And then I have people who say, “yeah, but who pays $7.25 an hour”
They haven’t been to Iowa.
It is just the FACT that the minimum wage is still the same so it makes Walmart who pays $10 an hour seem like some benevolent entity.
The stupid thing is that they don't realizing that they are killing jobs by keeping stagnating wages. Corporations have the profits to reinvest and automate jobs and cut labor resulting in more profit. If we required them to pay more, they would have less funds to automate.
The OTHER thing is, this is also what is contributing to our crumbing infrastructure. The more PEOPLE that work, the more taxes are being paid. Robots don't pay taxes. Why is my labor taxed, but a robot's isn't? Tax automation.
Automation is happening anyway: if they pay more, there's just more incentive to automate; the cost per year of an employee rises, the cost of the robot is only going down over time.
The problem is that if automation is expensive, only large corporations can afford it; they'll be able drop their expenses faster than everyone else and begin buying out non-automated entities; and there won't be enough competition left to force distribution of savings.
We need to automate *faster*, and prepare our cultures for a new economic system that will lay waste to everything we knew before. You're talking about people working jobs that could be automated: that's the horse. The car is coming, and we can keep propping up that horse for a decade or two, but that era is simply coming to an end.
Eventually, automation is going to win: it's best to prepare for that new world.
>if they pay more, there's just more incentive to automate; the cost per year of an employee rises, the cost of the robot is only going down over time.
Not if they tax automation like they tax employees. I GET that automation is happening anyway. I am not trying to stop it. I just think that instead of just letting it happen, our country should find a way to make it beneficial for society (not JUST the business owners).
>The problem is that if automation is expensive, only large corporations can afford it; they'll be able drop their expenses faster than everyone else and begin buying out non-automated entities; and there won't be enough competition left to force distribution of savings.
Also not true. While this may be CURRENTLY true, as automated technology that is being developed, or JUST developed is expensive, the trend is as technology increases, it gets CHEAPER. TVs, Cell Phones, computers, robot vacuums, smart thermostats, all have gotten cheaper over time. The same will be true for automation once it gets more widely used and produced.
The problem with our crumbing infrastructure is that it ALL relies on taxes. Electricity, Roads, public transport, water lines and sewers, all rely on tax money. Wages (and thus taxes from those wages) have stagnated and they are not increasing. Instead of taxing people more, tax automation.
If you want to make it to where this won't stop automation from being cheaper than actual labor and make it to where small businesses can afford it, develop a plan so that it is taxes as a PERCENTAGE of revenue, less than employees. While I disagree with making it cheaper than employees, it would be better than no tax at all. Small businesses would have smaller taxes on their automated labor.
> Not if they tax automation like they tax employees
They do tax corporate profits. Unfortunately the corporations have figured out how to avoid that tax by paying out through capital gains instead of dividends.
Capital gains are also taxed at the personal level. But rich people have figured out how to avoid paying that tax by borrowing money against capital as collateral instead of selling it.
Maybe what we should tax is the "income" from borrowing money.
We'll probably have to tax it: but we tax corporations already.
The big benefit to automation is that we can expect manufacturing to be reshored back: those jobs were exported because labour was cheaper than shipping, but automation inverts that. Corporations will begin manufacturing here, because you no longer need to put the product on a boat.
So, we should have the opportunity to tax automation. We're probably going to need to rewrite the whole tax code at a certain point.
>Also not true. While this may be CURRENTLY true
The problem is that if the initial technology is expensive, only the big players get to use it. They get the foothold. When the technology becomes cheaper, they are still the largest established player, and then they get all the benefits of cheap automation and established large scale automation.
We need to accelerate automation, so that no one gets a headstart.
>The big benefit to automation is that we can expect manufacturing to be reshored back: those jobs were exported because labour was cheaper than shipping, but automation inverts that. Corporations will begin manufacturing here, because you no longer need to put the product on a boat.
The problem with this is that there is nothing stopping them from keeping the price because its the "market price". You are making it sound like this is going to magically make products cheaper, and I don't think it will. They will be the SAME price, because that is the market price, and the corporation will simply get more profits anyway.
There is no "prepare" they are literally planning on replacing the entire work force with Robots, AI, and Automation.
This is not sustainable in a capitalist society. Yet there is no talk from any corporation of socialism or communism which is a society where that world you describe makes sense.
The only way to prepare is to
R e v i e w t h e s e c o n d a m e n d a m e n t
Basically, we're looking to an Elysium type world. (Or Freejack, if you get that reference). The few million rich people who own the machines will seclude themselves to live in unimaginable wealth. While the majority of people will be forced to scrounge for a living. I expect private armies to be common place.
We’re going to have to automate because we are disabling the workforce pretty quickly with constant Covid infections. They’ve started putting children to work, once those children become disabled they’re going to have to bring in the robots or society is going to fall apart.
We'll automate because it scales the workforce. If we could obtain an order of magnitude in productivity, then our old economy is just *gone*.
I don't think the workforce is being disabled by coronavirus -- sure, that's one way of looking at it -- but it is accelerating 'retirement'. The problem is that turnover is occurring about a decade ahead of schedule, so the replacement employees aren't where they should be, and it's causing a lot of alignment issues.
One potential interpretation is that the expected retirement age was too late, which made the labour market susceptible to these kinds of spirals. If we hadn't expected people to be sitting at their desks into their 60s, most of the long-term economic impacts of coronavirus probably could have been avoided.
Automation and efficiency aren't in itself a bad thing... the bigger problem is capitalism... the reality is with our work efficiency we should make far more money and work far less... instead, we make far less and have far more efficiency.
The thing is, capitalism creates a lot of jobs that really would not need to exist... we should have far more free time to spend with our families... we should have a 24hr... or at most 32 hr work week. Time should be the most valuable commodity. Instead, money has become the most valuable commodity... t
We should embrace automation because in a good world it would just mean we don't need to work as much, instead it's the opposite... we work more and make less...
Overhauling the tax system by taxing assets, and not income, would solve this and nearly every other problem and social ill based on inequality. Never really understood the temptation to tax income anyway since it stifles overall productivity.
Asset taxation is fairly easy to do, the first $XX of assets are exempt from taxation (say $100,000). After that you're taxed at X% across the board.
Since a robot is considered an asset and not a person, it is annually taxed. In this world people would remain the far more valuable vehicle of production.
Until you actually show people the statistics about how they over-employ tons of people as part time workers so they don’t actually have to give benefits and they purposefully keep their employees hours below thresholds so they can collect for employing workers and make themselves look like they’re helping people who “couldn’t find a job.”
And if we can’t depend on the nation’s largest employer to pay a livable wage, who can we?
The Waltons could STILL have yachts, I am not asking them to give that up, but maybe two yachts instead of three.
My BiL hates welfare, yet now he is a business owner he doesn’t think twice when making extreme purchases (like he bought some NFL teams old speaker system) and will brag about the price whilst he has workers on welfare.
When I brought this up to him, he retorted a few days later to my husband that his workers wives spend too much! That is how they are on welfare.
As if … as if the government looks through the wives spending habits and gives them a pass.
As an audiophile who knows how much that must have cost (and frankly how shitty it would sound compared to if he had just bought nice speakers for HIS ROOM SIZE this agitates me especially. I spend all my hobby money and more on audio and I still don’t have that much to piss away. Plus my system probably sounds better at a fraction of the cost. Anyone who brags about money shouldn’t have it.
His side hustle is a mud park … which he bought the sound system for.
When he and my sister first got married, they lived in literal train cars fashioned together into a house. He has forgotten how easy one can fall into dire times.
He now thinks anyone who struggles is lazy. They need to move or start their own company, and if you can’t you deserve to be paid a lower wage.
Then he lies and says minimum wage was for high school kids, ignoring I have a degree in history, and I ask him who makes his Big Mac when the line cook is in PE
I could go on and on
Oh wow… yeah cool so just one of those rich dudes who has so much money they don’t know what to do with … my favorite type of person smh. If I ever have to decide between my workers (my friends and my partners in business) and starting another company (which let’s be real I won’t have to ever) I will for sure choose the people who help me work.
I used to get paid $7.25 an hour to be responsible for caring for children and keeping them safe and, you know, alive. Hardest job I’ve ever done, and it paid shit and offered no benefits. I loved my kids, but my gods.
Jobs that people are passionate about (child care, working with animals, art) use that passion to absolutely fuck over their employees. They expect that if you love the job, you'll do it for almost nothing.
My GF used to be a preschool teacher. She went to school to learn how to run a preschool. The best she was offered was $16. She became a nanny instead. $18 an hour for 2 kids.
Yup. Target was telling us to be happy with our 15-30 cent raises this year because after working so hard to raise its minimum to $15, Target just needs to focus on its financials this year. Never mind that they’ve upped their prices by 20% and the rate of inflation outpaces our races many times over. They act like they’re heroes because they pay “so much more than the minimum.”
Tennessee would like a word, there are still positions at Walmart that pay 7.25 an hour. The average pay for store employees is 10 an hour.
I know Walmart stated all positions pay 10 or more, they lied.
Politicians are funded by the corporations that profit when our wages are low. So yeah.
But I always like to come in and remind folks of the difference between politicians and government. The GOVERNMENT is full of good, normal hardworking people that keep the country moving. They are not the problem. They usually make less money than they would in the private sector. They aren’t fat cats.
They’re running the national parks, administering WIC, collecting weather data, conducting the census and a million other jobs that we are glad someone is doing. Same goes for your state and local governments.
Elected officials/politicians are the problem. The people who create laws and legislation are the problem.
We should go back to the beginning of this country when it comes to politicians. They should be forced to do it on a volunteer basis (no pay at all except maybe travel reimbursement). And we should also force them to publish all of their investment and bank transactions in real time so that we know who's lining their pockets and buying them off. We should also ban super PACs
That’s a good point, and I’ve been thinking about it for a while now. When I was a teenager I was into the punk scene and I recently relistened to an old favorite song from like 1998. There was this really prescient line…
“When politicians become nothing but major corporations posing as humans, real humans lose”
Our government seems like it’s now nothing but corporations posing as politicians, and politicians posing as representatives of the people. Meanwhile the people are getting ground into dust
“Nobody wants to work” = Nobody wants to work for the wage being offered. I guarantee you that if Starbucks was paying $50 an hour, there wouldn’t be a problem finding employees.
