anything there is factually wrong (gpt hallucinates a lot), let me know.
If you want to play with AI slop, maybe log off lemmy and start doing this on your own… Not a single source cited.
Tankie spotted
Bro, shut the fuck up if that’s all you’re going to add to the conversation Jesus fucking Christ dude
Please, what’s your source on your claim?
Tankie spotted
Average interaction.
He means while they’re still kids btw
This was always the goal. Serfdom in a different package.
With good union representation, right?
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Oh, cool. We’re going backwards. That’s fun.
The ® next to their name means “reverse”, like an automobile’s transmission.
They’ll enslave every last person on the planet if you let them. You have to fight back, or that’s your future. That’s everyone’s future.
