I remember when I was younger, having low unemployment was considered a good thing, universally desired it seemed. Only in late stage capitalism is it a requirement that we have people who can’t find a job so the working class doesn’t get too uppity.
Reactionary take in response to billionaires being put in their place by a working class that is gaining back the union culture of the 20th century and pro-labour fervour of the 19th, assisted by the technology of the 21st.
More people are supposed to not have jobs, but at the same time, not be collecting unemployment or public assistance. So basically… go panhandle, live in a tent city, go to prison, or I guess just die is their suggestion.
If they died or went to prison then unemployment would go back down. The truth is they have no intelligent solutions and their economic beliefs are all make believe.
I thought of that but considered maybe they just want people to die, anyway. Agreed, I don’t get the impression this guy is super good at societal engineering or economics, other than as such might benefit people like him in the short term.
This effect was analysed in great detail by Marx in the 19th century, so it’s not a characteristic of late stage capitalism, just of capitalism.
His term “Reserve army of labour” refers to the unemployed.
Taking them as a whole, the general movements of wages are exclusively regulated by the expansion and contraction of the industrial reserve army…
From Capital by Marx
This is where you realize that capitalists don’t care about improving society, they just care about maximizing profit.
Full employment means full utilization of the productive forces of say society, but it also means there is a high demand for workers and a low supply thus the price of labour increases which is bad for business.
When an industry reaches a certain stage of development, capitalists make agreements with each other (economic cartels) effectively turning into monopolies and begin the cycle of destroying productive forces to increase profits. They reduce labour cost by doing massive layoffs, inflate the price of goods by decreasing production, etc… A very clear example of this is the oil cartel (OPEC), but it happens silently in every single sector.
Low unemployment is a good thing- to a certain percentage (3% i think?). Not 0%.
People are arguing saying we expect some people living it tents - no, we expect to have people unemployed for a short time while they swap jobs, or seasonal workers out of season, or new grads looking for their first role.
A good thing for who exactly?
Uh… people and the economy??? To copy paste my other comment
I’ll happy tell a new grad they don’t have to work full time in a minimum wage job while they work through the process of acquiring their first post-grad role, or the student to enjoy their gap year traveling the country. Happily tell the seasonal worker who did 15 hour days over summer they made enough to have 6 months off. The stay at home parent that they are doing a good thing even though they aren’t getting paid for it, or the person transferring between jobs that they don’t have to start the day after resigning from their other role.
Say that to the 3% in person
Happy to. I’ll happy tell a new grad they don’t have to work full time in a minimum wage job while they work through the process of acquiring their first post-grad role, or the student to enjoy their gap year traveling the country. Happily tell the seasonal worker who did 15 hour days over summer they made enough to have 6 months off. The stay at home parent that they are doing a good thing even though they aren’t getting paid for it, or the person transferring between jobs that they don’t have to start the day after resigning from their other role. Do you want to tell them all to get back into paid employment right now to keep unemployment at 0%?
There is a difference between unemployed but needing to work in order to afford food and shelter, and unemployed but being able to stay out of the workforce for a while. A lot of people need work but can’t find any. Certain degrees of unemployment are fine if those who can’t find work are taken care of, through a social safety net and similar.
Correct - but the unemployment rate doesn’t take that into account.
I lie, I gave a few bad examples. Those of working age but not looking (like the SAHP) are out of workforce and not included in unemployment rate. But seasonal, grads looking for the right job and those transferring between jobs are still unemployed and form that 3% i mentioned. The other type (structural unemployment) that relates to not having the skills that employers search for we should have as close to 0% as possible and that part is a concern.
Someone should unemploy him, you know, to help his numbers.
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Laughter is the best medicine?
Should be un something for sure.
Unemployment is a luxury that the rich can afford more of.
Fuck this cunt
In the face…
Repeatedly…
With a brick!
Or an anchor!
You said it before I could…Thank you.
Unemployment has to jump 40 to 50 percent, in my view. We need to see some pain in the economy. We need to remind people that they work for the employer, not the other way around
What a fucking asshole! True “we need to show those uppity peasant who’s boss” energy 🤬
Sounds like he’s mad he can’t afford as many yachts.
Absolutely
If you can’t put your yacht on a bigger yacht, how is life worth living?
Pfft, you need a golf course on a yacht in a pool on a house on a yacht!
