While workers in the western world agonize over what seems to be an impending job apocalypse, their Chinese counterparts are winning in pitched legal battles against AI automation.
Last week, according to the state-run Xinhua News Agency, a Chinese court ruled that companies can’t use AI as an excuse to fire workers. The case involved a quality assurance supervisor, identified only by his surname Zhou, who was hired in 2022 to oversee a tech company’s AI output. When his bosses tried to replace him with a large language model (LLM) in 2025, they offered him a demotion with a 40 percent pay cut.
Unsurprisingly, Zhou refused — so the company fired him, offering a severance package worth around $45,000. Unhappy with the rather paltry payout, Zhou contested the severance offer through a government arbitration panel.
After that panel ruled in favor of Zhou on grounds that the dismissal was illegal, the company filed a lawsuit with a lower court, presumably the district-level Primary People’s Court. After losing that suit, the company then appealed to the municipal-level Hangzhou Intermediate People’s Court, which upheld the lower court’s decision on the grounds that bringing on AI isn’t an excuse to start shredding job contracts.
It's sort of a disaster for China in the long-run, however, even if it sounds nice now. That means that heavily bloated state enterprises aren't going to face any competition from leaner firms using new technology. It means that the cost of starting a new business will go up. It means that inefficient firms use a pathway to getting more efficient. And it means less push to redeploy people to areas that technology can't automate.
If the central government backs this ruling, it basically opts China out of huge productivity gains, which China desperately needs given their aging population. This is going to basically make the typical Chinese family poorer over the long-run.
I don’t understand obsession with hating China either. The homeownership in China is over 90% - one of the highest in the world. So, China is trying to also reduce the other end of the stick - HO expenses by building equity. For a consumer, this is less consolidation of greedy corporate monsters trying to buy all flats to increase rent.
No, you see, it's more competitive for firms to have as many children working in the mines with black lungs as possible! If other mining companies followed suit, it would deincentivize competition and more lean companies that have more of their workforce dying in the mines would have the advantage!
Yes, a healthier society is one where money is increasingly concentrated in the hands of a few. And it's not like those ultra wealthy will try to use all sorts accounting techniques to minimise their tax burden either. Yes, all jobs must be automated away.
There's some misunderstandings here. Most state companies are important and critical sectors. A lot of businesses in China are privately owned, like the tech startup this article references.
As for starting a new company, that could happen, but if everyone is on the same playing field it doesn't matter. It does matter if one party uses AI to get an advantage.
Also, where exactly would we redeploy people? Right now a lot of it is in white collar work - is everyone going to go into the trades? Maybe downgrade human capital to manual work? Even that's set to be automated.
Last bit about misunderstanding. China is heavily focused and invested in automation. They already have a blackout factory - there's other's that can do the same but the Chinese seems more gong ho about it (pun intended)
So do you want the costs of education, healthcare, housing, etc... to come down? Probably yes.
The only way to do that is to improve productivity in the sector. We've largely capped out on gains from pure labor productivity (e.g. skills and training). That leaves us either technology (e.g. AI) or processes / workflows / ways of working (e.g. lean manufacturing, etc...).
In places where demand is inelastic, that means fewer workers which means that costs eventually fall. In places with very elastic demand, that usually leads to more total consumption but unit costs fall.
We just came off an election cycle where cost of living dominated the discussion. The only way to reduce the cost of living is to increase productivity in the most expensive sectors. Our best bet is AI. People will find new jobs. Sometimes those jobs will pay less. I'm in that same boat. But we are collectively better off being able to capture gains from productivity investments.
Cost of living is also a lot less there. No one’s saying it’s perfect, yes their citizens give up some rights, China also treats its minorities horribly, but for the majority they get a better education, are not saddled with debt, healthcare is for everyone, and if you purchase a home it’s yours (tax man can’t take it later if you forget to pay property tax).
US has demonized and vilified China and the Chinese for centuries. But maybe for once they’re not the bad guys in this storyline.
I wasn’t talking about minimum wage. I was talking about liveable wage. Agree. Minimum wage means nothing and is barely anything in the capitalistic hell hole of the United States.
The United States labor situation is a fucking nightmare but let’s not pretend like China is better. The entire Chinese economy is based on suppressing labor rights and geographical restrictions on both movement and welfare access to ensure a permanent lower class of citizen to use for low wage employees. There is so much wrong with the United States is also so bad that I think we’re almost at the point where it just needs to be burnt down but I’m not going to pretend what’s happening to Chinese workers is any better just to make that point. We need solidarity with workers in every country and Chinese workers don’t deserve to have their suffering marginalized.
Edit: if it’s not clear, I feel the same about the treatment of workers in the United States and think this individual decision about AI is good but I am simply responding to this person cheerleading for supposed Chinese worker rights.
I'm not going to pretend to be an expert here especially as we will all look at these things through cultural lenses that create bias. However the 10,000 ft view really looks like China has made massive strides to lift an extremely large portion if not majority of their population to a vastly better quality of life over the past ~20-30 years where here in the US it really feels there are efforts to erode the middle class.
The middle class has been massively eroded in the last few decades. The issue that reddit likes to ignore is that this is mostly due to people moving up the chain rather than down.
I have no idea if what you are posting is true. However, I'd argue the improvement was dramatically larger and more impactful in China since 2000 than what's happened in America.
I don't think we are drawing quite the same conclusions. While it clearly shows a growth in terms of percentage of population into the "upper category" there is a lot here that absolutely does not paint a rosy picture...
>...the gains for middle- and lower-income households were less than the gains for upper-income households.
>Consequently, there is now a larger gap between the incomes of upper-income households and other households. In 2022, the median income of upper-income households was 7.3 times that of lower-income households, up from 6.3 in 1970. It was 2.4 times the median income of middle-income households in 2022, up from 2.2 in 1970.
If you go all the way back to 1970 and compare what China's done, they basically moved from a 3rd world country to a super power. There's really no comparison from an average citizen's perspective who's quality of life has improved more.
> to ensure a permanent lower class of citizen to use for low wage employees.
Any honest assessment of China's development policy and outcomes for the past fifty years would show this to be plainly false. For all their faults and abuses, it's ridiculous to claim that their goal is to suppress wages when the outcome of their labor and economic policies has been to uplift literally hundreds of millions from the abject poverty of famine-prone subsistence farming. They are doing the largest amount of total good possible by focusing on the worst off, bringing more stable employment and higher earnings (even if only marginal) alongside public medicine and development programs.
Eliminating the extremely poor in China is truly eliminating the pool of the most desperate willing to work in the worst conditions. If it looks like low-wage Chinese workers are living a horrible life, that is only because we cannot effectively imagine the worse life that they left to get there. By targeting the worst off, they are literally doing the opposite of what you claim. Low wage workers in China simply aren't the bottom of the economic ladder.
The central planning authority has to balance total economic growth, which enables the improvements for the worst off, with the individual benefit of particular groups. I don't agree with their choices or methods, but I can recognize what they're doing. As the poorest are made better off, policy focus shifts to benefit the higher earning group into which those poor have transitioned. This is why China's factory labor earning rate has continued to increase (they're no longer the cheap labor market, that has shifted to SE Asia).
If they were truly doing what you claim, they would continue to be competitive with Bangladesh and Vietnam for cheap clothing production (for example). They aren't. China has priced its labor market out of the bottom tiers of global production.
This doesn't absolve them of being an abusive police state. We just don't need to make up reasons to criticize China when there are plenty already.
The unspoken truth of China is that the 800 million lifted out of poverty in the past three decades is due to them liberalizing their markets and the US middle class buying their products.
It wasn’t some genius master strategy they employed.
Nobody said the economy over decades didn’t pull countless people out of poverty. It’s pretty telling that you focused on that admittedly incredible historical trend as a straw man rather than what I actually was replying to which is the current labor rights situation that is in fact designed to abuse the rural transient workers for low income work while denying them access to the welfare state based on geographical restrictions. I can’t believe that I have to say this but I obviously understand that the number of people lifted out of poverty is an incredible feat but their modern labor rights record is downright abysmal. Just like the United States. One ruling on AI doesn’t change that. I guess the difference between me and you is I care about workers everywhere so I’m not gonna give them a pass just because the United States is also horrific.
How does the American system restrict geographical movement or class movement? Not saying things are peachy perfect here or that we couldn’t do certain things better as the wealthiest nation in the world. But say what we might (and there are many valid observations about the wealthy / corporate interests giving themselves the advantage, being interested in keeping a poor uneducated working class, etc)… there is nothing systematically here that is like actual slavery. And class mobility, hand in hand with the ability to work up in an education / career / trade for good income, is *still* much better than most of the world. There’s a reason we still have mass immigration. There are many parts of the world (like China) where there is actual systemic oppression, and others like Latin America where if you aren’t born into the right family or know people, working up and getting a better standard of living in your country might as well be impossible.
I’m not against criticizing the system, but I think jumping to such hyperbole discredits the arguments.
the government doesn't traffic people to pick tomatoes though. in china, if you're born in rural china you aren't allowed to work in a city without government permission. you can't receive government benefits if you leave either. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hukou
Shahid Yusuf, a Senior Adviser in the World Bank’s Development Research Group noted that the hukou system served as a "cornerstone of China's urbanization strategy" by controlling migration and channeling migrants toward small or medium-sized cities rather than allowing unchecked inflows to the largest urban areas. He described China's ability to achieve rapid urbanization while largely avoiding widespread slum formation as one of its "greatest successes" in managing its urbanisation pathway, stating: "One of China’s greatest successes in its rapid urbanization has been that it has managed to contain the process to the extent that there are crowded living conditions but very few slums. This is an important achievement for a developing country."[7]
Yes, that is their justification as it helps their central planning for those cities. It also dooms those individuals to near-certain poverty. The argument isn't that it had no benefits, the argument is that it is wrong.
World bank seems to think China has done a pretty incredible job of poverty reduction. https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/server/api/core/bitstreams/e9a5bc3c-718d-57d8-9558-ce325407f737/content
"However, there is ongoing debate regarding the future role of the system, and in recent years China has created reforms whose aim is to gradually relax hukou restrictions" from your own source.
There is currently a lawsuit against abortion pills saying that poor people getting abortions is a harm to the state because then they often get an education and leave, decreasing the population.
The lawsuit claims that, because poor people - according to the states of Kansas, Missouri, and Idaho - moving is a harm to the state and they would like to shackle them where they are. And they want the courts to make it so they can’t move any more by forcing them to have babies and wallow in poverty.
Class movement? As a constant force in the US? Right now?
A country where the government is both limiting the number of degrees that can be considered professional (including nursing and teaching) while piling debt upon the people that want to be educated and make a better living?
A country that protects billionaires and grinds the majority of their population into uneducated poverty?
You don’t think there’s systematic oppression in the US? Really?
In this instance, China is better. In almost any state in the US a similar worker could be laid off to be replaced by AI and receive no compensation or legal recourse through the courts. This employee in China was able to avail himself of the courts and receive confirmation that his termination was illegal. I don't think that would happen in most jurisdictions in the US. I could be wrong though.
But you didn’t say “in this instance China is better” because everyone would obviously agree that this individual decision is better which I even mentioned in my comment. What you said is that China has more labor rights than the United States which is simply not true and I wanted to make sure that was clear. You see this online more and more because of how shit the United States has become people feel like they have to prop up Chinese alternatives (which is sometimes valid) but in this particular case Chinese labor rights are abhorrent. I was just making the point that cheerleading for China with false claims does nothing to help the argument against the United States and actually marginalizes Chinese workers struggles.
I actually disagree that this individual decision is better. it sounds nice, but in an aging population, productivity growth is the single most important thing we need out of our economy.
For example, take healthcare. With our demographics, healthcare costs will eat the economy and government budgets without significant increases in productivity. AI is the best option on the horizon to buy us those productivity gains.
And there are a ton of jobs where huge shares of workers are close to retirement. Take accounting, as another example. The number of young people going into accounting is declining, the number retiring is accelerating. How will we get all of that work done without automation, in particular given the pending decline in young people entering the workforce.
> I actually disagree that this individual decision is better. it sounds nice, but in an aging population, productivity growth is the single most important thing we need out of our economy.
In China, productivity enhancement has to be used to increase the productivity of the company's existing workers.
Currently in the United States, a company could use AI to keep productivity the same and increase profits using layoffs.
Not sure why you would prefer the US method here. China's ruling is definitely the more pro-social of the two.
Can you explain why this would limit productivity in China?
Demand for some goods and services is elastic, and demand for others is inelastic. For places where demand is relatively fixed, but we could produce that good or service with 1/5th the number of people, you are going to artificially keep the price of that good or service high by not allowing them to automate.
Let's take healthcare in the US. Despite the memes, labor costs are a huge driver of healthcare costs in the US. If we could reduce labor costs of just the administrative side of healthcare in the US by 30%, that would be amazing. Particularly as our population ages. Without that, households in the US will get poorer as the share of household spending on healthcare rises.
The US method is, over the long run, far superior. People will have to move to new jobs. I expect to have to move to a new job. At the person level, it sort of sucks. But at the system level, it's essential. We've seen this much more in manufacturing than in services. The cost of a unit of processing power, or refrigeration, or basic stuff like TVs has cratered over the past 40 years. Almost all of our inflation is in labor-intensive places like healthcare, education, housing. Unless we drive productivity in those places, they will continue to get more expensive.
> Demand for some goods and services is elastic, and demand for others is inelastic. For places where demand is relatively fixed, but we could produce that good or service with 1/5th the number of people, you are going to artificially keep the price of that good or service high by not allowing them to automate.
>
> Let's take healthcare in the US. Despite the memes, labor costs are a huge driver of healthcare costs in the US. If we could reduce labor costs of just the administrative side of healthcare in the US by 30%, that would be amazing. Particularly as our population ages. Without that, households in the US will get poorer as the share of household spending on healthcare rises.
