"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

This is NOT "capitalism", this is #neoliberalism. These two words are not synonyms. This is #monopoly r#entseeking, not capitalism. This is #neofeudalism. This is #WageSlavery and #DebtSlavery. This is the #OwnershipSociety—ownership of you and your entire life by the aristocracy. You will own nothing, and the ruling class will be happy.

https://beige.party/@ned/116245378674305491

"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

"Rent A Human and other platforms like it will benefit from a technological shift that won’t change the current structure of labor and class relations — they will turbocharge them. Existing platforms such as Taskrabbit still require time, effort, and attention to delegate each task. Rent A Human, however, liberates the wealthy from the constraint of time and attention.

This relationship allows for a new dynamic — managerial compression — enabled by the digitized platform and AI. Your run-of-the-mill princeling living on the Upper West Side or Bel Air, or in whatever silk-stocking enclave he calls home, can wake up and instruct an AI agent to “complete this week’s to-do list.” However much Taskrabbit and its ilk have made easier the task of summoning vassals to attend to whatever errand and chore, they still require discrete requests and commands. That small expenditure of time has now been removed. Digital grandees can now instruct their AI agent to peel their grapes, wait in lines overnight for new sneaker drops, secure the last gluten-free scone from their favorite café, and test new oat milks for froth — all before leaving for Pilates — with little more than a spoken command."

https://jacobin.com/2026/02/artificial-intelligence-ai-labor-exploitation

#AI #AIAgents #RentAHuman #WageSlavery #LaborExploitation

"Now that I have college-age kids myself, I’m once again seeing these dynamics firsthand. Corporations recruit students as early as freshman year, offering high-paying summer internships that are hard to resist. Preprofessional programs—such as Harvard’s Undergraduate Consulting Group, Princeton’s Tiger Capital Management, and the Blue Chips at the University of Chicago—seek out students, some even before college, and socialize them into these tracks as soon as they set foot on campus. Other organizations don’t have the resources to compete, making them less visible to students and less prestigious.

Despite their lofty mission statements about developing civic leaders, few schools push back against this corporate career funnel. Most colleges profess to be neutral when it comes to first jobs—but they benefit from the funding streams provided by prospective employers, who pay colleges thousands of dollars a year, and in some cases upwards of $20,000, to promote themselves to students through career-services offices.

Many students today are, understandably, anxious about the rise of AI and its effects on entry-level roles. But this development could also give us an opportunity to change the norms around first-job choices. Many corporations will soon need fewer staffers straight out of college to do routine work, but they will still need people among their senior ranks with strong leadership qualities.

Companies will therefore have every incentive to push back their recruiting timelines and encourage young people to acquire crucial human skills first—the kinds of skills that can best be developed by working in communities to tackle social problems. And young people themselves, even those who might want to run a major company someday, would benefit immensely from devoting the early years of their careers to such challenges."

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/02/first-jobs-graduates-predict-future/685892/

#FirstJobs #Schools #HigherEd #JobMarket #WageSlavery

"This might at least help to pose the problem, which is not so much that workers as a whole are turning to the right as that the class is fundamentally fractured by the material interests deriving from the market position of its component parts as Weber noted long ago. Framed in this way, the necessary strategy would seem to be not to accommodate the rightward drift to little avail, but to find a basis on which to suture that divide, one that speaks both to highly specific, culturally inflected market interests as well as class-wide interests rooted in the common experience of wage labour.

This politics must start from the observation that the economic interests of wage earners under capitalism are highly differentiated and can point in different, even contradictory political directions. Class interests and economic interests are by no means identical. It is not a matter of appealing to ‘economic’ interests over ‘social’ or ‘cultural’ interests (misleadingly termed ‘identity’ politics). Rather, it is a matter of developing a materialist politics that is at once specific and general, and which addresses workers’ lives in the experientially accessible realm of market relations, and their potential in the experientially distant structure of ownership."

https://newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/first-principles

#Politics #Left #LeftWing #Capitalism #ClassWarfare #PoliticalEconomy #WageSlavery #IdentityPolitics

Coitadinhos desses investidores e accionistas "pobrezinhos" vulgo capitalistas...

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Pity those "poor" investors and shareholders AKA capitalists...

"Gross domestic product measures all the value added in the economy. For example, the value added by a manufacturer is its sales minus inputs such as parts and raw materials. That value is then distributed either to labor as wages and benefits, or to capital as profits and interest. Some value added is also allocated to depreciation, the cost of replacing assets as they wear out or become obsolete.

The shift to capital from labor has actually been under way for more than 40 years. Labor received 58% of the total proceeds of economic output, as measured by gross domestic income (conceptually similar to GDP), in 1980. By the third quarter of last year that had plummeted to 51.4%. Profits’ share, meanwhile, rose from 7% to 11.7%.

