Day 19

“Everyone should be paid a #FairWage for the #work they complete and it is time for the major parties to commit to this meaningful change for people with disability.

#People with #disability are being overlooked and left behind in the major party policy promises this election campaign.

… The answer to getting more people with disability into work is not to allow #CheapLabour, it’s to ensure we are funding #employment services that actually work, which allow people with disability to connect with work they find #meaningful and also gives them the opportunity to build their capacity to perform those roles.” — #DavidPocock

$3 an hour.

#AusPol / #Independent / #LNP / #Liberal / #Nationals / #Labor <https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/live/2025/apr/17/australia-election-2025-live-peter-dutton-anthony-albanese-coalition-labor-income-tax-cost-of-living-leaders-debate-ntwnfb?page=with%3Ablock-68001d5c8f08bcf9ff48311e#block-68001d5c8f08bcf9ff48311e>

@tknarr @lauren

To me, the whole "H1-B is for when you simply cannot find a qualified citizen/green-card candidate" problem could be solved with what seems to me to be a missing requirement.

If you "can't find" a matching candidate, clearly you've already tried recruiting with generous compensation etc. So if you're forced to go outside the national labour pool, it should obviously be that anyone you hire on an H1-B is right at the top of your compensation, right?

i.e. hire an H1-B engineer, they had better be the highest-paid (or tied for highest) engineer in the company.

If you enforce that, the cheap-labour abuse just goes away...

But of course, every complex problem has a simple, easy to understand wrong answer, so maybe I'm missing something.

"Postdoctoral researchers earn an average of $47,500 a year — a little more than half of the average annual salary for university graduates. Moreover, postdocs face constant upheaval, because they typically have to move to a new role every few years. Some researchers spend a decade or longer jumping from one short-term contract to the next."
#JobInsecurity #ContractWork #CheapLabour #academia #government

“The obscenity of the system is made possible by the dramatically diminished bargaining power of #labour. Weak labour is #CheapLabour. More lucratively, the world’s #workers can increasingly be mobilised according to #employers’ precise needs, so not a penny is wasted. The purpose is to transform the #HumanWorker into a machine that can be switched off when not in use (although at least machines are tended with maintenance). In 2020, #Amazon’s UK sales soared by half to £19.4bn. In 2021, an investigation in Britain found that the company was bypassing its own #employment #standards by hiring thousands of zero-hours workers through #agencies.” — #NesrineMalik

Zero-hour workers.

#corporate / #economics <https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/jan/23/system-rigged-inequality-pandemic-despair-super-rich>