A Person wrote:What's your take?
Anything other than one person = one vote will quickly get corrupted into something that severely disadvantages those who are not rich and powerful. It is a system that will guarantee feudalism even faster than we seem to be going toward that exploitative system right now.
Last week, in one of my Health Policy classes where virtually everybody works full time as a manager we had a fun exercise. I had them identify how many hours a week they had to work for their jobs. Then I asked them to take their annual salary and divide by the number of hours they actually work a year.
One of our managers happens to be a nurse with an MBA, and he is the director of the OR department at his hospital (not a top executive, but right below the Vice President of Nursing) and he is making the rather nice salary of $108,000 a year. So he figured his salary was about $51 per hour. However, he has to work an average of 78 hours per week to complete all the work involved in doing his job (and he is effectively on-call 24/7 but we will ignore that for now). So he calculated that salary out (e.g. divided his $108k salary by the product of 78 hours a week by 52 weeks a year). He found he was working for only $26.62 an hour. Now, you should know that newly graduated, nurses with just a two year associate degree make that much an hour, and have not nearly the stress he has. And if they take on a lot of double shifts or even work a second job, they will make as much or more than him, just by working the same hours he works. (He has a 6 month old baby at home that he almost never sees, but many of the new nurses aren't married yet and have no family demands, so working that many hours wouldn't be so destructive to them).
He is actually making less than most of his staff nurses per hour. (He told me that his really experienced RNs make about $33.50 an hour). And many of the other executives in the class discovered they were making less per hour than their experienced staff too! In fact, hospitals are now having a big problem recruiting directors of nursing departments. Unless a person is really in love with doing management work, management today is actually a poor paying, family-destroying, rather nasty job to have.
My point here is that America does have greater productivity than the other industrialized countries right now. But is that really something to be proud of? We have it at the expense of the people and their families. Americans are now working more hours than do the people of any other industrialized country. I interpret that to mean that Americans are very stupid people. They are willing to work thousands of hours a year for nothing! And the beneficiaries of all that work is not the Americans doing the work, it is their rich employers. Now, does anybody want to explain to me why the American middle class is so happy to let themselves be worked to death for NO pay???? Only slaves work for no pay. And frankly, some of them got better benefits than the American middle class is getting right now.
