@tinker Wow, do you not get a pension at all? Alongside the state pension (which is pretty low) I contribute 8% and my employer contributes 10%.

I naively thought pensions were pretty universal.

Also can't quite believe it's legal for you to not be paid when you're unwell. We have annual limits but are fully paid for days off ill up to that limit.

@tdp_org @tinker Can confirm. I'm approaching 40 and I have no pension and I've never been paid for a sick day in my life and everything I have for retirement I've invested myself.

That's just how it is here.

@louis @tdp_org @tinker

That's just atrocious. It's not like we're sick for fun?!

@Mab_813

You've gotta flip it around.

It's not a questions of what is right or wrong... It's a question of corporate profits. Corporations sole goal is to make money.

You do this by increasing the price of the good or service to as high as it can go (charge what the market can bear) and decreasing the costs of making that product or service....

...including the cost of labor, or human capital, or human resources.

So... if you aren't working, why should the company pay you? That's a loss for them and affects profits.

You might say, well, if they don't pay you can just leave for another job.... but they're all like this. So where will you go?

So generally what companies do is they treat human resources AS CONSUMABLES...

Read that again.... their workers are meant to be *disposable*. Ramp them up. Force labor out of them as much as possible. Pay them as low as they'll take. Burn them out. Fire them (immediately, without cause, it's legal - look up "work at will states")

Then hire up the next person who is damned near close to homelessness and is desperate for anything to be able to eat.

If they have a degree, they're under a LOT of debt with high interest rates which means they won't be able to pay off the debt which means they need more money than even the cost of living just to keep surviving.

Make sure the social safety nets are gone so that folks will work or die. If they ARE able to save up money, hit them hard when they get sick (healthcare is for profit as well). Easy to get predatory student loans at high interest rates to pay for education that continually costs more and more and more.

If they lose their house, they become homeless, so make being homeless a crime and you can get actual slave labor out of them in prison (look up the 13th amendment in our constitution... it ENSHRINES slavery).

The US has the highest amount of prisoners and the highest per capita amount of prisoners. We love our slave labor. Homelessness is increasing. Wages are stagnant and dropping. Even the last vestiges of our social safety nets (guaranteed right to buy health insurance that doesn't cover anything and an embattled social security)

Edit to Add: "The system isn't broken... it was designed and built this way. And it's working exactly as intended."

@louis @tdp_org

@tinker @Mab_813 @tdp_org Yup.

Very small businesses sometimes put the welfare of their employees first, but they can't really compete with the companies that put profits first. And, as soon as any company grows big enough for an IPO, the stock market demands unending short-term gains which involve hollowing out what made the company great before its IPO, including employee benefits.

Everything here is geared to screw the people at the bottom to enrich just a few folks at the top.

@tinker @Mab_813 @tdp_org And the saddest part is that the customers (who are also the workers) seem to agree with this system.

Everyone says "Oh, why can't they make things that last like they used to?" But small businesses go bankrupt trying to do just that every single day. Consumers want things cheap and disposable, and that includes labor. It's why you can get fired in so many states *for no reason at all* perfectly legally.