Dunno why, but this brings to mind fresh top of the class JDs, paid a $100K++ training wage, while learning the ropes from partners, associates, paralegals (lower caste) and legal secretaries.

Slave labor is so much more economical than actually paying the peasants.

“”…accept a reduced wage, or even no wage, during a period in which they are in training for jobs “”

Yeh, whatta deal. “You boys come pick mah cotton for free for a few years and I’ll bump you up to junior assistant to the overseer real soon.”

I believe these fuckers are willing to lose it all rather than see a 4 percent tax increase on the top margin. History tells us that the peasants stand for this shit for only so long.

Which is actually a model that is beginning to change, as clients balk at paying for first-years to learn their jobs on their “dime.”

Wonder how often Epstein has had to pay rent, buy food and gas, buy clothes to wear to work, etc. on NOpaycheck? “Makes good economic sense,” riiiiiight.

Of course, I keep hearing about employrs requiring 12-hr shifts, 16-hr shifts, etc., etc. and wondering if there really are any rules about employers-employees relations that matter any more.

We’re already going into debt trying to buy the shit we already made for them, how is doing it for ‘a reduced wage’ going to make things better?

The average Wall Street CEO makes $10 million and the average american worker makes $40k and these people think the problem is that the CEO pays to much in taxes!!!

Lilies

Damn world’s going to L in an ‘andbasket

Mother enters house after working third job.

Son: Hi Mommy! What’s for dinner tonight? I’m hungry!

Mother: Well, son, Mommy has spent the day learning valuable lessons in salad bar managment and grease trap repair at the Golden Corrall as part of her new apprentice training program. Mommy never learned these things while getting her Phd in electrical engineering, or working for twenty years at Megacorp before they shipped her job to Shanghai. It really is going to pay off some day.

Son: Frowning. I don’t understand.

Mommy: Here. (tosses son half-eaten apple). I found that in the neighbor’s garbage.

Son: Yeaaa, Mommy!

Yes, the sad truth about the minimum wage bailouts meant to provide a basic standard of living prop up low-wage workers failed investment houses is that it rarely leads to long-term employment changes in greedy risk-taking behavior.

Guaranteed minimums for failed corporate persons, good. Guaranteed minimum anything for actual persons, bad. Yes, we know.

Fixxed

And what does this remind us of? (tip of the hat to Dickins)

“How, then?” cried madame, contemptuously. “The other world?”

“Does everybody here recall old Foulon, who told the famished people that they might eat grass, and who died, and went to Hell?”

“Everybody!” from all throats.

“The news is of him. He is among us!”

“Among us!” from the universal throat again. “And dead?”

“Not dead! He feared us so much–and with reason–that he caused himself to be represented as dead, and had a grand mock-funeral. But they have found him alive, hiding in the country, and have brought him in. I have seen him but now, on his way to the Hotel de Ville, a prisoner. I have said that he had reason to fear us. Say all! HAD he reason?”

Wretched old sinner of more than threescore years and ten, if he had never known it yet, he would have known it in his heart of hearts if he could have heard the answering cry.
___________________________________

As the story goes, Foulon the French Minister of Finance supposedly once remarked about famine-stricken peasants: “these swine, if they have no bread they’ll eat hay”. He ended with his head on a pike and his mouth stuffed with hay, being paraded through the streets of Paris….

King James thanks you. So do about 449 lesser patrons. Also Messrs Johnson, Webster, Murray et omn. al. Especially Al.

Clowns to the left of me….

OT Breaking News!

Mz. Wheeler reports Udall’s amendment (think it’s 1031?) was voted down . . . (hint: Dayen/FDL)

http://www.emptywheel.net/2011/11/29/udall-amendment-fails-37-61/

Scum.

I find your scenario very plausible. Sigh.

Naturally, these companies cannot be expected to labor (for only corporate entites really “labor”) under the tyranny of anyone from the evil yet incompetent government actually checking to see whether they hire any of these unpaid “trainees” or simply rotate in a new batch after a month or so. After all, this IS America.

But seriously folks, so any of these so-called American exceptionalists and Super-Patriots ever think “Gee, people whose parents weren’t millionaires USED to be able to make a good middle-class living and have a decent life – why can’t that happen anymore?” Wait, lemme guess – that was one of the problems with America that we’re now fixing, right?

I was thinking the same thing. Slavery would make it a lot easier for them.

That’s right. Work for nothing until your glorious employer deigns to throw you a few scraps.

USA USA USA

The great thing for The Owners about eliminating the minimum wage is that almost all other hourly wages are pegged to it. So every employee’s paycheck will float gradually downward to meet the Zero point. It’s very exciting, and great for profits, you see.

