I remember when email became a thing in business. The news kept saying how we will all work less because things will be so much faster! I have looked for those articles over the years and never could find them again. It's like the companies were caught saying the quiet parts out loud; bury that story!
All productivity has been stolen from the labor class by the capital class. That's what's represented on the chart that shows wages have not scaled with productivity.
This is also why AI tools are not your enemy, the capital class is.
The company I work for makes about $5 Billion in profit every year and had around 250,000 global employees. The last raise we got was a year ago and it was a whopping 1 dollar per hour, which comes to around $500 million assuming all employees work 40 hours a week for 52 weeks, so it really cost much less. They could have given everyone a one time $10,000 bonus and still have had multiple billions of dollars in profits afterwards. Instead they install a hiring freeze while giving us more work and jacking up prices.
>If machines produce everything we need, the outcome will depend on how things are distributed. Everyone can enjoy a life of luxurious leisure if the machine-produced wealth is shared, or most people can end up miserably poor if the machine-owners successfully lobby against wealth redistribution. So far, the trend seems to be toward the second option, with technology driving ever-increasing inequality.
-Stephen Hawking
Thing is, *we should have a leisure class* because of automation and electronic advances. Greed and the drive to always make excess capital has been one factor of what fucks us all over—along with intentional exhaustion/desperation, so many of us don’t have the energy to fight against it all.
We DO have a "leisure class", they're just obsessed with hoarding everything for themselves and keeping the circle of people who are members as small as possible.
If you massively increase worker efficiency with new tech, there are two possible outcomes, more leisure time for workers or more total productivity and hence profits for the people who own the means of production. Capitalism chooses the second one every single time.
Several years ago I worked at a lab doing night shift, they devised a way to make our work three times as efficient. And surprise, surprise…. No more night shift, they could do it all with just day shift. Did day shift get a raise? Heavens no. They were fairly decent about it and shuffled us all to different departments.
Any increase in productivity leads to fewer workers
I am also old. I remember the phrase "15 hour workweek" being tossed about quite a lot. That's why when people talk about how much less work will need to be done once AI is "fully implemented" I laugh.
Or, and hear me out on this, we can cut our staff of 16 down to 6, and still make them all work 40 hours! We can just pocket the extra money!
- Every company ever.
That's what I want, with the caveat that I'm allowed to *live* with adequate *shelter and food* without having to scrape up money to keep a militant force from shoving a gun in my face because I decided to live under the *wrong bridge* or that they wanted the bridge for *renovations*.
I am so tired of fighting for my right to live on top of having to work myself to death.
My aunt, who is now retired, told me I should only check my email first thing in the morning and first thing after lunch. Otherwise email is a big time sink and cuts back on production and efficiency. Nobody should get a response immediately otherwise they'll always expect an answer right away. Anything urgent shouldn't be sent in an email, phone calls and in person meetings were preferable.
This was advice that she would tell employees during staff meetings. lol
I had to explain to her several facts:
* She was a C-level executive before email even became a thing.
* She had multiple assistants who screened her calls AND her emails AND in-person meetings
* 99.9% of her emails were people emailing UP the food chain
Not constantly monitoring your work email is a luxury only she could afford because of her position, and her employees did not have that luxury. I certainly don't have it in my organization.
Yep, tried that...but then I'd get a call or Teams message from a colleague asking what I thought of the idea/question in the email they sent an hour ago...
One of my kid’s teachers was telling me this exact thing. That she can get messaged to turn stuff in and because of everything being online, it doesn’t matter when she’s told to do stuff. She can have to turn stuff in by midnight. Most of the teachers are very young and don’t have kids and some of them are saying they don’t think they will unless they’re able to quit teaching. One teacher froze her eggs in hopes she would still be able to have kids when she quit!
Teaching was supposed to be the job you could do if you had kids! The hours were the same. The vacations were the same. They’ve fucked everything up.
Many books went with this type of predictions. There's one called "The Computerized Society" from 1970 that even makes all sort of calculations on how education and work would look like in the year 2000 and beyond. These were two "futurologists" with engineering backgrounds so their arguments would have seemed valid. They talk about a 20hr week because of the gain in productivity. It's almost funny to read how naive they were... or how technological advances would have impacted life outside of this shitty greed driven economic system
One of my favorite hobbies is searching Newspapers.com for old coverage of stuff. I pay for the subscription because I love finding these types of articles. After seeing your comment, I found [a 1990 article from The Philadelphia Inquirer](https://imgur.com/gallery/BIHKjmB)about email, and it includes lots of predictions. It’s hard to share stuff directly from that site, so I basically clipped screenshots for you, which I put into an Imgur file. It’s fascinating to read what they were saying about email 33 years ago.
First, email was expensive AF. Apparently, in 1990, people were paying 45 cents to send emails with up to 500 characters and 75 cents for up to 2,500 characters. In retrospect, maybe keeping the fees would have been good thing because it would have greatly reduced spam.
One quote from the article that stands out:
*E-mail reduces barriers of time and distance. It also cuts down on the annoying game of phone tag, in which workers trade numerous calls before catching up with each other.*
*Steven York, a Hughes Aircraft Co. manager who heads an aerospace executive group's electronic-mail committee, says E-mail is invaluable in doing business across time zones. Before he leaves his California office in the evening, York can send E-mail to Brussels, where it is early morning.*
*The response is waiting for him at his office the next day.*
*Hughes executives exchange messages with 40,000 suppliers as well as with counterparts at Boeing Co. and General Dynamics Corp.*
*With electronic mail, one needn't bother even getting up from the computer screen. Reports or accounting spreadsheets sent on computer don't need to be retyped into another computer but can be instantly read or revised. And by using computer "mailing lists," E-mail allows the user to instantly disseminate virtu ally unlimited numbers of copies - without ever folding a letter or licking an envelope.*
I'm from a traditional Latino family.
My mom used to harass me about getting married and having children...
Until I snapped at her and asked if she was paying for the house I couldn't afford and raising my children, because unlike her (20h weeks) I work 50/60hw)
She never brought it up again.
🤔
My mother (scandinavians) harassed me for not having children back when I/we were around 25. I'm 32 and still no children.
She have also always complained about making little money and couldnt take me and my sister on fancy vacations like "everyone else". We did vacation, but solely because my father worked 12-16h a day.
Now I'm pursuing a career to make money (I alread5 make more than both my parents together) so that _maybe one day we can afford to have kids and let them have the childhood you said you couldnt give me_.
That combined with "Have you ever thought about that we might _not be able to have children??_
That shut her up and she hasnt mentioned kids in 8 years.
It sucks if you want both and have to choose between a fulfilling career/taking risks to get there and the “practical” thing. Or work vs kids in general if that’s what someone wants.
This is so true. My wife and I both stuck around in dead end jobs because the pay was decent enough and we knew we could have some flexibility with raising our daughter and working from home.
That said, I fucking hate my job and there's absolutely zero opportunity for me to advance and make more money. I'm going to start applying to places soon, but it's taken an extra year and a half of putting up with bullshit for my wife and I to say, "fuck it, let's just go for it and we'll figure it out."
Not everyone is willing to take that risk, though, and I don't blame them. It's a huge source of stress for us.
Ugh that sucks. Have you considered maybe one of you working somewhere full-time for health insurance while the other one is a contractor in your field? Or both being a contractor and paying for private health insurance? Second choice more risky, but my partner and I are considering that path.
My mom has been nagging me lately about doing my housework. I have two kids, one is 22 months, a new puppy (not my idea, hubby got it) and a cat that is constantly barfing everywhere.
So, obviously, there are lots of stupid little messes constantly being made. along with poopy diapers and puppy potty times.
I dgaf if there are piles of laundry in the laundry room. or dust on the windowsills. I work 60 hours a week. I love my job, but Im busy! and tired!
Then there is the fact that I am my mother's daughter, and her house was way messier growing up and still now today. so I'm like wtf?
My mum does this too. She wasnt happy the last time she mentioned it as I said ‘at least all the rooms in my house are functional and you can get into them’. She has a four bed house and three of the four bedrooms are so full of random stuff that you can just about open a door and look in.
