I recently read an article about a Chicago restaurant having to close its doors because it had to pay workers $1.75 more an hour. Seems to me if your business fails because you rely on low wages, and then raising prices to "combat" it causes you to lose customers, something needs to be rethought. I notice the executives never seem to think "Maybe we're paying ourselves too much." It's always "Make the customer pay" (and then "Hey, where'd our customers go?"). Personally, I think the gov't sticks its nose in way too much.

Yeah, you'll need a diminishing amount of skilled labor.

I think calling them superfluous is taking an extremely utilitarian view at the human condition.

Obviously, everybody needs a sense of belonging and I think in modern times, we have taken the lazy complacent approach of pigeon-holing the meaning of that belonging into gainful employment sometimes to the detriment of other worthwhile community endeavors.

For example, I spent my Monday evenings doing role-playing games at a youth center. It's not a significant source of revenue (my full time job pays me 2.5x times what they are paying me per hour) and its the type of activity that is overlooked in our career-minded society, but I get a lot from it as I like to think, that in some small way, I'm helping those teenagers think more critically and more imaginatively. This certainly not the type of activity a robot could do for the foreseeable future, but it is definitely something that we can use.

I agree with you, but I do think the conditions in our societies frequently reduce us to the point that we become useless eaters. One of the major factors is the intentional degradation of community and family, which leaves us more and more isolated from each other, and consequently, disempowered.

100% in agreement there and probably one of the main reasons why the natality rate in the Western world is so low atm.

I think either this generation or future generations will have no choice, but to tackle this problem head on as its consequences will become more and more severe (both in terms of low natality rates and in terms of an increasingly poor populace with no real sense of belonging).

But not in Belgium though - you must be somehow at fault, or your employee at an economic failure.

But of course, not anyone hopes to lose their job, so it must come sooner.

European thing. Some might say not treating European worker like dirt is very foolish, because being cruel to employees is necessicated for the success.

But say you can be as cruel and unfair to an employee as you wish.

If everyone does this, whom can - or would - buy a capital expenditure item?

Minus inherited wealth of course - crit hit that, by-passing any normative armour checks.

That was so profound, Deepak Chopra.

Mind if I call you Deep for short?

The only way to do that is to rid ourselves of the status quo, because the powers that be are perfectly happy to maintain economic growth by importing cheap labor.

Finland already was with Bernie Sanders here - our education system was public. The moral ideal was educating the best minds and social mobility and cohesion.

The constitution of Finland is actually for universal education, and it will be very hard to change that for privatisation.

So healthcare is.

Looking to blame cheap labour is pretty trouble-free and easy. Ever asked youself whom profits from private schooling and healthcare?

I think the trend has been toward exporting production to areas where labor is cheaper, moving the seat of companies wherever taxes are low and generally having a front row seat for the ear of the political elite and at times being in bed with them too.

The darker aspects of globalization are inevitable and are very hard to tackle without political agreements between several countries, but the general apathy toward the stagnation (and at times regression) of democracy in the US and in Canada is directly our fault and we have the capacity to own that and take the reign back.

Heck, in Canadian politics, I'm always amazed at how many people don't realize how patently abysmal our first-past-the-post voting system is. An overwhelming majority of voters, from all political stripes, should be outraged about it at this point. They should be marching in the streets about this. Instead, many aren't even aware of the problem and how much it undermines our democratic system.

The only party who puts that issue at the forefront atm is the Green Party and they have like 1 seat. The Liberals are talking about it, but now that the unbalanced political system favors them, I'm afraid they'll get greedy like the Conservatives were before them and just toss most talked-about political reforms out the window until they lose (at which point it will be too late).

As I see it, supporting cheap labor is supporting the economic conditions that make labor cheap. Let's support a humanistic and sustainable global economy so people don't feel that they have to go to another nation to have a life that is worth living.

We have both the importation of cheap labor and outsourcing here in the states.

What is a first-past-the-post voting system?

I think voting should be scrapped altogether at this point in favor of a lottery system akin to what the ancient Greeks used.

Am I wrong to think you shall have never heard of Joe Hill?

"Don't mourn, organize."

Well, now you do. That was a person executed by shooting in the US soil for trade uninion activity.

I do admit that taking in a million plus refugees whithin a year is hard for Europe, but when US has taken a couple of ten k's plus - your concern is pretty cheap.

Historically, and I hope now, labour union movement have been in the forefront of avoiding exploitation or segretation because they do not accept that anyone of skill or opportunity to be paid unfairly.

First-past-the-post means that there is a single-pass for voting. Essentially, everyone votes for one candidate and then, whichever candidate has the most votes wins.

