I work with people like this. The next sentence is always some variant of “if they don’t want to be poor they should get a better job. “
Yeah dumbass, there’s 100 million 6-figure jobs available for everyone to not be poor. And education that doesn’t put you 6 figures in debt. They should work harder than the 2 jobs they’re already working and Ubering on the side, you say? They’re already doing 4x as much as your privileged fat ass sitting behind a desk who knocks off early on a Friday.
Fuck I hate people sometimes.
You have a great point.
100 million 6-figure jobs available for everyone to not be poor
While “100 million” was likely made up, there are 8.3 billion people on earth. Those 100 million jobs are enough for 1/83 of the population.
Wife of a friend argues that “burger flippers” shouldn’t earn enough money. She agrees there’s a market for burgers and that the jobs need to be filled, but the people shouldn’t be compensated for their time. You can’t change her mind.
Oh, do they also hit you with the “it’s not meant to be a permanent full-time job, just for kids breaking into the work force for some pocket money” type shit? As if the supply of teenagers wanting to be exploited for pennies is infinite, while the lead is a 47-year-old who’s been there for 12 years and gotten $5 in raises?
Oh absolutely.
I’ve yet to see a high school that has classes between 10pm and 6am, though.
“It’s what the market will bare”
Burger Flippers Unionize, drive up wages
“They’re making my burgers too expensive!!!”
There’s isn’t even an actual relationship between paying people more money and the price of the product to an individual. Not like that at least, and especially not with high volume fast food where the amount of time an employee takes to make a single unit is neglegible.
Big Macs in the Netherlands are in the same ballpark as in the US, price wise, despite higher wages for “buger flippers” and better overall benefits, job security and working conditions.
There’s isn’t even an actual relationship between paying people more money and the price of the product to an individual.
That’s broadly true. But end customers can’t see the business balance sheets. So when wages go up at the same time as inflation, they do the Milton Friedman Econ 101 thing and blame wage earners for price spikes regardless of the reality.
Big Macs in the Netherlands are in the same ballpark as in the US, price wise, despite higher wages for “buger flippers” and better overall benefits, job security and working conditions.
I remember that staistic from decades ago. I wonder if it still holds true. The Dutch have been undergoing their own neoliberal fleecing of late. Rents are skyrocketing. Deregulation and union busting has taken their toll.
I remember that staistic from decades ago. I wonder if it still holds true. The Dutch have been undergoing their own neoliberal fleecing of late. Rents are skyrocketing. Deregulation and union busting has taken their toll.
According to some cursory googling it is. But you are also correct with the rest you’re saying here ofcourse.
The relationship is just one they create artificially because American business has devolved into essentially finding any excuse you can to jack up the price
Big Macs in the Netherlands are in the same ballpark as in the US, price wise
Are they the same size though? Isn’t everything in America
fatterbigger?I’m working off of the assumption they are, but you could be on to something.
Yeah that’s the talk show propaganda line. Designed to make the idiots feel good that they’re better than the burger flippers.
We look at it and go, well who makes the money then the corporations? the CEO’s? They say well they earned it, and we write them off as a lost cause.
And ofc she wants to make it big. Get a huge valuation on a company with just a potential customer base (Google, M$ etc will all be paying her!) in six months and then sell. She asked me to invest. I declined.
The secret ingredient is crime
Unironicaly, I believe people do this to get ahead, and that is the only way people make it out.
Everyone should just work hard and become middle-managers instead of complaining about low wages.
- a conservative who used to argue with me online
At the same time they were probably arguing to pay the entry level less and by proxy setting themselves up to povery even as middle mangers.
Well the water is rising fast, but there’s still ladder above me, go ahead and open the valve some more!
So he cleans the trash then?
I doubt he showers.
No one should have to work multiple jobs to “just get by.” In fact, your survival shouldn’t be tied to wage slavery.
My family of MAGAts keep insisting that unskilled labor shouldn’t be paid a living wage.
And fail to see the flaws in that logic.
I agree with the argument but there is one undue assumption : Maybe they don’t agree the job is necessary.
They don’t tell rich people who do unnecessary jobs to go do something productive instead.
No they’re producing money that’s like pure value and stuff doing. You need to download more ram my guy.
Maybe they don’t agree the job is necessary.
If you’re patroning the business, you are implicitly conceding the necessity.
I’ll spot you there’s a plethora of Bullshit Jobs, but they are far more likely to be bureaucratic policing or saturation marketing than retail food service.
Then why are they at McDonald’s?
Because they are lazy and tell themselves that it’s smarter to eat fast food than to cook
I knew someone who rationalised ordering food to be delivered for every meal as more economical than cooking
He became the Chief Financial Officer for KFC in my country
He’s fat, and his relationship fell apart
Because they never stopped being children and things that aren’t awfulor familiar scare and horrify them. Their brains are fundamentally broken at a deep level and they need probably years of intensive managed psychological help to want anything other than what amounts in aggregate to death in every way that matters while being desperately afraid to die. McDonalds is like a branded fun nostalgic thing that invokes the dying without being scary
McDonald’s branding isn’t even fun anymore
I more meant along the line that if they don’t deem the job important enough, why are they still relying on the worker?
The what? I don’t understand and neither do they.
I agree with the argument but there is one undue assumption : Maybe they don’t agree the job is necessary.
I was just using McDonald’s workers as an example, as I’ve heard that referenced multiple times in the past as “why don’t they just get a better job”, referring to the idea that their job doesn’t deserve a living wage.
So if “they” don’t deem the job as necessary, why are they still relying on it?