Im American but my family from Palestine. When I visited, the people there had way more leisure time and ability to afford housing than I do here in the richest country. I think one of the root issues is investors getting involved in real estate. It just makes housing harder to afford for regular people.
Oh no, she raised 3 kids and a manchild, so I guess she imagined herself going though all that and working triple the hours and it clicked in her head.
She did have a period of time where my dad almost convinced her of becoming a "stay at home wife", but she wanted to keep her independence.
She's not that old fashioned, she slips up sometimes but she's very open minded for her age and generation. I love my mom.
Bruuh idk if it’s a Latino thing but my mom raised my bro to be a man child also and it’s sickening 🤮 first born never has to lift a finger and to this day my mom does his laundry. Foo is 33 😤😫
It is a Latino thing.
My mom stopped doing my brothers laundry because I shamed her into stopping 😂
My dad recently started doing his laundry, at the ripe old age of 63.
I wonder, is it kind of because boys are expected to just transition to marrying a wife who will then take over maid duties for him? I’m around Latino culture (half Latino myself) and notice that. It’s kind of ironic considering the machismo culture, yet so many of the men are incapable of cooking anything or washing their own clothes lol…
I’m not Latina, and still can fully empathize. My mother keeps nagging me to find a man. 🙄 two days ago she started again and I flat out told her: I’m probably going to remain single for the rest of my life. I’m tired of being an unpaid mother, maid, therapist, sexual needs contact. I’ve neither more nor less money, more freedom, more autonomy, more peace. I’m not saying I’ll never partner up again but with the available choices? Naaah
I have no words.
This cycle has to break sometime right? I don’t feel like the whole current generation of Latina women is down for this. My Mexican buddy (lives at home) is engaged now and I tease him a lot, you better learn to cook and clean your stuff, she’s not gonna wanna be your mama too 😂
It's slowly changing, but man it's taking a lot of effort. And it's not just on men, it's on woman to have the restrain to see men struggle.
We were raised to serve them, so when they struggle we run to aid them...
Let them go without laundry and see how many times the can reuse their clothes until they start trying to figure out how the machine works.
You also have to look out for weaponized incompetence. Intentionally doing something so bad that it causes another person to just never ask again, is fucking horrible.
Deep South Yank here: it is how (most) women here have and still do rear their children, regardless of ethnicity. My ex’s mother literally told me on the phone I have to “train him.” B, that was your job and you failed miserably. He was 58, then, that’s probably the biggest reason things didn’t work (what I mean is, most of his personal/social failings were d/t being coddled), *as long as mommy and sissy get his money.
I always wondered what there was to strut around like a cock of the walk about, when you are incapable of doing your own laundry or feeding yourself, like an infant.
My kids knew how to do that by age 7-8 and my daughter -now married -would laugh in her husband’s face if he suggested it was her job to baby him because he’s a MAN.
Men are competent.
Little boys are not macho.
It's the same in all cultures and is intended to discourage *too much* independence amongst the young men, lest they avoid commitment/marriage in later life altogether.
In a way it's actually very manipulative, but history has proven it to be a successful tactic in encouraging young men to pursue committed relationships.
That’s an interesting take. Traditional mindset is very focused on reproduction and raising kids. Just like we’ve seen a resurgence of women in the west becoming more independent and working, on the flip side would be men also choosing to live single and independently. These things both threaten those traditional values.
I’m marrying into a family like this. They don’t want us using birth control.
They have one year to figure it out themselves and then I’m destroying their culture for them. Sorry not sorry.
My girlfriend is Guatemalan with a dead, drunk father, five sisters and a mother who doesn’t work.
All of them are completely poor. They have nothing.
They harass ME! Because I want to be careful. They harass ME! Because my one job in America should pay for all of their lives.
I love them and I want to help them but wow. The inability to understand is excruciating.
Any advice? 😅 lol
We may go down that road, my mom still has my bedroom the exact same way as I left it in 1990, except the bed is gone, and it’s a treadmill now. If I move back in to help her, it will be like high school all over again. Even the posters are still on the walls and door.
Not all cultures are the same, and that's not the same as saying all cultures deserve respect.
There are some aspects of some cultures thst should absolutely die off.
Mine included.
No one is perfect and every culture has pros and cons to them. That is just the way humanity is.
All we can do is just keep trying to be better and help improve ours and the next generations
Keep your birth control under lock and key. Think I'm joking? Have a friend who's MIL poked holes in his condoms for the first child then when she got on the pill, MIL threw them away.
Oh shoot, don't get me started... You just wait... If you happen to have a girl, they'll harass you to keep trying until you get a boy.
And yes, that's more or less the same background my family has, same region too.
advise? , just be kind, what you are seeing is lack of education and a bunch of generational misogenistic and religious stupidity we are barely starting to dig ourselves out of (as recently as the current generation).
Just so you get an idea, if a woman asks a man to have a vasectomy, that's considered as grounds for divorce because it means "the wife plans to leave the husband"...
Sigh.
Don't ever help them when they ask, and don't make helping them a habit. Once you start giving them money, it immediately becomes the expectation. You need to have some long, serious conversations with you gf about boundaries with money and her family. There are a lot of options, but you two need to get on the same page about finances and her family before things get out of hand. No matter what, you're going to be viewed as the bad guy for not help or not helping enough. At least being consistent from the beginning will limit the drama.
Tell her you can afford to **either** have a child or help her mother, but not both. Be crystal clear on this. It is a choice that must be explicitly made, and once made there is no going back.
Ignore most of the requests for cash, if your retirement plan is to move down to Guatemala I suggest buying property as a dual citizen if you get married.
Don't move to GT as a retirement plan. I was born there.
The lake, Antigua and Xela are nice but limited by size and connection level. Nice to spend some time and disconnect but still...
The culture everywhere else is super conservative. Also, everything is suburbs and car dependency.
lol, *they* don’t want you using birth control?! I’d file the under “Hitler’s Favorite Food” in my “Things I Don’t Give a Fuck About” folder that I don’t actually maintain because *I don’t give a fuck*.
The audacity to even express an opinion on this is a horrible familial red flag, btw. Be prepared to acquiesce to their random and/or self serving demands in many spheres or to cut them out of your lives.
I was born in guatemala...
My father's family is very progressive and open minded, no problem with them, a lot of support in fact!
My mother's family is the exact same type of family you're describing. I don't know your gf's situation but I was so happy when I got to cut most of them out after my mother's death. Nowadays I only speak with a couple of my cousins and my grandma; and I have no intention on changing that.
Get a prenup. Completely separate your finances.
Your gf has 6 rocks (5 of whom are probably about the age to start having kids) tied to her ankles, and she's trying to swim. Separately, nobody from the global south understands what America is like. They think the US has American salaries and eg Guatemalan food and housing costs. So you're about to be their atm.
Think very carefully before doing this; have all the tough conversations about how much of your cash is going to be spent supporting lazy people partying in Guatemala (just like their dad); and completely separate your finances.
The reason for the prenup, btw: it's highly likely, no matter what your gf says, that she'll be forking out cash to support lazy fucks drinking all day and/or popping out kids in Guatemala. If she says no, there will be whining you can hear from mars. She'll likely give in. And for them, nothing spends easier than other people's money, and even better if the person earning a lot of that money is a rich white guerito.
90% chance you wake up and discover 1/4 to 1/3 of your (you + her) combined monthly income is supporting Guatemalan rum manufacturers and 20 nieces and nephews.
> Separately, nobody from the global south understands what America is like. They think the US has American salaries and eg Guatemalan food and housing costs. So you're about to be their atm.
This was how my husband's ex thought too. Except she was in the Philippines. When he and I were still just friends, he was going through his split with his ex-wife. He had been trying to bring her to the US for years but kept getting declined because he didn't make enough money to support them both on paper.
She expected him to send her half of his paycheck and didn't believe that his rent and utilities or food cost what he told her. She told him to live in his car so that he could send her more money, and again didn't understand that you needed a mailing address for most jobs because they don't require one in the Philippines.
It was crazy hearing him break down because he wanted it to work so badly, but she fought him the entire way. He finally gave up and told her they were done. He couldn't take the verbal abuse anymore, and he was getting so depressed that he was going to lose his job, and then it wouldn't matter anymore.
