I believe labor is worth whatever the employer can get away with. As such the value of the cheapest labor is what society allows companies to get away with. An employee's wages should be high enough to live off of and this should be enforced by having high labor standards.
The combination of a growing no/low/medium-skill large workforce in the US makes for unlivable wages for most people because there are too many people chasing too few jobs. America doesn't do traditional factories per the Rust Belt and offshoring, but when it does, they are highly automated and don't employ as many people as they used to.
America either needs to find a way to put labor supply to work or it is going to have to give money to people so they can survive until we can find something useful or meaningful for them to do.
Perhaps America should heavily invest in a wider range of community, education, and healthcare social enterprises to provide services that aren't easily automated and are lacking.
third option is dispose of them by letting whoever can't find a job fall into (if they're lucky) being NEETs at a relative's house, or (if unlucky) meth and fentanyl addiction in encampments, scrounging off scraps, essentially in a waiting room for a quick death, while the masses are distracted by mass media with one unrelated distraction after another
in the meantime, the defeated homeless addicts serve as a "reserve army of labor" or as george carlin put it to "scare the hell out of the middle class" in other words, keep wages down and enforce docility for those who are still lucky enough to have jobs
The third option is what is happening right now. It's pathetic. The ruling class has perfected its use of media technology to influence the masses so well that we can even analyze, discuss, and reveal their methods without fear, because even if we announce it from the rooftops the masses will still turn back to their TVs and tiktoks and forget they heard anything, dividing their attention among 100 distractions to keep them from ever banding together.
That's all very well for those lucky enough to be employed. In a future where an increasing amount of necessary work is done by machines, what about those whose labor is not needed? Eventually, that's going to be nearly everyone.
>In a future where an increasing amount of necessary work is done by machines, what about those whose labor is not needed?
A lot of work that's absolutely needed for our survival is still paid dogshit: think construction, cleaning, waste disposal, agriculture, fruit picking, etc. Even in developed countries with human rights, most of this work is done by what are basically modern slave workers usually from abroad on dinghy visas.
Those are the jobs getting the least amount of automation. Robotics is insanely far away from reaching the speed, dexterity, cognition, perception, adaptability and cost for that to be automated at the same rock bottom prices as human slaves.
Currently we live in a society in which a few people have more wealth than tens of millions. The distribution of resources in the world is grossly unfair and there needs to be an evening out of this distribution. Let's first have a more equal society and then tackle the problem of underemployment.
> Let's first have a more equal society and then tackle the problem of underemployment.
In other words let's never tackle the problem of underemployment? A good way to ensure that something never gets done is to require a very hard thing to be done before it.
Your statement assumes a conclusion that has not been established and indeed that conclusion is wrong in my opinion. We can tax wealth and tax money transfers out of the country and do a host of other things to equalize things. We can establish labor standards that mandate a certain level of living for workers. We can also require a high level of labor standards for imported goods.
As an extreme example of how easy it can be to better equalize the distribution of wealth, and not one that I'm advocating for, the Soviets did a great job of ensuring that economic inequality was low. Of course this was obtained by ensuring that everyone was equally poor.
