Why is it ironic? What does you comment aim to achieve? It's a statement of a fact, are you implying that should we aim for shittier conditions for tech workers? Really sometimes I wish people would activate braincells before writing
I don't consider 'tech workers', working class. We're higher paid, our jobs do not destroy our bodies, in my mind it's a purely middle class career. I agree with your actual point though, we are pampered.
Of course tech workers are working class. You either give your labour for a living or you invest capital in businesses, and almost every tech worker is doing the former.
Not everyone who is working class is on minimum wage. Train drivers or boiler engineers or site foremen? All paid very well, in the UK as much or even more than tech workers.
I come from a working class background so I'm very aware of all of this. However my family (extended+) have all had poorly paying jobs, coal miners, nurses, pallet makers, warehouse, electricians, labourers, bakers. I'm the first to go to uni and do an easy job that pays well.
It is physically easy and it is very different from the other jobs I've listed.
Our jobs aren't working class.
Edit: by the by, boiler engineers are not paid well. A self-employed plumber with a gas cert can earn a good wage, but your average british gas tradie isn't bringing home half of what I earn
There are plenty of factory/labor jobs that don’t require people to wreck their bodies. Many of them provide workstations where people have the option to sit/stand or they are walking around most of the time. Occasionally bending over, not too much heavily lifting. Many of my ex coworkers who did these jobs were in fantastic shape. It’s disingenuous to pick out an extreme example.
> By the definition you give then people who claim benefits and do not work are not “working class”.
Yes, people who do not rely on overwhelmingly on selling labor for their support are not working class (people who are working class might transitionally be on support without working, or might be on support while working, depending on the benefit structure, but if their principal source of support over an extended time is not selling labor, then they aren’t, as a matter of economic class, “working class”.)
Just as someone isn’t part of the capitalist class if over time they do get most of their support from working and don’t have capital holdings. Economic class is a description of how you relate to the economy.
> It is delusional to think our jobs are on the same level as someone who grafts all day with their hands and does back breaking work for minimum wage.
The proletarian class isn’t defined by the nature of labor, but by the fact of selling it as one’s overwhelming-majority means of support within the economy. Yes, there are important differences within the class as well as the broad common features and interests.
this is a valid definition of “working class,” (I.e. non-owners), but it’s not how the phrase is typically used.
This phrase would include any non-owner professional like lawyers or doctors or even upper management.
On top of that many tech workers don’t fit even your definition because equity is often an important part of comp. That’s not the case for lawyers or doctors or management in other industries.
Using standard and customary vernacular, tech workers are not “working class.”
> Of course tech workers are working class. You either give your labour for a living or you invest capital in businesses
I mean, you’ve left out the petit bourgeoisie entirely, describing only the proletariat and haut bourgeoisie. Its true that some tech workers are in the proletariat (part of the proletarian intelligentsia) but a whole lot of tech workers are petit bourgeois, having a mixed reliance on capital and labor (not, for tech workers as such, the classical pattern of applying their own labor to their own capital, but that’s not the only pattern of mixed reliance that puts people in the middle class that sits between the working class and pure capitalists.)
Eh, compared to my relatives in the trades, construction, retail and warehouse work, and the jobs I had in high school, I'm on easy street here.
Negligible risk of trips or falls, no lifting anything heavy, no working around powerful machines or using dangerous tools, no dealing with chemicals, no need for hard hats or safety boots, no working in hot or cold or wet conditions, no working with knives, no splattering hot oil, no working in the dark, no loud noise, no working near moving vehicles, no standing on your feet 8 hours a day, no boss that gets mad if you're off sick, no mandatory overtime, very low stress.
The only thing that makes tech work more dangerous than sitting on my ass on the sofa is the office's free chocolate.
The more I think about it, the more I come to the conclusion that the "middle class" was a fiction invented by the capital class to divide the working class in two and pit them against each other. If you or someone in your family has to work so that you can survive, you are working class.
> the "middle class" was a fiction invented by the capital class to divide the working class
Totally agree.
> If you or someone in your family has to work so that you can survive, you are working class.
It's not so easy.
A dentist owning his own doctor's practice - the means of production, quickly worth several million dollars - does pretty clearly belong to the (petit) bourgeoise. His interest are often clearly opposed to that of the staff he employs. Every dollar saved on salaries, every day of vacation denied means more money in his pocket.