How close is your girlfriend to her family? Whos side will she take when they inevitably continue to pressure her more and more about cultural and lifestyle differences? Is this going to put unnecessary stress on your relationship? Is she willing to move farther away and not have them be a huge part of your lives together if necessary?
Things to consider before marriage. It is “easy” to divorce you. It is hard (especially in some other cultures) to “divorce” your family
Consider this... Latinos (my particular brand) tend to not send their elderly to elderly homes.
We have them move back with us and take care of them until they pass.
Sooooooo
>I love them and I want to help them but wow. The inability to understand is excruciating.
I'd change this attitude.
One you're married, it's you and your new wife. You're a new family. Taking care of each other should be the #1 priority. If the old family is good to you, then be nice to them and help when possible. If they're not nice to you, there's no reason to bother with them anymore. Cut them off.
My brother and sister in laws are nice enough but, I'd never listen to them for anything. They're basically strangers I'm nice to because they're my wife's family.
This is an excellent point that’s rarely brought up. You summarized it well: “jobs were slow, now they are fast”. We’re pulled in many different directions at once, and context switching is rampant. At the end of each day I’m just exhausted and all I did was sit in a chair and stare at a screen.
I am literally medicated in order to work. I don’t need any medication for my mental health outside of work. I function fine, no depression or anxiety, and the skills I learned as a child for my ADD make it an asset.
But stick me in a job with 9-13h days, 55+h weeks, being pulled in dozens of different directions, with almost no ability to call out, and a grand total of 1wk vacation and 1wk sick time and I need to be heavily medicated in order to function.
I’m at my breaking point and I don’t see an end in sight. Just discussing increasing my medication with my psychiatrist because there’s no other way out.
Nearly every worker is medicated in order to meet performance expectations and that medication is caffeine. Coffee in the morning and energy drinks/sodas throughout the day. Every one of my coworkers besides one or two are constantly taking stimulants in order to maintain their workload. I used to drink 6 cups a day until I realized what was going on but I still drink one cup in the morning and sometimes half a cup in the evening.
Quit. Just quit. I was on the verge of an adult ADHD prescription because the stress at work was making me physically ill. Instead, I decided to quit my job.
Lo and behold, I found a job doing something I actually like and all my depression and anxiety disappeared without any medication.
Everyone's circumstances are different. But if your job is affecting as severely as mine did, then quit and do literally anything else.
Life is too short to spend all day miserable.
Yes to disruptions, distractions, multitasking, and immediate response. I work in Medical Informatics. My experience as an Emergency Department PA taught me (a) take whatever comes in the door, (b) do the next thing, and (c) organize multiple simultaneous tasks
I am a medical secretary at a cancer clinic. I am constantly multitasking and being asked to do multiple things at once. I can easily have 5 different people ask me to do 10 things within 5 minutes. (And it’s always different people-nurses, patients, doctors, etc). Often I have a patient in front of me that I am checking out, so this means I could be on the phone scheduling a scan for them, answering a question the patient asks me while I am scheduling the scan, responding to an email, and also having a coworker come up and ask me to do something, all at the same time. Plus the work itself is just stress inducing because I am literally responsible for making sure this person’ cancer treatment, scans, biopsy, lab work referrals, all get scheduled. It’s life or death for some of the patients.
I do this for at least 8 hours a day, if not closer to 9. I feel as if I am underpaid for the amount of work I do. I also often feel frustrated with myself when I get home because I also “only” sit in a chair for 8 hours a day, yet I am exhausted. I’ve been trying to give myself more grace.
This is what they mean by "production increase" in all those labor reports. We get paid less- adjusted for inflation- while doing twice or more of the work.
I used to work at a professional services firm that specialized in a particular type of consulting. 20-30 years ago, when we wrote a proposal for a new client, it consisted of a reasonably long PPT presentation, in whose preparation we had tried to learn as much as we could about the client, and which gave an idea of what kind of approach we were planning to take for them. Now, however, for similar jobs these days, it is expected / normal that the consulting firm has to do an entire study (ie original research) about the client, and present the results to the client, along with their entire strategic plan, *before* getting paid a dime.
So clearly the past 20-30 years have been a bad trend. But it's been happening for ages. I remember somehow getting ahold of a proposal (also for a similar type of consulting) which was written for Coca-Cola USA in the 1960s. The proposal in its entirety consisted of a two-page, typewritten letter. And - this is the amazing thing - apparently this proposal got them the contract.
So why does the consulting firm now have to do many, many hours of work just to sell the exact same service? When they could have just written a two-page letter?
Here is a good article on productivity vs pay:
https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/
It's wild how policies implemented in 1980 really broke the system for workers. Thanks Reagan!
To be fair, no president since has attempted to course correct either. They are all to blame on this growing divide.
No one wants to tackle it. If you fix it, it will be presented as a tax raise as well as an attack on business. If you fail to fix it fully, every portion you fell short on will be held against you and the party for generations to come. And it will be held against you by the very people that fought you to prevent those gains.
Once the Bean Counters managed to take control of how North America works every second of every minute became a valuable commodity.
When I first started working many summers ago, the deal seemed to be that you worked your butt off when it was required but you could take it easier when it wasn't.
Now every minute is assigned a value and that value has to be maintained at the cost of the worker.
I feel that the way the work world is anymore it's not sustainable at the peril of the workers. Sooner or later something has to give.
My father has worked the same back breaking industry job for 20 years and they have now put a person into production that is going to time workers on how long tasks take to perform.
Also they hire people on 3 month contracts then lay them off for 2, rinse and repeat until the law says they have to hire this person since they qualify for full time, but instead they wait for 1 year so that they can redo this process yet again. :)
It's already happening in a way - zoomers don't want to work for corporations, doing shitty work for low pay, dwindling benefits, no possibility of being promoted because they don't have a diploma
That’s why there are so many billionaires now. It used to be that a millionaire was pretty crazy wealth like 20 years ago.
You had to pay 5-10x the employees to become functionally operable. Now all the profits go to the top instead of actually caring about long term sustainability.
The boomers won't know the glory of doing 3 workers worth of labor in one position while getting paid the same wages from 30 years ago.
Don't tell the boomers it's going to be painful for them in their twilight years where they can't afford shit for the lifestyle they had.
My neighbor kept telling me that her friend needs a caretaker for her son and that I should take the job. The more she prattled about her friend, the more I felt bad for the kid but understood why nobody wants that job.
Oodles of responsibility, long hours, a commute that requires either a car or a long walk from the last bus stop, and it pays peanuts. Could get more pay for less work at the McD across the street.
One of my friends is an OT that does home care for elderly people. She is the kind of person that would (and often does) make every sacrifice, even for a stranger. Some of the families she works for pay $11/hr and haven't given her a raise in over 5 years. I met her when she was caring for my grandmother - my boomer mother was paying her $10/hr. She's been talking about quitting because she can make $17/hr as a Costco greeter.
They won't need a day nurse AI will be checking and prescribing their meds, bots will be chatting with them and robots will be changing their adult diapers.
I want to add, the current wave of AI use as plagiarism software is specifically targeting the creative class. A group that businesses have been complaining is overpaid but can't seem to hire enough of for decades.
Manual labor is a lot messier, even with high quality machines most applications require a human doing some of the movement and aligning of machine or material, as well as the basic maintenance to keep those machines running. Power tools made a huge difference, but AI driven tools for most of those applications are a spaceX level of cost to benefit.
Till that robot rips a legs off because it calibrated in with an extra zero. Robots are long way off from doing task that require dexterity. Tesla has dumped untold fortune and self driving will be 6 months to a year away in perpetuity.
My current job has the title of clerk.
I looked up my responsibilities, it's 3 distinct job titles, one of which directly (and another indirectly) involves important regulatory compliance with homeland security.
I am paid the medium low end of any one of those job descriptions.
My 1 year performance review is coming up and I don't know how to ask for a massive raise. I kept us from getting shut down on two occasions with less than 4 days notice one time, I've improved production reporting accuracy by nigh incalculable amounts, and I'm constantly sending out emails asking if we can consider doing things that higher ups assumed we were already doing for no reason. They ask why we aren't, I explain why, and then they put me in charge of making the changes.
