From the two economies I have spent a great deal of time thinking about the future of work. It is the single most difficult chapter to write in my upcoming book, partly because I don’t like the conclusions I’m coming to. One thing I am realizing is there is a distinction between what we have seen as the “working” class and what I am coming to see as the “service” class. A working-class person is somebody who has a trade, and because of that skill, can generally command a decent income. The service class—bar and restaurant workers, retail salespeople, general manual laborers, and so on—is almost plug-and-play. It is not that the greedy restaurant owner doesn’t want to pay his staff more; it’s that competition generally won’t let him do so and still make a profit. So he holds his labor costs down—and he can do so because in today’s market, there are typically more people available for these jobs than there are jobs. And because of the Obamacare mandate, if you are a business with more than 50 employees, you simply cannot afford to have full-time employees, so you resort more and more to part-time positions, which don’t let workers earn adequate wages. -John Maudin, Thoughts From The Frontline Aug 4 The capitalist class is effectively arguing for socialism.
We have long had this notion of the “working class.” These are the people who don’t own businesses and are not “professionals” like doctors, lawyers, or accountants.
Rick Wagoner, former CEO of GM, not exactly a radical liberal, was arguing for socialized medicine many years ago for just this reason. The cyclic nature of the automobile industry necessitates hiring and firing a lot of people with regularity, through no fault of their own. Wagoner's argument was that employment could be a lot more stable were everyone to have health care, and therefore long term planning on the part of producers could be a lot easier as well. This was while Bush was in office, long before the whole private planes to beg for bailouts debacle, and needless to say it got exactly 0 traction. He was maybe ahead of his time. We'll see.The capitalist class is effectively arguing for socialism.
Speaking as a small business owner it's a helluva cost. Providing healthcare to our employees basically doubles how much we pay them per hour so that they can bitch about how shitty their benefits are. More than that because of the way my union contract is written if my wife and kid have any option for healthcare other than out-of-pocket they are ineligible for my union benefits (which cost me $600 a year and COBRA out at $1800 a month). That my bennies cost my union $600 a year but me $1800 a month says a lot about the power of collective bargaining. That we've got cartelized multinational healthcare corporations on one side of the table and people whose best options for representation include LegalZoom on the other says a lot about how little "the market" enters into this discussion.