• KillingTimeItself@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    16 days ago

    shouldn’t this be the default position of the economy though? Especially in a democratic society, where voters are actually educated.

    The workforce is your primary labor pool, so assuming enough governmentally enforced labor protections, and significant drawbacks in more exploitation, it will inevitably trend towards less.

    • PeriodicallyPedantic@lemmy.ca
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      16 days ago

      It should be, yet it isn’t.
      There was a brief window in north America where that was the case (or at least they were making progress), but that was decades ago.

        • PeriodicallyPedantic@lemmy.ca
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          1 day ago

          To be clear, when I said “it isn’t” I meant it’s not the default.

          I dont really care enough to go dig up hard numbers.

          But the time I’m talking about is after WW2, when the new deal was still going strong, and the top marginal tax rates for people and companies inhibited accumulation of wealth, and incentivized reinvesting profits into the company and workers instead of into exec bonuses and stock buybacks.

          The era had lots of other issues, notably bigotry, and consumer protections, but worker protections were moving in the right direction.

          Heath and safety have kept improving, but employment security has gotten worse because the incentives we had for companies to treat employees well have gone, and put employees at a disadvantageous position when bargaining with their employer