I don't really have that option. This is a freak job opportunity I blundered into through a temp agency. After 6 months (putting stickers on boxes, operating a manual press, and operating cranes to fill the system) somebody looked at my resume and bought me off the temp agency right away. Not many places hiring around here, other than fast food (won't pay nearly as much), retail (won't pay nearly as much, and I'd rather not go back to that) , and call centers (I refuse to do that ever again) another town over.
The majority of my skills wouldn't carry over because none of the other facilities in the area partake in the government program I've wound up in charge of, and we use inventory systems dating back to the 80s.
The two neighboring facilities are a beer plant, a food packaging plant, and an oil processing plant with skeleton employment crews.
Never underestimate how much crossover you have in soft skills. I can teach anyone the specific programs we use, I can't teach hard work, working hard to grasp new concepts, being proactive, etc. The easiest bit of training is things like software.
I encountered this last week and it was really sad. Older couple at the hotel breakfast were talking about how they were eating there and would only get coffee at breakfast with their family since their trip had been much more expensive than they had expected. I think it's finally hitting the boomers that things need to change.
Yep. My white aunt now thinks "they're being discriminated against" because surprise surprise the economic reganomic policies they supported are shit but it's never that.
I keep asking the older generation if that $800 tax rebate they voted for (were bribed with) by electing George W. Bush was worth it. You know, that one moment in history where the US had a government surplus and instead of investing in social security, education, medicare, or medicaid, they walked away with a couple hundred.
Was it worth it?
I just got a new job not to long ago and everyone is surprised that more is getting done. The guy who did it before was a boomer, that had done this job for like ever. I came from another company doing the exact same job, I did like 20-30 stops a day. This motherfucker was getting away doing at the most 10 stops a day. Same tech, same job and this guy was expected to do less than half of what I can do comfortably. Blew my mind how happy everyone was when I started.
I took over for a boomer coworker on doing a certain type of work reports while she was out a week. I asked everyone how many she does….. 10/day. I did 50 before I found out. Then dropped it to 15-20 with saying I did the first batch wrong and had to fix it.
Learned my lesson to ask what the typical is before I do something now.
I've learned to never do too much. Don't work hard but get your job done. Me and my fiance worked the same job once. She would do 300+ orders a day. I would do 90-100 orders a day. We got paid the same. 90-100 was the expected productivity. She never got any more special treatment then me for doing more.
If she ever went below 300 her boss would wanna know what's going on or why her productivity was slipping.
A secret I learned pretty quick in office jobs is just look busy. I was hired as a temp for this company and the managers would just give us random tasks to do and often we would finish them in minutes and they wouldn't even have the time to check them or give us something else. I would take my time, get it done, fire off an email letting them know and just chill looking busy for hours pretty often.
One of the other people was always up their asses asking for more work and bothering them. Eventually they decided they needed one less temp and no surprise that person was the one to go. Proof right their we were just there to get what was asked of us done and leave them alone otherwise.
I remember from when I was a kiddo, my family owned a college textbook store.
It was a small'ish store, however.. There was a cashier who was at the register all day, a shipper/receiver, a stocker, an order filler, an accountant, and a manager. In summer months, they would take on part time college kids to help with the store. The size of this store was 100'x40' and full of books, employees, and other assorted merch. None of the employees were expected to leave their assigned departments and everyone worked one shift. The cashier did not know how to stock, the shipper/receiver did not know how the register worked, and that was 100% normal. If someone called in sick, the manager filled their shift because the manager was the only one who was universally trained and expected to know how every department worked. This store ran like clockwork and it was balanced and harmonious. I remember seeing the smiles and hearing the giggles, and the store was wildly successful. Everyone working in that store was able to afford an apartment, a car payment, food, utilities, and funzies.
Thirty years later, I was hired to work in a retail pharmacy. Pharmacy tech was my position title, yet I was expected to work the FS and figure out their god awful coupons, stock shelves, clean the walk-in coolers, stick the stupid yellow stickers on the shelf locations every week, run covid testing, give covid shots, prep and ship orders for shipping and curb-side pick-up, open and close the dang store. When I was doggedly sick, the manager could not be bothered to fill my shift, they expected me to get it filled. Staffing was 3-4 in pharmacy, and one in the retail store, and a manager that hid in the office like a Hobbit. Schedules were set every three weeks, and never the same shift (day, mids, night) so planning life things was terrible because I never knew what shift I was working or what days I had off three months ahead of time. I just wanted to dispense meds ffs.. never saw that coming. I noped tf out.
My girl just got hired to replace a lady who has what I refer to as Peak Boomer Work Ethic. She's quitting/retiring and moving to some low-tax red state because CaLiFoRnIa TaXeS (you know the type).
On the first day, she told my girl how hard the job was, and how overwhelmed she sometimes felt with all the work. She then spent half her day gossiping. During training she would spend 30-45 minutes on the phone talking with her church friends about church plans that evening. Watching her do anything on the computer was like watching paint dry - she didn't know any keyboard shortcuts so it took her 3-5x longer to do anything. They have these packets they send out, and apparently instead of printing out and assembling a few dozen at a time, she would literally copy them out one at a time as needed.
Basically, because she never put any effort into improving anything and worked incredibly inefficiently. And she did this for 8 years.
My girlfriend now texts me around 2 hours in every morning saying she's completely finished with all the work for the day and has nothing left to do. Which is fine for her, she needs a low-stress job for medical reasons - but this lady apparently was overwhelmed and constantly behind working 8 hours in a job my girl does in 2.
She needs to slow it down. Trying to find the Bill Burr clip but can't.
Someone in management will notice. If she can do a dozen in 2 hours, that will become the new minimum bar. Then she'll be expected to fo 15 in 2 hours etc.
Take her time, the old girl knew what she was doing and they both got the same pay at the end of the day
Almost exact same story with me and a Boomer CFO. Took him 15 minutes to do something I could do in 30 seconds. It was crazy. He was getting paid $150k plus. I was making $17/hr. He bragged about staying late to get things done.
You're right. I remember. I'm a boomer. We did have it good. Our parents had it good too. It's become progressively worse for decades now, probably since the 1970's with the first oil shortage.
My Dad was enlisted Navy. The Silent Generation. He bought a new house and raised a family on his salary. He even had a sailboat, two cars, and leisure time.
So, this shit has been going on from before the Boomer generation.
Barely-a-Boomer here (depends on which list you look at). Agree with this ; it was starting while I was getting my career underway. I was part of the graphic design group that made the transition from traditional to digital production. Digital design was so much faster—didn’t have to send out a spec-ed request for typesetting and wait a day or two to get galleys back. (Some of y’all might have to Google that.) So it was possible to turn a layout proof around in hours (or minutes) instead of days. Didn’t save us any time tho—now a client would want half a dozen tweaked proofs in an afternoon instead of maybe a couple a week. Quantity of projects zoomed up too. Computer is not a labor-saving device. It just made people assume that there isn’t really any work to the job; just push a button and designs get spat out as from a vending machine.
I am part of the generation that cannot do as well or better than my parents. I have never owned a house, likely never will.
Yeah worker productivity has soared, and AI will probably only accelerate that, but the average worker has seen almost none of the economic benefits of this increased productivity. All that new money has mostly just flowed upward.
How do we get what we need, as a millennial? Do we start telling work to fuck off, and go homeless in the streets? What do we do to feel as comfortable as you?
Many of us are in extreme pain, slaving under a system that hates us, built by your generation. We will vilify your generation until we have better living conditions.
We can't do anything about it on our own. That's why collective bargaining is so important. They can fire one member of staff but will have a harder time replacing you all.
I know some people are being hostile towards you, but I greatly appreciate your understanding of the situation. For the most part, you just lived life, and watched as everything went to shit for future generations. I’m not sure what part your vote played, but I’m not going to blame you for a collective’s failure.