But my entire point is that US companies are more likely to cut labor to keep productivity the same, and increase profits.
Mandating a certain level of employment with those similar productivity gains would be the actual overall increase in productivity like what China seems to do.
There's no actual proof that making it easy to lay off workers because of AI would lead to more productivity gains in the US, compared to productivity gains in China.
China is currently neck and neck with the U.S. in terms of AI, with stronger employee protections in the AI space. If they had access to our chips they'd probably be ahead by now.
You haven't made a good case that the AI advantage in the US is because of more lax worker protections. I question the magnitude of that benefit, especially in the cost towards workers.
Would the US be meaningfully worse off in the AI race in the present or near future with stronger labor protections?
"But my entire point is that US companies are more likely to cut labor to keep productivity the same, and increase profits."
Then they will get outcompeted by companies that are leaner. Like, for all of the criticism that it's received, Walmart has kept US inflation down by about a half point for decades. I 100% guarantee that some company will figure out a way to undercut it's rivals if it feels that the liability risk of running leaner is low.
Laying off workers doesn't lead to productivity gains. It's a byproduct of high productivity in places with high demand inelasticity. Those workers get redeployed somewhere else. We've been doing that for nearly a century (in reality longer), which is why the median US household is dramatically richer than the median household in the UK or Spain or France.
Lax worker protections allow people to move to parts of the economy that aren't as efficient, lowering the costs of those goods and services as well.
So I think that you have causality backwards. Labor protections don't matter at all for the AI race, but prohibiting companies from laying off employees whose work can now be done at 1/100th the cost simply makes goods and services more expensive for consumers.
You're basically saying that you never want the price of anything to come down. The only way the price of something comes down is productivity growth.
That’s an ignorant statement, they do not. Unions are prohibited, and any labor standards are often ignored without consequence. Not saying the US is good, but China isn’t better.
Also any company with at least 300 employees is required to have at least 1/3 of it's board members be employees directly elected by the employees, a right enshrined in the constitution.
Love all these analysis of China via article online lol.
Reality of what is happening on the ground and what you read in article is like two totally different world.
I actually have relatives in China working as union rep. Their only task. Hosting parties for workers. Pizza party but with Chinese food.
Having a union and having an effective union is not the same thing.
Just like how China has a jury system. They are professional juries that hang out together, dine together. They get pay to do this. And you know if you don’t agree with the ring leader. Next thing you know you are not longer on the jury the next case.
Of course, workplace safety comes AFTER the issues happen, they don't appear out of thin air. People act as if China had rigourous labour laws and then dismantled them. China from the 2000s to now have reduced industrial casualties by an insane amount. The government is literally making them better little by little, this Ai regulation is simply a part of it.
Now, its not on parity to western countries yet, but it's getting there. Would you prefer it if the Chinese government did absolutely nothing for worker safety and labour laws? Because thats literally the only other alternative.
People tend to forget that while China was starving, America had supermarkets and cars for civilians. In 2026, the average chinese person now has a higher life expectancy than their american counterparts.
These things take time, and don't happen overnight. Any small improvement should be encouraged, and not scorned at like it is here by a bunch of people, that if the original post was about america, would be labled "Wumaos" and "Bots".
In any of the 26 "right-to-work" states which effectively prohibits joining and forming unions. North Carolina and South Carolina also prohibit unions for public employees since they are regulated by state law. Finally, the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) often excludes domestic workers, meaning many nannies and home care workers are prohibited from forming unions.
This stopped being an economics subreddit a long time ago and now is a forum filled with Bots and typically left aligned folks that want to talk politics.
No, I get why you feel like that, but it’s not the case.
You’re confusing prohibited with interfering with a billionaires capitalist ambitions. A lot gross stuff happens to make unions fail, or never get the chance to form but it’s different than prohibited on a national level.
Shooting the messenger isn't a valid debate either. Just because western media doesn't bother covering it doesn't mean it doesn't exist. You shouldn't be in this sub at all with such lack of common sense.
Don't waste your time on him. He has activated his psychological defense mechanism. He cannot believe beyond the cognitive, and puts everything down to state propaganda.
It’s not a denial, do you not understand how state run media works in communist countries? You must not if you chose that a a source.
It’s cool you can make a list, how often are those followed? Is there any consequences from the Chinese government for companies to at break those agreements? I can make a list twice that long for the us, but what’s the point if protections aren’t in place?
Such a low bar Americans have that a free rest stop is so hard to believe. This show more sad than delusion. Your employer hold your healthcare hostage. Employers actively replace high paying jobs with cheaper foreign workers. Everything is fucked all-around. But since it's China, the country that spends more money on infrastructure than every single fucking country in North America and western Europe COMBINED, it's these cheap ass rest stations that suspends belief.
It is spreading disinformation to say that labor standards are ignored without consequence. Its 100% a better system for the average Chinese worker who isn't homeless or strung out on drugs or unable to afford food, housing, education, healthcare, etc. like in the US.
Good things and bad things are exactly the same so your question doesn't matter. We should not trying to make things better at all, just keep voting for right wing democrats to do nothing. I learned this from r/destiny.
It’s not more labor rights, it’s contract rights. This is posted all over Reddit with completely misleading titles. What the court ruled was the man had a contract and the company cannot tear up the contract and replace the worker with AI. The same would be ruled in the US. Assuming the man didn’t do anything to void the contract or otherwise reduce the money he was owed US courts would rule a US contractor was due the balance of the contract.
The CCP is not giving workers more rights in China than US workers receive. At least not in this case.
This is not a good thing. The US economy stays winning for 400+ years precisely because companies are able to fire workers for any or no reason. That’s how we stay dynamic.
My biggest takeaway from this article is that workers rights in China are far ahead of where I perceived them to be. I mean, in America, I wouldn't be getting a $45k severance package for refusing a demotion. I'd just get fired and lose my healthcare.
American worker rights seem comically bad so probably not a good standard for comparing.
What i would like to know is if the famously atrocious asian work culture has changed at all.
A 40 hour work week on paper can mean little if you become a social outcast for clocking out before your boss.
Lolno. This is one law on paper, let's not pretend that actually means anything. It really is scary how the zoomies will see one niche fact and extrapolate that to mean "X is better than Y", no wonder companies love them with how easily you can manipulate them lol.
I read this article yesterday and it made me think companies were doing similar stuff to the US and blaming AI for layoffs. I doubt a lot of workers will be able to avoid layoffs from AI since companies can just stop blaming AI and just pick a legal reason to layoff.
People complain about the IS labor laws, but if we prevented ‘AI layoffs’ they would just become normal layoffs.
The Article states the termination was illegal:
> the municipal-level Hangzhou Intermediate People’s Court, which upheld the lower court’s decision on the grounds that bringing on AI isn’t an excuse to start shredding job contracts.
Title
> Chinese Court Rules That a Worker Cannot Be Replaced by AI
You seem to think those 2 things are the same thing. They are not. It simply means a company cannot use AI as an excuse to fire someone. They can still fire him for any reason and automate his job. They just can't use the narrative that an AI replaced him, like it often happens in the US.
As a Chinese person, the focus of this news isn't actually on the dismissal itself. Many states in the US practice free employment, and many white-collar jobs in China, like the one in the news story, generally have an employment contract. Unless there are force majeure events, the employer is obligated to pay a certain amount of severance pay if they want to terminate the job early. The company in the news story attempted to use AI as a force majeure event to evade most of the severance pay, which was ruled illegal by the court.
Yup. In the US, you can’t use race, religion, ethnicity, etc. as a reason to fire someone, yet it happens often and nobody is dumb enough to say that is the reason. Same thing here.
Because nobody reads the article, there are a couple of details worth noting. First, the court determined that using AI as a justification did not fall under the umbrella of negative circumstances, like downsizing or operational difficulties. So all a company has to do to get around this is claim other business-related reasons.
More importantly, the Chinese legal system doesn't follow precedent unlike the US. This means that another court could easily rule in favor of AI being a valid reason for layoffs.
and for anyone who doesn't know, in China work is tied to contracts which are usually set for a certain amount of time...not at will employment like the US.
Isn’t that basically a civil law system? I’m no expert, but many developed nations don’t use precedence in a binding way like we see in a common law legal system, it’s treated as advisory.
As far as how a legal system works without precedence, I guess it’s more down to lawmakers than interpretation by the courts when actually creating or shaping laws.
If courts have differing interpretations then the legislature can make the law clearer.
Not all countries have the same legislature-court relationship the US has, or even particularly similar, when it comes to interpreting law and setting precedent.
But if one court hands down a ruling then that's (reasonably) going to influence how individuals and firms are going to act with respect to that law.
It seems like a bit of a rug-pull to then be like "naw this judge doesn't think that other judge was right - sorry you tried to take away anything from that previous ruling to influence your actions lol"
A ruling by a judge is a de facto assertion of what exactly the law means. It seems obvious to codify that since rulings are inevitably going to influence future behaviour regardless of the stature of precedence in that legal system.
Except that a judge is human too and subject to failings, saying that a judge’s verdict on a single case is better than a team of legislators who can adapt to the evolving society is a bit shortsighted. Precedence is also subject to differences in details.
The argument that judges are bound by "objective" precedent is often overstated. A judge must first determine if a prior case is "factually analogous." By "distinguishing" a case, finding a small detail that makes the current case different from the past, a judge can effectively bypass precedent.
If a team of legislators passes a law that is out of touch with the evolving society, the public can vote them out. Judges, especially those with life tenure, are insulated from public accountability. While this protects minority rights, it becomes "shortsighted" when a single, fallible human makes a sweeping moral or economic judgment that the rest of society is forced to live with for generations.
> ...saying that a judge’s verdict on a single case is better than a team of legislators who can adapt to the evolving society is a bit shortsighted.
I didn't say this though, and I do not believe it.
Nothing in my comment was about judges being better or more objective. There should still be opportunity for higher courts to overturn something or distinctions made between similar-but-not-identical cases. There should still be the possibility that a legislature should be able to modify a law or remove it or clarify its meaning. And failing that for the legislators to be replaced via election.
My point is that it's silly to assume the public will not treat a prior ruling as instructive, because it is natural to do so.
>The argument that judges are bound by "objective" precedent is often overstated. A judge must first determine if a prior case is "factually analogous." By "distinguishing" a case, finding a small detail that makes the current case different from the past, a judge can effectively bypass precedent.
That's all fine, but there's obviously going to be cases that are incredibly similar to each other as well.
The spectacularly huge investment in data center infrastructure is aimed at reducing labor costs in the generation and use of software products. Work will certainly change, although I believe the depth and rate of change is overblown.
China has not passed any new laws or set any new legal precedence or anything (so the title is complete BS)
A company broke a persons work contract by trying to change his pay mid contract....you can't do that....their excuse was simply that they had AI to do his job. They then fired him for refusing the pay change....a double no no at that point.
This has nothing to do with AI ....if any company tried to change your pay mid contract for any reason the same thing would happen except in some very special and extremely rare cases (like the office burning down or something crazy and life changing like that). They could have said its cause the employee ate a turkey sandwich and the result would literally be the exact same.
In China you can totally be fired or not hired because of AI....they just can't do it mid contract which is pretty obvious....that's the whole point of a contract.
For Americans who don't understand this due to our mostly "at will" employment system which means you can be fired or quit at any time you please, in China you sign a contract, usually 1-2 years, with a company that lays out your general labor contract (pay, job details, etc) and during this contract they can't fire you for frivolous reasons but you also can't quit for no reason (without giving at least 30 days notice).
This dumb shit keeps getting posted over and over again, I see it on social media as well. Wildly misleading. Basically the company broke contract - it essentially has nothing to do with AI, apart from AI being the reason they decided to break contract.
This is actually incredibly important for Americans who don't understand how significant our legal system is in defining and curating capitalism.
Capitalism is rooted in the common law judicial system we have. It is confirmed and reinforced every time a court decides that a capitalist's claim of ownership and control over 'their property' is a more important legal claim than a worker's needs.
If you can read that and you understand what it says, you're either a leftist or a fucking monster. If you can't wrap your head around it, you're like at least a plurality of Americans.
This is probably less true in other western countries.
Americas concept of "at-will" employment is pretty unique to America in that it creates no legal obligation to continue work on either party (worker or employer). That's not true in Europe.
> “The termination grounds cited by the company did not fall under negative circumstances such as business downsizing or operational difficulties, nor did they meet the legal condition that made it ‘impossible to continue the employment contract,'” the court said
I think there will be European countries where redundancy has a test equivalent to the one above.
But it’s also a reason why America has the largest wealth disparity in the developed world, the worst country for workers rights and retirement. Just because we are productive doesn’t mean those gains are going to the productive people. We have a flawed system.
Yes, it very much is. There’s a reason America is a Mecca for startups. Imagine trying to take a risk on a new business and a bunch of moronic leftists tell you that you aren’t allowed to fire your workers if you find a way to do things more efficiently, lmao
Imagine thinking you're a smart business person well-versed in economic and business strategy and you have a start-up company and you hire way too many workers.
You're arguing that America is 'a Mecca' for business because we coddle entrepeneurs by allowing them to transfer their risky decision-making to workers making it workers' burdens to carry, not the owner.
> Imagine thinking you're a smart business person well-versed in economic and business strategy and you have a start-up company and you hire way too many workers.
Lmaoooo
You have no idea how anything works. Businesses overhire in anticipation of deals that fall through all the time. This uncertainty is an inherent part of business.
> You're arguing that America is 'a Mecca' for business because we coddle entrepeneurs by allowing them to transfer their risky decision-making to workers making it workers' burdens to carry, not the owner.
Wrong. Business owners still assume all financial risk, while signing over partial equity to workers, and workers are fully aware of the risk of job loss when they enter into voluntary work contracts. Some people love this aspect of startup work and seek it out on purpose.
