Political Memes

Two words:

Record Profits

Hospitals will ruin your life but most of the staff lives paycheck to paycheck.

I used to work as a building superintendent in a condo. I did the math and the corporation brought in around half a million a month in maintenance fees and the operating costs aren't anywhere that high. I used to get paid minimum wage. I did the math on the amount of units in comparison to my paycheck. It was something like a dollar per unit was going towards my pay. So whenever anyone acted like I should bend over backwards for them, I remembered that their particular issues and complaints were only worth $1 to me

In the condo and building maintenance industry, the less you do the more you make, the super and cleaners do everything and get paid shit, the manager and offsite manager's boss make a fortune

Admin and c-suite taking huge salaries and sucking companies, schools and agencies dry.

Eat the middlemen

Fuckingcapitalists

Unionize or cut out the middle man by collectively walking out, and forming a new daycare (microcredit,... the parents will flock towards the experienced staff with brand new equipment, selected by competent people).

It should be that easy. In the left spectrum (unions) and the capitalist spectrum (new competition). If it's not, then you don't live in ether system.

Corpos have figured out the things people actually need and are gouging

Can’t help but notice this person mentioned three extremely regulated industries where the government provides money to help people afford it.

Three industries we’ve decided are “too important to leave to the free market”.

Three industries where the government (a) restricts supply and (b) subsidizes demand, three industries where costs have skyrocketed, three industries where middle men take massive shares and leave nothing to the workers.

Free markets don’t do that, because in free markets there’s competition. If we had a free market, then anyone could take care of old people, take care of children, and teach courses on philosophy and engineering.

But none of those markets are open. The government maintains tight entry barriers that require enormous sums of money and legal effort to overcome.

They’re too important to be left to the free market, so they produce endless misery.

I was offered a job to teach at a college. Was a life long dream of mine (to teach). But the massive pay cut forced me to pass. Students should pay less, teachers should be paid more. I can't say for certain where the money's going, but it's not anywhere to the benefit of students that's for damn sure. And this is now becoming a problem with these for profit colleges. It's costs too much for students to go, and they pay to little to keep teachers. If you don't have teachers, you can't have students. If you have no students, you have no use for teachers. And since the bottom line is the only thing that's important, you lose entire departments. The college that was interested in me, is the one I went to. And they have maybe 25% of tech department left from when I went there. When I was there, there was networking, programming, server administration, desktop/server support, web design/e-commerce, etc. We had a new building and took up most of it. Now they have high turnover in teachers because they can't/won't pay them enough. And they have a general IT course to give you exposure to various things for the purpose of transferring the credit to a bachelors degree. And a Cybersecurity, Virtualization, & Networking course.

you can stop paying corpos for services that people you know can render

I do volunteer office work for a non-profit childcare center, and have looked at their budget and their books. It's basically impossible to efficiently do at the scale of a single center in a high cost of living city.

If you're paying teachers an average of $30/hour and maintaining a ratio of 4 kids to 1 teacher at all times, and covering 50 hours per week of operational time (for example, operational hours between 8am and 6pm 5 days per week), and you actually have enough staff to not pay overtime, that's $1500/week in wages per teacher, or $375/week per student. Throw in taxes, healthcare, paid vacation, and staffing in redundancy so that you can handle illness and the unexpected, and each kid might be at $400-450/week in labor costs of the direct work of watching and teaching the kids.

But in reality, childcare is in crisis now because a qualified worker could probably get a higher paying nanny job for 1 or 2 kids at a time, so there's a severe shortage of workers even at that $30/hour average wage. And so there needs to be overtime, and that creeps up to $450-500/week for workers.

And then you have the ongoing overhead: rent, utilities, furniture/equipment, toys, books, other supplies, etc. Most centers provide food, and have to contract out for that, too.

And then there's the cost of management. Someone needs to run the place, there might need to be something like a receptionist, and these centers often have to contract out their bookkeeping, electronic records, or even basics like running a website. Most have extra features like electronic reports and maybe even pictures/video for parents, and that costs money, too.

So even on the non-profit side, without a profit motive or distributions to shareholders, the industry as a whole has a mismatch between the prices parents are able to pay versus the bare minimum acceptable cost of providing that service. (In fact, the nonprofit I'm thinking of has donations coming in to cover things like tuition assistance for parents who need it, or a lot of the supplies, and volunteers like me who can provide specialized labor for no cost to the center.)

Childcare should be subsidized by the government, and there's basically no way this industry can continue to exist based purely on revenues from parents alone. Otherwise the industry will enter a death spiral and the number of people simply unable to afford kids will grow out of control.

Yes, thank you. I understand you are privileged.

It's almost like there's greedy fatcats in every industry stuffing all of the profits down their fat gullets while everyone else barely holds off starvation.

Worker and Consumer Cooperatives should be the only way to form a business. Fuck external and unequal capital ownership by shareholders.