• bstix@feddit.dk
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        1 year ago

        My local sewer guy takes pride in his job. Not only does he care enough to know the entire sewer layout for every lot in town, he also cares enough about it to always provide the customer with a good offer. He just wants it done right. But it doesn’t just stop there. He is also the chairman for the sewer industry in the entire country, giving advice to all the other sewer companies, municipalities and other industries.

        No, he probably doesn’t particularly enjoy hosing down somebody’s fatberg, but him and his guys usually seem to have fun doing it anyway. He gets paid well be too.

        If I got half the pay for having half the fun and being able to take half the pride in what I do, I’d gladly accept the job.

          • Radioactive Radio@lemm.ee
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            1 year ago

            Not at the level of food service industry, cashier’s and the like. Simply cuz automating gutter cleaning doesn’t make capitalists any money.

              • unfreeradical@lemmy.world
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                1 year ago

                The suggestion was that workers (“we”) should seek to automate processes that workers prefer not to perform.

                Your objection was that if such automation were possible to achieve and to implement, then they would have already done so.

                Processes of production, and the utilization and development of machinery implicated in production, is determined by business owners, not by workers.

                Business owners are bound by the profit motive, not by a motive to improve the experience of workers.

                Any activity or objective not supported by the profit motive is simply discarded, under our current systems.

                The meaningful suggestion is that workers (“we”) should seek to automate processes that workers prefer not to perform, even if business owners (“they”) have no motive for doing so.

                • helenslunch@feddit.nl
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                  1 year ago

                  Buddy if you “we” could do that “we” never would have been employees in the first place.

                  If you think automation is not profitable then you vastly underestimate the costs of running a business and hiring human employees.

                  • unfreeradical@lemmy.world
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                    1 year ago

                    Buddy if you “we” could do that “we” never would have been employees in the first place.

                    Workers already are the ones who design and build machines, but our capacities are constrained by business owners, who control the resources of society, including the enterprise that conducts research and manufacturing, and who direct the labor of workers for using the resources they control.

                    If you think automation is not profitable then you vastly underestimate the costs of running a business and hiring human employees.

                    You are attacking a straw man.

                    Some automation is profitable, at any particular time, but some automation may improve the experience of workers without being profitable.

                    Various relevant factors include the availability of technologies previously developed through public investment, the degree by which private enterprise is competitive versus monopolized, the structure of the labor pool especially in its degree of stratification, and the relative profitability of other investment opportunities, such as those more overtly framed around speculation, predation, extraction, or exploitation.