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Not sure if it's still common practice or not, but at one point Salmon that was caught in Scotland was being frozen, shipped 10,000 miles to China, filleted by underpaid workers, then refrozen and shipped 10,000 miles back to Scotland to be sold in supermarkets.
Recruitment under capitalism is incredibly inefficient as well. People should not need to apply to hundreds of jobs over months and months, doing absolutely zero real work in the meantime, just to get an interview. There should be some way to automate things so that an average candidate can tell a website they're looking for jobs of certain types, fill in their info once, and then companies who are looking for that type of candidate automatically get an easy, manageable list of 2-5 people who have the qualifications they're looking for. Doing things this way, the automated system can put each candidate on the market for no more than maybe 10 jobs at a time, and if they are picked for none of these 10 jobs, there could be some type of fallback guaranteed job available that you are automatically recruited into if you give the OK.
The stress, dread and anguish this causes unemployed workers is a feature, not a bug. If you are desperate for a job, you'll accept lower wages for more labour. That's also partly why employers create a bunch of hoops for candidates to jump through. Raises desperation and creates a sunken cost mentality to the worker if at the end the employer reveals the position is not as advertised.
When i read the concept about "reserve army of labour" (kinda cringy name ngl) it all clicked, wages can't go up if there is an entire army of unemployed willing to do the same work for less. The demand/supply argument that libertarians like to make is irrelevant when there is a huge supply of unemployed available.
made me think of this line from Dark Marxism blog:
Capital in a scientific, not a metaphorical sense, is a control system. And it is capital, as a control system, that ultimately creates and maintains the abstraction we call exchange-value. Capital is the abstractor.
taken from this post: https://ianwrightsite.wordpress.com/2020/09/03/marx-on-capital-as-a-real-god-2/
I made !atwork@lemmygrad.ml just now for this kind of stories because I think people might want to tell theirs too
great idea, i do have many thoughts on my industry that i'd like to share.
Middlemen in basically every single service in Neo-liberal hells like the US. An example. Let's say you need to get a clearance to work for some specific Government function. (yes clearances are a whole shit show of exclusions etc etc, but let's ignore that for now.) There needs to be a process that you follow to make sure you meet the requirements for that clearance.
Ultimately all of this information the government already has on you. Criminal Records, possibly Fingerprints, relative wealth, family connections, etc etc. So much like a NCIS check, if the government was functional and no one needed to be a middleman, it would be a Yes/No immediately, with potentially the needs to fingerprint you, as that was written into the requirements. Unfortunately several security cottage industries have sprung up around that process and it is in those industries best interests to make sure the process can never be improved. So the government can never move beyond paper records. You have to go to a special "certified" and private fingerprinting place. You have to physically mail different packets to different state police agencies to get your background check done. You have to talk with different arms of the government to provide tax information, bank accounts, birth certificates, social security numbers. None of this should be necessary, but every middleman that has shoe-horned their way into the process ensures it will forever be necessary.The ultimate consequence is that now everyone thinks government is "inefficient," and more services become privatized.
For real, the "service" economy should be renamed to middlemen economy.
"Survival of the richest by rushkoff" is a fun read on how the tech industry boils down to a bunch of middlemen "going meta" between themselves, its a shallow critic but fun read.
The ultimate consequence is that now everyone thinks government is “inefficient,” and more services become privatized.
You have to hand it to them, they know what they're doing. Bastards.
And if you want something done? You ask one 'provider' who tells you it's not in their remit so you have to go to a second 'provider' who tells you it's not in their remit and they send you to the first 'provider' and so on. Both providers promised the government they can cut the cost of the service to basically zero and the government is happy to pay them for making the system 'efficient'; which means driving service users to the market, where someone will charge a fee and still not provide the service because pretending to do so is still offering more than you'll get from anywhere else.
And the owner of all these 'provider' companies is a parent corporation that will make the government decision-maker/legislator a board member with dividend rights for doing fuck all except funnelling public money into private hands. Did I mention they're bastards?
Do the chickpeas taste the same? I'm wondering if we also sacrifice flavour/quality due to this practice?
I thought I was joking when I said, "The history of all hitherto society is the history of the struggle between chickpeas and tahini".
Lol. Want to experience some really brain destroying stupidity with Capitalism just work in the supply chain of pharmaceuticals. Every single supplier of materials has their own separate way to documenting shit and there is absolutely zero consistency between notifications and documentation so it is just a clusterfuck of information and trying to decipher what they are saying or where the information is.