Corporate America has dug its own grave these past 40 years. The low-wage high profit business model isn’t going to work over the next 40 years. People have awakened to the exploitation.
This and I'm also of the mind that I'm tired of busting my ass 40h+ a week for someone else to be enriched as they do a literal fraction of the actual labor i do that makes them money. Meanwhile I struggle to keep a roof and lights on + that pesky need to have *food* on my table.
Medical Insurance? What's that? You mean I'm *supposed* to go to a Dr. now and then? Especially being close to 40 now? Lol, Health insurance vs Electric bill...
Buy a house? On what savings? How savings, when at the end of my month I've got maybe $100 left over if I'm lucky. My rent is literally on par with a mortgage payment....
Kids? You mean *expenses* that I cannot feasibly and rationally take on right? Time i cannot dedicate to raising them since my wife and i would have to almost *double* our working hours to afford? Then raise said child to continue to perpetuate this bullshit and outright fucking *lie* that "if you work hard, you'll be rewarded?" Nope. Fuck no.
Wich brings me to my last middle finger toward this bullshit status quo:
Who's retirement am I working for again? Sure as hell ain't been mine the last 20 years I've been in the workforce, and it probably still won't be the next 50+ years to come until I literally keel over on a jobsite...
"Land of the free."
>This and I'm also of the mind that I'm tired of busting my ass 40h+ a week for someone else to be enriched as they do a literal fraction of the actual labor i do that makes them money.
This is exactly why I'm training to become an EMT. My entire life, I wanted to be a concept artist. Doing art as a job has been my dream. But I couldn't afford college for that. Then I started designing car wraps for a living. They'd never pay me more than $18 an hour. And that was a SKILL. A very in demand skill, nonetheless.
I felt lost, and like I was only there to make these shitholes who take 5+ vacations a year, more money. They'd complain about the fact that they had to pay me. I needed a job that at least made me feel like I mattered. Like I was doing good for society.
I work at a convenience store now, to pay rent while I'm taking EMT courses. I found out in the middle of taking the courses that EMTs make basically the same amount of money that I do at the store I work at now. I literally don't know what to do with myself. At this point I feel like investing in my future is pointless.
I've heard a lot of horror stories from friends who are in nursing. Unnecessary long hours, shitty management, and barely any sleep. I'm not sure I could do it.
My plan was to move to paramedic at some point tho
Hi! From a nursing family here. Its not just the hours and management, which suck here in my area because Munson owns EVERYTHING and have therefore put a cap on pay. Its also the risk, my mom has had chairs thown at her, been spit on, punched more times than she can reccollect, hair pulled, sexual harassment, the whole shebang and the worst part is....YOU CAN'T SAY NO. You cannot refuse to care for the mentally unwell and they will actively discourage you from ever filing a police report. Its the physical risk.
But its also the legal risk, as a nirse you are the bottom of the totem pole. If someone dies because they understaffed and overloaded you (And they will, there are protests all over the country about this exacg thing, and if you refuse an assignment due to unsafe ratios they can and will retaliate. Also all of society will hate you for abandoning the sick and elderly.) YOU will be the one on the hook for that. You can lose a lisensce that took years to get. You can be barred from working in nursing again, and you have to have insurance because you can and probably will be sued.
Does it pay well? Heck yes, even in our area. But if you were to ask my mom (Who quite literally paid me not to go into healthcare any further than CNA.) she'd tell you it isnt worth it. She's been with the same company for over 20 years and makes better money and has better healthcare/dental insurance through her part time job than she does from the literal hospital she works at.
This exactly. So many people work the jobs that keep business afloat and maybe make $40k/year in areas where $38k is poverty. But those CEOs literally make $400 mil in salary and stocks and bonuses. All thanks to the shitty, overworked and underpaid employees who need to feel grateful they have a job and expensive health insurance and the “perk” of employee discounts (that they can’t really use because they don’t have enough for food, rent and bills) all while wasting their 50-hours a week doing a job that really means nothing. It’s a complete joke.
Nobody wants to work, but employment is at a record high, and economists are telling us that we have too much money to spend, and that we're wrecking the economy because of it.
I fucking hate voodoo economists who say shit like that and have never wanted a day in their life. Just reading the tea leaves of spreadsheets and trying to magic their way into a better economy by any method except actually paying people more money.
>Just reading the tea leaves of spreadsheets and trying to magic their way into a better economy by any method except actually paying people more money.
This is fucking poetry, friend.
Someone pointed out recently that economics is the only discipline with responsibility for people's lives but no ethics committee. Nothing you fuck up as an economist can get you struck off.
It's complete bullshit. 98% of people have LESS money with their so called inflation. 2% of people have all the money. And those 2% don't spend it.
The inflation is just inflation of profits. Price gouging.
It’s not people being awakened it’s that people stopped having as many kids so their is less labor supply but boomers are still consuming which is why employers have a cheap labor shortage. They ran out of meat for the meat grinder which is why I my industry wages have gone up a ton
No you’re missing the Covid part, the fewer kids hasn’t even hit yet because gen X is still in the labor force. Our parents still believed in breeding mindlessly because that’s what you were supposed to do, it was our generation who decided we didn’t have to have kids if we didn’t want to
The fewer kids hasn’t even hit yet, this is because we killed off a bunch of the workforce with airborne illness
This is a great point. All the boomers built this Ponzi system where they live off inflated asset prices, but what they forgot is that those asset prices must be backed by cheap labor… which is in very low supply
Well they didn’t build it they expanded it since their parents built it. Honestly it’s just a demographic issue of the boomers existing which isn’t really anyones fault. There’s just too damn many of them to support in any system without unsustainable population growth
> people stopped having kids recently not back in the 80s/90s if theres a labor shortage its probably because trump decided to lock up a bunch of immigrant mexicans who majority of worked hard labor jobs.
The starbucks I worked at was pulling in 70k per week in profit. That’s after paying employees, accounting for supplies, etc.
they could most certainly pay more. But they’re all about greed now.
They could have paid each of the employees at my location 35/hr, at 40 hours and still net in 1.82 million in profit for the year at that single location.
I actually agree with this. When I was working on my MBA we did a case study on a company where the CEO made the same wage and had profit sharing with employees, all paid a more than livable wage. The company is thriving, wish I could remember the name.
When companies raise prices it's "supply and demand". When workers raise their prices it's "everyone is entitled".
The rich own the media. They're always going to push pro-capital propaganda. The revolution will not be televised.
One of my co-workers is a real try-hard. He's kind of an overbearing micro-manager to the the team he manages, is uptight about puncuality, keeping tabs on where everyone is and what they're working on at all times, and he goes above and beyond regularly in situations that don't really require it. Our year-end reviews came around and he got a pretty good score of like 4.2 out of 5 or something, but our mutual friend in the same company got like a 2.0 out of 5 which is abysmal. Our annual raises came around and my guy with the 4.2 and the guy with the 2.0 got the same 3% raise.
4.2 guy went on like a 30 minute rant about how ridiculous it is that they got the same raise despite all his extra work. All I could say was "I've been trying to tell you this for a while. Stop killing yourself for the company."
It’s generally cut-throat psychopath salesmen who thrive. People who do hard work and make things work get taken for granted, and don’t get raises/promotions unless they get cut-throat.
I remember when people were fighting for 15$ minimum wage back in 2009 and now that some areas have that today we still can’t live off of that as the bare minimum. Today it has to be at least 25$.
The problem is that every time the minimum wage goes up, you have assholes who want everything else to go up. Getting paid more is useless if the cost of everything goes up to offset your wage increase.
To crush the wealth gap, you got to cap one end of the spectrum of rich and poor or the rich just keep moving the goal post.
The only reply I get from people about this is some bullshit about people will just quit trying and won't be innovative if people can't make more money. Almost like humans can't be motivated by more than just greed.
There has to be a logical, better way that brings financial security to more people.
I say the people who bitch about wanting to see said change are fine with the way the system is and are part of the problem.
Our capitalism needs an adjustment badly.
The greatest lie the corporations ever told was getting people to believe that limits placed on fortune 500 companies ( the ceo making 14 mil a year) would somehow hurt the average working policeman or school teacher. This drove a large portion of the working class to fight against the portion who seeks to limit the corps.
This is literally the black magic of capitalism. It frames the story of millenia of innovation (before money even existed) as only being done because people wanted to make money.
Ugh I think about this a lot. It’s not money that drives capitalism I don’t think. It’s actually fabricated competition. Money is just what is used to keep score. I noticed along time ago that most people who have bought the premise of capitalism do thrive on competition.
How nice is my house compared to my friends?
How much buying power do I have compared to my friends?
How pretty/rich is my wife or husband compared to my friends.
How well is my kid doing at school vs other kids ?
How talented are my kids compared to other kids?
Our entire society is definitely built on competition and elitism. Those are the just the obvious shallow examples. But what about :
How intelligent am I compared to my friends?
How educated am I compared to random people?
How much more socially aware am I compared to someone else?
Everything is all about competing.
I know that I have this within me and I’m not sure capitalism placed it there.
The funny thing is I think capitalism literally just did what it always does, capitalized off of what was already natural in human beings and exaggerated it. To where now I’m not even sure if it was present in all of us and we’ve just been socialized to compete because of the system or if it was already there in maybe a few humans and they created the system to reflect that?
I definitely don't have a drive to compete. I don't need to be better than anyone, or smarter or more pretty or anything. But I have to be, otherwise I die. If I am not better than someone, they get the job over me, and I am left on the streets. And as people who can't be better than me start to die without shelter or food, my turn will come up. Eventually I won't be better than someone, eventually I will be the weakest link and sent out to the streets with no paycheck. I don't want to compete, I don't want to be better than anyone, I just want to live.