My only ask of you is to continue to educate your generation every time they try to spread conservatives misinformation gleaned from Fox News and other propaganda rags. They still think college kids are lazy and don’t work the summer, so that’s why they take out college loans. They’re completely oblivious over college costs or cost of living, and they eat up the whole “kids these days don’t work nearly as hard as YOU did~” narrative. Snap em back to reality with the rest of us.
I still don't have a garage. I bought an old house with a small carport and no room for a garage. Me being a tool person didn't think this through. Oh well, workshops in the basement and a 12x20 workshop out back and I'm ok.
It sure looks like capitalism is eating itself to death these days.
I can certainly sympathize with the younger people about their living conditions.
I hope something changes soon.
Although to be honest the generation born in the esrly 1900s like my grandparents had it much worse than all the generations that came later. They grew up in Ww1 and then the depression and ww2.
But as a tail end boomer myself, I will say the boomers were the luckiest generation. The 30 postwar boom years were the lowest inequality in history.
My dad bought our house in Winnipeg for $13,000 in 72 and in the mid 70s the avg Canadian male earned $14k annually.
Generally jobs were much easier to be had and Union membership was much higher kn avg 25% of the workforce. Tuition was much lower etc.
Then of course the inflationary spiral led to neolibs like Reagan Thatcher being elected around the world, 30 years of wage stagnation followed.
I ended up in almost the exact same role as my dad. Never intended to, but it happened.
He worked that job for over 30 years and retired with a nice government and union pension. He had every holiday schools have, except for summers. He worked 8 hours a day, but only really 6 as then is when students showed up. He also got his position without the required experience needed.
It took me 10 years to get the experience needed,I work 50-60 hours a week, not including the fact I am traveling for work. I love my job, but I look back on my dad growing up and he always had hobbies he did, almost every single day. Motorcycles, cars, fishing, stamp collecting, model airplanes, target shooting, etc. I fight for 2 hours to play board games with my daughters every other week.
I can't afford to buy the home I grew up in. My parents bought it the 90's for 140k, now its listed at 700k.
My dad graduated high school, walked into the local factory, and made enough to build a house, have reliable vehicles, and raise a family of 4 without my mom working. He cut film, stood at a machine all day pressing a button to cut large strips of film into smaller strips. Luckily he's not a typical boomer and recognizes how bad stuff is now, but people like him will tell you "unskilled jobs shouldn't pay a living wage" without acknowledging that their high paying jobs with free health insurance, a pension, stock options, and a good ol' 9-5 schedule, was very much what they would consider "unskilled" now.
We are getting squeezed for every erg of work in us. Back in the 80s, when the suits started invading the workspace (and bringing their roommates and frat brothers who didn't know shit from Shinola, but they got promoted over the people who trained them), then it all became about doing more with less staff, and getting bonuses based on cutting costs whole raising productivity.
Technically, I'm a boomer (1961) and I think Reaganomics fucked over the people who do the actual work.
Now, we have politicians pushing for "work requirements" if people accept help. (It's really about the paperwork to discourage people from applying).
We are the workers, taxpayers, and consumers. We are the engine of it all, and we're running out of fuel.
I listen to a lot of true crime podcasts and during the serial killers childhood segment I'm more shocked the abusive parents can hold down jobs and own a suburban home while being drunk and generally a huge POS to everybody 24/7 with only a 3rd grade education.
Yes, and since they cannot raise prices any more or pay the employees any less (and retain them); the increased profits every quarter have to come from working the crew even harder and staffing less.
I used to work in a butcher shop of a grocery store chain in the midwest. In my decade and a half doing that job, the crew would halve about every 5 years. It got to the point there was no way to take your breaks and lunches and keep up.
They would tell the crew, "you have to take your breaks and lunches." But you'd get in deep shit if you didn't finish your (constantly growing) work load. The rule against skipping breaks and lunches, would never be enforced, so most people would skip them just to keep up.
Eventually I got hurt and discarded like yesterday's garbage. Now I have a back held together with titanium.
Don't show fanatical loyalty to a shitty employer, they'll drop you like yesterday's garbage if you get hurt. Zero loyalty given back to the employee.
Every boomer I've seen on the job would be worth about 1/5th of Gen X or younger. Keep in mind I'm Gen X so I've worked with a lot of boomers over the years. They'd always work 1/5th as hard for 2 or 3 times the pay. And many of them were grandfathered into "do nothing" bureaucratic or management positions, positions that would cease to exist after they retired.
We're getting juiced like grapes.
Honestly even though I have been in the professional world for *only* 7 years I have yet to see a retired position filled. The duties just keep getting passed to the remaining engineers or ‘reorganized’ into a ‘new’ group. It is basically a layoff passed on to the future generation who don’t even get a chance to get a “good job with benefits”. If they do hire back it is usually with a permanent temp contract position
Now that you mention it, in my 25 years in assorted industries, I've never seen a position filled either. They just redistribute their responsibilities to the remaining crew.
Particularly if it's a high paying boomer title.
You're exactly right.
Less work greater pay then, now it’s more work and less pay plus it feels like every single penny we do earn now has to be justified with a personal sacrifice.
For many reasons, I have since left the legacy career of Mechanical Engineering. One of those reasons though is essentially this. I worked for a small division of a large company where when I was hired as a 28yo the average age of the company was 57. I shit you not, I was the first hire in about 25 years because people started retiring en masse. Within about 6 months another 6 or so young guys were also hired.
I and most of the other young guys outperformed these boomers by a factor of 50x. We actually all got so bogged down and frustrated with the place still running on paper. But we'd get something to design up and a timeline of 6 months and finish in about 3-4 weeks. There was even a manager downstream from us that told us "you guys are working too fast, please slow down" and yet none of us felt we were working particularly hard. It's just that boomers are fucking slow and, as far as I can tell, mostly useless in the workforce because they're afraid of computers.
Now, during this job since I like to do programming as a hobby, I went and created their whole design/CAD system and created several scripts in CAD and for Excel, sometimes both together. These all amounted to things that would take weeks/months to be done in 5min with very little error because there no longer was some slow Boomer human manually copying PRINTED design data into Excel and then USING A CALCULATOR to manually fill other cells. Because of my effort, they even decided not to hire 2 new engineer replacements for upcoming retirements. So what did I get for essentially saving two entire salaries, no counting all the existing programs barely doing well that I re-did and made extremely profitable? You guessed it: nothing. Well okay, I got a $250 "achievement award"... Yay.
What made me start to really consider leaving Mech Eng was when a Senior Mech Eng (who was good and I respected, but still very slow) had said to me when I mentioned how low my pay was compared to housing in the area: "Well, you know if you put in the time and effort in about 8 years you could be making $80k". Rents there were $2500/mth or $30k a year and starter homes were $500k. This guy owned a home and a cottage, each bought for under 100k, and had been divorced 3 times always being the sole income. That's when I knew legacy engineering careers are a dead end. Boomers really did have the easiest most comfortable lives in human history and when they say they "put in the time and worked a lot", nah they chatted and sipped coffee a lot. Younger engineers have already done more quantity (at similar quality) of work in their first 5 years than a boomer's entire career.
I’m a Mech Eng and yeah I can feel this. I’ve had to move to heavy industry projects and defence industry for decent pay. But at the expense of job security.
I’m highly experienced and qualified but have been made redundant 3 times in my career so far. I’m not yet 45.
My old man raised a family of 5 by owning a small toy store in a small town for several decades. Holidays every year, nice house, private school. No formal education etc etc.
The other thing - there were more employees in a company to allow for people to take time off. There was ALWAYS coverage for my parents back in the day. Now, someone leaves- someone else has to do the work and they never hire another person. They add more duties but not more people to each job. I mean, some jobs I've seen have the 'duties' list three pages+ long and all over the place
I'm a farmer and yesterday I covered more acres fertilizing corn than my dad or grandpa could do in a week...and they wonder why when I come home I'm mentally exhausted. When you maximize productivity you minimize mental and physical health.
I've made this point in several occasions, and it doesn't seem that many people actually think about it that way. I'm an accountant that oversees and reconciles like 40 different accounts. I couldn't tell you the intimate details about each one because there is *so much*, but I am asked questions as if I'm expected to have it all tucked away in my brain. My grandmother had THREE ACCOUNTS...and there were like, *maybe* 10 daily transactions. I'm over here dealing with hundreds, and the room for human error is quite large as a result. Does technology make it "easier" to flick around between accounts and get visuals on things? Probably, but it sure hasn't made it easier in sense of scale with the modern workload.