In multi-pass voting, people select more than one choice in order of preference. In the first pass, the candidate with the least number of votes is eliminated and whoever voted for him get their votes transfered to their second pick.

This can go on for a fixed number of iterations or until there are 2 candidates left standing.

This has two main positive impacts:

- Elimination of strategic voting: In single-pass voting, people tend to vote for who they think might win that they like most as opposed to voting for who they want the most to win. For example, in our current first-past-the-post system, I want to vote for the Green Party, but I know they probably won't win so in a tight race between Liberals and Conservatives, I'll vote Liberals to ensure they'll win (even though my pick would be Green). This state of affair greatly favors well established party and help insure that lesser parties will always remain that way.

- Elimination of strategic merges: In our current first-past-the-post system, similar parties have to merge to remain competitive, otherwise they'll lose to more different parties who have merged. For example, let's say that party A, B and C are vastly similar and party D is very different (but a single party). In the voting booth, 35% of the population votes for party D, 20% for party A, 20% for party B and 25% for party C. So, party D wins, even though 65% of the population would have favored a party that is vastly different from it. To counter this in the next election, party A, B and C merge into a single party and after that, they finally start winning elections, except that now, the voters are stuck with a 2 party system and no choice. Whatever differentiated party A, B and C is no longer decided by the voters, it is decided internally within the merged party and this is inherently less democratic. Voters are stuck with a lot less choice.

This would be very beneficial in our primaries, so the Federal Election Commission (Democratic and Republican parties) will never allow it. Undemocratic, ya know. : (

Older article but relevant: http://www.businessinsider.com/walmart-employees-pay Re-run the numbers using "only" the ~1.4 million employed in the US and it still doesn't work - but it is closer, bumping the salary to around $35k. Really damn good for sliding boxes of Tasty-Os across a cash register. Cut the hours in half and still pay that much per hour and it's essentially the equivalent of making $70k per year were it a 40-hour week.

For working a cash register. Does that make sense to anyone? How is the local mom-and-pop store supposed to make that work?

So even hugely successful and profitable Walmart, a company employing scads of people in the occupation group we're talking about, can't afford to do what you propose. Note that the quote talks about pre-tax profit, so even with the full measure of their profit they couldn't make it work, let alone pay their own people that much AND pay the higher taxes required to support others - a tax they wouldn't pay since anyway since $35k would eat up all of their profits, and thus no biz income tax. Higher wages would get some of that back but not even half since that income level pays little tax already. And if cost controls were instituted on the staples they sell, that would either make it impossible to stay in business or else the prices of the non-controlled products would go way up: inflation. That doesn't even figure hiring twice as many people at that rate since they're now only working 20 hours per week.

That's just one company. Plenty of big retailers and grocery chains are in the same position: employing hundreds of thousands of people - often on thinner margins and lower profit than Walmart - and the proposal demands a doubling (or worse) of their labor cost while mandating they can't raise prices on many products - especially in the case of grocery retailers - to help pay those people the higher wages.



Among all the other problems, there are a large number of occupations where a drastic reduction in working hours simply isn't feasible. Doctors and nurses / healthcare pros, police / fire / EMS, farmers, managers, truck drivers, maintenance / repair staff, construction workers... that scratches the surface. We can't make a huge cut in hours for healthcare workers without either cutting back the availability of those services or taking a big hit in quality as those extra positions are filled with people who don't have adequate training in the required field. Speaking of fields, farmers and many construction workers operate under the rules of Mother Nature, so they also are not able to work less: the work needs to be done by a certain time, dictated by weather and the general march of seasons. Throwing more warm bodies at these tasks doesn't work: skill and expertise is required.

So what you'll have is a group of workers putting in half the hours - or non-workers putting in no hours (and why would they work since the baseline 'income' is guaranteed for everyone?) - making nearly as much as the skilled long-haul truck driver who is working full time. And the other group - the worker putting in a full day five days or more per week, the ones who often have some sort of specialized training that came at the expense of personal time and money - will be supporting, through taxes, the leisurely lifestyles of those who work either half the time or not at all.

One could say that the extra time will be used for the benefit of society, but I deal all the time with the type of worker who would benefit from the proposal, and so so many of these are not the people who are going to help make gains for society. But some will; kudos to them. Are they enough to make up for the rest? The rest will be spending more time on Facebook and XBone, not volunteering at the local elementary school.

Meanwhile, the rest of us are busting ass for 40-60 hours per week to support those working very little.

For good reasons, I think it's going to be an uphill battle selling that.