>Businesses overhire in anticipation of deals that fall through all the time
If you hire entirely on speculation of unsure growth and have to layoff workers because a deal fell through, you failed. You failed to provide meaningful work and you failed in the negotiation to secure a work order. I don't know how you are measuring "all the time" and how many workers are affected over such timelines, because you're speaking in vague generalities. Even if this were true, it says nothing about my point: it's a failure of the business, so it's not smart business and it shows incompetence, not skills.
>This uncertainty is an inherent part of business.
Gonna need you to quantify this if you claim that hiring large numbers of employees only to fire them within a short window is an "inherent part of business." I don't dispute that it happens, I am disputing your characterization that such a thing is an "inherent part of business." "Inherent part of business" is transactions, payroll, sales, business cycles, unpredictability, sure. But layoffs are decisions. That's a single strategy for cutting costs. And layoffs as the result of overhiring is simply a failed endeavor.
>Wrong. Business owners still assume all financial risk
A business which lays off workers to stay solvent has transfered a proportional amount of risk from itself to those people. If I employ a person for $50,000 salary and I lay them off I save the company $50,000. If that keeps my business from having to file bankruptcy I have succeeded in offsetting some of my risk of losing my capital investment onto the worker.
This is not that complicated. It is a simple concept.
>and workers are fully aware of the risk of job loss when they enter into voluntary work contracts.
This is stupid and trite. I could, for one, say the exact same thing for the business owner: they are well aware of the risks of hiring an employee and the costs that incurs and should they fail to meet revenue goals they will lose money. Choosing to layoff the employee to avoid or offset those losses is a transfer of that risk. It's a simple OR decision: take the losses fron paying the employee their full salary, or lay them off and save the money you otherwise would pay them. This doesn't answer the question any better than before.
>Some people love this aspect of startup work and seek it out on purpose.
Some people love the additional risk of losing their jobs because a start-up didn't project revenues correctly?
I feel like it would be more prudent to pass a law that says a customer has a right to speak to a human representative of the company and that they should expect it within a reasonable amount of time.
Pass this similar to the FCC rules on ISPs about service guarantees. Where is they fail to do so they're subject to large fines.
Everyone likes talking to humans, not robots, but at the same time a lot of services that used to be expensive and not widely available are now free and widespread exactly because of digital technology that doesn't require large costs of paying actual humans to tell you what a webpage or robot could.
Daaaaaaaamn, just going to go out there and thrust out that last paragraph.
The problem is, the American judicial system use to follow common law, today it does not do so. We have a supreme court that has been over turning decades of precedent and common law history in favor of corruption.
Nah, fam, this is actually how the court has always operated. It's always been very arbitrary, it's just that common law 'tradition' and (mostly) wealthy elites on the bench cater to capitalist interests. There have been ample opportunities for the US Supreme Court to decide cases in favor of people or workers but overwhelmingly they find in favor of capital.
Huh I wasn't aware I was a monster for understanding thermodynamics. I guess my votes for Bernie Sanders, with the goal of instituting medicare for all because it's cheaper per capita than a private system, is irrelevant?
A pure capitalist could support instituting Medicare for all because it would de-couple healthcare from employers and release potential Entrepreneurs to start innovating.
It's who owns the capital. Who owns the businesses, the land, the corporations, the stocks, etc. Who owns so much that they do not need to work to earn a wage or salary?
If you can imagine a company which is owned entirely by the people who work at that company, then you can begin to understand the difference between capitalism and socialism.
If the ownership can be owned and traded on a piece of paper while thousands if workers continue to work to the bone for a pittance, that's capitalism.
It's about ownership, not trade. Trade and activity and production all happen regardless of whether capitalism is the system. Birds perform productive labor. They build nests, some of them elaborate. So do apes. How can they build a place to call home without capitalism? Because labor and production and yes, even trade, are distinct from capitalism.
I mean by some definitions I am, by others I'm not. It depends?
But no matter what my political leanings are, that does not change the facts on the ground. DNA begets copies of itself. This requires acquiring matter and energy. That is what the profit motive is, at its most fundamental level.
It doesn't matter what form of government you institute. It's all a form of capitalism. Karl Marx and Adam Smith famously agreed on the Labor Theory of Value, for example.
All systems are about efficiently allocating resources so humans can survive and reproduce. Recognizing that reality does not make me or anyone else a monster.
>DNA begets copies of itself. This requires acquiring matter and energy. That is what the profit motive is, at its most fundamental level.
It sort of depends on what you mean by 'profit motive.' The problem is not that a company as an entity has a natural incentive to reserve excess revenue/cash/income for things like further investment or savings, etc. The problem is that there is a small number of owners of that capital who control those profits and who don't benefit through contributing to productive activity but instead siphon off profits to themselves simply because they have a piece of paper calling them 'owner.'
Ownership is inherent. If I eat an apple, you do not get to eat the same apple. But it would be inefficient for everyone to grow their own apple trees for everyone to have their own apples, so we strike a balance. Some level of centralization balanced with some level of competition/fragmentation. Anyone CAN grow apples but only some people actually DO grow apples to benefit from economies of scale. It's called specialization.
How would people specialize without ownership? Why would anyone volunteer to collect trash, for example, without being compensated? And by compensated, the money is just an intermediate step for accounting purposes. Their actual goal is to acquire ownership over the things that money can buy, not the money itself.
No matter how you slice it, at some point there needs to be a mechanism to incentivize labor. And that incentive is ownership.
>Ownership is inherent. If I eat an apple, you do not get to eat the same apple
The apple is not productive capital. It's a consumable item. The orchard is the productive capital. No individual should own the orchard, ideally. Unless and until we achieve a society that does not depend on trade and money, a farmer needs to tend to the trees and land and harvest the apples, etc. And they need to be compensated for that labor. That is not the same as profiting from ownership of the land.
>How would people specialize without ownership? Why would anyone volunteer to collect trash, for example, without being compensated?
Compensation is distinct from ownership in capitalism. If you earn a salary or wage, you aren't an owner, you'te a worker.
>No matter how you slice it, at some point there needs to be a mechanism to incentivize labor. And that incentive is ownership.
Labor in the sense of productive effort is inherently incentivized and natural. A lion performs labor when they hunt a wildebeast.
Ownership isn't an incentive of labor when an overwhelming majority of people are in fact workers and do not own any significant amount of capital. A small minority of ultra wealthy people directly own a majority of productive capital, meaning they perform no labor, earn no salary or wage, yet live like kings.
Well this gets into problems of over population. Before we had civilization, we had very few humans alive at any given time. This meant there wasn't much of a need to worry about land scarcity. But now that we have 8 billion mouths to feed, land is very scarce. So we have markets to allocate that scarcity.
If no human is allowed to own an orchard, it would be the government that decides, I guess?
But then you run up against an even MORE centralized system that is very hard to organize and administer effectively. Private administration is an optimization.
How? You're jumping too far ahead. Just stay in the discussion, in the here and now. What did I say that makes you concerned about overpopulation? How did you get there?
>Before we had civilization, we had very few humans alive at any given time.
This is very broad. How are you defining 'civilization?' How many is 'very few?' Are we talking pre-agricultural revolution, or pre-Sumeria? Why?
>This meant there wasn't much of a need to worry about land scarcity. But now that we have 8 billion mouths to feed, land is very scarce. So we have markets to allocate that scarcity.
Okay, okay. So we have some assertions about populations, carrying capacity, and scarcity.
So markets don't perfectly allocate resources, though markets can be very effective in creating a broad baseline of availability for readily available commodities.
>If no human is allowed to own an orchard, it would be the government that decides, I guess?
That's too simple of a binary. The orchard should be owned either by the farmers who work the orchard, or the community which is fed by the orchard. Exactly how you delineate a 'government' is simply another question that we should hold off until we get some of these basics straight. If the workers who pick the apples and tend to the trees and manage the bookkeeping all share ownership of the orchard, what's the problem?
The best way to serve a worker’s needs is to enable dynamic business that increases productivity and makes goods and services cheaper (raising real wages).
As ironic as it may seem, workers benefit when businesses have the ability to fire them for any cause. Because this makes business less risky, more nimble, more dynamic. It’s why the US leads the world in startup formation and has all the largest companies.
This doesn’t make me a “leftist” or a “monster”, it just means you are ignorant about economics.
>The best way to serve a worker’s needs is to enable dynamic business that increases productivity and makes goods and services cheaper
This is literally just trickle-down economics and it is soundly being rejected by the economic community because gestures broadly around.
Workers are not better off than they were in the 1980s when Reagan popularized 'trickle down economics.' Technology has improved, but that is somewhat inevitable as scientists and engineers always work towards improving technology regardless of who owns capital. Depending on how you measure wages, average wages may have grown and may have stayed stagnant, but that's hardly a clear victory for your claim. People are more in debt and are more frustrated and constrained by cost of living from healthcare to childcare to food.
>workers benefit when businesses have the ability to fire them for any cause.
You're a deeply unserious person. This is hooey.
>Because this makes business less risky, more nimble, more dynamic.
It makes business ownership less risky. The risk has been transferred to the worker you gibbon.
>It’s why the US leads the world in startup formation and has all the largest companies.
The US also has the most amount of capital, has the world's global reserve currency, disproportionately affects global trade and markets and has the world's 3rd largest population. Until you can control for variables like that you can't make such a ridiculous claim aboit why the US leads anything.
>This doesn’t make me a “leftist” or a “monster”, it just means you are ignorant about economics.
Oh no it definitely makes you ignorant about economics.
You must contend with the fact that productivity, real median wages, and GDP per capita are higher in the US than any other major nation.
I see vague things like “global reserve currency, highest accumulation of capital, etc.” being expressed - why do you think the US achieved these things?
Exploitation. Relative isolation from other global powers. We were the only major country to not suffer any major attacks in our mainland, so our productive infrastructure all remained in tact after WW2.
I don't really know what specific examples you might care anout because I don't know how much you are denying the US does or if you just don't know much history about the US' involvement in strong-arming other countries.
There are certainly elements of luck and chance, like geography and population, but even those were won in part through death and conquest at least in part.
Before it collapsed it managed to bring a Eurasian backwater civilization to a global superpower with nukes and a leading space program. I think that's at least as interesting as why it collapsed.
Contributing factors of collapse include exterior threats to its interests from the US and its allies throughout the Cold War, and getting stretched too thinly.
I don't see what this definitively tells us, though.
>Doesn’t it tell us that the free market is superior to centrally-planned economies?
God, no.
To what extent can we even all agree that the US's policies both domestic and internationally are perfectly represented as "free market?" Was fighting the Vietnam War an example of the "free market?" Many right-leaning libertarians think FDR's New Deal policies were actuakly (inexplicably) disastrous state overreach, while the broader consensus is that strong social safety nets, a new minimum wage, and broad corporate regulation and labor protections created the Golden Age of Capitalism. It is hard to outright deny this was a time period of significant economic growth and widespread prosperity particularly in the expanding middle class, no?
There are far too many confounding variables to say that the US 'won' the Cold War and therefore 'free markets are superior to central planning.' This is just shallow analysis.
Not to mention how the rise of China under their version of communism is also challenging many US-centric assumptions.
China, Vietnam, and numerous former-Communist states (Poland as a prime example) all experienced economic modernization and growth once they embraced free market principles.
China. following the market reforms of Deng in the late 1970s, Vietnam after its market liberalization in the 1980s, and Poland after its independence from the Soviet Union in the 1990s.
This is clear history that anyone who wishes to understand modern economics should study and understand.
You are clinging to an ideology that failed the test of time and was proven inferior to the free market. We have quite literally run the gamut. The contest is over.
I can do no more at this point. I hope in time you accept reality.
Capitalism is the best system we have, and our ambition in the 21st century is to properly regulate its excesses to the benefit of all humanity.
>American wages are the highest in the world for a reason.
Because the strength of the petro-dollar, the fact that we exploit the global south for their resources and ship them here for cheap, and our social safety net is the lowest in the developed world making a higher driver of personal expenses driving demand for higher wages?
>Yes, they are. Median incomes are about 73% higher than in 1980 and average incomes are even greater still.
I said 'workers are not better off.' I made no claim about any quantity or measure of wage growth.
Here's a debate among two conservatives in disagreement on the very point I put forward:
Whether you believe people are better off or not is probably due more to your own personal belief about positive trends than any factual data. You can't wrap up the notion of "better off" in just a single number like "wage growth" with or without various inflation calculations.
>Workers do not assume any financial risk.
I already explained how they do, actually. If I spend $100,000 to start a business, that's how much money I have risked. If I hire too many employees I face potentially not meeting my financial obligations. If I don't meet those obligations, I lose my capital. If I decide to fire some employees to prevent or delay my loss of capital, then yes, 100%, I have transferred some of the risk of losing that capital to that employee. The employee didn't fail to do their agreed work, but they lost their job because I failed to properly forecast or failed to meet sales projections. The risks of failing have, therefore, been transferred in part to the employee who is now unemployed.
I feel like I'm overexplaining this but you have demonstrated obstinance and this is the only way to communicate when one party is rejecting a rather simply point.
>Done. US has the highest per capita GDP and the highest wages.
Sorry, you think that accounts for all of the variables I mentioned? Lol. What a joke.
>Because the strength of the petro-dollar, the fact that we exploit the global south for their resources and ship them here for cheap, and our social safety net is the lowest in the developed world making a higher driver of personal expenses driving demand for higher wages?
I love how leftists always come up with these silly excuses when their theory doesn’t match reality.
“Petro dollar” is not a real thing and EVERY country in the world buys things from “the global south”. That’s not exploitation.
America workers have the highest wages in the world because America is the most productive economy in the world. Everything else you are saying is pure cope.
>You can't wrap up the notion of "better off" in just a single number like "wage growth"
>EVERY country in the world buys things from “the global south”. That’s not exploitation.
We don't just "buy stuff" from the global south. We impose our will on other nations. We punish them when they try to operate using principles other than "capitalists should be permitted to pursue profits without any other considerations to the needs of people."
