And the immediate concern is about what it can cost the economy. Not the social impacts regarding family, friends, and society as a whole but the economy.
We will sacrifice our entire society to protect our beloved economy!
You hit the nail on the head.
The entire point of an economy is to be a mere tool to better distribute goods and services within a society for the explicit benefit of said society. If an economy is working against a society, it is literally doing the opposite of what its role is.
Whenever theres a crisis under our modern global rigged capitalism, the first thing that happens is the well bribed, middle manager politicians come out to assure the citizenry that any and all cruel measures will be taken against society in order to protect our beloved economy. it's a perversion of priorities. The tail wagging the dog.
Our modern global economy has turned humanity against humanity for the sake of stoking sociopathic greed, both in the few that have dangerous, society warping levels of wealth, and the billions of wannabe temporarily embarrassed millionaires fucking other peasants over for scraps.
The global economy needs to be smashed to bits and rebuilt with entirely different goals and values, or it will make our species destroy ourselves in the name of profit for a few thousand narcissistic asshole families.
We won't though, we'll keep following the owner's orders to our doom, even after they're barking them remotely from their luxury climate change bunker compounds protecting them from the climate apocalypse they caused, until the last peasants struggling to survive stop bothering to answer on the other end.
People are always like "Why is there no revolution!?"
Because most aren't willing to risk their lives and their comfort to make the world better for everyone. "What do I get out of it?" they will ask.
Part of the issue is past revolutions didn't have a ruling class that literally employed the best psychologists that money can buy to spew propaganda that has been scientifically proven to confuse citizens and change minds.
The idea that it will get easier to fight back against your oppressors as they grow their pile of tools and weapons with which to control society is a joke.
The longer is waited, the harder ripping off the fucking band-aid will be.
Wait too long and there won't be a band-aid to rip off as mass extinction comes for us all.
Slowly but surelly over the last couple of decades the political discourse moved from "best for people" to "best for money".
By now politics isn't about doing what's best for people anymore (it's what's best for "The Economy" or for "Businesses") though we get thrown a few never really fullfilled promises (almost exactly like modern marketing, even using Focus Groups to find out what are the things to say which will have the most positive reaction from the public).
And just like when companies successfully shift to a Marketing-heavy strategy, for Political Parties too the quality of their product - policies - went down as they shifted to marketing as a way to keep their "consumers" - i.e. voters - "buying" their product, and the price - in terms of how much wealth they're extracting from the broader society for their leaders and their paymasters and how little they leave for everybody else - has gone up.
Unsurprisingly, by now more and more of people are getting dissatisfied even if most don't quite get it how they got there.
It kind of makes sense to put it that way. Presumably, workers being unhappy might make some sense if it was a tradeoff between productivity and work-life balance.
But no, it's bad for both social effects and economic effects
I applied to over 100 remote positions before finally throwing in the towel and taking a hybrid position. There's a finite amount of remote employers and they are unbelievably picky as a result.
Well when you put it that way, guillotine'ing a few billionaires once a year would probably save everyone a ton of money and significantly improve workforce moral.
There are about 3,000 billionaires on Earth. More people died on 9/11 than there are "winners" who manipulate our species, world governments, and our entire civilization to their detriment for short term private profit.
Our common enemy oppressing humanity doesn't have enough numbers to fill a tenth of a football stadium. Just saying...
Jokes aside, they aren't the biggest hurdle, their army of deluded true believer, self-hating, "love me senpai" peasants are.
I thought about it and I don't want that happening to the CEO of where I work. I want him to go into early retirement and I don't know step on a Lego once in a while. Not even every month just like once a year. That would be justice in my mind.
tbh even the monsters are victims of their class position - being a billionaire warps a person into a horrible creature that is deserving of pity as much as they are deserving of a good French haircut
Maybe if we had a UBI, people would be okay with jobs that weren't that great so they could have a better life than a UBI provided. I know I'd be a lot happier if I knew I had a financial safety net.
Or you know just the understanding that the effort put into my job would have benefits rather than just barely have enough to survive and keep myself mildly entertained
What's the point in increasing wages if prices go up faster?
Remember: products are priced according to what people are willing to pay, not what they cost to produce.
The answer isn't to make more, it's to spend less. The only people who should be taking a hit are those profiting. They'll still make more money than any of you can ever hope to dream of.
"We need to increase employee surveillance to identify workplace unhappiness and take appropriate administrative action against employees costing revenue by being unhappy at work, against corporate directives to all non-executive staff requiring they be very happy during work hours as a condition of their employment."
-The owners, almost certainly
You can always count on the capitalists to prescribe increased beatings as the cure for declining morale. Meanwhile you never see them sharing that expensive bar in their office filled with top shelf liquor with their unhappy employees...
I'm able to make this comment right now because I called out of work because I fucking hate my job and they treat us like shit. So yeah I'd have to agree.