No pity for the bosses

Here's the thing. The reason why people don't support taxing the rich is this: we all hope to be rich one day. We all have that hope. Even though none of us will ever become rich. We imagine ourselves as rich, and think, no I would not want to be taxed. I want to keep all the money!

When I had started working, or even now, a couple of years back, when I heard of workers trying to unionise at Apple, or Amazon, I used to think, why would these people not let Apple (or Amazon) do the work. I believed the company line.

I used to believe that unions were antithetical to good businesses. They did not let businesses do the good work of serving their customers.

I do not think that anymore. In most cases, we the people do not get a voice. Monopolies decide to make services worse, while raising prices. We, can not and do not do anything.

Doctorow writes about this often at Pluralistic. He wrote about how this is a thing for nurses in America.

Take Shiftkey: nurses are required to log into Shiftkey and indicate which shifts they are available for, and if they are assigned any of those shifts later but can't take them, their app-based score declines and they risk not being offered shifts in the future. But Shiftkey doesn't guarantee that you'll get work on any of those shifts – in other words, nurses have to pledge not to take any work during the times when Shiftkey might need them, but they only get paid for those hours where Shiftkey calls them out. Nurses assume all the risk that there won't be enough demand for their services.

Each Shiftkey nurse is offered a different pay-scale for each shift. Apps use commercially available financial data – purchased on the cheap from the chaotic, unregulated data broker sector – to predict how desperate each nurse is. The less money you have in your bank accounts and the more you owe on your credit cards, the lower the wage the app will offer you. This is a classic example of what the legal scholar Veena Dubal calls "algorithmic wage discrimination" – a form of wage theft that's supposedly legal because it's done with an app.

The way we treat our healthcare workers and teachers and most people for that matter, is truly hideous. All, in search of, in service of profit. The businesses do not care about their workers, or society. The only thing that matters is shareholder value. It's weird.

When you target the vulnerable, and not to improve their lives, but to make their lives worse, you should know you are in a shitty business.