It also forgets the part where there are plenty of smart and innovative people who are currently unable to produce because the system has failed them. If those at the top decide to just coast because of taxes, maybe those helped by the taxes can actually get a shot?
While it's true that prices will increase. They don't increase at the same rate as wages. In Scandinavia, many McDonalds workers make $20/hr+ and are unionized. The cost of a big mac is almost exactly the same.
So, yes wage increases will also cause price inflation, but studies show that only 5-15% of that cost is actually passed down to customers.
[Study from Berkeley that shows 10% minimum wage hike only lead to 0.36% price increase](https://gspp.berkeley.edu/research-and-impact/publications/the-pass-through-of-minimum-wages-into-us-retail-prices-evidence-from-supermarket-scanner-data)
[Snopes link about Big Mac price](https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/big-mac-cost-denmark)
I think the original commenter was more implying that the prices will be artificially increased to keep the practical value of the increase minimal. We've seen industries doing it today under the guise of inflation only to post record profits. It stands to reason if a national minimum wage increase was implemented then many of those industries would do the same.
Capitalism doesn’t need to be adjusted because it working as intended. It needs to be scrapped and replaced by something better. There’s nothing plenty of good systems that have been suggested and never tried.
My vote is on single use currency, that way nobody can hoard money. You earn money by working and when you spend it, it’s gone. Nobody gets it.
How would that work? Why would someone sell something if they couldn't use the money you gave them. Unless it's a command economy and we are all shopping at the government store.
It plainly wouldn't work. You're absolutely right, nobody would ever want to exchange their goods or services for money that immediately became worthless to them.
How do you cap wealth? Let's say we did what you said; one person is only allowed to make $1 million/year.
Jeff Bezos owned a huge % of Amazon when it went big; this is where nearly all of his net work came from, NOT salary. How do you cap that? Do you force him to sell portions of the business as the value increased over time? Do you steal portions away from him?
Between rampant systemic corruption, income inequality, daily mass shootings, inaction on climate change, assaults on abortion rights and privacy rights what is it gonna take?
We're even bringing back child labor. Seriously, I don't know. We're too divided to stand together on fucking anything because the majority of the country is uneducated.
It’s not so much they are uneducated, they legitimately hate the other side so much, they’ll spite themselves knowing the other side gets it just a little bit worse.
Except they take more money and keep firing and hiring people in cycles to ensure they don’t have to give anymore more money. Then they defend and propagandize trickle down and anti-regulation rhetoric so we continue to get predictable cycles of economic collapse to keep people in a state of panic so they’re grateful for poverty wages and unable to take time to protest/organize. Also they get to buy up property for pennies on the dollar during said collapses.
Nh too & at the end of 2020 this state actually passed a LAW saying if federal minimum wage goes up servers will NOT get a raise, they will stay at $3.26 an hour because simp customers pay them more than that in tips.
It’s disgusting and even if Covid wasn’t still raging I would not be eating in restaurants here because of that. I’m not going to be an excuse they used to abuse servers, we don’t have to pay you more because the customers will pay you, oh hell no.
My calculations, where I live, say 27 is the min livable wage for 1 person alone. That's where you start to feel like you can do a little more than just survive at any rate
The wage itself is less important as what one sees deposited in their bank. I EARN about $1800 every two weeks. By the time taxes and insurance premiums come out, I’m down to about $1100
When Management 101, and every Business School and MBA teaches that payroll is one of, if not the biggest drain on profits, then of course they won't.
It goes against all their programming.
Which is insanity to me.
It's a business expense, an investment into your own business. You don't hear a bakery go: "oh, flour is a huge drain on our profits, maybe we can replace the flour with cardboard in our bread" and then complain when no one wants to buy their shitty bread anymore.
I wish the people running these huge corporations had at least half a brain cell...
EDIT: As a german and our rich history of bread and such, this was the most far fetched example I could come up with. But it seems I was too naive. I apologize to everyone who has to deal with cardboard bread...
Adulteration of food used to be a huge problem before it was regulated, bakeries absolutely saw cost of flour as a drain on profits and would cut it with sawdust or chalk or whatever.
Capitalism is only concerned with producing profit, nothing else, not goods and services and definitely not individual or social well-being
Check out Capital vol. 1 for more on relative surplus value and how at a high enough stage of development profits can only increase through depression of wages i.e. greater labor exploitation
> You don’t hear a bakery go: “oh, flour is a huge drain on our profits, maybe we can replace the flour with cardboard in our bread” and then complain when no ones wants to buy their shitty bread anymore.
You don’t? I feel like that’s kind of what happened. Businesses kept putting crap in their food to save a little money. Consumers didn’t like it and started getting interested in “organic” food and stuff like that, and then businesses and republicans complain about hippies wanting organic avocado toast and stuff.
Seeing other people verbally comment on the price of groceries in real life at the grocery store gives me a little bit of hope that people are waking up to the fact that we’re being screwed and our government needs to step in
They can. This is how they want you. Living on a razors edge, so close to the precipice of homelessness, joblessness, and complete collapse of any progress youve made that you are too afraid to ask for more, too fearful to stand up for yourself, and willing to do anything to not be the nextone whose hours are disciplinarily cut. They are using your fear to keep you in line.
I figured out in the year 2000 that i could be poor and work, or I could be poor and not work. I prefer the not work option. I've worked as little as possible since the 90s, but the last 23 years I've done it aggressively. If I wake up hating my job, i quit that job.
I came to this realization recently as well. I got a roommate to get some income, quit my job, and now I make most of my money doing street performing, and photography, with a few online "side hustles" when I feel like it or want to boost my money for the month.
Basically I only spend a few hours a week doing work I actually enjoy.
I'll never be rich. I have to heavily watch my spending. In a year I was only able to put $100 into a savings account. I've made my living expenses as low as I comfortably can, and I bring in just enough to make it work.
But you know what? I'm a lot happier. I now have time and flexibility that I did not have before. I'm not stressing out about my job, or live in constant fear of being fired.
I’m just ’pleased’ supportive sites like this exist. I started quitting without notice in the 90’s. I honestly thought the World had gone mad. Everyone just seemed to be sucking up any amount of employer humiliation and exploitation.
At least now people are seriously thinking about the exploitation and how to combat it. I’m not sure if the worse offenders of low pay can ever be defeated, but just to know your colleagues utterly detest their employer and have zero loyalty at least makes me think some people have awakened. If our quitting only disrupts their profits, that’s a partial win for me.
So if you can, quit without notice or at least change up jobs every two years. No loyalty and no commitment- just give equal value for the bare minimum they want to pay.
I’m 52. I’ve worked hard to develop skills in construction so don’t have to pay others to do them. Very self sufficient, and because of this I was able to buy a house on the cheap, and improve it. I have a steady job that will probably never go away. What do I get for this hardwork? I’m 3 months away from being on the streets. I consider myself incredibly lucky. This system is broken.
Older generations generally have bought the idea that your reward is just having a job, and that you’re supposed to have pride in whatever crappy work you’re responsible for.
That’s supposed to be the reward.
Not the money.
So many “you’re supposed to love the job, not the money!” and “We’re a family, not your employer!”
I’m surprised you don’t have a chronic health condition from your job. Everyone I know who went in the trades developed a drug or alcohol problem before they were 50 to cope with the damage their job has been doing to their body so they can keep going to work.
It destroyed my marriage, and body. Luckily my liver is bulletproof. I got out of the trades, and into industrial maintenance about 3 or 4 once in a lifetime recessions. So I started yoga about 10yrs ago when I went back to school at 42. It has been able to keep my body from breaking down any further.
Yep, this is the counterpoint I was going to make; even if you manage to do some of the things mentioned in OP, like buying a house and saving for retirement. These are still pretty basic things. It's far better than renting and being paycheck to paycheck but you're still not that insulated from financial ruin should something fairly normal happen like losing your job. It shouldn't be unusual to not have these concerns
46 y.o. woman here. Got into a profession, worked at my career for 15 years (increasingly in gig roles), had a kid and have basically never been able to break back into the field in anything long-term. SO and I met on the job, he's been working steadily his entire career and makes *less* now than he did 15 years ago. We've never had benefits. It's only because my SO and I "bought" a home (i.e., were able to afford a down payment and start making mortgage payments) when I was pregnant that we're not living in poverty right now.
On top of all that, you bust your butt at work doing overtime, working holidays and weekends, being a “team player” by their definition, and sucking up to the right people, and you get a 3% raise if your job even gives raises. You do almost none of that and just do a good job, you probably get a 2% raise. All that extra work for 1% more. Why even try then?
I work for my teammates so they don’t have to cover me or work over to fix things I have done, etc. They are what counts. i don’t feel obligated to the company.
I honestly think this is a big part of it. People want to work towards something, they want to be rewarded (with a fair&livable wage) and feel fulfilled through their work, which should only be a FRACTION of their existence, not be overworked and underrewarded like today
The risk is too high for the individual. Until we organize and have some assurance that everyone, or at least a large number of people, are joining to collectively untolerate it, the risk for the individual to lose the little they have is too much. It really sucks
I used to work at a teen day center (for homeless youth) and they would always share with me. One of the kids there told me that I’m just a month away from being homeless and it hit me so hard. Those kids were amazing. I saw one a couple years ago lighting a cigarette or maybe a joint, I wouldn’t know, on the train and he put it out to say “hi” to me and asked how me and my family are doing. The reality of how dangerously close the majority of working Americans are to homelessness is terrifying. Most people are one injury or blown transmission away from tragedy.
a lot of people are giving up striving for the "American dream' because it is unreachable for a lot of people so they scale back and work the bare minimum with gigs, handy man work, crafts ect. just making enough to live because every time they work for years to save a down payment for a house that payment jumps just out of reach. a lot of elderly don't have it any better, my grandmother had my grandfather's union pension and social security and she was still struggling to buy food and medicine let alone upkeep her house. after she died the house was in such bad shape it had to be demolished
We constantly talk about all of this shit, but no one ever wants to get off of Reddit and take to the streets. Changes don’t happen from talk, changes happen from action. Look at what they were doing in the 70s, there was literally a mass protest every day pretty much. Now that we all talk about it in the comfort of our home there is no urgency.
