|
Wow, that's a huge loving deal. Are they going after unpaid interns as well or is this only going to be about employees?
|
#
¿
Aug 14, 2015 21:55
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 19, 2024 21:56 |
|
|
Equine Don posted:Well that's loving stupid if the thread title suggests "permanent temp" is going to go away, when it's really merely making both employers liable for legal infractions. So this won't positively affect workers who get paid far less for doing the same job as true permanent employees, unless something illegal happens. It's a big deal though because companies just love to hire other agencies to bring in temp workers to absolve themselves of all responsibility when it turns out that those workers were illegal immigrants and/or being paid less than minimum wage. There were stories coming out about Walmart hiring other companies to clean their stores and it turning out that said companies hired illegals to work for like $2/hour. Walmart got to just go "welp, not our workers!" They won't be able to now.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 15, 2015 05:31
|
|
|
Equine Don posted:People will still be getting screwed over when they do these unpaid internships because hey you signed the paper not our problem! So stupid this continues to exist in 2015. Hell I work at a fortune 500 company that is frequently rated as one of the best places to work, I do weekly 20+ hours more than a company employee, but even though I work nowhere else I'm just a contractor and so that justifies no vacation, no healthcare, 2x lower pay, all for the exact same responsibilities. This country is so hosed Yeah and this sort of thing is a step toward ending those conditions. It's the issue with capitalism as a whole; you make one way of exploiting the workers illegal and they come up with another. Then when you put laws in place to get them to knock that poo poo off they scream that it will ruin all business and usher in a thousand years of liberal darkness. Of course if you become technically "an employee" I kind of wonder if it's going to keep being "one of the best places to work." That probably only counts direct employees.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 15, 2015 06:00
|
|
|
Kim Jong Il posted:I support the workers in this case, but it's pretty obvious that fast food if not all retail is going to get hit hard by automation in response to these pushes. That was going to happen eventually no matter what.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 15, 2015 08:51
|
|
|
computer parts posted:I've yet to find a person who likes working retail. If the pay wasn't so awful I'd have actually liked my retail job. I spent most of my time unloading and sorting trucks. I just hid in the back of the store and carried heavy things around. I just figured I was getting paid to exercise and then when it was time to leave I could go do other crap if I wanted. Granted before the economy tanks I could get all the extra hours I wanted and we were getting deliberately dicked on medical stuff. Then the Great Recession hit and everything went to garbage.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 16, 2015 00:07
|
|
|
-Troika- posted:The whole "make the parent company liable for labor violations of the franchise" thing is retarded, much like a lot of poo poo the NLRB has pushed (and gotten slapped down for by federal courts) in the past 10-15 years. Some random bureaucrat at the head office obviously has nothing to do with your manager being an rear end in a top hat. I'm pretty sure the whole idea is to force the companies to actually care about employees they've managed to absolve themselves of responsibility for. The issue is that, right now, companies can indirectly perpetuate all sorts of abuses on their employees then just shrug and go "well they weren't our employees so it isn't our fault." Except that it kind of is. I guarantee you that some companies do in fact know that the companies they are hiring for temp/indirect work are breaking the law or mistreating employees but don't care because it costs them less. Companies really only care about the bottom line and will do literally anything to make more profit. This looks like people are trying to pull the rug out from under at least some of the awful practices.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 16, 2015 08:53
|
|
|
foobardog posted:It's quite possible. For every group of programmers doing something cool like self driving cars, there's 15 making sure that a prick in accounting can reduce human beings into numbers to better justify running their life after their jobs get outsourced. That's kind of the problem with progress in general, especially computer science (yes I'm a CS major why do you ask?). Humans are actually kind of lazy and always want an easier or cheaper way to do something so somebody, somewhere is always looking for it. If you look at human history it's been a long history of getting more efficient in the way we do things. Now we're automating everything and just don't need warm bodies to be doing much of the work. Whether we like it or not more and more formerly human jobs are going to be done by robots. You can't really stop it. The main response has been "radical, lower labor costs, more profit!" but it's causing massive social problems.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 16, 2015 09:58
|
|
|
Forceholy posted:So Dredd is a prophecy instead of a satire of law enforcement and police states? Generally speaking dystopian fiction is more or less "this very well might happen." A common assumption (pretty sure this even dates back to Marx) is that there will come a point where automation will completely devalue labor. We're seeing even now that that the supply of labor is higher than current demand. The wealthy of course give no shits if there are hungry and homeless people; they just want more money. But the hungry and homeless may reach a point of critical mass where social unrest progresses to outright rebellion. Of course the wealthy, instead of actually sharing the wealth or letting communism happen, will crack down.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 16, 2015 12:40
|
|
|
Kim Jong Il posted:How do you do that? I get having a high marginal rate and limited deductions if you want to stop deadweight loss, that seems more efficient than $15 hour for menial work. Guaranteed minimum income, subsidized food and housing, paying people that don't have jobs to like go to school and learn more things. There are poo poo loads of ways but America's solution is best summed up as "go starve to death in the gutter."
