Certainly, we live in interesting times. The capabilities are all there, what is left of the puzzle is tying it all together.

Gradually manpower to make a shirt has declined by 99%. It happened gradually so we continue to have more garment workers than needed. This is driving down salaries and it removes job security which again improves productivity.

I've seen stuff from up close that was much to ridiculous and I live in the Netherlands. I take all kinds of weird jobs just to see what things are like.

The latest trend is to reduce the work week from 5 to 2-3 days and the work day from 8 to 4-5 hours. That way you can make people work at insane speed. (Speed no one could work at for 40 hours)

In one such job (which wasn't the most idiotic example at all) a group of 5 people produced half a million boxes of cookies in a day. The conveyor belt moved so fast one couldn't scratch himself. After taxes I got 35 euro per day.

I kept getting back to the same thought. Do I need cookies to cost 99 cents per box? How terrible would it be if they cost 1 euro? Would we raise our nose and push the shopping cart ahead thinking "how dare they ask this much money for cookies?!" When shopping I couldn't care less if it costs 99 cents or 1 euro. I'm not saying we should pay people 1000 euro per day. I'm saying the customer certainly doesn't care if prices go up by that much. Only the Joneses would cry about it. They would demand salaries to go down to the appropriate 35 euro in a country where rent is 800. You'll just have to work 8 weeks to pay for it, you figure it out! You should have paid more attention in school then someone else would have had to package the cookies!

I can see how that line of reasoning works on an individual level and ill certainly make it work for me myself and I. I don't consider the societal puzzle solved like that.

On the second day I asked a manager if I could take a box of cookies. He couldn't look at me, he looked at the floor, then at the wall, then at the ceiling, then back at the wall. After 10 long seconds of silence he said, no not today sorry.

It took me days to figure out what thoughts were behind that expression, it was a simple yes/no question in my book... Then it struck me! The legal limit of gifts for employees (which includes product) is 1% of the salary! Having worked only 2 days there was no room to gift me the 99 cent pack of cookies.

At the end of the 3rd work day I found the manager at the exit. He proudly pointed out a pallet of test product. 1 box per person! He said!

Since I take such jobs somewhat as a corporate spy I had already learned that those boxes will be unpacked and the cookies will be sold as pig food.

Reading the expressions on his face this charade was much more painful for the manager than the employees.

The rules for taking cookies home were much less strictly enforced when people worked full time. No inspector would have considered it paying salary in cookies.

For the 4th time they are building a whole new factory now. I'm sure they will ramp up production to at least a million boxes per day. 3 out of the 5 jobs can be automated easily.

1 cent extra would then allow us to pay 5000 euro per day. Imagine how angry people would get?

Garment workers:

https://sustainablebrands.com/read/marketing-and-comms/garme...
"On average, they worked 60 hours a week and earned an hourly rate of 28 taka (the equivalent of $0.95 in purchasing power parity). They earned less than the minimum hourly wage 64 percent of the time and there was significant evidence to suggest that the more they worked, the less they earned."

forget ppp, 28 taka is $0.33

I'm simply suggesting we should build that world you portray rather than pretend it already exists.