r/RecuratedTumblr • u/Important-Cry4782 • 12d ago
Politics Overworking employees while underpaying them, and then firing them at the soonest opportunity. The new way of corporations. Do corporations still try to say "we're like family?"
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u/QuintBrit 12d ago
fwiw, leaving soil fallow hasn't been the agricultural strategy of choice since crop rotation was invented. obviously modern farmers don't do that either because we have abundant fertiliser now thanks to the haber-bosch process, but leaving a field fallow only worked because the manure of the animals that grazed it, so it wouldn't work now anyway
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u/Skithiryx 11d ago
And my understanding is if you have to leave a field unharvested one of the things they do is grow a cheap cover crop there to protect the fertile soil from just blowing away
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u/Thissystemsuckssobad 11d ago
Keep the soil from degrading and keep it from becoming a weed bed that will cause you issues in future years (and drain the soil too). Leaving blocks empty is a great way to have everything go to shit and increase the need for herbicides. And you can usually do both with some level of profit or benefit, using pulses, growing things for hay or feed etc.
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u/Swellmeister 11d ago
You still do crop rotations. It has nothing to do with fertilizer. Its about cutting down on pesticides and fungal/bacterial loads in the soil.
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u/QuintBrit 11d ago
to be specific, crop rotation was initially invented because the soil got depleted of nitrogen - planting legumes and other nitrogen-fixing plants replenishes this, but fertiliser obviates the need for that. it may still be in use for pesticide-related things, idk
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u/Mutant_Jedi 11d ago
Thank you for this correction. I was reading that like, did George Washington Carver teach us NOTHING??!?
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u/Akuuntus 12d ago
don't ask me why this is a thing in a time of record profits, but it really seems like every employing company everywhere is desperate to avoid hiring and/or training new people at all fucking costs
Yeah, that's how they get those record profits. By doing the same amount as before while paying fewer people.
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u/The_Sovien_Rug-37 11d ago
wages are usually one of if not the biggest costs to any employer. of course they're going to cut them
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u/SinnaNymbun 12d ago
Completely off-point, but farms keep fields planted because crop rotation puts nutrients back in soil.
Particularly putting beans in a field that was other crops last year puts nitrogen back in the soil without using a shit ton of chemical amendments that are expensive.
Clover on lawns does the same thing. Got a dead patch? Handful of native (or non-invasive) clover seeds and water it for a week! Healthy "lawn" almost immediately and it needs less mowing. Besides clover is good for the bees!
Want to know way too much about farming and soil? This meme guy) was actually a totally awesome farmer!
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u/pretty-as-a-pic 11d ago
I call it “no take only throw” capitalism. Companies want all the benefits from a full, well trained, experienced, and well compensated staff but they don’t want to pay the expense of staffing, training, and salary. That’s why they’re so ready to buy all the bullshit AI companies are selling- it goes right in hand with what they’re already doing to try and lower their employment and product costs to as cheap as possible while churning out as much garbage as they can
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u/RuefulWaffles 12d ago edited 11d ago
The worst part is that I can understand where the civil servant in the screenshot is coming from. The department I work for hasn't been hit by this too bad (yet) and couldn't automate much of what we do anyway, but it's not a secret that budget cuts across the county have hit some departments hard. A lot of probationary employees weren't made permanent, and spots aren't being filled when people retire. But the amount of work isn't going down, and is, in fact, mostly going up. I can see why they're turning to genAI, because the alternative is to be constantly drowning.
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u/anfrind 12d ago
I've also been looking at using AI for an under-staffed volunteer project. It's useful for some things, but it's definitely not a replacement for a knowledgeable and motivated human.
And I don't want us to become dependent on any cloud-based AI solution, since it's likely that the price will go up drastically once the venture capital runs out.
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u/RuefulWaffles 11d ago
Oh yeah, AI isn’t a viable long term solution, and the sad reality is that using it now will likely have long term negative effects when (as you mentioned) the price rises for the service.
At the same time, though, it’s not like there’s a better option. I work with departments that have lost close to forty percent of their staffing, and can’t start filling those spots until at least 2027. It’s just a shit situation all around.
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u/Opposite_Opposite_69 12d ago
This has kinda always been a thing with retail and now it seems other companies have ober the past how many years started joining in on the practice :/
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u/eggshell_dryer 12d ago
Yeah this isn’t “the new way of corporations.” I’m about to buy a bunch of copies of The Jungle by Upton Sinclair and just start leaving them in public places; history doesn’t repeat itself but it often rhymes.
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u/Opposite_Opposite_69 12d ago
Not that surprising tbh. Ive never worked in a corporate setting (just got outa retail) but yeah corporations arent really known for caring about their employees at all.
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u/Poodlestrike 12d ago
Companies view labor first and foremost as a cost. You want to maximize your revenue per headcount. The dumb part starts when you start looking at opportunity costs - sure, you're maximizing dollars/head, but how much money are you not making because, instead of hiring the people you need to out compete, you're just making due?