Cuba embargo. Bay of Pigs. Venezuela. Grenada. Iranian Coup of 1953. These are just very hot and quick examples off the top of my head. If you can't see the world through any lens other than "everyone is either engaging in free trade or they are stupid or terrorists" I can't really help you. You need to read more. Try getting an education maybe, but you're extremely stubborn and way overconfident in your understanding of the world.
>We impose our will on other nations. We punish them when they try to operate using principles other than "capitalists should be permitted to pursue profits without any other considerations to the needs of people."
We absolutely do not do this, lol. Tons of other nations have extremely generous social programs and high tax rates, wealth taxes, and we trade with them.
>Cuba embargo. Bay of Pigs. Venezuela. Grenada. Iranian Coup of 1953
Lmao, do you have any examples that aren’t 80 years old?
Anyway, your leftists rants are completely irrelevant. None of this has anything to do with American wages and wealth. The US the world’s most productive economy in the mid-1800s, LONG before any of this happened.
America is wealthy because we have high productivity. Not because the IMF requests market policies as a precondition for receiving a loan, lol.
Just total abject ignorance of how economics works.
Private property. Capital. Not your personal residence, not your clothes and toothbrushes and televisions etc, that property which is used by workers to generate profits for the owner.
This is fantastic for the rest of the world. If countries want to stand in the way of progress, let them. Luddites end up on the wrong side of history.
Farming used to require a majority of the working population. The technology advanced and we could automate almost all of it.
If only this court ruling had happened sooner, we'd still all be famers.
Except that most of what we call AI right now isn't anywhere near being able to replace human workers, and most of the work (image recognition tasks etc) that could have been automated has already been replaced years ago anyway.
Outside of work like translation, I can't imagine how stupid one must be to use LLMs to replace an actual employee like in this case.
that eliminates one of the base user cases for AI, doesnt it? So companies will sink millions into developing AI tools AND retain less efficient workers?
Something tells me companies will just make up other excuses to cut headcount
So they are going to use different excuse?
This ruling makes no sense in the real world, and is going to be circumvented in hundreds of different ways.
which is better long term--empowering and developing people + adopt AI, or a country that only does the latter to replace people. You're leaving a lot of compute power untapped.
This is typical communist thinking. Instead of adapting, they try to persist jobs that have become obsolete. The legal system can enforce regulations on tangible things (pollution, patents, etc.) There’s no way a court can prove a worker was replaced by AI. The same conversations came up regarding assembly line workers from years ago. So much has been automated by machines over the last several decades because it’s just more efficient. The workforce adapted and “productivity” increased across the board.
My 2 cents…All of the industries that are going to be impacted by AI probably SHOULD be impacted by AI. I want more capable and secure software. If you think Mythos is just going to crank out the next massive workforce application on its own, you don’t know software development. People are still needed.
Our medical system needs help. Find the pain points of both efficiency and accuracy and incorporate AI.
Our legal system is filled with arrogant type-A personalities, lazy lawyers and tired judges. If we want a fair legal system, incorporate AI. Same goes for governance. You want a just government? How about all those arrogant ass-hats videos out of Texas councils? Replace politicians with technology. Computers would at least vote without bias of some billionaire slipping an envelope of money in its pocket.
If you want AI slop art and music, that’s up to you but I think humanity will still appreciate creations by its own kind. I’m not impressed that a robot can can run through an obstacle course. I am impressed with human ballet and a live orchestra.
If we had anything resembling AGI then sure it makes sense to replace those positions with it. Seeing as we're not even close, not even on the same field let alone ballpark..
>The case involved a quality assurance supervisor, identified only by his surname Zhou, who was hired in 2022 to oversee a tech company’s AI output. When his bosses tried to replace him with a large language model (LLM) in 2025, they offered him a demotion with a 40 percent pay cut.
[OP] kootles10 | 23 hours ago
From the article:
While workers in the western world agonize over what seems to be an impending job apocalypse, their Chinese counterparts are winning in pitched legal battles against AI automation.
Last week, according to the state-run Xinhua News Agency, a Chinese court ruled that companies can’t use AI as an excuse to fire workers. The case involved a quality assurance supervisor, identified only by his surname Zhou, who was hired in 2022 to oversee a tech company’s AI output. When his bosses tried to replace him with a large language model (LLM) in 2025, they offered him a demotion with a 40 percent pay cut.
Unsurprisingly, Zhou refused — so the company fired him, offering a severance package worth around $45,000. Unhappy with the rather paltry payout, Zhou contested the severance offer through a government arbitration panel.
After that panel ruled in favor of Zhou on grounds that the dismissal was illegal, the company filed a lawsuit with a lower court, presumably the district-level Primary People’s Court. After losing that suit, the company then appealed to the municipal-level Hangzhou Intermediate People’s Court, which upheld the lower court’s decision on the grounds that bringing on AI isn’t an excuse to start shredding job contracts.
Odd-Transition1527 | 23 hours ago
Good stuff honestly. Thanks for sharing.
mcsul | 19 hours ago
It's sort of a disaster for China in the long-run, however, even if it sounds nice now. That means that heavily bloated state enterprises aren't going to face any competition from leaner firms using new technology. It means that the cost of starting a new business will go up. It means that inefficient firms use a pathway to getting more efficient. And it means less push to redeploy people to areas that technology can't automate.
If the central government backs this ruling, it basically opts China out of huge productivity gains, which China desperately needs given their aging population. This is going to basically make the typical Chinese family poorer over the long-run.
Odd-Transition1527 | 19 hours ago
LMAO. Loss of jobs due to AI will affect income tax gains. Without those, the revenue for the government will reduce.
I will be more worried about other countries where the inflation has already started to climb up.
Additional-Baby5740 | 19 hours ago
Seriously. I don’t know where people think governments make money from
Odd-Transition1527 | 19 hours ago
I don’t understand obsession with hating China either. The homeownership in China is over 90% - one of the highest in the world. So, China is trying to also reduce the other end of the stick - HO expenses by building equity. For a consumer, this is less consolidation of greedy corporate monsters trying to buy all flats to increase rent.
Pure economics.
kelfupanda | 7 hours ago
Because its a rental?
DanDanDan0123 | 12 hours ago
Sometimes when people don’t have jobs they go revolutionary!
anothergothchick | 19 hours ago
It’s always a disaster when labor rights are upheld 🙄🙄 my English coal mine has never recovered from the banning of child labor /s
veryupsetandbitter | 19 hours ago
No, you see, it's more competitive for firms to have as many children working in the mines with black lungs as possible! If other mining companies followed suit, it would deincentivize competition and more lean companies that have more of their workforce dying in the mines would have the advantage!
AbsoluteTruthiness | 16 hours ago
Yes, a healthier society is one where money is increasingly concentrated in the hands of a few. And it's not like those ultra wealthy will try to use all sorts accounting techniques to minimise their tax burden either. Yes, all jobs must be automated away.
sigmaluckynine | 16 hours ago
There's some misunderstandings here. Most state companies are important and critical sectors. A lot of businesses in China are privately owned, like the tech startup this article references.
As for starting a new company, that could happen, but if everyone is on the same playing field it doesn't matter. It does matter if one party uses AI to get an advantage.
Also, where exactly would we redeploy people? Right now a lot of it is in white collar work - is everyone going to go into the trades? Maybe downgrade human capital to manual work? Even that's set to be automated.
Last bit about misunderstanding. China is heavily focused and invested in automation. They already have a blackout factory - there's other's that can do the same but the Chinese seems more gong ho about it (pun intended)
mcsul | 13 hours ago
So do you want the costs of education, healthcare, housing, etc... to come down? Probably yes.
The only way to do that is to improve productivity in the sector. We've largely capped out on gains from pure labor productivity (e.g. skills and training). That leaves us either technology (e.g. AI) or processes / workflows / ways of working (e.g. lean manufacturing, etc...).
In places where demand is inelastic, that means fewer workers which means that costs eventually fall. In places with very elastic demand, that usually leads to more total consumption but unit costs fall.
We just came off an election cycle where cost of living dominated the discussion. The only way to reduce the cost of living is to increase productivity in the most expensive sectors. Our best bet is AI. People will find new jobs. Sometimes those jobs will pay less. I'm in that same boat. But we are collectively better off being able to capture gains from productivity investments.
AutotrophicGyroscope | 23 hours ago
Imagine that. China has more labor rights than the US.
Worst_Username_1 | 21 hours ago
The current US government could never. They can barely agree that $7.25 is NOT a liveable wage.
Egg-Archer | 16 hours ago
Hate to break it to you but in purchasing power parity (PPP) terms, China's highest hourly rate is equivalent to earning about $7.00/hour in the US.
Worst_Username_1 | 9 hours ago
Cost of living is also a lot less there. No one’s saying it’s perfect, yes their citizens give up some rights, China also treats its minorities horribly, but for the majority they get a better education, are not saddled with debt, healthcare is for everyone, and if you purchase a home it’s yours (tax man can’t take it later if you forget to pay property tax).
US has demonized and vilified China and the Chinese for centuries. But maybe for once they’re not the bad guys in this storyline.
Egg-Archer | 8 hours ago
I didn’t dispute any of that. Agree in fact. Just pointing out that minimum wage alone means nothing. You kind of proved my point.
Worst_Username_1 | 6 hours ago
I wasn’t talking about minimum wage. I was talking about liveable wage. Agree. Minimum wage means nothing and is barely anything in the capitalistic hell hole of the United States.
Leaper229 | 20 hours ago
Imagine not being able to comprehend the original reporting
mrbrannon | 22 hours ago
The United States labor situation is a fucking nightmare but let’s not pretend like China is better. The entire Chinese economy is based on suppressing labor rights and geographical restrictions on both movement and welfare access to ensure a permanent lower class of citizen to use for low wage employees. There is so much wrong with the United States is also so bad that I think we’re almost at the point where it just needs to be burnt down but I’m not going to pretend what’s happening to Chinese workers is any better just to make that point. We need solidarity with workers in every country and Chinese workers don’t deserve to have their suffering marginalized.
Edit: if it’s not clear, I feel the same about the treatment of workers in the United States and think this individual decision about AI is good but I am simply responding to this person cheerleading for supposed Chinese worker rights.
Dirks_Knee | 20 hours ago
I'm not going to pretend to be an expert here especially as we will all look at these things through cultural lenses that create bias. However the 10,000 ft view really looks like China has made massive strides to lift an extremely large portion if not majority of their population to a vastly better quality of life over the past ~20-30 years where here in the US it really feels there are efforts to erode the middle class.
Tierbook96 | 19 hours ago
The middle class has been massively eroded in the last few decades. The issue that reddit likes to ignore is that this is mostly due to people moving up the chain rather than down.
Dirks_Knee | 15 hours ago
I have no idea if what you are posting is true. However, I'd argue the improvement was dramatically larger and more impactful in China since 2000 than what's happened in America.
Tierbook96 | 15 hours ago
https://www.pewresearch.org/race-and-ethnicity/2024/05/31/the-state-of-the-american-middle-class/
Dirks_Knee | 13 hours ago
I don't think we are drawing quite the same conclusions. While it clearly shows a growth in terms of percentage of population into the "upper category" there is a lot here that absolutely does not paint a rosy picture...
>But the middle class has fallen behind on two key counts. The growth in income for the middle class since 1970 has not kept pace with the growth in income for the upper-income tier. And the share of total U.S. household income held by the middle class has plunged.
>...the gains for middle- and lower-income households were less than the gains for upper-income households.
>Consequently, there is now a larger gap between the incomes of upper-income households and other households. In 2022, the median income of upper-income households was 7.3 times that of lower-income households, up from 6.3 in 1970. It was 2.4 times the median income of middle-income households in 2022, up from 2.2 in 1970.
If you go all the way back to 1970 and compare what China's done, they basically moved from a 3rd world country to a super power. There's really no comparison from an average citizen's perspective who's quality of life has improved more.
DarkElation | 10 hours ago
So they’re doing the thing we did 60 years ago? Ok…
dakta | 18 hours ago
> to ensure a permanent lower class of citizen to use for low wage employees.
Any honest assessment of China's development policy and outcomes for the past fifty years would show this to be plainly false. For all their faults and abuses, it's ridiculous to claim that their goal is to suppress wages when the outcome of their labor and economic policies has been to uplift literally hundreds of millions from the abject poverty of famine-prone subsistence farming. They are doing the largest amount of total good possible by focusing on the worst off, bringing more stable employment and higher earnings (even if only marginal) alongside public medicine and development programs.
Eliminating the extremely poor in China is truly eliminating the pool of the most desperate willing to work in the worst conditions. If it looks like low-wage Chinese workers are living a horrible life, that is only because we cannot effectively imagine the worse life that they left to get there. By targeting the worst off, they are literally doing the opposite of what you claim. Low wage workers in China simply aren't the bottom of the economic ladder.
The central planning authority has to balance total economic growth, which enables the improvements for the worst off, with the individual benefit of particular groups. I don't agree with their choices or methods, but I can recognize what they're doing. As the poorest are made better off, policy focus shifts to benefit the higher earning group into which those poor have transitioned. This is why China's factory labor earning rate has continued to increase (they're no longer the cheap labor market, that has shifted to SE Asia).
If they were truly doing what you claim, they would continue to be competitive with Bangladesh and Vietnam for cheap clothing production (for example). They aren't. China has priced its labor market out of the bottom tiers of global production.
This doesn't absolve them of being an abusive police state. We just don't need to make up reasons to criticize China when there are plenty already.
Prestigious_Load1699 | 3 hours ago
The unspoken truth of China is that the 800 million lifted out of poverty in the past three decades is due to them liberalizing their markets and the US middle class buying their products.