I am not sure putting people working from pay check to pay check or having to work two jobs to survive in the same category as people getting middle six-figures TC would be helpful for analyzing the social strata.
You don't want to be divided from the miners who extract the minerals and the factory workers who assemble the crappy tech that we design? I do. It's absolutely squalid over there.
You want to trade off positions with those 10 year olds in the quarries? That's fine. I'd rather go home at night to my family, watch The Wire with my wife for the tenth time, and then when everyone goes to sleep I'd like to come here and post on Hacker News. Please report back with your experiences.
I didn't say that, or anything close to it. Funny how in your eyes the only way to not separate yourself from them is to literally do their job. Maybe you can ignore those 10 year olds in the quarries, but I think it's our responsibility to use our positions to improve their situations. It would be kind of neat if there weren't 10 year olds in the quarries, and they could instead go to school, no?
Then who's going to do the mining? Adults? Do you want your iPhone, your car, your video games, your shoes, your plane trips, or not? All that stuff is gonna be "cost prohibitive" if all of these quarry kids go to school and all if these factory workers go home early. Cause: These unfortunate saps work 14 hours a day, eat straw, and have the philosophical thoughts whipped out of their brains. Effect: We live like kings and post all kinds of philosophy online. Don't believe me about this causality? Good, then we can go back to living like kings. You keep posting about ethics, and I'll keep posting about epistemology.
Yes, it should be adults with good compensation. Child labor should never be acceptable to anyone, especially if you reap the rewards as described! I'd rather not live like a king quite as much, and have them have a better life. Or better yet, I'd rather have billionaires not exist and have both of us live like a king.
I don't know about that. I'm on a first name basis with my CTO. I hope to never see in person those wretched souls mining the cobalt for my Tesla. Ghastly!
The man that invented the concept of classes to divide society in order to make them fight against each other was Marx. He created the concept of "class struggle" along the classes himself.
There was a very important reason for that. Early socialist leaders were usually selected among the best in any trade. The carpenters chose the best and most successful carpenter to represent them, and so on with most professions.
That was simply unacceptable for "intellectuals" like Marx or Lenin or Trotsky that never touched a tool or worked physically on their entire lives, something they were all the time being reminded by actual workers(something Lenin hated so much).
The new Frame made them the bosses on the new system.
Like Natzis could decide who was arian or jew, even if they had dark hair or jew parents, the marxist could decide who was working class and who did not. The children of rich jew merchants that were most marxist revolutionaries could became working class if they said so.
There are lots of people that do not accept the Marxist frame at all because they are not marxist.
>if you or someone in your family has to work so that you can survive, you are working class.
As someone who has lived in Africa , Asia, South America and Europe, I tell you that 90% of people in the US don't need work to survive. Unless by "survive" you mean things like buying a pickup truck.
There are kids in Africa in which "survive" means eating once a day and their minds being confused after two hours of work like learning to read.
Class is a very useful concept to understand societies. It's not even an exclusively Marxist concept. Weber also uses the term, but uses different metrics than Marx to distinguish between classes. How can you effectively have a good understanding of feudal society without understanding the division between feudal lords and serfs. Or between citizens, outsiders and slaves in classical Greek societies?
In discussions about philosophy ans philosophical concepts, one do not need to agree with all the interlocutor's assumptions: it is just required to understand them and discuss them in a balanced way.
Working class as in "people who work"? Since tech workers are comfortably in the middle class when it comes to income level.
Anyway, for most people, compensation and income level are really good, which is why unionization isn't as much a thing for tech workers. This is also because there's a lot of disparity, with some earning $35K / year and others $350K / year for basically the same job; unionization and successful agreements would mean the $35K / year would go up, but the $350K / year would go down by a lot and wouldn't want to cooperate. And that's just salary, then there's stocks, stock options, bonuses, perks, etc to consider.
I'm not saying tech workers shouldn't unionize, all I'm saying is that the incentives are low. Because if you don't want to work under the conditons that e.g. Meta offers, you can vote with your feet and work somewhere else, pretty much anywhere and anything you want.
