Two words:

Record Profits

Don’t worry because you are free to exploit people as well! Oh, you’re not exploiting, fucking over, and scamming literally every human being you meet? What’s wrong with you. Maybe you’re just not smart enough to screw people over. /$

I used to work as a building superintendent in a condo. I did the math and the corporation brought in around half a million a month in maintenance fees and the operating costs aren’t anywhere that high. I used to get paid minimum wage. I did the math on the amount of units in comparison to my paycheck. It was something like a dollar per unit was going towards my pay. So whenever anyone acted like I should bend over backwards for them, I remembered that their particular issues and complaints were only worth $1 to me

In the condo and building maintenance industry, the less you do the more you make, the super and cleaners do everything and get paid shit, the manager and offsite manager’s boss make a fortune

It’s almost like there’s greedy fatcats in every industry stuffing all of the profits down their fat gullets while everyone else barely holds off starvation.

Admin and c-suite taking huge salaries and sucking companies, schools and agencies dry.

This is generating the typical anti-capitalist hate, but we should also consider that this is also a reflection on the kinds of unpaid work that women have been doing for generations. The problem isn’t necessarily profits or middle-men, it’s just that some things are always going to be expensive if people are actually paid for the work they do.

Take daycare. In the US the government says that one adult should care for no more than 3 infants, no more than 4 toddlers and no more than 7 preschoolers.

Take someone working at the US poverty line at about $15,000 per year. That’s $1250 per month. For 3 infants that’s $415 per month each, for 4 toddlers that’s $312 each, for 7 preschoolers that’s $180 each. That’s the absolute cheapest you could possibly go, where a worker is at the poverty line, and there are no costs for rent, supplies, and also zero profit.

But, as a parent, you probably don’t want the absolute lowest “bidder” to take care of your kids. You probably want someone who’s good with kids, kind, gentle, patient, etc. So, let’s not even go all the way up to the lowest possible teacher’s salary of $34,041 in Montana. Let’s say the daycare worker is great with kids, but doesn’t have the teaching background to get even the least well paying teaching job available in the country. Let’s say you’d be willing to have someone who makes $24,000 per year for easy math. That’s a wage where the caregiver is going to struggle to make ends meet in most of the country, but maybe it’s worth it for them because they like working with kids. That’s $2000 per month. For infants it’s $667 per month each or $8000 per year, toddlers it’s $500 per month each or $6000 per year. preschoolers it’s $285 per month each or about $3500 per year.

Again, this is before you consider any profits. That’s money straight from the parents to the caregiver’s salary. That’s before you consider rent, before supplies, before snacks, etc. That’s no reading nook, no library, no arts and crafts, that’s presumably just using someone’s living room.

Now, if the daycare worker is going to be able to take sick days or vacations, you’ll need to pay part of another person’s salary who will cover. So instead of 1 person watching 7 preschoolers, you have 10 people watching 70 preschoolers plus 1 who rotates in to cover when the main workers are unavailable, so make that another 10%. We’re up to almost $9k per year for an infant, and we still don’t have cribs, baby food or a cent in profit, and we have a worker who is barely scraping by.

The point is, any job that involves a lot of human supervision is going to be very expensive. Caring for babies and old or sick people involves a lot of human supervision. Much of this work used to be done by women who didn’t work outside the home. Now that women are working outside the home, even when they have young children, we’re realizing how expensive it is. None of what I’ve talked about involves capitalism or profits, it’s just purely paying someone to do child-care work while the woman does other work.

But, this is where the capitalism / socialism aspect comes in. If we want women to be able to work outside the home, and we also want kids to be something that isn’t financially ruinous, society needs to help pay for those things. In a purely capitalist, no socialism, winner-take-all world, having kids is a major liability. Having an option to not have kids is great, but in the long term society is doomed if nobody is willing to have kids anymore.

Private equity, shareholders. No publicly traded business is in the business of providing service and goods of value.

I do volunteer office work for a non-profit childcare center, and have looked at their budget and their books. It’s basically impossible to efficiently do at the scale of a single center in a high cost of living city.

If you’re paying teachers an average of $30/hour and maintaining a ratio of 4 kids to 1 teacher at all times, and covering 50 hours per week of operational time (for example, operational hours between 8am and 6pm 5 days per week), and you actually have enough staff to not pay overtime, that’s $1500/week in wages per teacher, or $375/week per student. Throw in taxes, healthcare, paid vacation, and staffing in redundancy so that you can handle illness and the unexpected, and each kid might be at $400-450/week in labor costs of the direct work of watching and teaching the kids.