It wasn’t some genius master strategy they employed.
mrbrannon | 11 hours ago
Nobody said the economy over decades didn’t pull countless people out of poverty. It’s pretty telling that you focused on that admittedly incredible historical trend as a straw man rather than what I actually was replying to which is the current labor rights situation that is in fact designed to abuse the rural transient workers for low income work while denying them access to the welfare state based on geographical restrictions. I can’t believe that I have to say this but I obviously understand that the number of people lifted out of poverty is an incredible feat but their modern labor rights record is downright abysmal. Just like the United States. One ruling on AI doesn’t change that. I guess the difference between me and you is I care about workers everywhere so I’m not gonna give them a pass just because the United States is also horrific.
ProgrammerAvailable6 | 22 hours ago
I mean … you could probably say that about the US at this point, too.
Plus the slave labour so nicely embedded in the 13th amendment.
tomorrow_comes | 22 hours ago
How does the American system restrict geographical movement or class movement? Not saying things are peachy perfect here or that we couldn’t do certain things better as the wealthiest nation in the world. But say what we might (and there are many valid observations about the wealthy / corporate interests giving themselves the advantage, being interested in keeping a poor uneducated working class, etc)… there is nothing systematically here that is like actual slavery. And class mobility, hand in hand with the ability to work up in an education / career / trade for good income, is *still* much better than most of the world. There’s a reason we still have mass immigration. There are many parts of the world (like China) where there is actual systemic oppression, and others like Latin America where if you aren’t born into the right family or know people, working up and getting a better standard of living in your country might as well be impossible.
I’m not against criticizing the system, but I think jumping to such hyperbole discredits the arguments.
phaedrus910 | 22 hours ago
Hey look a comment from a person who's never thought about the tomato pickers in South Florida
Magikarpical | 20 hours ago
the government doesn't traffic people to pick tomatoes though. in china, if you're born in rural china you aren't allowed to work in a city without government permission. you can't receive government benefits if you leave either. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hukou
johnahoe | 20 hours ago
Shahid Yusuf, a Senior Adviser in the World Bank’s Development Research Group noted that the hukou system served as a "cornerstone of China's urbanization strategy" by controlling migration and channeling migrants toward small or medium-sized cities rather than allowing unchecked inflows to the largest urban areas. He described China's ability to achieve rapid urbanization while largely avoiding widespread slum formation as one of its "greatest successes" in managing its urbanisation pathway, stating: "One of China’s greatest successes in its rapid urbanization has been that it has managed to contain the process to the extent that there are crowded living conditions but very few slums. This is an important achievement for a developing country."[7]
Sililex | 12 hours ago
Yes, that is their justification as it helps their central planning for those cities. It also dooms those individuals to near-certain poverty. The argument isn't that it had no benefits, the argument is that it is wrong.
johnahoe | 11 hours ago
World bank seems to think China has done a pretty incredible job of poverty reduction. https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/server/api/core/bitstreams/e9a5bc3c-718d-57d8-9558-ce325407f737/content
Dirks_Knee | 20 hours ago
The equivalence you are looking for is the exploitation of illegal immigrant labor in the US.
phaedrus910 | 20 hours ago
"However, there is ongoing debate regarding the future role of the system, and in recent years China has created reforms whose aim is to gradually relax hukou restrictions" from your own source.
ProgrammerAvailable6 | 22 hours ago
There is currently a lawsuit against abortion pills saying that poor people getting abortions is a harm to the state because then they often get an education and leave, decreasing the population.
The lawsuit claims that, because poor people - according to the states of Kansas, Missouri, and Idaho - moving is a harm to the state and they would like to shackle them where they are. And they want the courts to make it so they can’t move any more by forcing them to have babies and wallow in poverty.
Class movement? As a constant force in the US? Right now?
A country where the government is both limiting the number of degrees that can be considered professional (including nursing and teaching) while piling debt upon the people that want to be educated and make a better living?
A country that protects billionaires and grinds the majority of their population into uneducated poverty?
You don’t think there’s systematic oppression in the US? Really?
frenchiefanatique | 19 hours ago
It may not explicitly restrict movement but the trends are clearer than even that movement is declining and has been for 30 years in the US
https://www.richmondfed.org/publications/research/economic_brief/2025/eb_25-19
Additionally, on the point of economic upward mobility, the US is lower than the OECD average, taking about 5 generations to move up (China is at 7)
https://www.weforum.org/stories/2018/08/moving-up-the-income-ladder-takes-generations-how-many-depends-on-where-you-live/
half-baked_axx | 21 hours ago
Home ownership in China is far higher than the US. Purchasing power is also higher. Your comment reads like strong coping.
bionicjoey | 21 hours ago
Both are just different flavours of capitalist dystopia
Z3r0sama2017 | 21 hours ago
This. Both are bad.
AutotrophicGyroscope | 22 hours ago
In this instance, China is better. In almost any state in the US a similar worker could be laid off to be replaced by AI and receive no compensation or legal recourse through the courts. This employee in China was able to avail himself of the courts and receive confirmation that his termination was illegal. I don't think that would happen in most jurisdictions in the US. I could be wrong though.
mrbrannon | 22 hours ago
But you didn’t say “in this instance China is better” because everyone would obviously agree that this individual decision is better which I even mentioned in my comment. What you said is that China has more labor rights than the United States which is simply not true and I wanted to make sure that was clear. You see this online more and more because of how shit the United States has become people feel like they have to prop up Chinese alternatives (which is sometimes valid) but in this particular case Chinese labor rights are abhorrent. I was just making the point that cheerleading for China with false claims does nothing to help the argument against the United States and actually marginalizes Chinese workers struggles.
Long-Emu-7870 | 4 hours ago
What about the right to education and healthcare?
In the US you have a right to better working conditions, but what is the worth if you get sick and die?
mcsul | 19 hours ago
I actually disagree that this individual decision is better. it sounds nice, but in an aging population, productivity growth is the single most important thing we need out of our economy.
For example, take healthcare. With our demographics, healthcare costs will eat the economy and government budgets without significant increases in productivity. AI is the best option on the horizon to buy us those productivity gains.
And there are a ton of jobs where huge shares of workers are close to retirement. Take accounting, as another example. The number of young people going into accounting is declining, the number retiring is accelerating. How will we get all of that work done without automation, in particular given the pending decline in young people entering the workforce.
tpounds0 | 19 hours ago
> I actually disagree that this individual decision is better. it sounds nice, but in an aging population, productivity growth is the single most important thing we need out of our economy.
In China, productivity enhancement has to be used to increase the productivity of the company's existing workers.
Currently in the United States, a company could use AI to keep productivity the same and increase profits using layoffs.
Not sure why you would prefer the US method here. China's ruling is definitely the more pro-social of the two.
Can you explain why this would limit productivity in China?
mcsul | 18 hours ago
Demand for some goods and services is elastic, and demand for others is inelastic. For places where demand is relatively fixed, but we could produce that good or service with 1/5th the number of people, you are going to artificially keep the price of that good or service high by not allowing them to automate.
Let's take healthcare in the US. Despite the memes, labor costs are a huge driver of healthcare costs in the US. If we could reduce labor costs of just the administrative side of healthcare in the US by 30%, that would be amazing. Particularly as our population ages. Without that, households in the US will get poorer as the share of household spending on healthcare rises.
The US method is, over the long run, far superior. People will have to move to new jobs. I expect to have to move to a new job. At the person level, it sort of sucks. But at the system level, it's essential. We've seen this much more in manufacturing than in services. The cost of a unit of processing power, or refrigeration, or basic stuff like TVs has cratered over the past 40 years. Almost all of our inflation is in labor-intensive places like healthcare, education, housing. Unless we drive productivity in those places, they will continue to get more expensive.
tpounds0 | 15 hours ago
> Demand for some goods and services is elastic, and demand for others is inelastic. For places where demand is relatively fixed, but we could produce that good or service with 1/5th the number of people, you are going to artificially keep the price of that good or service high by not allowing them to automate. > > Let's take healthcare in the US. Despite the memes, labor costs are a huge driver of healthcare costs in the US. If we could reduce labor costs of just the administrative side of healthcare in the US by 30%, that would be amazing. Particularly as our population ages. Without that, households in the US will get poorer as the share of household spending on healthcare rises.
But my entire point is that US companies are more likely to cut labor to keep productivity the same, and increase profits.
Mandating a certain level of employment with those similar productivity gains would be the actual overall increase in productivity like what China seems to do.
There's no actual proof that making it easy to lay off workers because of AI would lead to more productivity gains in the US, compared to productivity gains in China.
China is currently neck and neck with the U.S. in terms of AI, with stronger employee protections in the AI space. If they had access to our chips they'd probably be ahead by now.
You haven't made a good case that the AI advantage in the US is because of more lax worker protections. I question the magnitude of that benefit, especially in the cost towards workers.
Would the US be meaningfully worse off in the AI race in the present or near future with stronger labor protections?
mcsul | 13 hours ago
"But my entire point is that US companies are more likely to cut labor to keep productivity the same, and increase profits."
Then they will get outcompeted by companies that are leaner. Like, for all of the criticism that it's received, Walmart has kept US inflation down by about a half point for decades. I 100% guarantee that some company will figure out a way to undercut it's rivals if it feels that the liability risk of running leaner is low.
Laying off workers doesn't lead to productivity gains. It's a byproduct of high productivity in places with high demand inelasticity. Those workers get redeployed somewhere else. We've been doing that for nearly a century (in reality longer), which is why the median US household is dramatically richer than the median household in the UK or Spain or France.
Lax worker protections allow people to move to parts of the economy that aren't as efficient, lowering the costs of those goods and services as well.
So I think that you have causality backwards. Labor protections don't matter at all for the AI race, but prohibiting companies from laying off employees whose work can now be done at 1/100th the cost simply makes goods and services more expensive for consumers.
You're basically saying that you never want the price of anything to come down. The only way the price of something comes down is productivity growth.
Long-Emu-7870 | 5 hours ago
That sounded a lot better 10 years ago.
rowdyroddysniper | 23 hours ago
That’s an ignorant statement, they do not. Unions are prohibited, and any labor standards are often ignored without consequence. Not saying the US is good, but China isn’t better.
Leoraig | 22 hours ago
China has a law for regulation and protection of trade unions, they are not prohibited at all.
Source: http://en.npc.gov.cn.cdurl.cn/2021-12/24/c_791373.htm
quandrum | 17 hours ago
Also any company with at least 300 employees is required to have at least 1/3 of it's board members be employees directly elected by the employees, a right enshrined in the constitution.
US labor unions dreams of this.
pibbleberrier | 12 hours ago
Love all these analysis of China via article online lol.
Reality of what is happening on the ground and what you read in article is like two totally different world.
I actually have relatives in China working as union rep. Their only task. Hosting parties for workers. Pizza party but with Chinese food.
Having a union and having an effective union is not the same thing.
Just like how China has a jury system. They are professional juries that hang out together, dine together. They get pay to do this. And you know if you don’t agree with the ring leader. Next thing you know you are not longer on the jury the next case.
rowdyroddysniper | 22 hours ago
Independent labor unions are banned in china.
phaedrus910 | 21 hours ago
Well moved goal posts. Expertly done
warwick607 | 22 hours ago
> Unions are prohibited, and any labor standards are often ignored without consequence
Ah so just like the US
imbakinacake | 22 hours ago
There's a reason almost all major work death accidents don't happen in America but in places like China and India but okay
SaltGas3789 | 8 hours ago
Of course, workplace safety comes AFTER the issues happen, they don't appear out of thin air. People act as if China had rigourous labour laws and then dismantled them. China from the 2000s to now have reduced industrial casualties by an insane amount. The government is literally making them better little by little, this Ai regulation is simply a part of it.
Now, its not on parity to western countries yet, but it's getting there. Would you prefer it if the Chinese government did absolutely nothing for worker safety and labour laws? Because thats literally the only other alternative.
People tend to forget that while China was starving, America had supermarkets and cars for civilians. In 2026, the average chinese person now has a higher life expectancy than their american counterparts.
These things take time, and don't happen overnight. Any small improvement should be encouraged, and not scorned at like it is here by a bunch of people, that if the original post was about america, would be labled "Wumaos" and "Bots".
Elizabeth-WildFox886 | 22 hours ago
And deaths in USA are multiples worse than Europe. Europe is the safest place in the world to work and is the last hope for humanity
Rogerkein | 22 hours ago
Where are unions prohibited in the US? Why is this sub filled with uneducated idiots like you who spew complete nonsense?
warwick607 | 21 hours ago
> Where are unions prohibited in the US?
In any of the 26 "right-to-work" states which effectively prohibits joining and forming unions. North Carolina and South Carolina also prohibit unions for public employees since they are regulated by state law. Finally, the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) often excludes domestic workers, meaning many nannies and home care workers are prohibited from forming unions.
Tierbook96 | 19 hours ago
Define public because a quick check tells me police/fire/teachers all have unions in SC
warwick607 | 19 hours ago
Public employees in SC have no right to unionize. See Branch v. Myrtle Beach 340 S.C. 405. Police/firefighters can have associations (e.g., Fraternal Order of Police) but these are prohibited from collective bargaining with the state. Same goes with teachers.
Javisel101 | 18 hours ago
Not prohibited on paper but in practice. Union-busting is a billion dollar industry for a reason
Elestra_ | 21 hours ago
This stopped being an economics subreddit a long time ago and now is a forum filled with Bots and typically left aligned folks that want to talk politics.
rowdyroddysniper | 22 hours ago
No, I get why you feel like that, but it’s not the case.
