Op-Ed: Underpaid, understaffed, wage theft, and prices out of control. Happy?
By Paul Wallis
September 19, 2024
DIGITAL JOURNAL
UK nurses will stage a second unprecedented strike amid an increasingly acrimonious fight with the government for better wages
UK nurses will stage a second unprecedented strike amid an increasingly acrimonious fight with the government for better wages
- Copyright AFP/File ISABEL INFANTES
If you search the words “underpaid, understaffed, and wage theft” you’ve given yourself a lifetime job researching them. The words mean a totally dysfunctional environment where organizational failure is unavoidable. This is global. It’s also happening with a backdrop of out-of-control prices for just about everything.
The word is “systemic”. It can’t be any sort of coincidence that these things are so common. That’s particularly the case in the ultra-cheapskate US, where “employment at will” apparently means a license to gouge workers.
It goes well with the mantras of “hate the public, hate the staff and hate the customers”, though. There’s that adorably delicate subtle ambience of sleaze and greed.
Meanwhile, in the unreal world, CEO wages have risen 1085% since 1978, where workers’ wages have risen 24%, according to one source. That’s probably a massive underestimate. Many people have asked why so few people who do so little make so much.
There’s no rational answer to that question. There’s no particular reason why a herd of deformed meeting-dwellers should get paid anything. They don’t actually do their own jobs. They delegate to lesser cretins, and that’s all they need to do.
In the days of Rent A Meaningless Degree, it’s inevitable that the talentless take over. (A degree is meaningless when given to an idiot.) As long as no competent people are involved, everything’s sweet until it all inevitably falls over. This is underperformance on a truly colossal scale.
It’s also hyper-obstructionist by intent. Cheaper tech, better time management, better productivity, better business models, you name it; they just don’t happen. For example – There’s no good cost-effective business reason for “back to the office”. Those places cost millions, and all that’s likely to happen is that diseases spread a lot faster. The upkeep of the buildings is obscene, the liabilities endless, and you’re paying for it.
If there was ever a species of serial underachievers on Earth, this is them. They have political ideologies to back them up. They’re in luck, too. In a deregulated environment, you can’t pull the plug on insane prices and unearned wages. This isn’t socialism; it’s common sense and business best practice, and you can guess how popular that is right now.
Why the cheapskate stuff, you may wonder in your palatial hollowed-out grain of rice? To create entirely fictional numbers, and maybe rip off some poor people. The appearance of success isn’t success, but it looks like it. Most of these guys can’t even make sense of their own balance sheets.
Most of the stockholders in this cartoon can’t read them either. So, everyone’s happy. They get paid for this fictional fantasy. World Com, Enron, Lehmann Bros, you live or die by the numbers. It’s more likely you create the numbers and vanish before the crash and burn kicks in.
Many businesses are going broke and being exposed to serious legal actions thanks to this culture. A lot of businesses are basically doing business for their inner parasites, not for themselves. Eventually, long afterward, it shows on the balance sheets, but you can see the problem.
Never mind the rhetoric. More outraged verbiage is hardly enough. The fact is that there are plenty of simple solutions to this mess:
All of these things are breaches of applicable laws in some form. Therefore, as a business, you have a perfect in-house excuse to sue and sack the parasites.
Fines don’t scare anyone. Therefore, you shut down the business until compliance. That’ll scare the guys who own the businesses out of these bad habits fast enough.
You create a nice bonny bouncing stack of case law and penalties to cover underpayment, understaffing, and wage theft, This is “strategic” case law for pests. At the moment you could get any number of cases for all these issues, preferably class actions.
It’s all easily fixable. Now let’s see what happens.
If you search the words “underpaid, understaffed, and wage theft” you’ve given yourself a lifetime job researching them. The words mean a totally dysfunctional environment where organizational failure is unavoidable. This is global. It’s also happening with a backdrop of out-of-control prices for just about everything.
The word is “systemic”. It can’t be any sort of coincidence that these things are so common. That’s particularly the case in the ultra-cheapskate US, where “employment at will” apparently means a license to gouge workers.
It goes well with the mantras of “hate the public, hate the staff and hate the customers”, though. There’s that adorably delicate subtle ambience of sleaze and greed.
Meanwhile, in the unreal world, CEO wages have risen 1085% since 1978, where workers’ wages have risen 24%, according to one source. That’s probably a massive underestimate. Many people have asked why so few people who do so little make so much.
There’s no rational answer to that question. There’s no particular reason why a herd of deformed meeting-dwellers should get paid anything. They don’t actually do their own jobs. They delegate to lesser cretins, and that’s all they need to do.
In the days of Rent A Meaningless Degree, it’s inevitable that the talentless take over. (A degree is meaningless when given to an idiot.) As long as no competent people are involved, everything’s sweet until it all inevitably falls over. This is underperformance on a truly colossal scale.
It’s also hyper-obstructionist by intent. Cheaper tech, better time management, better productivity, better business models, you name it; they just don’t happen. For example – There’s no good cost-effective business reason for “back to the office”. Those places cost millions, and all that’s likely to happen is that diseases spread a lot faster. The upkeep of the buildings is obscene, the liabilities endless, and you’re paying for it.
If there was ever a species of serial underachievers on Earth, this is them. They have political ideologies to back them up. They’re in luck, too. In a deregulated environment, you can’t pull the plug on insane prices and unearned wages. This isn’t socialism; it’s common sense and business best practice, and you can guess how popular that is right now.
Why the cheapskate stuff, you may wonder in your palatial hollowed-out grain of rice? To create entirely fictional numbers, and maybe rip off some poor people. The appearance of success isn’t success, but it looks like it. Most of these guys can’t even make sense of their own balance sheets.
Most of the stockholders in this cartoon can’t read them either. So, everyone’s happy. They get paid for this fictional fantasy. World Com, Enron, Lehmann Bros, you live or die by the numbers. It’s more likely you create the numbers and vanish before the crash and burn kicks in.
Many businesses are going broke and being exposed to serious legal actions thanks to this culture. A lot of businesses are basically doing business for their inner parasites, not for themselves. Eventually, long afterward, it shows on the balance sheets, but you can see the problem.
Never mind the rhetoric. More outraged verbiage is hardly enough. The fact is that there are plenty of simple solutions to this mess:
All of these things are breaches of applicable laws in some form. Therefore, as a business, you have a perfect in-house excuse to sue and sack the parasites.
Fines don’t scare anyone. Therefore, you shut down the business until compliance. That’ll scare the guys who own the businesses out of these bad habits fast enough.
You create a nice bonny bouncing stack of case law and penalties to cover underpayment, understaffing, and wage theft, This is “strategic” case law for pests. At the moment you could get any number of cases for all these issues, preferably class actions.
It’s all easily fixable. Now let’s see what happens.
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