(WEEKLY) Work

I just quit my job to start a business with a friend and I thought the reaction I received from my coworkers was interesting. Most were genuinely confused, didn't understand why I would want to quit, and were surprised that I would do so without any guarantee of employment somewhere else (somewhere that isn't a non-funded startup).

One manager, at a loss for words, just asked (in a weirdly childlike way) "why?" And I didn't have a good answer for him. Because I can't imagine staying at this job until I'm middle management? Because I hate the internal corporate pressure to produce crappy software? Because I want to set my own schedule and have a shot at wealth that will give me freedom from the 9-5 before I'm in my 60's?

I want to be free, and I want my son to be free.

I think many people have a deep aversion to being unemployed, or are scared of being in an untenable financial situation. If I have an unexpected expense in the next three months, I'm screwed, and that's a scary place to be in. It's not a place that most of my coworkers have ever been in. It's been a while since I've been in that place, but I have been there, and rolling the dice with your home or vehicle on the line is easier when you have had the experience of doing so, failing, and recovering from that failure. If you were raised middle class or in stable poverty of some sort, you may never have found yourself with all of your belongings in a rucksack and then come back from it.

Anyway, just an observation.

What is the ideal work / life balance? Right now, the worldwide average is 5 days per week, 8-5 PM. Is this too much / too little / just right?

The ideal work/life balance is the one that works for your circumstances and temperament. A "one size fits all" solution is doomed to failure because people are radically different not only from person to person, but within a single person's life.

With productivity skyrocketing and wages falling, what would you like to see to fix things?

Greedy CEOs beheaded and their heads placed on pikes outside their company headquarters as a warning to those who come afterwards.

No, I'm not joking. Much.

The fact that the ratio of mean CEO salary to mean employee salary is closing on on 400:1 right now¹, vs. 20:1 in 1965, is laughable. As someone who has lived through part of the '60s, and all of the '70s, '80s, '90s, '00s, '10s, and up until now, I can guarantee you that things are not 20 times better now for society than they were 50 years ago. Indeed starting in the early '80s (about 1983, give or take) things have been taking a steady downward turn that is accelerating for most people.

In 1978 my neighbours had a nice bungalow in a decent suburb of Edmonton, all paid for by a single income: specifically a milkman's income. A single, lower-end blue-collar income was enough to have a family of four live quite comfortably in a three-bedroom home with a finished basement and a decent-sized yard. (My own family of three had two incomes, both white-collar, so we were living high off the hog in comparison—but our neighbours were by no means impoverished; not even slightly!)

Today, that same family, presuming you can even find a blue-collar job of roughly that calibre of income (most of them have been destroyed, see), there is absolutely no way that family could live in the house they did. They'd be relegated to some crappy one-bedroom apartment in a mediocre neighbourhood (or maybe a two-bedroom apartment in a shithole slum). And my two-white-collar-income family with only one child? We could likely barely manage to pay for the house we lived in at the time, but it would be really spartan inside and we'd have little to no disposable income after food, shelter, and clothing.

Would you accept less money and shorter hours?

No. I accepted the same money for shorter hours. When CEOs are making 300× (or greater!) my salary for visibly doing far less work, they can fuck off and hand over the share that I contribute to their bottom line, or they can let me work less. Anything else and I'm just warming up the guillotine.

Of course I have that privilege. I'm good enough that I can set my terms in my job and if they don't like it, I change my employer and set my terms there. Sadly not all my fellow labourers have that ability.

What would you feel minimum wage should do to adjust?

I don't think there should be a minimum wage. I think there should be a universal basic income that covers the essentials of life (food, shelter, clothing, all at basic levels)² and then if people want more than that they can find jobs. With a UBI companies have to contend with the fact that they can't literally threaten the lives of their employees any longer to force them to work for less than they think they're worth. If the basics are all adequately covered, the salaries paid by companies will have to be high enough to motivate people to work for them. Which may mean that CEOs will have to return only earning 20 times as much as the average worker again. This is my sad-for-the-CEOs face: 😐

Do you feel that the current resurgence of Unions is positive or negative?

Absolutely a positive. When one side of an "agreement" has a monopolistic amount of power over wealth, the other side needs monopolistic amount of power over labour to combat it. Anything else is indentured servitude, not employment.

If the CEO can literally threaten my life to accept unpleasant jobs for inadequate pay, I should be able to literally threaten his ability to earn enough to make that power. If CEOs can destroy lives, labour should be able to destroy companies.

Until we get UBI and have companies finding out that they need to pay people to motivate them.

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¹ https://www.epi.org/publication/ceo-pay-in-2021/

² Paid for by taxing the shit out of billionaires instead of going on knees before them to service them orally.