“to take part in the scheme they were told by their case manager they would be stripped of their £53- a-week jobseekers allowance (JSA) if they backed out.”

For 53 pounds a week? MotherFing God, what the F is going on?

“In April, Tesco filed pre-tax profits of £3.5bn.”

Free labor for corporations, and the government uses taxpayer monies to pay 53 pounds a week.

Are you Fin kidding me? Are these people serious? Man, the blowback is going to be vicious.
Some states are firing public workers and hiring prison labor, with all the money going to the prison industrial complex. The prisoner does not get paid. It goes all to the the top.
They’re using prison labor to do all sorts of work for corporations, and all the money goes to the top.

Holy mother of God, these things are out of their mind. They’ve gone beyond sociopathic. They’re certifiably insane. The whole thing is going to come down.

Perhaps. I tend to think that the public as a whole has been so accustomed to accepting shit as gold that they won’t ever do anything to change it. The public is too fucking lazy and self-satisfied. Unless they are personally and drastically affected, they’ll just step over the bodies of their neighbors while they twiddle away on their cell phones, iPads, or iPods. As long as they have their tunes, booze, weed, food, and some sort of shitty job, they’ll go with the flow and everyone else can fuck off.

Let’s ignore the fact that unemployment benefits are cut off when you begin a training program. So he’s suggesting that you give up any income you might have and go to work for free. Wonderful idea.

“The systematic deregulation of labor markets offers the best, last hope of tackling unemployment.”

Epstein makes a lot of sense–unless you think about it. Or unless you ask yourself, Are workhouses and a return to the time of Charles Dickens even remotely close to a good idea?

No doubt it would help the unemployment problem, though. There’s bound to be a huge demand for torches, pitchforks and tumbrels.

Why is it only the PTB who get to use historical demonizing techniques? What examples can we learn from peasant uprisings?

It was only a matter of time before our Galtian Overlords latched onto this idea.

Don’t want to start a flame war, but IIRC, this is quite similar to a controversial Georgia program favored by the wingnuts that the Obama administration was pushing.

Trust me, if you have a PhD in EE, I guarantee you won’t be working at golden coral

Please forgive my ignorance, but who the hell is Richard Epstein and why should anyone be interested in or concerned about what he says? I did the google and the wikipedia, etc., but he’s just another ultra-right wing wanker for the 1%. So?

We were well on our way to proving that a horse could work efficiently on no food at all when the ungrateful animal up and died on us.

Trust me, if you have a PhD in EE, I guarantee you won’t be working at golden coral

Having advanced degrees and lots of work experience really doesn’t account for all that much these days. I know quite a few very well educated and qualified people who are out of jobs and finding it difficult at best to find a new job in any field, much less in the field in which they are qualified.

Michele Bachmann – considered by some to be a serious contender for POTUS – loves the idea of slavery. I mean, really, haven’t we all seen this one coming from miles away?? The whole idea of the current depression is to force the rubes into accepting ever more shitty conditions whilst encouraging said rubes to blame it on other 99%ers, who are somehow even shittier than you. Go figure: it works, I’m sad to say.

Sadly, I have to agree with you. I think things’ll have to get a whole lot worse before any serious level of the population starts to wake up and give a crap. As long as they can drink beer and watch some crap tv show, it’s all good. If your neighbor starves to death bc he didn’t have any money due to losing his job, etc? Eh? The Mofo was probably lazy and *deserved* to die. Eff him. Plenty more where he came from.

The real irony here is that should this Galtian dream come true of people working for free then there will be NO CUSTOMERS TO BUY THE CRAP THOSE PEOPLE MAKE!

What possible good is having labor costs at zero when sales are also at zero?

Its evolution. Those that are willing to change and adapt survive. Those that want to sit on their ass and talk about the good ole days won’t of the 40 hour work week won’t. Its been happening for millions of years. Some of you guys need to get used to it.

Clearly the Galtian Overlords slept through Systems Analysis 101–either that or they figure to steal all the cookies and make a run for the border.

In simplest terms: The more people who have jobs, the more money more people have. The more money more people have, the more money they spend. The more money they spend, the more products they buy. The more products they buy, the greater the demand for products. The more demand for products, the more people are hired. The more people who have jobs . . .

The same works in reverse, of course. Except it never ends well for anybody. Not even the Galtian Overlords. Which is why I’m considering investing in pitchforks, torches and timbrels.

I apologize for the mass mush of my previous comment. I keep getting “system error” when trying to space the stuff in readable
paragraphs.

But now that I think about it, that’s same problem with much of our
information. It all comes out as a mass of mush, so garbled together
it would take a cryptographer to decipher it.