Employee and employer work TOGETHER. I would love to meet this guy in person, real let them eat cake energy. Anyway, where’s my guillotine sharpener.?
Employee and employer work TOGETHER
Sounds like commie talk to me. How long have you been a member of the Communist Party of America? /s
The thing is, the workers work for money, not for the employer.
The employer is just a middleman that can easily be replaced.
Absolutely!
Indeed. Anyone earning more than 40k annual salary belongs to the richest 3% in the world. Get ready gringos, we third world countries are coming for you
When we have nothing to lose, then we have no problem eating the billionaires.
If billionaires ruined the economy in such a way that 50 percent of people couldn’t afford to feed their families then I like to think that people would simply eat the billionaires.
But that’s wishful thinking and seeing how people interact in public and online makes me think that way too many people still think billionaires are awesome.
If billionaires ruined the economy in such a way that 50 percent of people couldn’t afford to feed their families
What do you mean “if”? They’re well on the way already and it’s getting worse, not better.
then I like to think that people would simply eat the billionaires.
Problem with that is that owning everything also includes bodyguards and even de facto private armies.
way too many people still think billionaires are awesome.
Unfortunately you’re absolutely right.
Tim Gurner is talking like someone who has never been an employee, much less experienced actual poverty.
You talking about me? Because you’d be wrong on both counts. That’s part of why I despise greedy and power-hungry billionaires (but I repeat myself) like him…
Or did you mean him?
I meant him. Apologies if that came across the wrong way. I’ll edit my post for clarity.
Fair enough 😁
i think this guys face should meet a crowbar
That’s a weird way to spell guillotine
Guillotine was the bourgeoisie tool to separate the head from their necks. The current ruling class is the modern iteration of that bourgeoisie. I think that the wall and a Kalashnikov would be much more representative of the tools of the proletariat.
It looks like it already has
well since he failed to learn from it maybe they should repeat the lesson.
I hope this isn’t a bannable comment, but someone needs to bring out the fucking guillotine for these fucks.
We should indeed have more unemployed people, since we should strive to a world where nobody has to work anymore.
Implement Universal Basic Income.
Or we could just get rid of money and everyone gets what they need? Like, money is just something we made up.
Good luck getting anyone means to give up something without getting something.
I’m pretty sure if you got rid of money people would immediately reinvent it.
I hate cleaning and I pay someone to do it for me. What am I going to do? Barter?
The problem isn’t money it’s lack of worker protections and consolidation of power.
Welcome to North Korea!
UBI with capitalist relations of production is simply not sustainable.
Where would UBI come from if nobody is working?
Automated production.
It is easier to see the extinction of humanity than the end of capitalism. But if we cannot imagine the end of capitalism we will see the extinction of humanity.
Eventually, though (as Sophie From Mars speculates) the population will be reduced to where the USD and EU are meaningless, and the remaining bands act more like mutual aid.
The question is if humanity has been reduced by then to tens of millions, or thousands.
UBI in imperialist countries comes from the global south people labour.
What is it with property developers and being brainless dicks?
People having been throwing shit on plots of land since the beginning of time. It probably scratches that sweet spot of little thought and a lot of money that most people seem to be after.
“passive income!” when they talk to each other, but tons of hard work when described to anyone else.
Property developers have been activelly helped by governments and central banks for at least 2 decades who have done all sorts of things to rig the housing markets to always go up, even though to owner-occupiers higher prices are almost never a good thing (sure, the house is worth more, but if you try and cash it in by moving, any other house you buy or rent is also more expensive, so you gain nothing from your home having a higher valuation).
A guy his age has spent his entire life getting the message from top politicians and bankers that his economic activities are more important than just about all others and get rewarded no matter what (it really is a “no skill needed, just lots of starting money” domain), so it’s only natural if he behaves accordingly.
PS: Also, given that people keep reelecting the politicians who keep sacrificing the whole Economy (and keep selecting central bankers who do the same) to serve his interests and those of others in the same domain as her is, he probably thinks most people are morons. Worse, he’s probably right.
This is the original “stop eating smashed avocado on toast” guy.
This guy need to improve the planet by being a lot less alive.
About 100% less should do the trick.
I live in his city and I will not hesitate to tip my $6.50 latte over his narcissistic noggin, should the opportunity arise.