In the 1980s and 1990s, the demise of unions and the spread of outsourcing sapped workers’ bargaining power. The nature of capital also changed: Businesses spent less on long-lived buildings and factories and more on computer equipment, software and intellectual property that must be replaced every few years.

And then there is automation. Its impact showed up first in manufacturing as machines, robots and computers took the place of workers. In 1980, 66% of value added in factories went to labor as wages and benefits, said Pascual Restrepo, a Yale University economist. By the 2000s, that was down to 45%.

This was great for manufacturing productivity and consumers who got cheaper products. But it meant that workers who might have landed good-paying factory jobs took lower-paid work elsewhere. This can explain about half the drop in labor’s share of output between 1987 and 2016, according to a study by Restrepo and Daron Acemoglu of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology."

https://www.wsj.com/economy/jobs/capital-labor-wealth-economy-2fcf6c2f

#Capitalism #USA #Labor #ClassWarfare #Inequality #WageSlavery #Capital

Today in Labor History February 6, 1919: The Seattle General Strike began. 65,000 workers participated. Longshoremen, trolley operators and bartenders also participated. The strike began in response to government sanctioned wage cuts. Both the AF of L and the IWW participated. During the strike, the workers formed councils, which took over virtually all major city services, including food distribution and security. They also continued garbage collection. Laundry workers continued to handle hospital laundry. And firefighters remained on duty. They established a system of food distribution, which provided 30,000 meals each day. Any exemption to the work stoppage had to be ok’d by the General Strike Committee. Army veterans created an independent police force to maintain order. The Labor War Veteran's Guard prohibited the use of force and didn’t carry weapons. The regular police made no arrests in any actions related to the strike. Overall, arrests dropped to less than half their normal number.

A pamphlet that was distributed during the strike said, “You are doomed to wage slavery till you die unless you wake up, realize that you and the boss have nothing in common, that the employing class must be overthrown, and that you, the workers, must take over the control of your jobs, and through them, the control over your lives instead of offering yourself up to the masters as a sacrifice six days a week, so that they may coin profits out of your sweat and toil."

The strike ended when they brought in federal troops and the workers were pressured to quit by bureaucrats from the national unions, particularly the AFL.

#workingclass #LaborHistory #generalstrike #seattle #police #union #afl #IWW #wageslavery

Today in Labor History February 3, 1910: Mary Harris "Mother" Jones addressed Milwaukee brewery workers during a two-month stint working alongside women bottle-washers while on leave from the United Mine Workers:

"Condemned to slave daily in the wash-room in wet shoes and wet clothes, surrounded with foul-mouthed, brutal foremen . . . the poor girls work in the vile smell of sour beer, lifting cases of empty and full bottles weighing from 100 to 150 pounds, in their wet shoes and rags, for they cannot buy clothes on the pittance doled out to them. . . . Rheumatism is one of the chronic ailments and is closely followed by consumption . . . An illustration of what these girls must submit to, one about to become a mother told me with tears in her eyes that every other day a depraved specimen of mankind took delight in measuring her girth & passing comments."

#workingclass #LaborHistory #MotherJones #workingconditions #women #exploitation #milwaukee #publichealth #wages #wageslavery

Today in Labor History February 1, 1865: President Lincoln signed the 13th Amendment to the Constitution, abolishing slavery. However, the 13th Amendment does not abolish all forms of slavery. The state is still permitted to force prisoners to work for free, or for wages far below the minimum wage, with virtually no labor rights. They are even allowed to do this and sell the products made by prisoners for a profit, sometimes even getting tax breaks for doing so. Of the 1.2 million people incarcerated in state and federal prisons in the U.S., nearly 800,000 are laboring by force, whether they want to, or not. Roughly 17% of these prisoners work for government-run businesses (e.g., DMV call centers; doing laundry for public hospitals; hazardous spill cleanup; firefighting in state-owned forests); while 3% work for private-sector employers, at extremely low wages, with no labor rights or protections. And, so long as capitalism exists, the rest of us are wage slaves, forced to choose between selling our bodies and our time to whoever will agree to pay us, or losing our ability to feed and house our families, sometimes at paltry wages that have been driven down by competition from the incarcerated slave labor force. Sadly, with the right-wing backlash against everything “woke,” politicians and pundits successfully convinced California voters to vote against Prop 6, in 2025, which would have banned prison slave labor in their state.

https://www.epi.org/publication/rooted-racism-prison-labor/

#workingclass #LaborHistory #slavery #Abolition #lincoln #thirteenthamendment #prison #capitalism #wageslavery #BlackMastodon