You’re confusing prohibited with interfering with a billionaires capitalist ambitions. A lot gross stuff happens to make unions fail, or never get the chance to form but it’s different than prohibited on a national level.
khoawala | 22 hours ago
https://www.bjreview.com/China/202408/t20240819_800374948.html
Here is China building over 200,000 24/7 union stations to provide free food, drinks, charging and rest service to public workers.
rowdyroddysniper | 22 hours ago
You cited a Chinese national newspaper, if you don’t understand why that isn’t a good source, you probably shouldn’t have this conversation.
anothergothchick | 19 hours ago
“Uhm actually, you cited a communist source 🤓☝️please use more trustworthy sources like the US government!”
rowdyroddysniper | 19 hours ago
Not what I said at all, is it?
khoawala | 22 hours ago
Shooting the messenger isn't a valid debate either. Just because western media doesn't bother covering it doesn't mean it doesn't exist. You shouldn't be in this sub at all with such lack of common sense.
https://www.reddit.com/r/LateStageCapitalism/s/XktbtPCuVq
Aggravating-Coast335 | 20 hours ago
Don't waste your time on him. He has activated his psychological defense mechanism. He cannot believe beyond the cognitive, and puts everything down to state propaganda.
rowdyroddysniper | 22 hours ago
It’s national media in a communist country, why is it a good source?
khoawala | 22 hours ago
Your denial isn't a good source either. Your only argument so far is that the US has the rights for workers to complain. Where's the result?
Here's China:
rowdyroddysniper | 22 hours ago
It’s not a denial, do you not understand how state run media works in communist countries? You must not if you chose that a a source.
It’s cool you can make a list, how often are those followed? Is there any consequences from the Chinese government for companies to at break those agreements? I can make a list twice that long for the us, but what’s the point if protections aren’t in place?
khoawala | 22 hours ago
Such a low bar Americans have that a free rest stop is so hard to believe. This show more sad than delusion. Your employer hold your healthcare hostage. Employers actively replace high paying jobs with cheaper foreign workers. Everything is fucked all-around. But since it's China, the country that spends more money on infrastructure than every single fucking country in North America and western Europe COMBINED, it's these cheap ass rest stations that suspends belief.
phaedrus910 | 22 hours ago
https://www.news24.com/world/china-executes-top-former-banker-bai-tianhui-for-exceptionally-serious-bribery-20251209-1060
Consequences.
coke_and_coffee | 22 hours ago
Lmaooo
Bro cites late stage capitalism subreddit
Murky-Science-1657 | 22 hours ago
China is better in the regard.
d88k41t | 4 hours ago
Unions and worker rights are foundation in communism, the ccp might not support them fully but they aren't abolished either.
Prestigious_Load1699 | 3 hours ago
This poster is correct.
Worker unions were banned in 1949 by the CCP, and remains state policy.
Please actually study from history folks.
dur23 | 22 hours ago
Source for any of that?
chemicaxero | 18 hours ago
It is spreading disinformation to say that labor standards are ignored without consequence. Its 100% a better system for the average Chinese worker who isn't homeless or strung out on drugs or unable to afford food, housing, education, healthcare, etc. like in the US.
swadx001 | 20 hours ago
Not so difficult since they don't have any
MentalDisintegrat1on | 15 hours ago
China is progressive in a lot of ways but it gets drowned out with propaganda and echo chambers.
They also are speed running with medicine and treatments while we have a guy that thinks herion is safer than vaccines.
This regime is setting us back by decades.
GreyJedi98 | 6 hours ago
Pretty sure the ccp just doesn't want to pay for the extra ram to power the AI
AlwaysPetTheBelly99 | 16 minutes ago
On paper? I guess? In reality though that's a laughable statement
phaedrus910 | 22 hours ago
What do yall think people's republic means?
wackOverflow | 19 hours ago
It means as much as “Democratic People's Republic” does in North Korea.
The_Keg | 22 hours ago
I spit on this fucking piece of shit statement.
Shame on you for actually typing this.
https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/society-equity/china-tries-call-time-its-996-culture-long-hours--ecmii-2025-09-01/
BroughtBagLunchSmart | 22 hours ago
Get some coffee, come back when you are not triggered.
The_Keg | 22 hours ago
And if I dont, what are the likes of you gonna do?
Is it better to be an average worker in the U.S or China?
SaintAnton | 22 hours ago
Gosh youre so defiant and rebellious and cool. I hope when i grow i can be the likes of you someday
Substantial_Brain917 | 22 hours ago
If you say their comment with a French Canadian accent it sounds kinda funny
SaintAnton | 19 hours ago
I wrote it in the Goofy voice but if he was born in the great white north
Prestigious_Load1699 | 3 hours ago
United States, without question.
The CCP banned labor unions in 1949.
It’s an absolute disgrace that you get downvoted in an economics sub.
I weep for humanity.
BroughtBagLunchSmart | 20 hours ago
Good things and bad things are exactly the same so your question doesn't matter. We should not trying to make things better at all, just keep voting for right wing democrats to do nothing. I learned this from r/destiny.
chrisk9 | 22 hours ago
Companies will just use a different excuse.
badazzcpa | 8 hours ago
It’s not more labor rights, it’s contract rights. This is posted all over Reddit with completely misleading titles. What the court ruled was the man had a contract and the company cannot tear up the contract and replace the worker with AI. The same would be ruled in the US. Assuming the man didn’t do anything to void the contract or otherwise reduce the money he was owed US courts would rule a US contractor was due the balance of the contract.
The CCP is not giving workers more rights in China than US workers receive. At least not in this case.
coke_and_coffee | 22 hours ago
This is not a good thing. The US economy stays winning for 400+ years precisely because companies are able to fire workers for any or no reason. That’s how we stay dynamic.
SvenTropics | 21 hours ago
My biggest takeaway from this article is that workers rights in China are far ahead of where I perceived them to be. I mean, in America, I wouldn't be getting a $45k severance package for refusing a demotion. I'd just get fired and lose my healthcare.
Birdperson15 | 20 hours ago
No just in this one case they have a few legal reasons to lay someone off and AI is not one of those names reasons.
Bayo77 | 15 hours ago
American worker rights seem comically bad so probably not a good standard for comparing.
What i would like to know is if the famously atrocious asian work culture has changed at all. A 40 hour work week on paper can mean little if you become a social outcast for clocking out before your boss.
Reasonable_Fold6492 | 20 hours ago
Lol no. Im korean and I can say my chinese zoomer friends doesnt like working in china for a reason. Laws doesnt mean jack shit
AlwaysPetTheBelly99 | 13 minutes ago
Lolno. This is one law on paper, let's not pretend that actually means anything. It really is scary how the zoomies will see one niche fact and extrapolate that to mean "X is better than Y", no wonder companies love them with how easily you can manipulate them lol.
Birdperson15 | 20 hours ago
I read this article yesterday and it made me think companies were doing similar stuff to the US and blaming AI for layoffs. I doubt a lot of workers will be able to avoid layoffs from AI since companies can just stop blaming AI and just pick a legal reason to layoff.
People complain about the IS labor laws, but if we prevented ‘AI layoffs’ they would just become normal layoffs.
StupidScaredSquirrel | 23 hours ago
Soo... not what the title says at all? Not surprising
theHip | 23 hours ago
The Article states the termination was illegal: > the municipal-level Hangzhou Intermediate People’s Court, which upheld the lower court’s decision on the grounds that bringing on AI isn’t an excuse to start shredding job contracts.
Title > Chinese Court Rules That a Worker Cannot Be Replaced by AI
Windowsideplant | 22 hours ago
You seem to think those 2 things are the same thing. They are not. It simply means a company cannot use AI as an excuse to fire someone. They can still fire him for any reason and automate his job. They just can't use the narrative that an AI replaced him, like it often happens in the US.
Icy_Dragonfruit_2533 | 22 hours ago
As a Chinese person, the focus of this news isn't actually on the dismissal itself. Many states in the US practice free employment, and many white-collar jobs in China, like the one in the news story, generally have an employment contract. Unless there are force majeure events, the employer is obligated to pay a certain amount of severance pay if they want to terminate the job early. The company in the news story attempted to use AI as a force majeure event to evade most of the severance pay, which was ruled illegal by the court.
Birdperson15 | 20 hours ago
Which is a completely different narrative then many people are taking from this headline.
rowdyroddysniper | 22 hours ago
Yup. In the US, you can’t use race, religion, ethnicity, etc. as a reason to fire someone, yet it happens often and nobody is dumb enough to say that is the reason. Same thing here.
AtomWorker | 22 hours ago
Because nobody reads the article, there are a couple of details worth noting. First, the court determined that using AI as a justification did not fall under the umbrella of negative circumstances, like downsizing or operational difficulties. So all a company has to do to get around this is claim other business-related reasons.
More importantly, the Chinese legal system doesn't follow precedent unlike the US. This means that another court could easily rule in favor of AI being a valid reason for layoffs.
CrimsonBolt33 | 21 hours ago
and for anyone who doesn't know, in China work is tied to contracts which are usually set for a certain amount of time...not at will employment like the US.
BobcatNo6451 | 21 hours ago
Actually Chinese contracts are better in a sense that the company has to pay severance when firing people.
Batbuckleyourpants | 20 hours ago
This is high level jobs only, it is common in the US too.
If you are held to a non compete they may even have to pay your wages after you are fired.
CrimsonBolt33 | an hour ago
depends on the reason...and they will try to do so all the time assuming you wont take it to arbitration or court.
MaltySines | 17 hours ago
How the fuck do you have a legal system without precedence?
BankDetails1234 | 15 hours ago
Isn’t that basically a civil law system? I’m no expert, but many developed nations don’t use precedence in a binding way like we see in a common law legal system, it’s treated as advisory.
As far as how a legal system works without precedence, I guess it’s more down to lawmakers than interpretation by the courts when actually creating or shaping laws.
MaltySines | 15 hours ago
It seems like it would be hard to prevent arbitrary rulings without precedence binding future rulings. I'm no legal scholar so I dunno
gimpwiz | 11 hours ago
If courts have differing interpretations then the legislature can make the law clearer.
Not all countries have the same legislature-court relationship the US has, or even particularly similar, when it comes to interpreting law and setting precedent.
MaltySines | 11 hours ago
But if one court hands down a ruling then that's (reasonably) going to influence how individuals and firms are going to act with respect to that law.
It seems like a bit of a rug-pull to then be like "naw this judge doesn't think that other judge was right - sorry you tried to take away anything from that previous ruling to influence your actions lol"
A ruling by a judge is a de facto assertion of what exactly the law means. It seems obvious to codify that since rulings are inevitably going to influence future behaviour regardless of the stature of precedence in that legal system.
dashingstag | 9 hours ago
Except that a judge is human too and subject to failings, saying that a judge’s verdict on a single case is better than a team of legislators who can adapt to the evolving society is a bit shortsighted. Precedence is also subject to differences in details.
The argument that judges are bound by "objective" precedent is often overstated. A judge must first determine if a prior case is "factually analogous." By "distinguishing" a case, finding a small detail that makes the current case different from the past, a judge can effectively bypass precedent.
If a team of legislators passes a law that is out of touch with the evolving society, the public can vote them out. Judges, especially those with life tenure, are insulated from public accountability. While this protects minority rights, it becomes "shortsighted" when a single, fallible human makes a sweeping moral or economic judgment that the rest of society is forced to live with for generations.
MaltySines | 9 hours ago
> ...saying that a judge’s verdict on a single case is better than a team of legislators who can adapt to the evolving society is a bit shortsighted.
I didn't say this though, and I do not believe it.
Nothing in my comment was about judges being better or more objective. There should still be opportunity for higher courts to overturn something or distinctions made between similar-but-not-identical cases. There should still be the possibility that a legislature should be able to modify a law or remove it or clarify its meaning. And failing that for the legislators to be replaced via election.
My point is that it's silly to assume the public will not treat a prior ruling as instructive, because it is natural to do so.
>The argument that judges are bound by "objective" precedent is often overstated. A judge must first determine if a prior case is "factually analogous." By "distinguishing" a case, finding a small detail that makes the current case different from the past, a judge can effectively bypass precedent.
That's all fine, but there's obviously going to be cases that are incredibly similar to each other as well.
hutacars | 15 hours ago
> the Chinese legal system doesn't follow precedent unlike the US.
I'm not sure the US does anymore either....
Distinct-Response907 | 22 hours ago
The spectacularly huge investment in data center infrastructure is aimed at reducing labor costs in the generation and use of software products. Work will certainly change, although I believe the depth and rate of change is overblown.
CrimsonBolt33 | 21 hours ago
China has not passed any new laws or set any new legal precedence or anything (so the title is complete BS)
A company broke a persons work contract by trying to change his pay mid contract....you can't do that....their excuse was simply that they had AI to do his job. They then fired him for refusing the pay change....a double no no at that point.
This has nothing to do with AI ....if any company tried to change your pay mid contract for any reason the same thing would happen except in some very special and extremely rare cases (like the office burning down or something crazy and life changing like that). They could have said its cause the employee ate a turkey sandwich and the result would literally be the exact same.
In China you can totally be fired or not hired because of AI....they just can't do it mid contract which is pretty obvious....that's the whole point of a contract.
For Americans who don't understand this due to our mostly "at will" employment system which means you can be fired or quit at any time you please, in China you sign a contract, usually 1-2 years, with a company that lays out your general labor contract (pay, job details, etc) and during this contract they can't fire you for frivolous reasons but you also can't quit for no reason (without giving at least 30 days notice).
dattokyo | 15 hours ago
This dumb shit keeps getting posted over and over again, I see it on social media as well. Wildly misleading. Basically the company broke contract - it essentially has nothing to do with AI, apart from AI being the reason they decided to break contract.
artbystorms | 19 hours ago
AI is really going to test the limits of China's 'pro worker' communism. I'm curious how they will react compared to America is very 'anti-worker'
Raise_A_Thoth | 23 hours ago
This is actually incredibly important for Americans who don't understand how significant our legal system is in defining and curating capitalism.
Capitalism is rooted in the common law judicial system we have. It is confirmed and reinforced every time a court decides that a capitalist's claim of ownership and control over 'their property' is a more important legal claim than a worker's needs.
If you can read that and you understand what it says, you're either a leftist or a fucking monster. If you can't wrap your head around it, you're like at least a plurality of Americans.
regprenticer | 22 hours ago
This is probably less true in other western countries.