No. its the money that makes the fried potatoes. What do workers have to do with it? Clearly you’ve never made anything in your life.
Ohh it’s not necessary, it can be automated. Then a tablet can take the order/payment. then you don’t need managers.
Cleaning, Maintenance, and Unemployment. That’s what our grandchildren will be left with. And maybe not cleaning if the design is done well enough.
Availability kills value bro
thats the point
Enabling mass-migration into rich countries just means brown people will become the new underclass, enabling just more racism.
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I’m team automation, BTW. No need to create a new underclass of brown people.
This makes the fundamental assumption that the job has to be done by a human.
In this day and age, a whole lot of “poor people jobs” can be automated (at least to some degree). That happens whenever the supply of people available to do the job cheaper than the capital cost of the machine dries up.
Everybody raising their qualifications to work “better jobs” is one way to do that.
This would be a better argument if eliminating jobs didn’t mean the people who used to work that job die in poverty if they can’t adapt to a new job.
It isn’t an argument at all, merely fact. The dynamic applies regardless of whether we like it or not. Jobs will be eliminated, some humans will be made redundant and be unable to adapt into higher-value labour.
At that point, the only real choice in the matter is whether society pays these people to sit around and do nothing (welfare), requires them to work a meaningless job or lets them die of poverty.
Unfortunately, too many people (and almost all US politicians) consider “let them die of poverty” to be the correct and moral choice.
Yeah that’s fucked up.
When there is less work to do, god forbid we get creative. Like having all the people doing less work overall. No, let’s gamble on the lives of some people. These people!
Especially americans could do with some more vacation days. Between fewer work days and fewer hours per work day I’d probably choose the former.
Where I live we have 5 weeks of paid leave every year, ends up being a pretty nice balance.
Your name checks out.
Bootlicker.
Or we could have free higher education to help people learn those skills rather than say fuck em if they dont have the money to pay for it
Even with free higher education, there are people who either don’t want to or can’t participate. Here in Sweden for instance we’ve had huge troubles integrating the MENA migrant wave of the 2010s into the job market, despite education being not just free but compensated by the gov:t.
A decade after the fact and this group is still hugely overrepresented in unemployment unfortunately (>5x). Many fuckups in that puzzle, but availability of education isn’t one of them.
Some jobs absolutely should be done by humans. I don’t want kids being taught by machines. They need human interaction to do many things, from learning how to appropriately take turns with others, to having someone guide how they hold a pencil.
It’s unfortunate that so many of us who dedicate ourselves to educating the next generation still can’t afford a living.
100%
Sad part is that teachers being treated badly seems to be pretty common in the western world, even in welfare states (albeit not as bad as the US).
My grandfather was a teacher and given how much I enjoy teaching and giving others that joy of understanding I absolutely would’ve been a teacher in a different world.
It’s by design. A society with the capacity for critical thinking wouldn’t put up with the 1%'s bullshit.
When I was in the US the last time (must be around 20 years ago) there was a man in booth in a parking garage. It was something I had naver really seen in germany before. All our garages were already automated back then.
Later I thought about that and got to the conclusion that this person’s work must be cheaper than just putting up an automated system.
The US seems to have a few other jobs that I had never seen in germany. Greeter, bagger, sign spinner.
I don’t know what it looks like today but for me that looks like jobs just to make people work.
I’m in the US and I park in a large hospital’s parking garage a few times a year because one of my doctors has their office there.
They have automated systems AND a human in a booth. I think the human is mostly there to fix problems because the automated system uses paper tickets to track your time in the garage.
Many times in the past there has been a human standing at the ticket dispensing machine who would push the button as you roll up and hand you your parking slip.
Americuuuuh!
Anecdotal but around where I live in the US all the garages/lots have gone automated. You use an app or take a ticket to scan when you’re leaving. I’m all for automation but we really need to offset its societal impact with something like UBI.
The position criticized in the tweet is that people don’t care about workers in poverty now because they imagine a future in which that worker has a better job, and they forget about the person then put in poverty working the first position. The point is that the imagined future does nothing to help the real person suffering now nor reduce overall suffering even if it were realized.
Your imagined future of automated post scarcity has the reduced overall suffering part but it does nothing for people still waiting for their shitty jobs to be automated. You also don’t suggest any way of enforcing an equitable distribution of this automatic production rather than allowing it to be owned by the same people who own everything now, who have chosen to structure the current economy to keep so many in poverty.
Not really. While, yes, the job usually is necessary, telling someone to get a better job does not imply that their current one is necessary.
If it is necessary, why are people working that job poor?
The ruling class intentionally creates extra work to keep people off of the streets. David graeber wrote a good book about it.
https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/david-graeber-bullshit-jobs
I think that’s the right source material to answer the comment’s question, but the wrong answer.
The central idea of that book is that the most necessary labor is devalued under hierarchy in order to inflate the importance of unnecessary roles. Not that unnecessary labor is created to keep people occupied. It is, but the unnecessary labor inventoried in that book by Graeber are mostly decently-paid white collar jobs, used to illustrate the fact that even do-nothing cushy roles are paid better than our most essential workers.
No person working a full time job should be poor. And a 20hr per week job should be able to comfortably split the median rent of a 2 bedroom apartment with another working adult and offer at least a basic lifestyle.
I don’t give a fuck about judging if a job is necessary or not. If a buisness needs a job filled then they have to pay enough for people to live
Every shitty job is necessary to somebody to some degree or no one would pay for it.
It comes down to this. If you want something to be done by someone, but you also dont think people that do that thing that you want should be paid enough to live a decent life, then you are evil. Period.
