Comment on Richest super balances to be taxed at higher rates after Greens agree to back Labor plan
FreedomAdvocate@lemmy.net.au 1 week agoThat entire perspective is absurd joke. People being paid to do their job are getting what they’re owed. If they want to start a business they can go ahead and do it and reap the rewards……or the losses. That’s the risk.
eureka@aussie.zone 1 week ago
Is this claiming that the amount someone deserves is determined by their contract? That’s an odd assumption, even if it’s a normalised one.
We live under a system where millions of people don’t have, and can’t get, the capital (or expertise) needed to start their own legal profitable business, and effectively must resort to selling themselves to earn a living wage. And even if that wasnt the case, we obviously can’t all run individual businesses in this system without being outcompeted and being forced back into proletarianisation. Most of the population being workers rather than business owners isn’t some personal decision, it’s a basic premise of capitalism.
And there isn’t much power a worker has to influence what salaries are being offered on the market. The business owner sets the wage, and if there are enough unemployed and underemployed people looking for jobs to avoid homelessness, business owners collectively decide how low they can all go (and luckily there’s a minimum wage so they can’t just race to the bottom livable wage). So there’s no material reason to assume that a person only deserves the amount their salary is - it’s not based on how useful a worker is, just on how low a business owner can offer.
Let’s take an extreme example to illustrate: slave labour. Or let’s dial it back: prison labour - Canberra Times reports prisoners get paid about $2 an hour for their labour, AusPrisons.com lists weekly rates the same ballpark. I got paid far more as a teen performing menial minimum wage factory work. Clearly these people are being paid so low because its legal to do so and because they’re not in a good position to decline such abysmal offers. Not because their labour isn’t valuable, not because their work isn’t worth more, not because the business owner is taking more risk. It’s because they’re vulnerable employees and they can be exploited more for profit.
As a side note:
I have been underpayed thousands of dollars by multiple jobs. So I’m not even getting paid what I’m legally owed until I or the union point out the wage theft.