this post was submitted on 01 May 2024
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It's true not many people need work, so the lack of open roles isn't critical to the economy. But not everyone is happy at their job.

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[–] [email protected] 62 points 6 months ago (1 children)

We're going back to the period between 2008 and 2020 where employers didn't want to pay for well educated and experienced professionals and it was impossible to negotiate your salary. We're back at having stagnating wages again. In a period of incredibly high inflation no less.

I only got a significant bump in 2021 when companies claimed worker shortages.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 6 months ago (2 children)

We’re going back to the period between 2008 and 2020 where employers didn’t want to pay for well educated and experienced professionals and it was impossible to negotiate your salary.

Is what you're citing industry or region specific? In technology those years represented explosive growth and wage increases.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 6 months ago (1 children)

I'm a software engineer. In Canada. There was no explosive growth. Only layoffs and stagnant wages. There was a huge brain drain to the US during that period. Many of my university friends ended up in the states.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago

I know many wonderful Canadian brothers and sisters that have come from up north. Its always been one of those strange things to me that my Canadian friends can't get even close to the same pay in Canada as the USA. I imagine there are many reasons for it.

I suppose we can say that those Canadians experienced the explosive growth in wages too, just not inside Canada.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

I wonder if that had anything to do with low interests rates and Venture Capitalists practically throwing cash at startups?

Other industries just simply didn't have the same advantages, and now that tech companies no longer have those advantages either, they're becoming just like any other corporation.

Also, tech companies are on the forefront of businesses who sell services to other businesses which tends to be much more profitable than selling to consumers. Regular consumers have never been Google's customers, even though most regular people use Gmail. Their customers are the advertisers.

People were throwing money at tech because tech was "disruptive" which meant finding a way to skirt existing employment laws, destroy established industries with worker protections, and then boost the prices to insane levels once they've completely wrecked traditional competition. See: Uber.

I wonder why they were throwing so much money at tech? It wasn't about Union Busting, was it?? Oh wait, it totally was.

Many of these companies are currently suing the US Government claiming the FTC has no authority to regulate them and that the National Labor Relations Board is "unconstitutional."

Acting like "tech" was in any special position other than being poised to exploit the living fuck out of everything feels pretty naive.

Related: The Tech Baron Seeking to Purge San Francisco of “Blues” The tech barons are and were fascists. They're happy to pay unwitting people very well to help build a terrible new world nobody else actually wants.