But in reality, childcare is in crisis now because a qualified worker could probably get a higher paying nanny job for 1 or 2 kids at a time, so there’s a severe shortage of workers even at that $30/hour average wage. And so there needs to be overtime, and that creeps up to $450-500/week for workers.

And then you have the ongoing overhead: rent, utilities, furniture/equipment, toys, books, other supplies, etc. Most centers provide food, and have to contract out for that, too.

And then there’s the cost of management. Someone needs to run the place, there might need to be something like a receptionist, and these centers often have to contract out their bookkeeping, electronic records, or even basics like running a website. Most have extra features like electronic reports and maybe even pictures/video for parents, and that costs money, too.

So even on the non-profit side, without a profit motive or distributions to shareholders, the industry as a whole has a mismatch between the prices parents are able to pay versus the bare minimum acceptable cost of providing that service. (In fact, the nonprofit I’m thinking of has donations coming in to cover things like tuition assistance for parents who need it, or a lot of the supplies, and volunteers like me who can provide specialized labor for no cost to the center.)

Childcare should be subsidized by the government, and there’s basically no way this industry can continue to exist based purely on revenues from parents alone. Otherwise the industry will enter a death spiral and the number of people simply unable to afford kids will grow out of control.

Eat the middlemen

True. I used to teach at a technical school, oh, a quarter century ago now. Seats were something like $500 per person, and I would have a class of 14 to 18 students. So $7,000 to $9,000 worth of tuition per day.

I was making $18 an hour, IIRC? $144 a day?

OH! AND I had to wear a suit and tie every day. So in addition to the usual expenses, there were also drycleaning bills.

After 9/11 class size shrunk to 2-3 people a day and the school went out of business.

Oh my, reminds me of a saying we used to have back under soviet occupation. Translated it would be “If you aren’t stealing, you’re stealing from your family.”. Americans are at the point where that’s the world they live in, but they haven’t yet developed the depressing worldview of the average soviet citizen. Oof…

The internet has a serious issue with managers, upper management, and even landlords nowadays. It’s so weird to see people slip back into blaming anyone but the real grifters who provide no benefit but take a dollar for no real benefit, or the wage inequality with CSuites. Even people here are falling back into blaming people in their own wage bracket rather than looking at people who provide nothing or paid too much.

As someone who’s worked the peon doing the shit to management, so much of the issue is rooted in insurance and government mandated oversight.

People love to hate on their manager making $20,000-40,000 more than them, but they’re basically the same as you to everyone grifting or the 1%. Quit blaming them for living in a society that both WANTS and REQUIRES massive oversight.

Running a business ethically takes far more money than anyone wants to admit.

Running a business while making sure you follow all government regulations, codes, is insurable, and is cost efficient is even harder.

First, get rid of for profit insurance. They should all work as collectives.

Get rid of for profit healthcare and go single payer. Remove middlemen who provide no benefit. Quit overpaying shit like salesmen because they’re a clear tick that shows more $$$$ and pay people nicely. A housekeeper making $40,000 shouldn’t be $50,000 away from their manager and shouldn’t be $400,000 or more away from their President. Quit overvaluing and paying a rich person to what amounts to having to have someone dedicated to sucking up to other rich people to stay alive.

Understand that the stock market only works with infinite growth. You will need to save up exactly what you plan to use in retirement without the magic of it or compounding interest and redistribute the wealth through unionizing, and collective bargaining.

Understand that all of it takes someone to lead and do it that will need to be paid as well. People want to live their lives happily, not sacrifice themselves and their life out of some noble goodness of their heart. Pay them appropriately and understand that if you’re in these positions, you shouldn’t be paid double what other people make just because you do important work. We all do.

Remember that it takes more people to run anything that we like to admit, and that often these regulations are there for a reason. Find the real fat, and cut it while you can.

Seriously though, blame for profit businesses that should just be government run if they’re a requirement. Insurance/public health, safety/audit oversight, infrastructure, utilities, public health.

Push for cooperatives for things that can be more privatized but get sketchy when it’s all government or full on for profit, like private land ownership, private schools, banking to credit unions.

It has been unchecked corporate greed. If you just look around or follow twitter pages like more perfect union. Story after story of corporate greed and people coming together to try to make life fair and liveable.

They recently had one of some big corpos buying up all the land in a state to build their own crypto city. Even that land is for farming is ultra important. Now that group of corpos are suing the people for coming together and not selling.

Capitalism combined with markets with inelastic demand is a lot of fun. But communism bad because tankies or whatever.

but the shareholders!