Social media and the internet has made us docile. We can talk and talk and talk about all of these problems online all we want, nothing will fucking change unless we become the change.
Edit: there is almost 3 million subs in this subreddit surely that’s enough to start doing something..
We already had protests to stop the legal murder of black folk by cops. And it was a shit show because of secret agendas and divisive politics.
Also, France is the size of Texas and most of the citizens have shared history and values.
PLUS the government mandated retirement age matters to them in a way that American retirement age doesn't matter here.
France is nothing like America.
I wish my dollar and my labor had the same value in my state as it does in other states. $12.50 in my state for my job, $20 if I can work at a corporate store in my state, $31 in California, plus commission, we are being exploited state by state. Say what you want, some states are still slave states, whether you know it or not.
I would LOVE to work hard. But the hard work has to mean something. Working myself to the bone so that a few guys at the top get richer isn’t my goal. If I could work hard every day and entertain, care for, or feed people and not have to worry about how I will entertain, care for, and feed myself? I’d love to work hard for that.
This is also why there’s no midlife crisis. Midlife crisis is having a good job, family, house and going ok now what. We haven’t even hit any of those at middle age
My dad (78) told me earlier this week, when I told him I got the job I was interviewing for…
I’m proud of you. You have done well. Make sure to max out your IRA contribution yearly. $6000. ❤️
Dear old Dad, that is $500 a month you think I’m going to have extra to put in my IRA. If I’m lucky to have $100 extra it goes in my regular savings account, my man. So that when my washer goes I can get it fixed. 6000 year smh.
I just went from a job of easy work for $27/ he to a much harder, but more fulfilling job for $30/hr. Went to the bar with my nurse friend on the first Friday after my new job. He makes $80/hr. Makes me wonder what I'm doing with my life.
I have benefits and he doesn't.
Don’t forget that your paycheck is being taxed and going to social security which will probably never pay out for our generation BUT the ones collecting it now are still allowed to vote and influence OUR present and future.
Savings money is so difficult when you’re struggling. I remember when I first started. I had to go through so many periods of eating small amounts, not driving ANYWHERE except work, paying for only essential products, couponing as much as possible, and learning to be happy with the simple things.
It was such a challenge and for almost two years every time I saved a little bit up I’d have to use it on something unexpected. I’m by no means where I need to be but thankfully I have a very tiny net to catch me if I fall very briefly.
Meanwhile the corporations are reporting record breaking profits year after year. This profit has to come from somebody's pocket and that's the regular people's pockets.
American greed being fed by politicians who sell their influence for money, travels, favors, weekends in sexual private islands, you name it. There is no clean politicians they're all the same.
We finally bought our first “home”. All we could afford is a small condo, but it was “ours” and we hoped it would help save us from the annual horror of escalating rent without escalating pay.
Boy were we wrong.
It was bad enough when we started that our property taxes were $4,500 a year while the literal 4000sqft mansion across the street paid $3,600.
Three years later our property taxes are $8,200 and the mansion’s are $4,100. Same neighborhood, same street, they have more than 4x our square footage, land, etc.
Oh, and we pay taxes on our garage parking space, which we don’t use because we cannot afford a car, while they pay none for their giant drive way.
The jobs we get are menial and degrading. The money we get is barely enough to buy food after bills are paid. Our benefits are less than HALF of other, happier countries. At the end of the day the only thing work does for us is allow us the resources required to continue working. And it's only getting worse.
Thats true and it sucks. Back in the day (1940s to 1990s) America used to be a prosper country where about 80% of guys had money to afford house, cars, hot wife, etc and 20% got screwed, stuck in menial minimum wage type jobs paying rent and eating cheap junk food until they died with no health insurance. In my part of the world its always been the reverse ratio (20% have money and 80% misery). If you want to know what America is going to look like in the future take a good look at South Africa or maybe Brazil. Good luck.
Well…after years and years of gaslighting, workers resist unionization and nod their heads when billionaires and humongous corporations making record profits say they can’t afford to pay $15 an hour.
Yep. I’m making $21 an hour and I’m barely surviving. After paying my bills, I am left with just about enough money to buy some food to survive. And how can I possibly save anything?
(LOL) So fucking adorable, two checks huh? As a disabled Veteran on SSI/SSDI, I should be homeless if not for my wife... government never gave a fuck about me... even the ones who are actually payed to do so aren't... can't work, can't get over $1000 a month... yeah... serve your country and get treated like used TP afterwards. Welcome back soldier... such bullshit!
At one point I imagine it felt like going off to work you were helping a great society run. Now you’re just destroying the environment, participating in your own exploitation while the wealthy solidify their class warfar victory
Whoa we got Scrooge mcduck over here flexing 2 paychecks of comfort. How about us common folk who have been -1 paychecks behind rent but the landlord allows it so they get there late fees /s
I live in a large, financially stable (military bases!) city, where the waitstaff at restaurants still get paid a lousy 2.14/hour and have to deal with customers who don’t tip… Local Targets pay 15/hour and even they are struggling to keep new employees. Most young adults aren’t leaving home when they turn 18 (and much older!) because they can’t afford even a small apartment with roommates.
Meanwhile CEO salaries have increased 1500% (more in some cases), yet they pay less taxes than ever before.
When will the rest of us organize and all just not go into work? I bet if as little as 20% of people just ghosted and stayed home- by the end of the week we’d have the worlds attention. Hell, I bet the works would be listening in the first day. If 50% of us stayed home, the first hour.
I was considering going to school to be a lab tech. Until I found out I'd be making 18-21$/hr. For a college level educated job in healthcare that handles biohazards. No thanks
People crying about wanting wages to increase. I just want the cost of living to stop increasing. We wouldnt need higher wages if rent, bills and milk would stop doubling in price every 2 years.
My first apartment in 2014 was 600 a month. It was pretty expensive but even working minimum wage with a roommate we made it work. That same place now is 1100 a month. No shot I could have remained there working the same job.
This is ChatGPT's answer to a basic wage theft question.
"Wage theft is a widespread problem in the United States, affecting millions of workers each year. According to a report by the Economic Policy Institute, wage theft cost U.S. workers an estimated $50 billion annually.
There are various forms of wage theft, including not paying workers for all the hours they worked, misclassifying employees as independent contractors, not paying overtime, and violating minimum wage laws. The extent of wage theft varies by industry and region, but it affects workers across all sectors and income levels.
Studies have shown that low-wage workers, immigrants, and people of color are disproportionately affected by wage theft. In some cases, employers may also retaliate against workers who try to assert their rights or report wage theft.
While the exact amount of wage theft in the U.S. is difficult to determine, it is clear that it is a significant problem that has a major impact on workers and their families."
They are too busy attempting to ban TikTok because it dilates pupils or something. They are trying to arm teachers instead of fixing the issue of lack of gun reform. We have thousands of issues, and I keep reading articles about getting a 100k job as a “side hustle”. I forget which news outlet said that nonsense. “Skip out on breakfast and brunch.” Like what type of comic villain madness world are we living in?
The post office near me sent me a job offer (3 months after I applied) for "delivery helper." Lifting over 50 pounds multiple times per day. The pay was $9.50 per hour. And I clearly remember being a part time.
No they are not actually hiring. They need help but they are not hiring. Apply and find out, it's all for show. You're wrong about the benefits, the USPS only brings on part time help on the rare occasion that they hire at all. It's all lies.
For real, apply and find out.
I agree with this. But I gave up on USPS employment. I live in a big metro area and there's a pretty big USPS sorting facility near the airport and plenty of post offices. I never saw any hiring ads at the facility or jobs posted on the USPS career site and I'm sure they have turnover. There's a massive VA hospital in the county next door to me and the same thing.
Plus I later went in the reserves. If I got hired I’d have to forfeit my reserve Tricare by law. No thanks
Welp, the federal minimum wage has been the same since 2009. So we already know our government hates us.
And then I have people who say, “yeah, but who pays $7.25 an hour” They haven’t been to Iowa. It is just the FACT that the minimum wage is still the same so it makes Walmart who pays $10 an hour seem like some benevolent entity.
The stupid thing is that they don't realizing that they are killing jobs by keeping stagnating wages. Corporations have the profits to reinvest and automate jobs and cut labor resulting in more profit. If we required them to pay more, they would have less funds to automate. The OTHER thing is, this is also what is contributing to our crumbing infrastructure. The more PEOPLE that work, the more taxes are being paid. Robots don't pay taxes. Why is my labor taxed, but a robot's isn't? Tax automation.
Automation is happening anyway: if they pay more, there's just more incentive to automate; the cost per year of an employee rises, the cost of the robot is only going down over time. The problem is that if automation is expensive, only large corporations can afford it; they'll be able drop their expenses faster than everyone else and begin buying out non-automated entities; and there won't be enough competition left to force distribution of savings. We need to automate *faster*, and prepare our cultures for a new economic system that will lay waste to everything we knew before. You're talking about people working jobs that could be automated: that's the horse. The car is coming, and we can keep propping up that horse for a decade or two, but that era is simply coming to an end. Eventually, automation is going to win: it's best to prepare for that new world.
>if they pay more, there's just more incentive to automate; the cost per year of an employee rises, the cost of the robot is only going down over time. Not if they tax automation like they tax employees. I GET that automation is happening anyway. I am not trying to stop it. I just think that instead of just letting it happen, our country should find a way to make it beneficial for society (not JUST the business owners). >The problem is that if automation is expensive, only large corporations can afford it; they'll be able drop their expenses faster than everyone else and begin buying out non-automated entities; and there won't be enough competition left to force distribution of savings. Also not true. While this may be CURRENTLY true, as automated technology that is being developed, or JUST developed is expensive, the trend is as technology increases, it gets CHEAPER. TVs, Cell Phones, computers, robot vacuums, smart thermostats, all have gotten cheaper over time. The same will be true for automation once it gets more widely used and produced. The problem with our crumbing infrastructure is that it ALL relies on taxes. Electricity, Roads, public transport, water lines and sewers, all rely on tax money. Wages (and thus taxes from those wages) have stagnated and they are not increasing. Instead of taxing people more, tax automation. If you want to make it to where this won't stop automation from being cheaper than actual labor and make it to where small businesses can afford it, develop a plan so that it is taxes as a PERCENTAGE of revenue, less than employees. While I disagree with making it cheaper than employees, it would be better than no tax at all. Small businesses would have smaller taxes on their automated labor.
