“ According to Magne Mogstad, a Norwegian economist at the University of Chicago, Nordic countries primarily reduce economic and social inequalities by narrowing the differences in pre-tax income. They achieve this through a centralised system of wage bargaining that lifts wages at the bottom end and compresses them at the top. Because wage compression deliberately flattens the hierarchy of status we place on different types of work, a person’s value is more than her “marginal product”, in economics jargon. The fact that a doctor and a plumber can live a life with similar standards or expectations makes it easier to believe that we are all in this together. The moral philosopher Elizabeth Anderson describes this as “relational equality”. The point of equality, Anderson argues, is equality in social relations. “
@cjd@SpectralActivity the slave labor thing. i guess you just mean 'cheap labor', but immigrant labor isn't cheap in europe as they all immediately have rights to a state-sponsored apartment, food, spending money...
Cheap, whatever. The big point is if you dump enough young workers into the system, you can push wages down almost arbitrarily.
At least until they drag you out of your house and stick your head on the end of a pike...
I would use the US H1B system as an example, 20 people living in a house (illegal but common), working for an employer that if they quit that job or want to work somewhere else, they're deported. You can fiddle around with the exact definition of slavery but it's disingenuous because they have the same impact as slaves did in ancient Rome.
@cjd@SpectralActivity it's not at all the same. calling people who fly around half the world out of their own volition to take jobs where they are paid 10 times as much as they are at home 'slaves' is not a sensible thing.