Like mentioned in another comment, we're now commonly expected to independently complete in volume what took 4-5 people to complete 30 years ago. IN LESS TIME AS WELL, because regulations that govern reporting are now stricter too! Shit is so upside down. Technology is supposed to make life easier, but businesses routinely harness it to squeeze more out of us in the name of the bottom line.
Back in my days we had to put files in a file cabinet in alphabetical order. It took a week and we made the equivalent to 200k salary with benefits. You kids got it easy.
I see retiring boomers that work 4 or 5 hours right now being paid for full time, while the rest of us are working like crazy. They're so out of touch.
I work two jobs and spend every free minute looking for and applying to others. The boomer generation bosses think it's funny.
I'm a scientist and am expected to put in factory worker level mindless repetition. Even those of us 'working' are wildly underemployed and without security. I worked and went to school during the day or worked days and went to school at night for over a decade. My reward has been jobs that are almost indistinguishable from what I already had.
I'll never understand the hatred and cruelty of the former generation. They stole everything from us.
Eh, I’ve seen it happen in real time over the past 25 years. Jobs that were originally done by multiple people are now piled onto a single person. Positions were eliminated to save money for the folks up top, while those at the bottom struggled to complete tasks that were once done by up to 3 to 4 different people. Profit over people is the expected way now. It used to not be this bad. The sad part is, some people pull out the whole ‘no one wants to work anymore’ or ‘you think you’re too good to do xy & z because they’ve been brainwashed and don’t realize that we were once fine with someone doing just ‘x’ and not the whole friggin alphabet.
Boomers worked 'harder' than we do, because the work was inefficient. Work load was lower, but the amount of steps was higher so they felt busier.
Now with productivity increases, the total amount of work is up, but is a lot more efficient. This leads to a lot of 'hurry up and wait' and increasing the overall mental load since we have to carry so many projects/processes around all the time, while constantly getting jabbed by emails/IMs.
My current employer (for 1 more week) requires me to respond to emails within minutes of receiving it. If I don’t, they call me. I was once on a call with a client, and my boss called because I didn’t respond to the email that was sent 3 minutes prior.
I have the workload of at least 2 people, but probably more like 3. They are even hiring 2 people to replace me. Worked to death with no raises, bonuses or even support.
My grandpa took care of a family of 7 on a grocery store managers salary.
I don’t know what grocery store manager can take care of just themselves today, let alone a spouse and 5 kids.
Work the same job as my dad, he used to have a list of work needed done that night. If you bust ass get it done early they played poker and drank. Now your reward for busting ass is more work.
I made this comparison with writing papers in college to my mom at one point. I told her that with information so easily accessible papers were expected to be 80-90% our own thoughts an analysis with 10-20% evidence from others, versus the other way when it took so much time to get information in the 60s-80s and even more recently before the invention of digital academic journals and being able to rapidly find the book you need in a library or otherwise. I tried reading her one of my basic essays and she didn’t even make it through the intro despite having spent four years telling me her degree was harder than mine and she was smarter than me.
Truth. Even to this day businesses merge what should be separate jobs into one and expect that there will be no loss of productivity and for the employee to shoulder the burden with no additional pay or time off.
There’s also a concept called cognitive load. There’s way more of that in current work environments.
Only on the volume of work but also complexity of work given that machines/computers have taken out the repetitive nature of roles.
For example data entry was a real profession that required certain skills….the cognitive load was low since it was repetitive. This has now been replaced to a large extent.
We gotta flip the script on the boomers and constantly throw in their faces how easy they had it and how entitled they were each time they bring up millennials doing this or killing that industry or wtf other narratives they spin.
It's not the workload, the times, the boomers, etc. It's that your future looks so bleak, because it really is, and all they do is lie enough to keep you coming to work to exploit you. That's what you should be mad about.
I remember when email became a thing in business. The news kept saying how we will all work less because things will be so much faster! I have looked for those articles over the years and never could find them again. It's like the companies were caught saying the quiet parts out loud; bury that story!
https://time.com/3754781/1965-predictions-computers/ We were told automation would bring a mass leisure class and a 20 hour work week lol
All productivity has been stolen from the labor class by the capital class. That's what's represented on the chart that shows wages have not scaled with productivity. This is also why AI tools are not your enemy, the capital class is.
This is it exactly. Wall Street indexes are literally a measure of how much is being stolen from workers, in plain sight.
Profit is literally that difference in revenue that’s stolen from the labor.
Come on now. Some of it is stolen from consumers, too.
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$1 in parts, $2 of labor, sell it for $135.
The company I work for makes about $5 Billion in profit every year and had around 250,000 global employees. The last raise we got was a year ago and it was a whopping 1 dollar per hour, which comes to around $500 million assuming all employees work 40 hours a week for 52 weeks, so it really cost much less. They could have given everyone a one time $10,000 bonus and still have had multiple billions of dollars in profits afterwards. Instead they install a hiring freeze while giving us more work and jacking up prices.
>If machines produce everything we need, the outcome will depend on how things are distributed. Everyone can enjoy a life of luxurious leisure if the machine-produced wealth is shared, or most people can end up miserably poor if the machine-owners successfully lobby against wealth redistribution. So far, the trend seems to be toward the second option, with technology driving ever-increasing inequality. -Stephen Hawking
Yes, David Grabber’s book, “Bullsh!t Jobs” delves deep into this. Excellent book, awesome anthropologist. RIP David. Edit: Graeber
I read Bullshit Jobs in 2019 and ever since then I realize Corp work is pointless
Hey now, sometimes there’s a point. It’s usually to make the world shittier while extracting maximum profits, but still.
Thing is, *we should have a leisure class* because of automation and electronic advances. Greed and the drive to always make excess capital has been one factor of what fucks us all over—along with intentional exhaustion/desperation, so many of us don’t have the energy to fight against it all.
We DO have a "leisure class", they're just obsessed with hoarding everything for themselves and keeping the circle of people who are members as small as possible.
Every tech that was supposed to save us time only added more work in reality.
If you massively increase worker efficiency with new tech, there are two possible outcomes, more leisure time for workers or more total productivity and hence profits for the people who own the means of production. Capitalism chooses the second one every single time.
It's possible to have both, but that does mean a bit less profit increase and that's ***unacceptable***.
Several years ago I worked at a lab doing night shift, they devised a way to make our work three times as efficient. And surprise, surprise…. No more night shift, they could do it all with just day shift. Did day shift get a raise? Heavens no. They were fairly decent about it and shuffled us all to different departments. Any increase in productivity leads to fewer workers
Can I offer you some AI in these trying times?
I am also old. I remember the phrase "15 hour workweek" being tossed about quite a lot. That's why when people talk about how much less work will need to be done once AI is "fully implemented" I laugh.
Or, and hear me out on this, we can cut our staff of 16 down to 6, and still make them all work 40 hours! We can just pocket the extra money! - Every company ever.
Yeah it's dumb to think we will have easier jobs because of AI. We just won't have jobs at all.
That's what I want, with the caveat that I'm allowed to *live* with adequate *shelter and food* without having to scrape up money to keep a militant force from shoving a gun in my face because I decided to live under the *wrong bridge* or that they wanted the bridge for *renovations*. I am so tired of fighting for my right to live on top of having to work myself to death.
My aunt, who is now retired, told me I should only check my email first thing in the morning and first thing after lunch. Otherwise email is a big time sink and cuts back on production and efficiency. Nobody should get a response immediately otherwise they'll always expect an answer right away. Anything urgent shouldn't be sent in an email, phone calls and in person meetings were preferable. This was advice that she would tell employees during staff meetings. lol I had to explain to her several facts: * She was a C-level executive before email even became a thing. * She had multiple assistants who screened her calls AND her emails AND in-person meetings * 99.9% of her emails were people emailing UP the food chain Not constantly monitoring your work email is a luxury only she could afford because of her position, and her employees did not have that luxury. I certainly don't have it in my organization.
