"It is not always clear to management, staff, clients, and customers what the proper level of staffing should be. And it is not always clear why a business is understaffed: Can the firm not find enough qualified workers, or is management deliberately trying to cut costs by heaping more work on fewer people? But in recent years, both the extent and impact of understaffing have emerged, and it is not just disgruntled workers making the case.

A 2024 Kennedy School survey of 14,000 workers found 53 percent believe their workplace is “always” or “often” understaffed. Surely, workers will often agitate for adequate staffing, while bosses will push employees to do more with less. But researchers looked into public-health agencies and found many need to hire 80 percent more workers to be fully staffed. Mt. Sinai Health System in New York was ordered to pay $2 million in 2024 due to critical understaffing in emergency departments, labor and delivery units, and oncology. A Journal of the American Medical Directors Association article correlated low levels of staffing at nursing homes (especially in poor neighborhoods) with increased use of antipsychotic medications.

The Department of Transportation’s inspector general determined that 77 percent of “critical facilities” for air traffic controllers are staffed below the required 85 percent threshold, with New York and Miami at 54 percent and 66 percent, respectively. State officials in Texas reduced the capacity of the county jail serving the Houston area due to chronic understaffing. In countless news reports of unionization campaigns and strike threats, from Starbucks to major hospitals to railroad workers, you will see “understaffing” mentioned as a key concern. The trend affects white-collar workers, too; 83 percent of millennials report that they take on up to six tasks beyond their job description due to turnover."

https://prospect.org/2026/03/19/understaff-workplace-business-covid-cvs-pharmacies-hotels-grocery-stores/

#USA #Understaffing #ClassWarfare #Capitalism #WageSlavery

"So the point Marx made was that, in the process of producing goods, whatever technology capitalists use, they have to deal with the fact that their workers may not have the same goals and drives as they do.

In other words, there is an underlying conflict and divergence of interests between workers and capitalists. He has committed to paying these workers, and he wants to make sure he gets the most out of that investment. His fundamental concern, just like with a machine, is now that he has spent the money on it, he wants to get as much value out of it as he can. He wants to get as much bang for his buck. So that means when he sees a worker, he sees the wage as an investment that he wants to get the maximum returns out of.

Well, what is it that the capitalist paid for in that investment? He paid for work. He wants them to do the work at the maximum, fastest, and best quality possible.

Now, for the worker, sure, he’s happy to have a job. He came to work. He wants to keep the job. But that doesn’t mean that at the job he wants to give his employer the quality, extent, and pace of work that the capitalist wants. Why? Well, because oftentimes the pace of work is killing him. And oftentimes the machinery is dangerous. And he also knows that if he works really fast, really hard, really well, he’s increasing the productivity of his boss, which means some of that labor is going to become expendable, because as your productivity goes up, you don’t need as many people working it. So he literally might be working himself out of a job!

The way to summarize this is, what capitalists want is for the worker to give up as much work as possible. What the worker wants is to give just as much work as he can get away with. In other words, the worker wants to give up only as much work as he absolutely has to, which means he’s probably going to want to give up less work than what his boss wants."

https://jacobin.com/2026/03/work-deskilling-labor-capitalism-technology

#Capitalism #Marx #Marxism #Labor #Automation #ClassWarfare

"Most wavering Trump voters are not becoming Democrats — they are disengaging from politics entirely. Of the 20.1 percent who are wavering, only 3.4 percent plan to vote Democrat. The remaining 16.7 percent say they will vote for neither party or are unsure.

This is the pattern that should alarm anyone who assumes that defection from Trump automatically signals support for Democrats: a large bloc of young, low-income, non-white working-class voters who tried the political system, found it wanting on both sides, and are now preparing to check out. These are not people moving left. They are people losing faith that politics can deliver for them at all.

The strategic implications are clear. There is a constituency of working-class, lower-income, disproportionately non-white voters who voted for Trump but are not loyal Republicans. They are gettable — but not with the standard Democratic playbook of appeals to norms, institutions, and preserving a democracy that many of them feel has given them little reason to defend.

These voters responded to Trump’s promise of material improvement. They are now wavering because that promise has gone unfulfilled or because the administration’s cruelty on immigration has become impossible to ignore.

What would reach them is straightforward: a politics that takes their economic grievances seriously and offers concrete material programs — lower prices, better and more stable jobs, cheaper and higher quality health care, and affordable housing. The fact that they are disengaging rather than switching parties is an indictment of the Democratic Party’s failure to offer a credible alternative.

Trump’s coalition was always more brittle than it looked. The question is whether anyone will organize the people it is leaving behind."

https://jacobin.com/2026/03/trump-coalition-voters-working-class

#USA #Trump #Trumpism #MAGA #Politics #DemocraticParty #ClassWarfare

"At an Amazon fulfillment center in Spain, we used a flurry of brief walkouts late last year to force the company to improve wages and time off.

We struck for three days in November and in December in a series of “flexible strikes,” timed to hit production with intermittent walkouts during the holiday “peak” season. On December 22, the union committee announced a settlement, negotiated through government mediators.

The facility, RMU1 in the city of Murcia, employed 2,000 workers at the time, and our union the General Confederation of Labor (CGT) was one of four unions that represented them. [European countries don’t have the same “exclusive representation” system as the U.S., so multiple unions can have a presence at the same worksite. –Editors]

About 75 percent of the workforce, made up of workers from Spain and immigrants from Venezuela, Ecuador, Colombia, and Morocco, participated in the strike, reaching beyond the ranks of the CGT to include other union members.

Our experience shows what’s possible, even at a multinational corporation designed to neutralize organizing. Building from below, workers can organize a well-planned strike—over the objections of more conservative unions—draw on their knowledge of the production process, hit the company where it hurts the most, and wrest real gains.

Here’s how we got Amazon to negotiate with us when it didn’t want to."

https://labornotes.org/amazon-workers-spain-cgt-strategy

#Spain #Amazon #GGT #Murcia #CGT #Labor #WageSlavery #ClassWarfare

A quotation from Victor Hugo

Victor Hugo (1802-1885) French writer
The Man Who Laughs [L’Homme qui rit], Part 2, Book 2, ch. 11 (1869) [tr. (1888)]

More about this quote: wist.info/hugo-victor/82457/

#quote #quotes #quotation #qotd #victorhugo #classwarfare #economicinjustice #exploitation #poor #poverty #power #rich #wealth #meme