• TheGrandNagus@lemmy.world
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    18 days ago

    I’m so fucking sick of this discussion.

    If your income is in the form of dividends, stock selling, or collecting rent money, you’re not a worker.

    If you work as an employee for a company, and are also a landlord on the side, then yes you are a worker. But you are a worker because of the working for a company part, not the landlord part.

    End of discussion.

    Now let’s look at a paragraph from this dog shit article, breaking it up into points…

    I know investment bankers and corporate lawyers who work far more hours and under much greater pressure than me.

    And? Nobody ever said investment bankers or lawyers weren’t workers. They work for companies and are paid.

    They have no inherited income, come from ordinary backgrounds and their wealth is entirely down to their salary.

    Ok? What does this have to do with assessing whether someone is a worker or not?

    But that salary is simply too large for them to count as working people.

    When did the government or anybody ever say that anyone with a decent salary isn’t a worker?

    In any case, I’ve watched several episodes of Industry, and they are patently the wrong type of working people. And what’s more, they are having way too much sex, although Starmer has not quantified how much coupling working people are allowed.

    I don’t even know what to say about this. Are they unrelatedly complaining about sex in a TV programme, or do they genuinely think Labour’s view on who counts as a worker comes down to how often that person has sex and how many people they have sex with?

    It’s honestly embarrassing that FT even published this. Under a fucking £39 per month paywall too.

    • Buckshot@programming.dev
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      18 days ago

      I feel like they could have avoided all this argument by saying won’t raise taxes on working people’s earnings, rather than just working people. Any sane and honest person knows what they meant and the whole thing is just trying to gotcha them. Just shows they don’t have any substantive criticism.

      • Echo Dot
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        18 days ago

        They’ve just been flailing around while they’ve been having the leadership contest. They don’t really have a direction.

        Hopefully now they have a leader they won’t feel the need to argue about literally everything.

    • Echo Dot
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      18 days ago

      It is such a stupid discussion because there are many people that work in industries that are in high demand and thus get very high wages. But that’s the point, they get a wage, thus are a worker.

      It’s the Tories that started trying to muddy the waters about this because they’re angry about something, although God knows what, because they appear to be raging against the made up version of the policy rather than the actual policy.

      • fakeman_pretendname
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        18 days ago

        What would we call it? hallo-old-chum-you-fiend? my-good-friend-the-dishonourable-sir?

        Is anyone posh using British Lemmy who can help advise?

        • ᴇᴍᴘᴇʀᴏʀ 帝A
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          18 days ago

          What would we call it? hallo-old-chum-you-fiend? my-good-friend-the-dishonourable-sir?

          I say, that’s a bit much old thing!

    • mannycalaveraOP
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      18 days ago

      I feel… and hear me out… you’re taking this opinion piece too seriously. Read it like you’d read a Spectator article (and I very much appreciate you might read the Spectator). These are meant to be tongue in cheek. They’re not meant to be taken seriously or over analysed.

      Could you imagine being this put out about the guardian opinion pieces?

      • Echo Dot
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        18 days ago

        Right but they raised the very important point that the article is basically complaining about a bunch of people not being considered working when they are working and are considered working people.

        They’re literally complaining about nothing

        • mannycalaveraOP
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          18 days ago

          I never saw the article as anything more than a sarcastic opinion piece. They’re not calling on the chancellor to reverse the budget. They’re not pointing to business opposition. They’re not saying anything but haven’t an armchair moan in, what looks like to me, a light-hearted opinion piece.

          But fair enough if others see it differently. I certainly didn’t.

  • flamingos-cant
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    18 days ago

    7.2 million people in this country are food insecure, but one bad thing befalls investment bankers and landlords and it’s all we hear about for weeks, because guess which segment of society journalists are sourced from.

  • beepnoise@piefed.social
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    18 days ago

    TheGrandNagus hit the nail on the head perfectly, but as someone who actually does read the FT every now and then, I’m genuinely shocked they even published this.

    Granted, it’s under an “Ask Shrimsley” thing, but for a hot minute I was reading it like a normal FT article thinking “what the actual fuck?”

    It honestly reads like the comment section of the FT, not something that should’ve been passed through an editor and published.