Americas concept of "at-will" employment is pretty unique to America in that it creates no legal obligation to continue work on either party (worker or employer). That's not true in Europe.
> “The termination grounds cited by the company did not fall under negative circumstances such as business downsizing or operational difficulties, nor did they meet the legal condition that made it ‘impossible to continue the employment contract,'” the court said
I think there will be European countries where redundancy has a test equivalent to the one above.
coke_and_coffee | 22 hours ago
> Americas concept of "at-will" employment is pretty unique to America
And it’s why America is the largest and most productive economy in the world.
Chemical-Fault-7331 | 19 hours ago
But it’s also a reason why America has the largest wealth disparity in the developed world, the worst country for workers rights and retirement. Just because we are productive doesn’t mean those gains are going to the productive people. We have a flawed system.
coke_and_coffee | 19 hours ago
The poorest American workers are still better off than almost anywhere in the world, while the average worker is FAR better off.
Raise_A_Thoth | 21 hours ago
No, no it's not.
coke_and_coffee | 21 hours ago
Yes, it very much is. There’s a reason America is a Mecca for startups. Imagine trying to take a risk on a new business and a bunch of moronic leftists tell you that you aren’t allowed to fire your workers if you find a way to do things more efficiently, lmao
Raise_A_Thoth | 21 hours ago
Imagine thinking you're a smart business person well-versed in economic and business strategy and you have a start-up company and you hire way too many workers.
You're arguing that America is 'a Mecca' for business because we coddle entrepeneurs by allowing them to transfer their risky decision-making to workers making it workers' burdens to carry, not the owner.
Lol you're an incredible specimen.
coke_and_coffee | 20 hours ago
> Imagine thinking you're a smart business person well-versed in economic and business strategy and you have a start-up company and you hire way too many workers.
Lmaoooo
You have no idea how anything works. Businesses overhire in anticipation of deals that fall through all the time. This uncertainty is an inherent part of business.
> You're arguing that America is 'a Mecca' for business because we coddle entrepeneurs by allowing them to transfer their risky decision-making to workers making it workers' burdens to carry, not the owner.
Wrong. Business owners still assume all financial risk, while signing over partial equity to workers, and workers are fully aware of the risk of job loss when they enter into voluntary work contracts. Some people love this aspect of startup work and seek it out on purpose.
Raise_A_Thoth | 19 hours ago
>You have no idea how anything works
Classic lashing out when winning an argument.
>Businesses overhire in anticipation of deals that fall through all the time
If you hire entirely on speculation of unsure growth and have to layoff workers because a deal fell through, you failed. You failed to provide meaningful work and you failed in the negotiation to secure a work order. I don't know how you are measuring "all the time" and how many workers are affected over such timelines, because you're speaking in vague generalities. Even if this were true, it says nothing about my point: it's a failure of the business, so it's not smart business and it shows incompetence, not skills.
>This uncertainty is an inherent part of business.
Gonna need you to quantify this if you claim that hiring large numbers of employees only to fire them within a short window is an "inherent part of business." I don't dispute that it happens, I am disputing your characterization that such a thing is an "inherent part of business." "Inherent part of business" is transactions, payroll, sales, business cycles, unpredictability, sure. But layoffs are decisions. That's a single strategy for cutting costs. And layoffs as the result of overhiring is simply a failed endeavor.
>Wrong. Business owners still assume all financial risk
A business which lays off workers to stay solvent has transfered a proportional amount of risk from itself to those people. If I employ a person for $50,000 salary and I lay them off I save the company $50,000. If that keeps my business from having to file bankruptcy I have succeeded in offsetting some of my risk of losing my capital investment onto the worker.
This is not that complicated. It is a simple concept.
>and workers are fully aware of the risk of job loss when they enter into voluntary work contracts.
This is stupid and trite. I could, for one, say the exact same thing for the business owner: they are well aware of the risks of hiring an employee and the costs that incurs and should they fail to meet revenue goals they will lose money. Choosing to layoff the employee to avoid or offset those losses is a transfer of that risk. It's a simple OR decision: take the losses fron paying the employee their full salary, or lay them off and save the money you otherwise would pay them. This doesn't answer the question any better than before.
>Some people love this aspect of startup work and seek it out on purpose.
Some people love the additional risk of losing their jobs because a start-up didn't project revenues correctly?
Butane9000 | 22 hours ago
I feel like it would be more prudent to pass a law that says a customer has a right to speak to a human representative of the company and that they should expect it within a reasonable amount of time.
Pass this similar to the FCC rules on ISPs about service guarantees. Where is they fail to do so they're subject to large fines.
Illustrious-Lime-878 | 22 hours ago
Everyone likes talking to humans, not robots, but at the same time a lot of services that used to be expensive and not widely available are now free and widespread exactly because of digital technology that doesn't require large costs of paying actual humans to tell you what a webpage or robot could.
coke_and_coffee | 22 hours ago
Dumb. If you don’t like how a business operates, don’t be a customer.
Dfiggsmeister | 22 hours ago
Daaaaaaaamn, just going to go out there and thrust out that last paragraph.
The problem is, the American judicial system use to follow common law, today it does not do so. We have a supreme court that has been over turning decades of precedent and common law history in favor of corruption.
Raise_A_Thoth | 22 hours ago
Nah, fam, this is actually how the court has always operated. It's always been very arbitrary, it's just that common law 'tradition' and (mostly) wealthy elites on the bench cater to capitalist interests. There have been ample opportunities for the US Supreme Court to decide cases in favor of people or workers but overwhelmingly they find in favor of capital.
thepopdog | 20 hours ago
You're contradicting your own point.
Raise_A_Thoth | 19 hours ago
Provide the receipts. Where did I say one thing that contradicted another thing?
javascript | 22 hours ago
Huh I wasn't aware I was a monster for understanding thermodynamics. I guess my votes for Bernie Sanders, with the goal of instituting medicare for all because it's cheaper per capita than a private system, is irrelevant?
Pale_Sail4059 | 22 hours ago
A pure capitalist could support instituting Medicare for all because it would de-couple healthcare from employers and release potential Entrepreneurs to start innovating.
javascript | 22 hours ago
That is another great justification for it!
Raise_A_Thoth | 22 hours ago
"Pure capitalist"
Markets don't define capitalism.
javascript | 22 hours ago
What is capitalism other than markets??
Raise_A_Thoth | 21 hours ago
It's who owns the capital. Who owns the businesses, the land, the corporations, the stocks, etc. Who owns so much that they do not need to work to earn a wage or salary?
If you can imagine a company which is owned entirely by the people who work at that company, then you can begin to understand the difference between capitalism and socialism.
If the ownership can be owned and traded on a piece of paper while thousands if workers continue to work to the bone for a pittance, that's capitalism.
It's about ownership, not trade. Trade and activity and production all happen regardless of whether capitalism is the system. Birds perform productive labor. They build nests, some of them elaborate. So do apes. How can they build a place to call home without capitalism? Because labor and production and yes, even trade, are distinct from capitalism.
phaedrus910 | 21 hours ago
Relationship between owner and wage worker.
Raise_A_Thoth | 22 hours ago
Why aren't you a leftist then?
javascript | 22 hours ago
I mean by some definitions I am, by others I'm not. It depends?
But no matter what my political leanings are, that does not change the facts on the ground. DNA begets copies of itself. This requires acquiring matter and energy. That is what the profit motive is, at its most fundamental level.
It doesn't matter what form of government you institute. It's all a form of capitalism. Karl Marx and Adam Smith famously agreed on the Labor Theory of Value, for example.
All systems are about efficiently allocating resources so humans can survive and reproduce. Recognizing that reality does not make me or anyone else a monster.
Raise_A_Thoth | 22 hours ago
>DNA begets copies of itself. This requires acquiring matter and energy. That is what the profit motive is, at its most fundamental level.
It sort of depends on what you mean by 'profit motive.' The problem is not that a company as an entity has a natural incentive to reserve excess revenue/cash/income for things like further investment or savings, etc. The problem is that there is a small number of owners of that capital who control those profits and who don't benefit through contributing to productive activity but instead siphon off profits to themselves simply because they have a piece of paper calling them 'owner.'
javascript | 22 hours ago
Ownership is inherent. If I eat an apple, you do not get to eat the same apple. But it would be inefficient for everyone to grow their own apple trees for everyone to have their own apples, so we strike a balance. Some level of centralization balanced with some level of competition/fragmentation. Anyone CAN grow apples but only some people actually DO grow apples to benefit from economies of scale. It's called specialization.
How would people specialize without ownership? Why would anyone volunteer to collect trash, for example, without being compensated? And by compensated, the money is just an intermediate step for accounting purposes. Their actual goal is to acquire ownership over the things that money can buy, not the money itself.
No matter how you slice it, at some point there needs to be a mechanism to incentivize labor. And that incentive is ownership.
Raise_A_Thoth | 21 hours ago
>Ownership is inherent. If I eat an apple, you do not get to eat the same apple
The apple is not productive capital. It's a consumable item. The orchard is the productive capital. No individual should own the orchard, ideally. Unless and until we achieve a society that does not depend on trade and money, a farmer needs to tend to the trees and land and harvest the apples, etc. And they need to be compensated for that labor. That is not the same as profiting from ownership of the land.
>How would people specialize without ownership? Why would anyone volunteer to collect trash, for example, without being compensated?
Compensation is distinct from ownership in capitalism. If you earn a salary or wage, you aren't an owner, you'te a worker.
>No matter how you slice it, at some point there needs to be a mechanism to incentivize labor. And that incentive is ownership.
Labor in the sense of productive effort is inherently incentivized and natural. A lion performs labor when they hunt a wildebeast.
Ownership isn't an incentive of labor when an overwhelming majority of people are in fact workers and do not own any significant amount of capital. A small minority of ultra wealthy people directly own a majority of productive capital, meaning they perform no labor, earn no salary or wage, yet live like kings.
javascript | 21 hours ago
Well this gets into problems of over population. Before we had civilization, we had very few humans alive at any given time. This meant there wasn't much of a need to worry about land scarcity. But now that we have 8 billion mouths to feed, land is very scarce. So we have markets to allocate that scarcity.
If no human is allowed to own an orchard, it would be the government that decides, I guess?
But then you run up against an even MORE centralized system that is very hard to organize and administer effectively. Private administration is an optimization.
Raise_A_Thoth | 21 hours ago
>Well this gets into problems of over population.
How? You're jumping too far ahead. Just stay in the discussion, in the here and now. What did I say that makes you concerned about overpopulation? How did you get there?
>Before we had civilization, we had very few humans alive at any given time.
This is very broad. How are you defining 'civilization?' How many is 'very few?' Are we talking pre-agricultural revolution, or pre-Sumeria? Why?
>This meant there wasn't much of a need to worry about land scarcity. But now that we have 8 billion mouths to feed, land is very scarce. So we have markets to allocate that scarcity.
Okay, okay. So we have some assertions about populations, carrying capacity, and scarcity.
Let's talk about scarcity.
Did you know there are far more vacant homes than homeless people in America?
Did you know that we throw away enough food to actually feed everyone?
https://pirg.org/edfund/resources/the-food-we-waste-could-end-hunger/
So markets don't perfectly allocate resources, though markets can be very effective in creating a broad baseline of availability for readily available commodities.
>If no human is allowed to own an orchard, it would be the government that decides, I guess?
That's too simple of a binary. The orchard should be owned either by the farmers who work the orchard, or the community which is fed by the orchard. Exactly how you delineate a 'government' is simply another question that we should hold off until we get some of these basics straight. If the workers who pick the apples and tend to the trees and manage the bookkeeping all share ownership of the orchard, what's the problem?
Prestigious_Load1699 | 3 hours ago
Adam Smith only argued in favor of the labor theory of value in primitive, pre-capitalist societies.
Not at all the same as Marx.
coke_and_coffee | 22 hours ago
The best way to serve a worker’s needs is to enable dynamic business that increases productivity and makes goods and services cheaper (raising real wages).
As ironic as it may seem, workers benefit when businesses have the ability to fire them for any cause. Because this makes business less risky, more nimble, more dynamic. It’s why the US leads the world in startup formation and has all the largest companies.
This doesn’t make me a “leftist” or a “monster”, it just means you are ignorant about economics.
Raise_A_Thoth | 21 hours ago
>The best way to serve a worker’s needs is to enable dynamic business that increases productivity and makes goods and services cheaper
This is literally just trickle-down economics and it is soundly being rejected by the economic community because gestures broadly around.
Workers are not better off than they were in the 1980s when Reagan popularized 'trickle down economics.' Technology has improved, but that is somewhat inevitable as scientists and engineers always work towards improving technology regardless of who owns capital. Depending on how you measure wages, average wages may have grown and may have stayed stagnant, but that's hardly a clear victory for your claim. People are more in debt and are more frustrated and constrained by cost of living from healthcare to childcare to food.
>workers benefit when businesses have the ability to fire them for any cause.
You're a deeply unserious person. This is hooey.
>Because this makes business less risky, more nimble, more dynamic.
It makes business ownership less risky. The risk has been transferred to the worker you gibbon.
>It’s why the US leads the world in startup formation and has all the largest companies.
The US also has the most amount of capital, has the world's global reserve currency, disproportionately affects global trade and markets and has the world's 3rd largest population. Until you can control for variables like that you can't make such a ridiculous claim aboit why the US leads anything.
>This doesn’t make me a “leftist” or a “monster”, it just means you are ignorant about economics.
Oh no it definitely makes you ignorant about economics.
Prestigious_Load1699 | 3 hours ago
You must contend with the fact that productivity, real median wages, and GDP per capita are higher in the US than any other major nation.
I see vague things like “global reserve currency, highest accumulation of capital, etc.” being expressed - why do you think the US achieved these things?
Blind freaking luck!?
Raise_A_Thoth | an hour ago
>why do you think the US achieved these things?