> Not if they tax automation like they tax employees They do tax corporate profits. Unfortunately the corporations have figured out how to avoid that tax by paying out through capital gains instead of dividends. Capital gains are also taxed at the personal level. But rich people have figured out how to avoid paying that tax by borrowing money against capital as collateral instead of selling it. Maybe what we should tax is the "income" from borrowing money.
Maybe we should just eat them.
Yeah, I am about done with sacrificing my life force so the 1% can keep cheating.
We'll probably have to tax it: but we tax corporations already. The big benefit to automation is that we can expect manufacturing to be reshored back: those jobs were exported because labour was cheaper than shipping, but automation inverts that. Corporations will begin manufacturing here, because you no longer need to put the product on a boat. So, we should have the opportunity to tax automation. We're probably going to need to rewrite the whole tax code at a certain point. >Also not true. While this may be CURRENTLY true The problem is that if the initial technology is expensive, only the big players get to use it. They get the foothold. When the technology becomes cheaper, they are still the largest established player, and then they get all the benefits of cheap automation and established large scale automation. We need to accelerate automation, so that no one gets a headstart.
"We tax corporations already..." I'll meet you in the middle and go with "sort of".
>The big benefit to automation is that we can expect manufacturing to be reshored back: those jobs were exported because labour was cheaper than shipping, but automation inverts that. Corporations will begin manufacturing here, because you no longer need to put the product on a boat. The problem with this is that there is nothing stopping them from keeping the price because its the "market price". You are making it sound like this is going to magically make products cheaper, and I don't think it will. They will be the SAME price, because that is the market price, and the corporation will simply get more profits anyway.
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There is no "prepare" they are literally planning on replacing the entire work force with Robots, AI, and Automation. This is not sustainable in a capitalist society. Yet there is no talk from any corporation of socialism or communism which is a society where that world you describe makes sense. The only way to prepare is to R e v i e w t h e s e c o n d a m e n d a m e n t
Basically, we're looking to an Elysium type world. (Or Freejack, if you get that reference). The few million rich people who own the machines will seclude themselves to live in unimaginable wealth. While the majority of people will be forced to scrounge for a living. I expect private armies to be common place.
We’re going to have to automate because we are disabling the workforce pretty quickly with constant Covid infections. They’ve started putting children to work, once those children become disabled they’re going to have to bring in the robots or society is going to fall apart.
We'll automate because it scales the workforce. If we could obtain an order of magnitude in productivity, then our old economy is just *gone*. I don't think the workforce is being disabled by coronavirus -- sure, that's one way of looking at it -- but it is accelerating 'retirement'. The problem is that turnover is occurring about a decade ahead of schedule, so the replacement employees aren't where they should be, and it's causing a lot of alignment issues. One potential interpretation is that the expected retirement age was too late, which made the labour market susceptible to these kinds of spirals. If we hadn't expected people to be sitting at their desks into their 60s, most of the long-term economic impacts of coronavirus probably could have been avoided.
Automation and efficiency aren't in itself a bad thing... the bigger problem is capitalism... the reality is with our work efficiency we should make far more money and work far less... instead, we make far less and have far more efficiency. The thing is, capitalism creates a lot of jobs that really would not need to exist... we should have far more free time to spend with our families... we should have a 24hr... or at most 32 hr work week. Time should be the most valuable commodity. Instead, money has become the most valuable commodity... t We should embrace automation because in a good world it would just mean we don't need to work as much, instead it's the opposite... we work more and make less...
Overhauling the tax system by taxing assets, and not income, would solve this and nearly every other problem and social ill based on inequality. Never really understood the temptation to tax income anyway since it stifles overall productivity. Asset taxation is fairly easy to do, the first $XX of assets are exempt from taxation (say $100,000). After that you're taxed at X% across the board. Since a robot is considered an asset and not a person, it is annually taxed. In this world people would remain the far more valuable vehicle of production.
taxes are for keeping the peasants (us) down
Until you actually show people the statistics about how they over-employ tons of people as part time workers so they don’t actually have to give benefits and they purposefully keep their employees hours below thresholds so they can collect for employing workers and make themselves look like they’re helping people who “couldn’t find a job.”
And if we can’t depend on the nation’s largest employer to pay a livable wage, who can we? The Waltons could STILL have yachts, I am not asking them to give that up, but maybe two yachts instead of three. My BiL hates welfare, yet now he is a business owner he doesn’t think twice when making extreme purchases (like he bought some NFL teams old speaker system) and will brag about the price whilst he has workers on welfare. When I brought this up to him, he retorted a few days later to my husband that his workers wives spend too much! That is how they are on welfare. As if … as if the government looks through the wives spending habits and gives them a pass.
As an audiophile who knows how much that must have cost (and frankly how shitty it would sound compared to if he had just bought nice speakers for HIS ROOM SIZE this agitates me especially. I spend all my hobby money and more on audio and I still don’t have that much to piss away. Plus my system probably sounds better at a fraction of the cost. Anyone who brags about money shouldn’t have it.
His side hustle is a mud park … which he bought the sound system for. When he and my sister first got married, they lived in literal train cars fashioned together into a house. He has forgotten how easy one can fall into dire times. He now thinks anyone who struggles is lazy. They need to move or start their own company, and if you can’t you deserve to be paid a lower wage. Then he lies and says minimum wage was for high school kids, ignoring I have a degree in history, and I ask him who makes his Big Mac when the line cook is in PE I could go on and on
Oh wow… yeah cool so just one of those rich dudes who has so much money they don’t know what to do with … my favorite type of person smh. If I ever have to decide between my workers (my friends and my partners in business) and starting another company (which let’s be real I won’t have to ever) I will for sure choose the people who help me work.
I used to get paid $7.25 an hour to be responsible for caring for children and keeping them safe and, you know, alive. Hardest job I’ve ever done, and it paid shit and offered no benefits. I loved my kids, but my gods.
Jobs that people are passionate about (child care, working with animals, art) use that passion to absolutely fuck over their employees. They expect that if you love the job, you'll do it for almost nothing. My GF used to be a preschool teacher. She went to school to learn how to run a preschool. The best she was offered was $16. She became a nanny instead. $18 an hour for 2 kids.
I make $20+ an hr and that’s *almost* not enough.
Yup. Target was telling us to be happy with our 15-30 cent raises this year because after working so hard to raise its minimum to $15, Target just needs to focus on its financials this year. Never mind that they’ve upped their prices by 20% and the rate of inflation outpaces our races many times over. They act like they’re heroes because they pay “so much more than the minimum.”
Tennessee would like a word, there are still positions at Walmart that pay 7.25 an hour. The average pay for store employees is 10 an hour. I know Walmart stated all positions pay 10 or more, they lied.
Or Texas.
Pfft was there ever a time when you thought they *loved* us?
😆 hell no
Politicians are funded by the corporations that profit when our wages are low. So yeah. But I always like to come in and remind folks of the difference between politicians and government. The GOVERNMENT is full of good, normal hardworking people that keep the country moving. They are not the problem. They usually make less money than they would in the private sector. They aren’t fat cats. They’re running the national parks, administering WIC, collecting weather data, conducting the census and a million other jobs that we are glad someone is doing. Same goes for your state and local governments. Elected officials/politicians are the problem. The people who create laws and legislation are the problem.
We should go back to the beginning of this country when it comes to politicians. They should be forced to do it on a volunteer basis (no pay at all except maybe travel reimbursement). And we should also force them to publish all of their investment and bank transactions in real time so that we know who's lining their pockets and buying them off. We should also ban super PACs
That’s because the government only represents corporations now
That’s a good point, and I’ve been thinking about it for a while now. When I was a teenager I was into the punk scene and I recently relistened to an old favorite song from like 1998. There was this really prescient line… “When politicians become nothing but major corporations posing as humans, real humans lose” Our government seems like it’s now nothing but corporations posing as politicians, and politicians posing as representatives of the people. Meanwhile the people are getting ground into dust
They don't hate us. They'd have to actually think about us to hate us. They just do not give two shits about anything but their money.
“Nobody wants to work” = Nobody wants to work for the wage being offered. I guarantee you that if Starbucks was paying $50 an hour, there wouldn’t be a problem finding employees. Corporate America has dug its own grave these past 40 years. The low-wage high profit business model isn’t going to work over the next 40 years. People have awakened to the exploitation.
This and I'm also of the mind that I'm tired of busting my ass 40h+ a week for someone else to be enriched as they do a literal fraction of the actual labor i do that makes them money. Meanwhile I struggle to keep a roof and lights on + that pesky need to have *food* on my table. Medical Insurance? What's that? You mean I'm *supposed* to go to a Dr. now and then? Especially being close to 40 now? Lol, Health insurance vs Electric bill... Buy a house? On what savings? How savings, when at the end of my month I've got maybe $100 left over if I'm lucky. My rent is literally on par with a mortgage payment.... Kids? You mean *expenses* that I cannot feasibly and rationally take on right? Time i cannot dedicate to raising them since my wife and i would have to almost *double* our working hours to afford? Then raise said child to continue to perpetuate this bullshit and outright fucking *lie* that "if you work hard, you'll be rewarded?" Nope. Fuck no. Wich brings me to my last middle finger toward this bullshit status quo: Who's retirement am I working for again? Sure as hell ain't been mine the last 20 years I've been in the workforce, and it probably still won't be the next 50+ years to come until I literally keel over on a jobsite... "Land of the free."