|
|
#
¿
Aug 20, 2015 03:06
|
|
|
Alien Arcana posted:Why would this be any different between a human cashier and an automated kiosk? They'd have to do a price check either way. Kiosks gently caress up way more than humans do. Machines are goddamned stupid.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 20, 2015 18:21
|
|
|
gently caress You And Diebold posted:Only as smart as the user Every computer is basically a schizophrenic, severely autistic four year old with a learning disability that can only communicate in a broken form of a language you barely know. The biggest reason user errors happen isn't because people are stupid but because they don't understand that it isn't he machine's fault it didn't do what was expected. Machines also think very, very differently from humans. They do exactly what you told them to do it's just sometimes the message got screwed up or you fed it bad information. foobardog posted:So perhaps only as smart as the programmer. Eh there's even limits to that, all told. Programming is extremely difficult no matter which way you slice it and there is never enough time to fix all the bugs. It's also impossible to plan for every possible failure. Aside from that coding is almost always done in teams. Net code is especially awful and those computers are always connected to some kind of network or another. The best way to think about it is summed up by what one of my CS professors told me. "The entire internet is always burning down all the time. It's a miracle anything works." drat near everything is built on temporary hacks that never got fixed, somebody deciding to use a bug as a feature then the bug later being fixed and ruining everything, or just flat out new hardware not getting along with old code. If you can think of a possible way for something to go wrong I guarantee you that it will.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 20, 2015 19:07
|
|
|
Pope Guilty posted:There's a great commercial from the 90s where a shady-looking dude in a trenchcoat walks through a grocery store stuffing products into his coat, and as he steps out the door there's a tone and a flash of light and the security guard approaches. I think part of it is because retail knows that it's dying. The assumption there was that stores would still exist. Last I heard interblag shopping is taking over retail something fierce. Which is why every store has a website and stuff like Walmart's Site To Store thing is being pushed. Stores are nice for certain things or if you need something Right loving Now but really, online shopping is putting a squeeze on retail.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 21, 2015 09:42
|
|
|
Big Mad Drongo posted:At least for groceries, the problem is a bit different. Less than 10% of the grocery market is online right now, and a little more than 50% of people said they would make the switch in the undefined future in a recent study. So online is causing a shift, but it's going to be a long time before it really starts strangling supermarkets, barring some paradigm shift (easing drone laws is the most likely cause right now). To be honest I think that illustrates like all of the problems that America is running into right now, top to bottom. The internet is remaking absolutely everything but the transition isn't always comfortable and there are costs involved. The people doing all of the actual work are sick of being paid gently caress all while the price of everything goes up but everything is getting more expensive because investors are looking at their investments and only ever saying "more." But the reduced spending power of those same workers is putting a further crunch on retail. People can't buy poo poo if they can't afford to but all the investors are saying is "gently caress it, more." But then the increased automation and lower demand for work is creating a situation where there are just plain fewer workers to actually buy crap.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 21, 2015 17:17
|
|
|
Series DD Funding posted:And yet, as the real minimum wage has fallen, crime has gone down and corporate profits have gone up. Social unrest is also up. Protests are literally a society threatening violence.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 21, 2015 19:12
|
|
|
If you're going to treat temp workers like on-call employees then you're going to loving pay them like on-call employees. People that are on-call get paid for being on-call even if they aren't working. The gig economy is lovely because it puts a gently caress load of people on-call but they only get paid when they actually have work. You want a reserve army of workers? OK, fine. Put the damned safety net back in place so they don't go hungry if nobody wants to hire them today. Hell that's also a good time to argue in favor of GMI. Hey, so nobody is hiring? No big deal, you still have a place to live and food to eat. Head to the library and read a book in your spare time or like go clean up the park. Or just sit at home and play video games, nobody cares.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 22, 2015 18:22
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 19, 2024 21:56 |
|
|
One of the problems with such debates is that a great many people just love the idea of the poors suffering and going hungry but don't want to admit it publicly so they find other justifications. Other times it's people that bought into some propaganda that came out of some extremely rich guy who wanted to be even more extremely rich and decided "gently caress the poors" is the way to do that.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 24, 2015 19:09
|
|