'The man who wants to take your jobs'

[richb at pioneer.ci.net (Rich Braun)]

Derek Atkins wrote:
> Personally, I'd like to find a way to get paid for my work on OSS ...
>
> Why shouldn't I get paid for my hard work?

10th-grade economics:  supply/demand theory says your work is worth no more
and no less than the amount someone is willing to pay today.  If there is more
demand than supply, you'll get paid more.  The market cares little how hard
you're working, it only cares how much it has to pay someone else if you won't
sell it for the established market price.

Another comparison is the 5-day / 40-hour work week.  Before the labor unions
fought for and achieved this in the early 20th century, it was typical for
people to work 6 days and a lot more hours.  During my own life, a lot of
consumer appliances came out which promised to save time, and their
equivalents in the business world promised to reduce workload.  Why, then,
don't we have a 4-day workweek or a 30-hour one?

Supply and demand, my friend.  If the "standard" workweek gets reduced much
below 40 hours, more people are willing to work a 2nd job because there are
168 hours in a week and it becomes possible to commute between two 35-hour
jobs and still have a little waking time outside work.

This is, IMHO, the most important reason why the value of your hard work seems
to go down as overall productivity rises.  This would happen even without the
forces globalization aligned against you.

There is another force aligned against workers, one which I hadn't really
considered until I saw a commentary sometime this past week:  Internet and
other telecom technology has made jobs far more portable than workers. 
Companies can shift workload across international borders much faster than
workers can move in pursuit of the jobs.  Globalization may eventually
minimize this factor as living standards equalize around the world, but it
does seem like an independent force that pits companies against workers.

Unfortunately there are no easy answers.  To me it looks like what we're
witnessing is the failure of capitalism to distribute wealth equitably: 
society should be able to come up with a system for providing ample food,
clothing, shelter, medicine and transportation for the 6 billion people in
this world.  No '-ism' has been able to achieve that thus far.  Capitalism has
lasted longest--a couple of centuries--but over the next decade or so of
consolidating fortune-500 power I think it will become obvious to everyone
that it won't work.

Back to your regularly scheduled Linux program...

-rich