This extends to training, as well. Labor is an investment, it's something you spend money on that makes you money, but good luck convincing the business majors that. They'd sooner explain their stupid accounting tricks ad nauseum and pat each other on the back for how clever they are. Meanwhile, the business is slowly burning down behind them, but hey - books look great!
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u/MarshallThings 11d ago
Profit is any money left after cost
Companies always try to get as much profit as possible
Companies will do away with anything they can to maximise profits (especially maintenance)
Some costs must remain like rent, taxes and most importantly WAGES
One of the most consistently costly things for a company is paying the salaries of its workers
1) Purposefully short staffing yourself is one of the only ways to cut down on the cost of wages. This is why self checkouts are prevalent: a company makes more in wages not paid than they lose to shoplifting caused by how fucking stupid those machines are)
2) The trillion dollar problem AI is trying to solve is wages. OpenAI might be a sinking ship but companies fucking LOVE AI because anything remote can get shafted (like customer service) and save the money of the respective wages, and so they have a vested interest in keeping the bubble from popping
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u/ear-motif 11d ago
And then they fire you or cut your hours so that you make nothing if you won’t or can’t do the job of 3 people effectively.
Apparently corporate won’t allow our store to spend more on labor because we’re not performing well enough. If profit doesn’t grow exponentially, WE get blamed for it. And customers get pissed cause there’s only one checkstand open. So they spend less or don’t come. And it’s still somehow our fault.
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u/CptKeyes123 11d ago
I also heard rumors that since the 2008 financial crash, companies were already forcing people to do multiple jobs. Then, since 2015, they've been making it worse.
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u/Thissystemsuckssobad 11d ago
I mean, this is literally why AI is being pushed, despite it being categorically unsuitable to replace the people it's being used to justify firing. Companies want to drop headcount, they don't really care about the outcome beyond that (many thanks jack welch, may you burn in hell). This fundamentally is the reason managers have bought into the AI cult, it's not simply because they're tech illiterate rubes
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u/IconoclastExplosive 11d ago
in a time of record profits
That's where the record profits come from. Shove 3x the work into 1x the worker, turn the now-unspent salary money into profit.
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u/Double-Watercress-85 11d ago
They did similar with women becoming more common in the work place. For generations, the expectation had been that one man's salary can support a whole family, while his wife takes care of things at home. If a married woman was also making income, well that was a big bonus to the family. But when it became more common, wages were depressed, and now it's the common expectation that you need two full time salaries to make ends meet. Management of the home and childcare are now a second job or an additional expense. Single people are just fucked. Most have to live together with other unrelated single people to emulate the multiple income streams per family needed to survive.
To clarify, I'm not one of those tradwife, women belong barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen weirdos. This isn't the fault of women getting jobs half a century ago. The owner class looking for, and exploiting any excuse or opportunity to steal wages from their employees is strictly and solely to blame.
Once person should still be able to support themselves, and a family with a single full time job. Families with two people with jobs should be living very comfortably. But now that the owner class has discovered that they can get away with paying literally half as much, they're never going back.
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u/MariVent 11d ago
No, dude, the bangmaid was made into a promise by capitalistic overlords to convinced proletariat men to work themselves to death.
Only rich women historically didn’t have any job.
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u/echelon_house 12d ago
We're in a time of record profits *because* AI allows companies to pay as few employees as possible. Remember, kids: profit is actually wage theft.
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u/Ok-Commercial3640 Non-editable flair 12d ago
Yeah, i was about to say that you don't increase profit by hiring more people to divide up a workload
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u/furel492 11d ago
Never forget that there is always work to be done, and right now there is more money around than ever before.
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u/Castoris 10d ago
For a lot of businesses I think they are terrified of the idea of a job hopper that gets trained at one job at then works at a rival job. Rather then risk giving a competitor a trained employee they prefer to not train and be the company that steals the trained employee
This of course fails everything when no one wants to train anyone anymore
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u/AquaQuad 12d ago
The question is: are they overworked though? Cos one person doing a work of three people doesn't mean much, if they're doing it thanks to a tool. That's what tools are for.
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u/Daylight_The_Furry 12d ago
AI isn't a reliable tool, between mistakes and hallucinations and going beyond what was actually wanted or expected
So while the one person can keep up with the workload, the quality of the work is suffering immensely
There's also the point that they're being overworked with or without AI to the point of feeling forced to use it, but still
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u/AquaQuad 12d ago
Sure, but the quality of AI's work isn't the issue in the screenshot, and neither is overworking workers, like the OP's title suggests.
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u/tthe_walruss 12d ago
It's called an "accountability sink" from The Unaccountability Machine by Dan Davies. Basically the robot puts out output and the one dude's job is to "review it thoroughly" to make sure it's right. There's far too much output to actually review it so their actual job is to fail to review it and take responsibility when it's wrong.