> but the $350K / year would go down by a lot and wouldn't want to cooperate
That's not necessary. A large portion of corporate tech in Germany is unionized, and union jobs have hard salary ceilings (and also, of course, salary floors). But a company is allowed to offer a worker a non-union contract. They just always have to allow a worker to decline and take a union contract instead.
In real life, this means many team leaders and senior engineers and practically all managers/directors are on non-union contracts.
Non-union contracts that on paper are strict worse than the highest union contract get killed by the union. But when you make the jump, you usually have to do some math. Because leaving the union contract means you go from 35h/week with compensated overtime to unlimited overtime, so you might get screwed anyway if you're not careful.
Fascinating that German unions sometimes have managers as members. Are those members ostracized by the real workers? In the US, taking a management position means quitting the union -- workers don't want management in their meetings, and management don't trust anyone in the union so would never promote you anyway.
> Fascinating that German unions sometimes have managers as members.
Of course! From a theory perspective, it's completely clear: just because capital gives some workers a mediocum of power over other workers doesn't mean that those managers suddenly have different interests than the people they lead. They still need to sell their labour to survive, after all.
> Are those members ostracized by the real workers?
So much for theory. In the real world, bad managers exist everywhere. In union shops, they are probably reigned in much more than elsewhere, because they quickly find themselves in mediation meetings between workers, union and management every time their workers realize that they actually do have rights, and that those are violated by management frequently. Those guys are ostracised, whether they have a membership card or not.
But yeah, managers can easily get into situations where their own performance metrics would suffer if they follow union directives, so conflict of interests are not uncommon. Just like humans everywhere, they somehow live with the cognitive dissonance.
As an example, I worked in a production plant where the floor boss would go through quite a bit of paperwork to hire scabs from a temp agency during union strikes, because missing production deadlines was unthinkable to him. Normally a pro-union guy, glad to take the union-negotiated salary increases, not a bad boss, but seeing that his production lines never stopped was his job, and so he did just that.
> unionization and successful agreements would mean the $35K / year would go up, but the $350K / year would go down by a lot and wouldn't want to cooperate
Why would the top-level go down? Employers are paying what the market demands. It's not like Jessica Chastain makes less money because she's in the SAG-AFTRA union with the same job as actors making less than $35K / year.
It depends on the specifics of the union. There certainly have been/are unions with fairly strict pay scales based on seniority and related factors. The SAG is obviously not one of those. (It's mostly, as I understand it, minimum pay scales for time actually spent working--a lot of SAG members don't work very much.) Public sector jobs can often be.
I know a lot of investors like Warren Buffet. I bet they work harder than you do.
People usually believe investors are those scammers that advertise in Internet along rented Villas and Lamborghinis talking about how to live without working and so on.
They usually do not spend too much, as they are into the habit of saving way more than what they make.
Those that waste their money are not the investors themselves, but their families, like the trophy wife or the spoiled children.
If Warren Buffet stopped working tomorrow, how long do you think it would take for him to fall behind on his bills and default on his mortgage? That is the basic differentiator. If you work because you have to, then you are working class. If you work primarily because you want to, then you are not. There is of course also a large 'grey' area of people who could stop working and live quite comfortably, but feel compelled to keep working to finance their current lifestyle.
A lot of people on here denigrate executives, management, money people generally. Maube they add value commensurate with what they're paid. Some almost certainly do. Others probably don't.
However, I bet that the vast majority of software developers would hate the job and the lifestyle, perks or not--which among other things generally involves a ton of tightly-scheduled travel.
> However, I bet that the vast majority of software developers would hate the job and the lifestyle, perks or not--which among other things generally involves a ton of tightly-scheduled travel.
The travel is a prison they create for themselves, and generally one that they get off on. If your job is just chatting with and manipulating {employees,customers,higher-ups} then you need to invent a contrived way in which it seems hard, so you can keep justifying your salary.
Even better if you can tie your self-worth to your airline miles balance, and avoid your family for 3/4 of the year!
> Wasting their valuable time on earth for the sake of a manager's dictat.
I mean, isn't that what work is?
You get paid, in exchange you spend your time doing stuff at your boss's behest, which you wouldn't do if you weren't being paid?
I mean sure, there are some jobs like being a doctor which you might consider a higher calling, but nobody joins Facebook expecting to do socially useful work, it's an ad company.
Ironic, considering that tech workers have by far the best working conditions of the working class.