Something really wonky is going on with my computer. Ignore 2nd comment.

Those that want to sit on their ass and talk about the good ole days won’t of the 40 hour work week won’t.

Huh? What? Where? Won’t? What?

Ignore it.

It’s just ARWNJG.

Authentic Right Wing Nut Job Gibberish.

Similar to but more specialized than AFG, Authentic Frontier Gibberish, as found in Blazing Saddles.

Oh tnx. I thought it was IGMSFY (I got mine so fuck you) talk from a SP (smug prick)….

Richard Epstein, law professor at University of Chicago. Where else?

So, I take it he worked gratis while learning his job at UC? He’d be a hypocrite if he did otherwise.

I look at that photo. The champagne glasses, the sniggering, the utter disconnect and pomposity of these sorry ass excuses for human beings and I at times think that non-violence ain’t all it’s cracked up to be.

I hope everyone in that photo dies of anal cancer.

File under: “pining for servitude”. It’s always interesting to point out to people that if a job is worth doing, it’s worth getting paid for.

I know why. Because law students dedicated to defense or prosecution or immigration or women’s issues or whatever, can only pay off their law school loans by working in some corporate firm for a few years. And then there’s the delicate threading of the needle: leave that firm at just the right moment, before you’ve been branded as “one of them.” Plus, there’s the fact that those firms really do provide a high level of apprentice training. Similar problem with medical training. Worse there, really (many more years of training, at much lower wages.) Similar problem for your average undergrad Joe or Jane. Go for that high-bucks kind of job so you can pay off your student loans.
What a racket.

Hey, my comment was a response to MaryCh!

See 44 below. (This is a test.)

Tbogg, your site isn’t working.

BackEast loves to “reply” to my facts with a bunch of rightwing gibberish and/or El Lushbo’s talking point du jour. You can safely ignore bc there’s never any sense to what is keyed into the comments.

I can’t help but think guillotine.

I know, but I love his “pulled myself up by my own bootstraps so fuck everyone else” stories!

I’m currently re-reading Jared Diamond’s Collapse, in which he looks at the collapse of both ancient and modern societies and their proximate causes. Really, this is a book that BackEast would benefit from reading, as it would educate him in what the actual consequences are of these types of collapses. Hint: those at the top are the least likely to survive. In reviewing the Rwandan genocide, it emerged that even in areas with no Tutsis, Hutus killed other Hutus in large numbers. The Hutus most likely to be killed were those with the most land and livestock. In interviewing survivors several years after the genocides, some of them stated quite frankly that have-nots had calculated that if they killed some of the haves, their stuff could be divided up among the survivors and all the survivors would be a lot better off. (Rwanda before the genocide was the third most densely populated nation and had run out of areas that could be developed for agriculture, even as the population continued to explode. People were trying to eke out a living from ever-smaller plots of land, and a lot of them were going hungry.)

Then again, BackEast wouldn’t even have to read a book to figure this out if he were intelligent enough to heed the lessons of well-known history. I’m sure a lot of peasants died in the French Revolution also, but their odds of surviving were much, much higher than the nobility’s.

The majority of people aren’t dumb; when the only option left open to them to avoid starvation is to kill rich people and take their stuff, that’s what they do. Rich people have more of a stake in making sure that this isn’t the only available option than poor people do, but they have to be smart enough to recognize it. So far, rich people in the US are not, nor are their sycophants like BackEast.

A job training program that doesn’t pay you to participate? Hmm. Sounds like College to me.

Pure drivel from the Hoover Institute. Not so much as a coherent paragraph. They produce this junk by the truckload. Referencing Say as if his law isn’t ridiculous on the face of it nor historically proven to be nonsense. There’s not enough time in the world, at rates far exceeding minimum wage, to waste on such idiocy.

Another reference:

In Epstein’s view inequality in a free market system may be an incentive for people to create wealth.”If in fact it turns out that inequality creates an incentive for people to produce and create wealth, it’s a wonderful force for innovation.”

Couple this with the news that the U.S. has now exported more oil than it has consumed (for the first time in 62 years) and you have a dream come true for the oligarchs.

All of this is just an experiment to see who can make more money while destroying the inconsequentials.

I’m losing my new-found religion over this one…anybody got snark?

the U.S. has now exported more oil than it has consumed (for the first time in 62 years)

WTF?

The terrrists are winning.

Oil extracted from US and exported instead of used in US?

Depends on crude grade and refining capacity in many cases.

That’s what I really like about the “Drill-Baby-Drill” crowd. They need to tape “and Export” onto the end of that motto….

that the employer will eventually offer

When will this fucker eventually die?

~ Harry R. Sohl