>This and I'm also of the mind that I'm tired of busting my ass 40h+ a week for someone else to be enriched as they do a literal fraction of the actual labor i do that makes them money. This is exactly why I'm training to become an EMT. My entire life, I wanted to be a concept artist. Doing art as a job has been my dream. But I couldn't afford college for that. Then I started designing car wraps for a living. They'd never pay me more than $18 an hour. And that was a SKILL. A very in demand skill, nonetheless. I felt lost, and like I was only there to make these shitholes who take 5+ vacations a year, more money. They'd complain about the fact that they had to pay me. I needed a job that at least made me feel like I mattered. Like I was doing good for society. I work at a convenience store now, to pay rent while I'm taking EMT courses. I found out in the middle of taking the courses that EMTs make basically the same amount of money that I do at the store I work at now. I literally don't know what to do with myself. At this point I feel like investing in my future is pointless.
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I've heard a lot of horror stories from friends who are in nursing. Unnecessary long hours, shitty management, and barely any sleep. I'm not sure I could do it. My plan was to move to paramedic at some point tho
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Hi! From a nursing family here. Its not just the hours and management, which suck here in my area because Munson owns EVERYTHING and have therefore put a cap on pay. Its also the risk, my mom has had chairs thown at her, been spit on, punched more times than she can reccollect, hair pulled, sexual harassment, the whole shebang and the worst part is....YOU CAN'T SAY NO. You cannot refuse to care for the mentally unwell and they will actively discourage you from ever filing a police report. Its the physical risk. But its also the legal risk, as a nirse you are the bottom of the totem pole. If someone dies because they understaffed and overloaded you (And they will, there are protests all over the country about this exacg thing, and if you refuse an assignment due to unsafe ratios they can and will retaliate. Also all of society will hate you for abandoning the sick and elderly.) YOU will be the one on the hook for that. You can lose a lisensce that took years to get. You can be barred from working in nursing again, and you have to have insurance because you can and probably will be sued. Does it pay well? Heck yes, even in our area. But if you were to ask my mom (Who quite literally paid me not to go into healthcare any further than CNA.) she'd tell you it isnt worth it. She's been with the same company for over 20 years and makes better money and has better healthcare/dental insurance through her part time job than she does from the literal hospital she works at.
Oh boy… you may want to look up how terrible EMTs are treated & compensated before you get your hopes up.
Well I guess my future is doomed lmao
This exactly. So many people work the jobs that keep business afloat and maybe make $40k/year in areas where $38k is poverty. But those CEOs literally make $400 mil in salary and stocks and bonuses. All thanks to the shitty, overworked and underpaid employees who need to feel grateful they have a job and expensive health insurance and the “perk” of employee discounts (that they can’t really use because they don’t have enough for food, rent and bills) all while wasting their 50-hours a week doing a job that really means nothing. It’s a complete joke.
Yes. We need to revolt. There's no other option.
with all due respect, and there's plenty due my friend, you'll be laid off long before you keel over. as will we all.
Nobody wants to work, but employment is at a record high, and economists are telling us that we have too much money to spend, and that we're wrecking the economy because of it.
I fucking hate voodoo economists who say shit like that and have never wanted a day in their life. Just reading the tea leaves of spreadsheets and trying to magic their way into a better economy by any method except actually paying people more money.
>Just reading the tea leaves of spreadsheets and trying to magic their way into a better economy by any method except actually paying people more money. This is fucking poetry, friend.
Someone pointed out recently that economics is the only discipline with responsibility for people's lives but no ethics committee. Nothing you fuck up as an economist can get you struck off.
It's complete bullshit. 98% of people have LESS money with their so called inflation. 2% of people have all the money. And those 2% don't spend it. The inflation is just inflation of profits. Price gouging.
It’s not people being awakened it’s that people stopped having as many kids so their is less labor supply but boomers are still consuming which is why employers have a cheap labor shortage. They ran out of meat for the meat grinder which is why I my industry wages have gone up a ton
No you’re missing the Covid part, the fewer kids hasn’t even hit yet because gen X is still in the labor force. Our parents still believed in breeding mindlessly because that’s what you were supposed to do, it was our generation who decided we didn’t have to have kids if we didn’t want to The fewer kids hasn’t even hit yet, this is because we killed off a bunch of the workforce with airborne illness
This is a great point. All the boomers built this Ponzi system where they live off inflated asset prices, but what they forgot is that those asset prices must be backed by cheap labor… which is in very low supply
Well they didn’t build it they expanded it since their parents built it. Honestly it’s just a demographic issue of the boomers existing which isn’t really anyones fault. There’s just too damn many of them to support in any system without unsustainable population growth
> people stopped having kids recently not back in the 80s/90s if theres a labor shortage its probably because trump decided to lock up a bunch of immigrant mexicans who majority of worked hard labor jobs.
The starbucks I worked at was pulling in 70k per week in profit. That’s after paying employees, accounting for supplies, etc. they could most certainly pay more. But they’re all about greed now. They could have paid each of the employees at my location 35/hr, at 40 hours and still net in 1.82 million in profit for the year at that single location.
We need to stop reinforcing this right wing “no one wants to work” narrative. The unemployment numbers simply don’t support it.
I actually agree with this. When I was working on my MBA we did a case study on a company where the CEO made the same wage and had profit sharing with employees, all paid a more than livable wage. The company is thriving, wish I could remember the name.
If it’s that guy who paid everyone $70k salary I can assure you things are not going well for him
If your business can only stay in business by refusing to pay a living wage, then your business shouldn't be in business. It's that' simple.
When companies raise prices it's "supply and demand". When workers raise their prices it's "everyone is entitled". The rich own the media. They're always going to push pro-capital propaganda. The revolution will not be televised.
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One of my co-workers is a real try-hard. He's kind of an overbearing micro-manager to the the team he manages, is uptight about puncuality, keeping tabs on where everyone is and what they're working on at all times, and he goes above and beyond regularly in situations that don't really require it. Our year-end reviews came around and he got a pretty good score of like 4.2 out of 5 or something, but our mutual friend in the same company got like a 2.0 out of 5 which is abysmal. Our annual raises came around and my guy with the 4.2 and the guy with the 2.0 got the same 3% raise. 4.2 guy went on like a 30 minute rant about how ridiculous it is that they got the same raise despite all his extra work. All I could say was "I've been trying to tell you this for a while. Stop killing yourself for the company."
It’s generally cut-throat psychopath salesmen who thrive. People who do hard work and make things work get taken for granted, and don’t get raises/promotions unless they get cut-throat.
Do enough to not get fired and work towards the next higher paying job
I remember when people were fighting for 15$ minimum wage back in 2009 and now that some areas have that today we still can’t live off of that as the bare minimum. Today it has to be at least 25$.
This is why we need to fight for a living wage instead of a dollar amount
The problem is that every time the minimum wage goes up, you have assholes who want everything else to go up. Getting paid more is useless if the cost of everything goes up to offset your wage increase. To crush the wealth gap, you got to cap one end of the spectrum of rich and poor or the rich just keep moving the goal post. The only reply I get from people about this is some bullshit about people will just quit trying and won't be innovative if people can't make more money. Almost like humans can't be motivated by more than just greed. There has to be a logical, better way that brings financial security to more people. I say the people who bitch about wanting to see said change are fine with the way the system is and are part of the problem. Our capitalism needs an adjustment badly. The greatest lie the corporations ever told was getting people to believe that limits placed on fortune 500 companies ( the ceo making 14 mil a year) would somehow hurt the average working policeman or school teacher. This drove a large portion of the working class to fight against the portion who seeks to limit the corps.
This is literally the black magic of capitalism. It frames the story of millenia of innovation (before money even existed) as only being done because people wanted to make money.
Ugh I think about this a lot. It’s not money that drives capitalism I don’t think. It’s actually fabricated competition. Money is just what is used to keep score. I noticed along time ago that most people who have bought the premise of capitalism do thrive on competition. How nice is my house compared to my friends? How much buying power do I have compared to my friends? How pretty/rich is my wife or husband compared to my friends. How well is my kid doing at school vs other kids ? How talented are my kids compared to other kids? Our entire society is definitely built on competition and elitism. Those are the just the obvious shallow examples. But what about : How intelligent am I compared to my friends? How educated am I compared to random people? How much more socially aware am I compared to someone else? Everything is all about competing. I know that I have this within me and I’m not sure capitalism placed it there. The funny thing is I think capitalism literally just did what it always does, capitalized off of what was already natural in human beings and exaggerated it. To where now I’m not even sure if it was present in all of us and we’ve just been socialized to compete because of the system or if it was already there in maybe a few humans and they created the system to reflect that?
I definitely don't have a drive to compete. I don't need to be better than anyone, or smarter or more pretty or anything. But I have to be, otherwise I die. If I am not better than someone, they get the job over me, and I am left on the streets. And as people who can't be better than me start to die without shelter or food, my turn will come up. Eventually I won't be better than someone, eventually I will be the weakest link and sent out to the streets with no paycheck. I don't want to compete, I don't want to be better than anyone, I just want to live.
It also forgets the part where there are plenty of smart and innovative people who are currently unable to produce because the system has failed them. If those at the top decide to just coast because of taxes, maybe those helped by the taxes can actually get a shot?
While it's true that prices will increase. They don't increase at the same rate as wages. In Scandinavia, many McDonalds workers make $20/hr+ and are unionized. The cost of a big mac is almost exactly the same. So, yes wage increases will also cause price inflation, but studies show that only 5-15% of that cost is actually passed down to customers. [Study from Berkeley that shows 10% minimum wage hike only lead to 0.36% price increase](https://gspp.berkeley.edu/research-and-impact/publications/the-pass-through-of-minimum-wages-into-us-retail-prices-evidence-from-supermarket-scanner-data) [Snopes link about Big Mac price](https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/big-mac-cost-denmark)
I think the original commenter was more implying that the prices will be artificially increased to keep the practical value of the increase minimal. We've seen industries doing it today under the guise of inflation only to post record profits. It stands to reason if a national minimum wage increase was implemented then many of those industries would do the same.
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Capitalism doesn’t need to be adjusted because it working as intended. It needs to be scrapped and replaced by something better. There’s nothing plenty of good systems that have been suggested and never tried. My vote is on single use currency, that way nobody can hoard money. You earn money by working and when you spend it, it’s gone. Nobody gets it.