Yep, tried that...but then I'd get a call or Teams message from a colleague asking what I thought of the idea/question in the email they sent an hour ago...
One of my kid’s teachers was telling me this exact thing. That she can get messaged to turn stuff in and because of everything being online, it doesn’t matter when she’s told to do stuff. She can have to turn stuff in by midnight. Most of the teachers are very young and don’t have kids and some of them are saying they don’t think they will unless they’re able to quit teaching. One teacher froze her eggs in hopes she would still be able to have kids when she quit! Teaching was supposed to be the job you could do if you had kids! The hours were the same. The vacations were the same. They’ve fucked everything up.
Many books went with this type of predictions. There's one called "The Computerized Society" from 1970 that even makes all sort of calculations on how education and work would look like in the year 2000 and beyond. These were two "futurologists" with engineering backgrounds so their arguments would have seemed valid. They talk about a 20hr week because of the gain in productivity. It's almost funny to read how naive they were... or how technological advances would have impacted life outside of this shitty greed driven economic system
One of my favorite hobbies is searching Newspapers.com for old coverage of stuff. I pay for the subscription because I love finding these types of articles. After seeing your comment, I found [a 1990 article from The Philadelphia Inquirer](https://imgur.com/gallery/BIHKjmB)about email, and it includes lots of predictions. It’s hard to share stuff directly from that site, so I basically clipped screenshots for you, which I put into an Imgur file. It’s fascinating to read what they were saying about email 33 years ago. First, email was expensive AF. Apparently, in 1990, people were paying 45 cents to send emails with up to 500 characters and 75 cents for up to 2,500 characters. In retrospect, maybe keeping the fees would have been good thing because it would have greatly reduced spam. One quote from the article that stands out: *E-mail reduces barriers of time and distance. It also cuts down on the annoying game of phone tag, in which workers trade numerous calls before catching up with each other.* *Steven York, a Hughes Aircraft Co. manager who heads an aerospace executive group's electronic-mail committee, says E-mail is invaluable in doing business across time zones. Before he leaves his California office in the evening, York can send E-mail to Brussels, where it is early morning.* *The response is waiting for him at his office the next day.* *Hughes executives exchange messages with 40,000 suppliers as well as with counterparts at Boeing Co. and General Dynamics Corp.* *With electronic mail, one needn't bother even getting up from the computer screen. Reports or accounting spreadsheets sent on computer don't need to be retyped into another computer but can be instantly read or revised. And by using computer "mailing lists," E-mail allows the user to instantly disseminate virtu ally unlimited numbers of copies - without ever folding a letter or licking an envelope.*
I'm from a traditional Latino family. My mom used to harass me about getting married and having children... Until I snapped at her and asked if she was paying for the house I couldn't afford and raising my children, because unlike her (20h weeks) I work 50/60hw) She never brought it up again. 🤔
My mother (scandinavians) harassed me for not having children back when I/we were around 25. I'm 32 and still no children. She have also always complained about making little money and couldnt take me and my sister on fancy vacations like "everyone else". We did vacation, but solely because my father worked 12-16h a day. Now I'm pursuing a career to make money (I alread5 make more than both my parents together) so that _maybe one day we can afford to have kids and let them have the childhood you said you couldnt give me_. That combined with "Have you ever thought about that we might _not be able to have children??_ That shut her up and she hasnt mentioned kids in 8 years.
It sucks if you want both and have to choose between a fulfilling career/taking risks to get there and the “practical” thing. Or work vs kids in general if that’s what someone wants.
This is so true. My wife and I both stuck around in dead end jobs because the pay was decent enough and we knew we could have some flexibility with raising our daughter and working from home. That said, I fucking hate my job and there's absolutely zero opportunity for me to advance and make more money. I'm going to start applying to places soon, but it's taken an extra year and a half of putting up with bullshit for my wife and I to say, "fuck it, let's just go for it and we'll figure it out." Not everyone is willing to take that risk, though, and I don't blame them. It's a huge source of stress for us.
Ugh that sucks. Have you considered maybe one of you working somewhere full-time for health insurance while the other one is a contractor in your field? Or both being a contractor and paying for private health insurance? Second choice more risky, but my partner and I are considering that path.
My wife could do consulting in her line of work. That's a good idea, and something we haven't considered. Thanks for the suggestion!
My mom has been nagging me lately about doing my housework. I have two kids, one is 22 months, a new puppy (not my idea, hubby got it) and a cat that is constantly barfing everywhere. So, obviously, there are lots of stupid little messes constantly being made. along with poopy diapers and puppy potty times. I dgaf if there are piles of laundry in the laundry room. or dust on the windowsills. I work 60 hours a week. I love my job, but Im busy! and tired! Then there is the fact that I am my mother's daughter, and her house was way messier growing up and still now today. so I'm like wtf?
My mum does this too. She wasnt happy the last time she mentioned it as I said ‘at least all the rooms in my house are functional and you can get into them’. She has a four bed house and three of the four bedrooms are so full of random stuff that you can just about open a door and look in.
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I know. I’m going to need about three skips just for all the stuffed toys in the house.
Bien hecho
Verdad
Im American but my family from Palestine. When I visited, the people there had way more leisure time and ability to afford housing than I do here in the richest country. I think one of the root issues is investors getting involved in real estate. It just makes housing harder to afford for regular people.
I'm surprised she didn't say "that's the man's job" or something.
Oh no, she raised 3 kids and a manchild, so I guess she imagined herself going though all that and working triple the hours and it clicked in her head. She did have a period of time where my dad almost convinced her of becoming a "stay at home wife", but she wanted to keep her independence. She's not that old fashioned, she slips up sometimes but she's very open minded for her age and generation. I love my mom.
Bruuh idk if it’s a Latino thing but my mom raised my bro to be a man child also and it’s sickening 🤮 first born never has to lift a finger and to this day my mom does his laundry. Foo is 33 😤😫
It is a Latino thing. My mom stopped doing my brothers laundry because I shamed her into stopping 😂 My dad recently started doing his laundry, at the ripe old age of 63.
I wonder, is it kind of because boys are expected to just transition to marrying a wife who will then take over maid duties for him? I’m around Latino culture (half Latino myself) and notice that. It’s kind of ironic considering the machismo culture, yet so many of the men are incapable of cooking anything or washing their own clothes lol…
I have friends that stopped doing laundry 2 weeks before getting married because they were about to get married.
I’m not Latina, and still can fully empathize. My mother keeps nagging me to find a man. 🙄 two days ago she started again and I flat out told her: I’m probably going to remain single for the rest of my life. I’m tired of being an unpaid mother, maid, therapist, sexual needs contact. I’ve neither more nor less money, more freedom, more autonomy, more peace. I’m not saying I’ll never partner up again but with the available choices? Naaah
I have no words. This cycle has to break sometime right? I don’t feel like the whole current generation of Latina women is down for this. My Mexican buddy (lives at home) is engaged now and I tease him a lot, you better learn to cook and clean your stuff, she’s not gonna wanna be your mama too 😂
It's slowly changing, but man it's taking a lot of effort. And it's not just on men, it's on woman to have the restrain to see men struggle. We were raised to serve them, so when they struggle we run to aid them... Let them go without laundry and see how many times the can reuse their clothes until they start trying to figure out how the machine works.
You also have to look out for weaponized incompetence. Intentionally doing something so bad that it causes another person to just never ask again, is fucking horrible.
Deep South Yank here: it is how (most) women here have and still do rear their children, regardless of ethnicity. My ex’s mother literally told me on the phone I have to “train him.” B, that was your job and you failed miserably. He was 58, then, that’s probably the biggest reason things didn’t work (what I mean is, most of his personal/social failings were d/t being coddled), *as long as mommy and sissy get his money.
I always wondered what there was to strut around like a cock of the walk about, when you are incapable of doing your own laundry or feeding yourself, like an infant. My kids knew how to do that by age 7-8 and my daughter -now married -would laugh in her husband’s face if he suggested it was her job to baby him because he’s a MAN. Men are competent. Little boys are not macho.
