It’s so funny that the socialist rethoric doesn’t even crumble here when talking about big tech. Who are Microsoft’s poor exploited workers exactly? Last I checked, developers in big tech make bank. It’s the customers that get fucked.
THE TERM “exploitation” often conjures up images of workers laboring in sweatshops for 12 hours or more per day, for pennies an hour, driven by a merciless overseer. This is contrasted to the ideal of a “fair wage day’s wage for a fair day’s work”–the supposedly “normal” situation under capitalism in which workers receive a decent wage, enough for a “middle class” standard of living, health insurance and security in their retirement.
Sweatshops are horrific examples of exploitation that persist to this day. But Karl Marx had a broader and more scientific definition of exploitation: the forced appropriation of the unpaid labor of workers. Under this definition, all working-class people are exploited.
I don’t know when the last time you checked is, but I don’t think it’s funny that as early as 1996 Microsoft was successfully sued for nearly 100m for abusing workers as “permatemps”. That isn’t counting their practices of forcing their staff to work extreme hours, avoiding to pay benefits, and just doing just about anything they could to avoid giving their employees a way of “making bank”.
“In 1996, a class action lawsuit was brought against Microsoft representing thousands of current and former employees that had been classified as temporary and freelance. The monetary value of the suit was determined by how much the misclassified employees could have made if they had been correctly classified and been able to participate in Microsoft’s employee stock purchase plan. The case was decided on the basis that the temporary employees had had their jobs defined by Microsoft, worked alongside regular employees doing the same work, and worked for long terms (years, in many cases).”
It’s so funny that the socialist rethoric doesn’t even crumble here when talking about big tech. Who are Microsoft’s poor exploited workers exactly? Last I checked, developers in big tech make bank. It’s the customers that get fucked.
You can’t be that naive.
https://www.businessinsider.com/microsoft-slammed-over-child-labor-accusations-2010-4
Also, it’s very funny, you talking about “socialist rhetoric”, because I don’t think you even know what socialism means by “exploited worker”.
Have a look.
https://socialistworker.org/2011/09/28/what-do-we-mean-exploitation
I don’t know when the last time you checked is, but I don’t think it’s funny that as early as 1996 Microsoft was successfully sued for nearly 100m for abusing workers as “permatemps”. That isn’t counting their practices of forcing their staff to work extreme hours, avoiding to pay benefits, and just doing just about anything they could to avoid giving their employees a way of “making bank”.
“In 1996, a class action lawsuit was brought against Microsoft representing thousands of current and former employees that had been classified as temporary and freelance. The monetary value of the suit was determined by how much the misclassified employees could have made if they had been correctly classified and been able to participate in Microsoft’s employee stock purchase plan. The case was decided on the basis that the temporary employees had had their jobs defined by Microsoft, worked alongside regular employees doing the same work, and worked for long terms (years, in many cases).”
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permatemp#Vizcaino_v._Microsoft