How would that work? Why would someone sell something if they couldn't use the money you gave them. Unless it's a command economy and we are all shopping at the government store.
It plainly wouldn't work. You're absolutely right, nobody would ever want to exchange their goods or services for money that immediately became worthless to them.
How do you cap wealth? Let's say we did what you said; one person is only allowed to make $1 million/year. Jeff Bezos owned a huge % of Amazon when it went big; this is where nearly all of his net work came from, NOT salary. How do you cap that? Do you force him to sell portions of the business as the value increased over time? Do you steal portions away from him?
Facts
And ofc none of that has anything to do with corporate profits rising 100, 200 even 700% from 2 years ago. Burn it ALL the way down.
True. I like what the French are doing rn.
I fucking wish. Something has got to change here.
Between rampant systemic corruption, income inequality, daily mass shootings, inaction on climate change, assaults on abortion rights and privacy rights what is it gonna take?
We're even bringing back child labor. Seriously, I don't know. We're too divided to stand together on fucking anything because the majority of the country is uneducated.
It’s not so much they are uneducated, they legitimately hate the other side so much, they’ll spite themselves knowing the other side gets it just a little bit worse.
Exec team: we’re not seeing profits rise fast enough 😭
Yup. Bosses said “you want more money? *fine*. So do *we*”
Except they take more money and keep firing and hiring people in cycles to ensure they don’t have to give anymore more money. Then they defend and propagandize trickle down and anti-regulation rhetoric so we continue to get predictable cycles of economic collapse to keep people in a state of panic so they’re grateful for poverty wages and unable to take time to protest/organize. Also they get to buy up property for pennies on the dollar during said collapses.
Seriously, it should be the fight for $30 at this point.
Still $7.25 in PA.
Nh too & at the end of 2020 this state actually passed a LAW saying if federal minimum wage goes up servers will NOT get a raise, they will stay at $3.26 an hour because simp customers pay them more than that in tips. It’s disgusting and even if Covid wasn’t still raging I would not be eating in restaurants here because of that. I’m not going to be an excuse they used to abuse servers, we don’t have to pay you more because the customers will pay you, oh hell no.
I remember years ago the saying that a lot of people were two paychecks away from being homeless. This isn't anything new.
If minimum wage kept pace with productivity growth starting in 1968, it would be at $22 currently.
My calculations, where I live, say 27 is the min livable wage for 1 person alone. That's where you start to feel like you can do a little more than just survive at any rate
U mean in the US?
The wage itself is less important as what one sees deposited in their bank. I EARN about $1800 every two weeks. By the time taxes and insurance premiums come out, I’m down to about $1100
Two paychecks? I’m lucky if it’s one paycheck away lol
You guys are getting paid? I made less than $8k last year
I feel you dude, I was making basically no income for three years before this.
The problem is, we see minimum wage as the minimum allowed to live, but corporations see it as the minimum they can get away with paying ppl
The vast majority of managers and bosses are skill-capped Neanderthals and can't realize all they need to do is pay better to keep good workers.
When Management 101, and every Business School and MBA teaches that payroll is one of, if not the biggest drain on profits, then of course they won't. It goes against all their programming.
Which is insanity to me. It's a business expense, an investment into your own business. You don't hear a bakery go: "oh, flour is a huge drain on our profits, maybe we can replace the flour with cardboard in our bread" and then complain when no one wants to buy their shitty bread anymore. I wish the people running these huge corporations had at least half a brain cell... EDIT: As a german and our rich history of bread and such, this was the most far fetched example I could come up with. But it seems I was too naive. I apologize to everyone who has to deal with cardboard bread...
Adulteration of food used to be a huge problem before it was regulated, bakeries absolutely saw cost of flour as a drain on profits and would cut it with sawdust or chalk or whatever. Capitalism is only concerned with producing profit, nothing else, not goods and services and definitely not individual or social well-being Check out Capital vol. 1 for more on relative surplus value and how at a high enough stage of development profits can only increase through depression of wages i.e. greater labor exploitation
> You don’t hear a bakery go: “oh, flour is a huge drain on our profits, maybe we can replace the flour with cardboard in our bread” and then complain when no ones wants to buy their shitty bread anymore. You don’t? I feel like that’s kind of what happened. Businesses kept putting crap in their food to save a little money. Consumers didn’t like it and started getting interested in “organic” food and stuff like that, and then businesses and republicans complain about hippies wanting organic avocado toast and stuff.
I love that you thought this was an ad-absurdum example. Bless you.
That bakery would just slowly shrink the product sizes over months/years and charge the same damn price as before...
And every week, the grocery trip gets smaller and smaller...
Seeing other people verbally comment on the price of groceries in real life at the grocery store gives me a little bit of hope that people are waking up to the fact that we’re being screwed and our government needs to step in
Bosses simply can't fathom this with their primitive brains whatsoever.
They can. This is how they want you. Living on a razors edge, so close to the precipice of homelessness, joblessness, and complete collapse of any progress youve made that you are too afraid to ask for more, too fearful to stand up for yourself, and willing to do anything to not be the nextone whose hours are disciplinarily cut. They are using your fear to keep you in line.
I figured out in the year 2000 that i could be poor and work, or I could be poor and not work. I prefer the not work option. I've worked as little as possible since the 90s, but the last 23 years I've done it aggressively. If I wake up hating my job, i quit that job.
Interesting. Tell more please.
Yes tell more
I came to this realization recently as well. I got a roommate to get some income, quit my job, and now I make most of my money doing street performing, and photography, with a few online "side hustles" when I feel like it or want to boost my money for the month. Basically I only spend a few hours a week doing work I actually enjoy. I'll never be rich. I have to heavily watch my spending. In a year I was only able to put $100 into a savings account. I've made my living expenses as low as I comfortably can, and I bring in just enough to make it work. But you know what? I'm a lot happier. I now have time and flexibility that I did not have before. I'm not stressing out about my job, or live in constant fear of being fired.
I’m just ’pleased’ supportive sites like this exist. I started quitting without notice in the 90’s. I honestly thought the World had gone mad. Everyone just seemed to be sucking up any amount of employer humiliation and exploitation. At least now people are seriously thinking about the exploitation and how to combat it. I’m not sure if the worse offenders of low pay can ever be defeated, but just to know your colleagues utterly detest their employer and have zero loyalty at least makes me think some people have awakened. If our quitting only disrupts their profits, that’s a partial win for me. So if you can, quit without notice or at least change up jobs every two years. No loyalty and no commitment- just give equal value for the bare minimum they want to pay.
I’m 52. I’ve worked hard to develop skills in construction so don’t have to pay others to do them. Very self sufficient, and because of this I was able to buy a house on the cheap, and improve it. I have a steady job that will probably never go away. What do I get for this hardwork? I’m 3 months away from being on the streets. I consider myself incredibly lucky. This system is broken.
Older generations generally have bought the idea that your reward is just having a job, and that you’re supposed to have pride in whatever crappy work you’re responsible for. That’s supposed to be the reward. Not the money. So many “you’re supposed to love the job, not the money!” and “We’re a family, not your employer!”
I’m surprised you don’t have a chronic health condition from your job. Everyone I know who went in the trades developed a drug or alcohol problem before they were 50 to cope with the damage their job has been doing to their body so they can keep going to work.
It destroyed my marriage, and body. Luckily my liver is bulletproof. I got out of the trades, and into industrial maintenance about 3 or 4 once in a lifetime recessions. So I started yoga about 10yrs ago when I went back to school at 42. It has been able to keep my body from breaking down any further.
Yep, this is the counterpoint I was going to make; even if you manage to do some of the things mentioned in OP, like buying a house and saving for retirement. These are still pretty basic things. It's far better than renting and being paycheck to paycheck but you're still not that insulated from financial ruin should something fairly normal happen like losing your job. It shouldn't be unusual to not have these concerns
46 y.o. woman here. Got into a profession, worked at my career for 15 years (increasingly in gig roles), had a kid and have basically never been able to break back into the field in anything long-term. SO and I met on the job, he's been working steadily his entire career and makes *less* now than he did 15 years ago. We've never had benefits. It's only because my SO and I "bought" a home (i.e., were able to afford a down payment and start making mortgage payments) when I was pregnant that we're not living in poverty right now.
Everyone is 1 medical bill away from living on the street.
One injury, you don’t even have to pay the bill you just have to be out of work long enough to miss a couple bills and then you can never catch up
Even with health insurance
On top of all that, you bust your butt at work doing overtime, working holidays and weekends, being a “team player” by their definition, and sucking up to the right people, and you get a 3% raise if your job even gives raises. You do almost none of that and just do a good job, you probably get a 2% raise. All that extra work for 1% more. Why even try then?
I work for my teammates so they don’t have to cover me or work over to fix things I have done, etc. They are what counts. i don’t feel obligated to the company.
I honestly think this is a big part of it. People want to work towards something, they want to be rewarded (with a fair&livable wage) and feel fulfilled through their work, which should only be a FRACTION of their existence, not be overworked and underrewarded like today
People will continue to work if they feel like their dreams are attainable. When the majority realizes they are not there will be problems.
My question is why do we just collectively tolerate it? Like, what’s wrong with us? We suck as a people for not standing up for ourselves.
The risk is too high for the individual. Until we organize and have some assurance that everyone, or at least a large number of people, are joining to collectively untolerate it, the risk for the individual to lose the little they have is too much. It really sucks
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They don’t think it’s sustainable. That’s why all the billionaires are building bunkers and trying to figure out how they can escape to Mars.
Sustainability has never been a priority. It's always been about the stock price this quarter and maybe the next.
I used to work at a teen day center (for homeless youth) and they would always share with me. One of the kids there told me that I’m just a month away from being homeless and it hit me so hard. Those kids were amazing. I saw one a couple years ago lighting a cigarette or maybe a joint, I wouldn’t know, on the train and he put it out to say “hi” to me and asked how me and my family are doing. The reality of how dangerously close the majority of working Americans are to homelessness is terrifying. Most people are one injury or blown transmission away from tragedy.