Unemployment needs to jump 40-50%??? Is this guy seriously that utterly disconnected with reality? In Aus it’s never hit more than 12% in the last 4 decades, the economy would just collapse if unemployment got that high. It only got to 32% during the Great Depression in the US.
utterly disconnected with reality
is there another way to accumulate that amount of wealth?
having said that, if unemployment is 10% and he thinks it needs to jump (and not to be 50%) then unemployment would be at 15%
If unemployment is 10%, then the actual amount of people who aren’t employed anywhere is 50%. Because the laborforce participation rate is only 60% of the population.
That’s the difference between percentage and percentage points. If the unemployment rate were 5% then a 50% increase would make it 7.5%
An increase of 50 percentage points would make it 55%
I think he means 40 to 50% higher than now. It’s historically quite low at the moment.
It is low now, but also (in the US) the last few administrations played games with how they defined it, mainly by excluding people who had basically given up on finding employment.
That’s nothing new. That’s how it’s always been defined. I’m not unemployed if I’m not looking for work. Otherwise housewives would be unemployed, disabled people, pensioners, etc.
The one weird part is people transitioning just are counted towards the unemployed numbers even though they have a job coming.
They expanded the definition 5-10 years ago at various times, which resulted in a lower reported rate.
You have a cite for that?
According to this it hasn’t changed since 1945 when it was defined.
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I was baffled by that comment. Did he mean 40-50% higher or 40-50%. Huge difference.
If I understand his business correctly, that amount of unemployment would cause him to fail
His wording means it should increase 40-50%. Not that it should be 40-50%.
Do you know what percentages are?
“We need to see unemployment rise,” he argued. “Unemployment has to jump 40 to 50 percent, in my view. We need to see some pain in the economy. We need to remind people that they work for the employer, not the other way around… There’s been a systemic change where the employees feel that the employer is extremely lucky to have them, as opposed to the other way around.”
You love to see it.
Also, lots of comments about guillotines here. We might get some concern trolls about that, but at the very least, it sure is a problem when a billionaire like Tim feels like he can say something so outrageous without any consequences.
Funny thing that we witnessed in Iran: Violence is not the answer until the very hour it is.
Law enforcement in Georgia are attacking mutual aid stations. They’re recognizing and harassing the non-violent methods we would affect change.
And the billionaires are telling us they’d have us starve if we refuse to live as bonded servants.
This is how civil wars start.
People become violent when they no options for anything. The Syrian Civil War is a prefect example of this, in the lead up the civil war, there was economic polices that benefited a select few people, intense drought that drove food prices up for the common people, and a lack of way to show anger in a healthy democratic way (strikes, protests, etc.), lead to a lot of anger. The anger eventually exploded causing a civil war.
Right now, we all have a cost of living crisis ongoing, lack of political leadership to resolve these issues, and growing wealth inequality. The next global recession is going to have lot of angry people, who’s only options are going to be die a slow death or do something and maybe die a slow death.
When it happens remember to direct your anger at the right groups of people, political leaders who championed the status quo for corporations and billionaires, talking heads who tell us to be “grateful”, and corporations and billionaires focused on wealth hoarding. These people got us into this mess and will gladly leave all of us to sink if it means they get to keep their dirty hands on power.
When you vote, you are exercising political authority, you’re using force. And force, my friends, is violence. The supreme authority from which all other authorities are derived.
–Robert A. Heinlein
Any consequences! Exactly that. I’m sick of this rich man culture of fuck you I got mine. There needs to be a systematic change where the rich feel that they are extremely lucky to be allowed to horde so much and keep there heads. They’ve grown lazy and arrogant. Consequences for your selfish actions!
I hope he loses everything he has, and if he doesn’t, I hope people steal what’s left.
Stock market needs to go down to put arrogant Billionaire in their place.
that hurts a lot more people than just billionaires
So does the unemployment rate going up.
But at least it hurts billionaires, which the whole world can cheer about.
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The ruling class has clearly shown that the economy and the stock market are not as interconnected as they have been in the past. The markets are terribly inflated, it NEEDS to go down, or the eventual crash is going to be 1920’s bad.
The guillotine building industry has to jump to put these corporate dirtbags in their place
Can we bring out the guillotines already? Serious.
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Arrogant billionaire complains about having to operate in a free market. Oh the irony…