Exploitation. Relative isolation from other global powers. We were the only major country to not suffer any major attacks in our mainland, so our productive infrastructure all remained in tact after WW2.
I don't really know what specific examples you might care anout because I don't know how much you are denying the US does or if you just don't know much history about the US' involvement in strong-arming other countries.
There are certainly elements of luck and chance, like geography and population, but even those were won in part through death and conquest at least in part.
Prestigious_Load1699 | 55 minutes ago
You speak of exploitation and conquest.
Okay.
Why did the USSR - absolutely guilty of the same things ten times over - collapse while the capitalist West reigned supreme?
Raise_A_Thoth | 49 minutes ago
Why does any state collapse?
Before it collapsed it managed to bring a Eurasian backwater civilization to a global superpower with nukes and a leading space program. I think that's at least as interesting as why it collapsed.
Contributing factors of collapse include exterior threats to its interests from the US and its allies throughout the Cold War, and getting stretched too thinly.
I don't see what this definitively tells us, though.
Prestigious_Load1699 | 41 minutes ago
Doesn’t it tell us that the free market is superior to centrally-planned economies?
That the reason the US is the global superpower is because its economic system is superior?
Raise_A_Thoth | 28 minutes ago
>Doesn’t it tell us that the free market is superior to centrally-planned economies?
God, no.
To what extent can we even all agree that the US's policies both domestic and internationally are perfectly represented as "free market?" Was fighting the Vietnam War an example of the "free market?" Many right-leaning libertarians think FDR's New Deal policies were actuakly (inexplicably) disastrous state overreach, while the broader consensus is that strong social safety nets, a new minimum wage, and broad corporate regulation and labor protections created the Golden Age of Capitalism. It is hard to outright deny this was a time period of significant economic growth and widespread prosperity particularly in the expanding middle class, no?
There are far too many confounding variables to say that the US 'won' the Cold War and therefore 'free markets are superior to central planning.' This is just shallow analysis.
Not to mention how the rise of China under their version of communism is also challenging many US-centric assumptions.
Prestigious_Load1699 | 17 minutes ago
China, Vietnam, and numerous former-Communist states (Poland as a prime example) all experienced economic modernization and growth once they embraced free market principles.
China. following the market reforms of Deng in the late 1970s, Vietnam after its market liberalization in the 1980s, and Poland after its independence from the Soviet Union in the 1990s.
This is clear history that anyone who wishes to understand modern economics should study and understand.
You are clinging to an ideology that failed the test of time and was proven inferior to the free market. We have quite literally run the gamut. The contest is over.
I can do no more at this point. I hope in time you accept reality.
Capitalism is the best system we have, and our ambition in the 21st century is to properly regulate its excesses to the benefit of all humanity.
coke_and_coffee | 20 hours ago
> This is literally just trickle-down economics and it is soundly being rejected by the economic community because gestures broadly around.
No it is not, and “gestures broadly around” is not an argument. American wages are the highest in the world for a reason.
> Workers are not better off than they were in the 1980s
Yes, they are. Median incomes are about 73% higher than in 1980 and average incomes are even greater still.
> It makes business ownership less risky. The risk has been transferred to the worker you gibbon.
Workers do not assume any financial risk.
> Until you can control for variables like that
Done. US has the highest per capita GDP and the highest wages.
Raise_A_Thoth | 19 hours ago
>No it is not, and “gestures broadly around” is not an argument
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/tax-cuts-rich-50-years-no-trickle-down/
https://www.economicsonline.co.uk/definitions/trickle-down-economics-why-it-only-works-in-theory.html/
>American wages are the highest in the world for a reason.
Because the strength of the petro-dollar, the fact that we exploit the global south for their resources and ship them here for cheap, and our social safety net is the lowest in the developed world making a higher driver of personal expenses driving demand for higher wages?
>Yes, they are. Median incomes are about 73% higher than in 1980 and average incomes are even greater still.
I said 'workers are not better off.' I made no claim about any quantity or measure of wage growth.
Here's a debate among two conservatives in disagreement on the very point I put forward:
https://mishtalk.com/economics/the-great-debate-are-americans-better-off-today-than-in-the-1980s/
Whether you believe people are better off or not is probably due more to your own personal belief about positive trends than any factual data. You can't wrap up the notion of "better off" in just a single number like "wage growth" with or without various inflation calculations.
>Workers do not assume any financial risk.
I already explained how they do, actually. If I spend $100,000 to start a business, that's how much money I have risked. If I hire too many employees I face potentially not meeting my financial obligations. If I don't meet those obligations, I lose my capital. If I decide to fire some employees to prevent or delay my loss of capital, then yes, 100%, I have transferred some of the risk of losing that capital to that employee. The employee didn't fail to do their agreed work, but they lost their job because I failed to properly forecast or failed to meet sales projections. The risks of failing have, therefore, been transferred in part to the employee who is now unemployed.
I feel like I'm overexplaining this but you have demonstrated obstinance and this is the only way to communicate when one party is rejecting a rather simply point.
>Done. US has the highest per capita GDP and the highest wages.
Sorry, you think that accounts for all of the variables I mentioned? Lol. What a joke.
coke_and_coffee | 19 hours ago
>Because the strength of the petro-dollar, the fact that we exploit the global south for their resources and ship them here for cheap, and our social safety net is the lowest in the developed world making a higher driver of personal expenses driving demand for higher wages?
I love how leftists always come up with these silly excuses when their theory doesn’t match reality.
“Petro dollar” is not a real thing and EVERY country in the world buys things from “the global south”. That’s not exploitation.
America workers have the highest wages in the world because America is the most productive economy in the world. Everything else you are saying is pure cope.
>You can't wrap up the notion of "better off" in just a single number like "wage growth"
Cope cope cope cope cope cope cope
Raise_A_Thoth | 19 hours ago
You ignored almost everything I wrote.
>EVERY country in the world buys things from “the global south”. That’s not exploitation.
We don't just "buy stuff" from the global south. We impose our will on other nations. We punish them when they try to operate using principles other than "capitalists should be permitted to pursue profits without any other considerations to the needs of people."
Cuba embargo. Bay of Pigs. Venezuela. Grenada. Iranian Coup of 1953. These are just very hot and quick examples off the top of my head. If you can't see the world through any lens other than "everyone is either engaging in free trade or they are stupid or terrorists" I can't really help you. You need to read more. Try getting an education maybe, but you're extremely stubborn and way overconfident in your understanding of the world.
coke_and_coffee | 18 hours ago
>We impose our will on other nations. We punish them when they try to operate using principles other than "capitalists should be permitted to pursue profits without any other considerations to the needs of people."
We absolutely do not do this, lol. Tons of other nations have extremely generous social programs and high tax rates, wealth taxes, and we trade with them.
>Cuba embargo. Bay of Pigs. Venezuela. Grenada. Iranian Coup of 1953
Lmao, do you have any examples that aren’t 80 years old?
Anyway, your leftists rants are completely irrelevant. None of this has anything to do with American wages and wealth. The US the world’s most productive economy in the mid-1800s, LONG before any of this happened.
America is wealthy because we have high productivity. Not because the IMF requests market policies as a precondition for receiving a loan, lol.
Just total abject ignorance of how economics works.
Raise_A_Thoth | 18 hours ago
>We absolutely do not do this
Just deny history, alright.
Venezuela? We literally just kidnapped their president. And the Cuba embargo continues to this day. You really are obtuse.
>The US the world’s most productive economy in the mid-1800s
Lmfao.
By 1870 the US was growing but still well behind China and India at least.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_largest_historical_GDP#/media/File%3A1_AD_to_2008_AD_trends_in_%25_GDP_contribution_by_major_economies_of_the_world.png
Do you even have a basic grasp of anything historically accurate? Are you a flat-earther too?
coke_and_coffee | 18 hours ago
>Venezuela? We literally just kidnapped their president. And the Cuba embargo continues to this day. You really are obtuse.
You are proposing that American workers have high wages because we deposed the dictator of Venezuela and have sanctions on Cuba???
🤪🤡🤪🤡🤪🤡🤪🤡🤪🤡🤪
The economic illiteracy of leftists never ceases to amuse me.
>By 1870 the US was growing but still well behind China and India at least.
Most productive, not largest.
Do you even know words?
Prestigious_Load1699 | 3 hours ago
I saw the deflection.
You provided data, and then it became “only because of the petrodollar blah blah blah”.
Transparent.
The_Keg | 22 hours ago
This is why I abhor leftists like you. And I'm sure I'm not in the minority.
phaedrus910 | 21 hours ago
Oh don't worry, the feeling is mutual.
The_Keg | 21 hours ago
r/tankiethedeprogram
r/latestagecapitalism
r/Shitliberalssay
r/collapse
What a specimen
phaedrus910 | 21 hours ago
Yes sir. And? How did you get into an argument with communists in the baking subreddit of all places lmao Fuck is wrong with you?
NoPerformance5952 | 3 hours ago
It's been getting pissy in a lot of sureddits if you dare to question the US, capitalism, or trickle down economics.
Raise_A_Thoth | 22 hours ago
Why? Because I understand how the judiciary works to uphold systems of power?
Prestigious_Load1699 | 3 hours ago
There is so much to be unpacked here.
For starters, what do you mean by “property”?
Whether you understand the implications of that statement will dictate your grasp of basic economics.
Raise_A_Thoth | an hour ago
>what do you mean by “property”?
Private property. Capital. Not your personal residence, not your clothes and toothbrushes and televisions etc, that property which is used by workers to generate profits for the owner.
Key-Organization3158 | 22 hours ago
This is fantastic for the rest of the world. If countries want to stand in the way of progress, let them. Luddites end up on the wrong side of history.
Farming used to require a majority of the working population. The technology advanced and we could automate almost all of it.
If only this court ruling had happened sooner, we'd still all be famers.
Le-Inverse | 21 hours ago
Except that most of what we call AI right now isn't anywhere near being able to replace human workers, and most of the work (image recognition tasks etc) that could have been automated has already been replaced years ago anyway.
Outside of work like translation, I can't imagine how stupid one must be to use LLMs to replace an actual employee like in this case.
Acceptable_Deal_4662 | 21 hours ago
lol AI fucking sucks
Alone-Supermarket-98 | 5 hours ago
that eliminates one of the base user cases for AI, doesnt it? So companies will sink millions into developing AI tools AND retain less efficient workers?
Something tells me companies will just make up other excuses to cut headcount
krkrkrneki | an hour ago
"can't use AI as an excuse to fire workers"
So they are going to use different excuse? This ruling makes no sense in the real world, and is going to be circumvented in hundreds of different ways.
Twitchingbouse | 15 hours ago
If there any Americans who actually believe labor rights are better in China than the US, i highly encourage you to pick yourself up and move there.
averysmallbeing | 9 hours ago
As a Canadian I actually would rather live in China than the untied states.
Prestigious_Load1699 | 2 hours ago
Hahahahahhaha
Canada is currently experiencing a massive brain drain of high-skilled workers migrating to the US.
https://thehub.ca/2026/04/03/can-anyone-solve-canadas-brain-drain-problem/
plaregold | 22 hours ago
which is better long term--empowering and developing people + adopt AI, or a country that only does the latter to replace people. You're leaving a lot of compute power untapped.
Special-One1991 | 19 hours ago
And who's this company that is stupid enough to admit that!?
They will just say it's part of company restructuring to increase productivity and focus!
VA3DPrinter | 22 hours ago
This is typical communist thinking. Instead of adapting, they try to persist jobs that have become obsolete. The legal system can enforce regulations on tangible things (pollution, patents, etc.) There’s no way a court can prove a worker was replaced by AI. The same conversations came up regarding assembly line workers from years ago. So much has been automated by machines over the last several decades because it’s just more efficient. The workforce adapted and “productivity” increased across the board.
My 2 cents…All of the industries that are going to be impacted by AI probably SHOULD be impacted by AI. I want more capable and secure software. If you think Mythos is just going to crank out the next massive workforce application on its own, you don’t know software development. People are still needed.
Our medical system needs help. Find the pain points of both efficiency and accuracy and incorporate AI.
Our legal system is filled with arrogant type-A personalities, lazy lawyers and tired judges. If we want a fair legal system, incorporate AI. Same goes for governance. You want a just government? How about all those arrogant ass-hats videos out of Texas councils? Replace politicians with technology. Computers would at least vote without bias of some billionaire slipping an envelope of money in its pocket.
If you want AI slop art and music, that’s up to you but I think humanity will still appreciate creations by its own kind. I’m not impressed that a robot can can run through an obstacle course. I am impressed with human ballet and a live orchestra.
phaedrus910 | 21 hours ago
If we had anything resembling AGI then sure it makes sense to replace those positions with it. Seeing as we're not even close, not even on the same field let alone ballpark..
RipComfortable7989 | 23 hours ago
Nothing in this story relates directly to AI. The company fired him after he refused to accept a demotion package and the court said that was illegal.
Edit: keep down voting because it the article doesn't line up with your narrative, reddit.
SirTiffAlot | 22 hours ago
>The case involved a quality assurance supervisor, identified only by his surname Zhou, who was hired in 2022 to oversee a tech company’s AI output. When his bosses tried to replace him with a large language model (LLM) in 2025, they offered him a demotion with a 40 percent pay cut.
Nothing relating to AI huh?
Odd-Transition1527 | 23 hours ago
Article confirms that rights of a worker prevailed. If that’s not news worthy, don’t know what else is.
Labour rights, ALWAYS!
RipComfortable7989 | 22 hours ago
Labor rights are one thing but reddit circle jerking is concerned about the AI part and using it as a snarky remark against the US.
Odd-Transition1527 | 22 hours ago
Hmmm - and it’s not true becauseeeee? Do you want to pull up reports of layoffs at Meta, Oracle, and others?
RipComfortable7989 | 22 hours ago
Again, it has nothing to do with the article. stop conflating things and circle jerking each other off. The ruling was about labor rights, not AI.