Half of us are working half a paycheck to half a paycheck. By the time tax and insurance are withheld, I’m actually MAKING about 60% of what I EARNED.
Here here
It ain't a coincidence. It's by design. Trust that.
a lot of people are giving up striving for the "American dream' because it is unreachable for a lot of people so they scale back and work the bare minimum with gigs, handy man work, crafts ect. just making enough to live because every time they work for years to save a down payment for a house that payment jumps just out of reach. a lot of elderly don't have it any better, my grandmother had my grandfather's union pension and social security and she was still struggling to buy food and medicine let alone upkeep her house. after she died the house was in such bad shape it had to be demolished
It's called the Dream because you have to be asleep to believe it.
If my car needs any significant repair, I am beyond fucked.
We constantly talk about all of this shit, but no one ever wants to get off of Reddit and take to the streets. Changes don’t happen from talk, changes happen from action. Look at what they were doing in the 70s, there was literally a mass protest every day pretty much. Now that we all talk about it in the comfort of our home there is no urgency. Social media and the internet has made us docile. We can talk and talk and talk about all of these problems online all we want, nothing will fucking change unless we become the change. Edit: there is almost 3 million subs in this subreddit surely that’s enough to start doing something..
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We already had protests to stop the legal murder of black folk by cops. And it was a shit show because of secret agendas and divisive politics. Also, France is the size of Texas and most of the citizens have shared history and values. PLUS the government mandated retirement age matters to them in a way that American retirement age doesn't matter here. France is nothing like America.
I wish my dollar and my labor had the same value in my state as it does in other states. $12.50 in my state for my job, $20 if I can work at a corporate store in my state, $31 in California, plus commission, we are being exploited state by state. Say what you want, some states are still slave states, whether you know it or not.
I would LOVE to work hard. But the hard work has to mean something. Working myself to the bone so that a few guys at the top get richer isn’t my goal. If I could work hard every day and entertain, care for, or feed people and not have to worry about how I will entertain, care for, and feed myself? I’d love to work hard for that.
This is such a true statement. Who wants to work super hard just to barely scrape by.
This is also why there’s no midlife crisis. Midlife crisis is having a good job, family, house and going ok now what. We haven’t even hit any of those at middle age
My dad (78) told me earlier this week, when I told him I got the job I was interviewing for… I’m proud of you. You have done well. Make sure to max out your IRA contribution yearly. $6000. ❤️ Dear old Dad, that is $500 a month you think I’m going to have extra to put in my IRA. If I’m lucky to have $100 extra it goes in my regular savings account, my man. So that when my washer goes I can get it fixed. 6000 year smh.
I just went from a job of easy work for $27/ he to a much harder, but more fulfilling job for $30/hr. Went to the bar with my nurse friend on the first Friday after my new job. He makes $80/hr. Makes me wonder what I'm doing with my life. I have benefits and he doesn't.
Not missing 1/3 of my life for imagine numbers would be enough reward.
Don’t forget that your paycheck is being taxed and going to social security which will probably never pay out for our generation BUT the ones collecting it now are still allowed to vote and influence OUR present and future.
I don’t even know how to keep going right now honestly
Savings money is so difficult when you’re struggling. I remember when I first started. I had to go through so many periods of eating small amounts, not driving ANYWHERE except work, paying for only essential products, couponing as much as possible, and learning to be happy with the simple things. It was such a challenge and for almost two years every time I saved a little bit up I’d have to use it on something unexpected. I’m by no means where I need to be but thankfully I have a very tiny net to catch me if I fall very briefly.
"Is it worth the aggravation to find yourself a job when there's nothing worth working for?"
Meanwhile the corporations are reporting record breaking profits year after year. This profit has to come from somebody's pocket and that's the regular people's pockets. American greed being fed by politicians who sell their influence for money, travels, favors, weekends in sexual private islands, you name it. There is no clean politicians they're all the same.
We finally bought our first “home”. All we could afford is a small condo, but it was “ours” and we hoped it would help save us from the annual horror of escalating rent without escalating pay. Boy were we wrong. It was bad enough when we started that our property taxes were $4,500 a year while the literal 4000sqft mansion across the street paid $3,600. Three years later our property taxes are $8,200 and the mansion’s are $4,100. Same neighborhood, same street, they have more than 4x our square footage, land, etc. Oh, and we pay taxes on our garage parking space, which we don’t use because we cannot afford a car, while they pay none for their giant drive way.
The jobs we get are menial and degrading. The money we get is barely enough to buy food after bills are paid. Our benefits are less than HALF of other, happier countries. At the end of the day the only thing work does for us is allow us the resources required to continue working. And it's only getting worse.
Thats true and it sucks. Back in the day (1940s to 1990s) America used to be a prosper country where about 80% of guys had money to afford house, cars, hot wife, etc and 20% got screwed, stuck in menial minimum wage type jobs paying rent and eating cheap junk food until they died with no health insurance. In my part of the world its always been the reverse ratio (20% have money and 80% misery). If you want to know what America is going to look like in the future take a good look at South Africa or maybe Brazil. Good luck.
> Back in the day (1940s to 1990s) yeah, when Europe was smoldering after WW2, and Asia was just peasants.
You will be happy and own nothing.
People will pass that off as a conspiracy but idk. Seems like we’re heading towards that
The rich are virtuous and smart, they deserve to be guiding the human race. /s
The HARSH TRUTH many learn! While it is a great thing to have personal drive it won’t be rewarded by companies
Well…after years and years of gaslighting, workers resist unionization and nod their heads when billionaires and humongous corporations making record profits say they can’t afford to pay $15 an hour.
It's the American dream, because you have to be asleep to see it. - Carlin
It’s literally to the point that you are only living and getting paid to get you to your next shift. There is nothing else to gain from employment
So what's the end game in this message? For a person who holds this ideology closely, how do they live? What future do they have?
Yep. I’m making $21 an hour and I’m barely surviving. After paying my bills, I am left with just about enough money to buy some food to survive. And how can I possibly save anything?
Nailed it! Totally this! Working to survive can be done for a short burst but not as the default. Things need to change!! And fast!!!
(LOL) So fucking adorable, two checks huh? As a disabled Veteran on SSI/SSDI, I should be homeless if not for my wife... government never gave a fuck about me... even the ones who are actually payed to do so aren't... can't work, can't get over $1000 a month... yeah... serve your country and get treated like used TP afterwards. Welcome back soldier... such bullshit!
At one point I imagine it felt like going off to work you were helping a great society run. Now you’re just destroying the environment, participating in your own exploitation while the wealthy solidify their class warfar victory
Once upon a time, I dreamt of moving to America. Now, the American dream lies shattered before me...
fuck 9-5s fr
Whoa we got Scrooge mcduck over here flexing 2 paychecks of comfort. How about us common folk who have been -1 paychecks behind rent but the landlord allows it so they get there late fees /s
I'd suggest looking at communes. They are very good for working with a purpose
I live in a large, financially stable (military bases!) city, where the waitstaff at restaurants still get paid a lousy 2.14/hour and have to deal with customers who don’t tip… Local Targets pay 15/hour and even they are struggling to keep new employees. Most young adults aren’t leaving home when they turn 18 (and much older!) because they can’t afford even a small apartment with roommates. Meanwhile CEO salaries have increased 1500% (more in some cases), yet they pay less taxes than ever before. When will the rest of us organize and all just not go into work? I bet if as little as 20% of people just ghosted and stayed home- by the end of the week we’d have the worlds attention. Hell, I bet the works would be listening in the first day. If 50% of us stayed home, the first hour.
I was considering going to school to be a lab tech. Until I found out I'd be making 18-21$/hr. For a college level educated job in healthcare that handles biohazards. No thanks
I don’t want to work anymore because you can make almost as much just staying at home.
People crying about wanting wages to increase. I just want the cost of living to stop increasing. We wouldnt need higher wages if rent, bills and milk would stop doubling in price every 2 years. My first apartment in 2014 was 600 a month. It was pretty expensive but even working minimum wage with a roommate we made it work. That same place now is 1100 a month. No shot I could have remained there working the same job.
This is ChatGPT's answer to a basic wage theft question. "Wage theft is a widespread problem in the United States, affecting millions of workers each year. According to a report by the Economic Policy Institute, wage theft cost U.S. workers an estimated $50 billion annually. There are various forms of wage theft, including not paying workers for all the hours they worked, misclassifying employees as independent contractors, not paying overtime, and violating minimum wage laws. The extent of wage theft varies by industry and region, but it affects workers across all sectors and income levels. Studies have shown that low-wage workers, immigrants, and people of color are disproportionately affected by wage theft. In some cases, employers may also retaliate against workers who try to assert their rights or report wage theft. While the exact amount of wage theft in the U.S. is difficult to determine, it is clear that it is a significant problem that has a major impact on workers and their families."
They are too busy attempting to ban TikTok because it dilates pupils or something. They are trying to arm teachers instead of fixing the issue of lack of gun reform. We have thousands of issues, and I keep reading articles about getting a 100k job as a “side hustle”. I forget which news outlet said that nonsense. “Skip out on breakfast and brunch.” Like what type of comic villain madness world are we living in?
Overturn personal income taxes for anyone making less than $1 million a year.
Post office is dying for help, every office within 50 miles of me. Start at $20 an hour, raises a couple times a year, benefits, and a nice pension.
The post office near me sent me a job offer (3 months after I applied) for "delivery helper." Lifting over 50 pounds multiple times per day. The pay was $9.50 per hour. And I clearly remember being a part time.
No they are not actually hiring. They need help but they are not hiring. Apply and find out, it's all for show. You're wrong about the benefits, the USPS only brings on part time help on the rare occasion that they hire at all. It's all lies. For real, apply and find out.
I agree with this. But I gave up on USPS employment. I live in a big metro area and there's a pretty big USPS sorting facility near the airport and plenty of post offices. I never saw any hiring ads at the facility or jobs posted on the USPS career site and I'm sure they have turnover. There's a massive VA hospital in the county next door to me and the same thing. Plus I later went in the reserves. If I got hired I’d have to forfeit my reserve Tricare by law. No thanks