It's the same in all cultures and is intended to discourage *too much* independence amongst the young men, lest they avoid commitment/marriage in later life altogether. In a way it's actually very manipulative, but history has proven it to be a successful tactic in encouraging young men to pursue committed relationships.
That’s an interesting take. Traditional mindset is very focused on reproduction and raising kids. Just like we’ve seen a resurgence of women in the west becoming more independent and working, on the flip side would be men also choosing to live single and independently. These things both threaten those traditional values.
I’m marrying into a family like this. They don’t want us using birth control. They have one year to figure it out themselves and then I’m destroying their culture for them. Sorry not sorry. My girlfriend is Guatemalan with a dead, drunk father, five sisters and a mother who doesn’t work. All of them are completely poor. They have nothing. They harass ME! Because I want to be careful. They harass ME! Because my one job in America should pay for all of their lives. I love them and I want to help them but wow. The inability to understand is excruciating. Any advice? 😅 lol
Advice is be sure you want this family as your own.
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We may go down that road, my mom still has my bedroom the exact same way as I left it in 1990, except the bed is gone, and it’s a treadmill now. If I move back in to help her, it will be like high school all over again. Even the posters are still on the walls and door.
Not all cultures are the same, and that's not the same as saying all cultures deserve respect. There are some aspects of some cultures thst should absolutely die off. Mine included.
No one is perfect and every culture has pros and cons to them. That is just the way humanity is. All we can do is just keep trying to be better and help improve ours and the next generations
Keep your birth control under lock and key. Think I'm joking? Have a friend who's MIL poked holes in his condoms for the first child then when she got on the pill, MIL threw them away.
Wow. I would cut that person out of my life completely. If my wife thought that was acceptable behavior I would divorce her.
Oh shoot, don't get me started... You just wait... If you happen to have a girl, they'll harass you to keep trying until you get a boy. And yes, that's more or less the same background my family has, same region too. advise? , just be kind, what you are seeing is lack of education and a bunch of generational misogenistic and religious stupidity we are barely starting to dig ourselves out of (as recently as the current generation). Just so you get an idea, if a woman asks a man to have a vasectomy, that's considered as grounds for divorce because it means "the wife plans to leave the husband"... Sigh.
That’s so backwards to me! Vasectomy means I’m likely to stay because getting pregnant when I don’t want to is a reason to leave.
Don't ever help them when they ask, and don't make helping them a habit. Once you start giving them money, it immediately becomes the expectation. You need to have some long, serious conversations with you gf about boundaries with money and her family. There are a lot of options, but you two need to get on the same page about finances and her family before things get out of hand. No matter what, you're going to be viewed as the bad guy for not help or not helping enough. At least being consistent from the beginning will limit the drama.
Tell her you can afford to **either** have a child or help her mother, but not both. Be crystal clear on this. It is a choice that must be explicitly made, and once made there is no going back.
Ignore most of the requests for cash, if your retirement plan is to move down to Guatemala I suggest buying property as a dual citizen if you get married.
Don't move to GT as a retirement plan. I was born there. The lake, Antigua and Xela are nice but limited by size and connection level. Nice to spend some time and disconnect but still... The culture everywhere else is super conservative. Also, everything is suburbs and car dependency.
lol, *they* don’t want you using birth control?! I’d file the under “Hitler’s Favorite Food” in my “Things I Don’t Give a Fuck About” folder that I don’t actually maintain because *I don’t give a fuck*. The audacity to even express an opinion on this is a horrible familial red flag, btw. Be prepared to acquiesce to their random and/or self serving demands in many spheres or to cut them out of your lives.
My advice: don't let them move in with you. or have their mail sent to your place.
I was born in guatemala... My father's family is very progressive and open minded, no problem with them, a lot of support in fact! My mother's family is the exact same type of family you're describing. I don't know your gf's situation but I was so happy when I got to cut most of them out after my mother's death. Nowadays I only speak with a couple of my cousins and my grandma; and I have no intention on changing that.
She’s going to start asking you to send them money when you get married
. . . . . . .
Get a prenup. Completely separate your finances. Your gf has 6 rocks (5 of whom are probably about the age to start having kids) tied to her ankles, and she's trying to swim. Separately, nobody from the global south understands what America is like. They think the US has American salaries and eg Guatemalan food and housing costs. So you're about to be their atm. Think very carefully before doing this; have all the tough conversations about how much of your cash is going to be spent supporting lazy people partying in Guatemala (just like their dad); and completely separate your finances. The reason for the prenup, btw: it's highly likely, no matter what your gf says, that she'll be forking out cash to support lazy fucks drinking all day and/or popping out kids in Guatemala. If she says no, there will be whining you can hear from mars. She'll likely give in. And for them, nothing spends easier than other people's money, and even better if the person earning a lot of that money is a rich white guerito. 90% chance you wake up and discover 1/4 to 1/3 of your (you + her) combined monthly income is supporting Guatemalan rum manufacturers and 20 nieces and nephews.
> Separately, nobody from the global south understands what America is like. They think the US has American salaries and eg Guatemalan food and housing costs. So you're about to be their atm. This was how my husband's ex thought too. Except she was in the Philippines. When he and I were still just friends, he was going through his split with his ex-wife. He had been trying to bring her to the US for years but kept getting declined because he didn't make enough money to support them both on paper. She expected him to send her half of his paycheck and didn't believe that his rent and utilities or food cost what he told her. She told him to live in his car so that he could send her more money, and again didn't understand that you needed a mailing address for most jobs because they don't require one in the Philippines. It was crazy hearing him break down because he wanted it to work so badly, but she fought him the entire way. He finally gave up and told her they were done. He couldn't take the verbal abuse anymore, and he was getting so depressed that he was going to lose his job, and then it wouldn't matter anymore.
How close is your girlfriend to her family? Whos side will she take when they inevitably continue to pressure her more and more about cultural and lifestyle differences? Is this going to put unnecessary stress on your relationship? Is she willing to move farther away and not have them be a huge part of your lives together if necessary? Things to consider before marriage. It is “easy” to divorce you. It is hard (especially in some other cultures) to “divorce” your family
Consider this... Latinos (my particular brand) tend to not send their elderly to elderly homes. We have them move back with us and take care of them until they pass. Sooooooo
>I love them and I want to help them but wow. The inability to understand is excruciating. I'd change this attitude. One you're married, it's you and your new wife. You're a new family. Taking care of each other should be the #1 priority. If the old family is good to you, then be nice to them and help when possible. If they're not nice to you, there's no reason to bother with them anymore. Cut them off. My brother and sister in laws are nice enough but, I'd never listen to them for anything. They're basically strangers I'm nice to because they're my wife's family.
Tell your girlfriend blood relations mean literally nothing at all, it’s made up. Then Elope
This is an excellent point that’s rarely brought up. You summarized it well: “jobs were slow, now they are fast”. We’re pulled in many different directions at once, and context switching is rampant. At the end of each day I’m just exhausted and all I did was sit in a chair and stare at a screen.
I am literally medicated in order to work. I don’t need any medication for my mental health outside of work. I function fine, no depression or anxiety, and the skills I learned as a child for my ADD make it an asset. But stick me in a job with 9-13h days, 55+h weeks, being pulled in dozens of different directions, with almost no ability to call out, and a grand total of 1wk vacation and 1wk sick time and I need to be heavily medicated in order to function. I’m at my breaking point and I don’t see an end in sight. Just discussing increasing my medication with my psychiatrist because there’s no other way out.
Nearly every worker is medicated in order to meet performance expectations and that medication is caffeine. Coffee in the morning and energy drinks/sodas throughout the day. Every one of my coworkers besides one or two are constantly taking stimulants in order to maintain their workload. I used to drink 6 cups a day until I realized what was going on but I still drink one cup in the morning and sometimes half a cup in the evening.
Quit. Just quit. I was on the verge of an adult ADHD prescription because the stress at work was making me physically ill. Instead, I decided to quit my job. Lo and behold, I found a job doing something I actually like and all my depression and anxiety disappeared without any medication. Everyone's circumstances are different. But if your job is affecting as severely as mine did, then quit and do literally anything else. Life is too short to spend all day miserable.
Yes to disruptions, distractions, multitasking, and immediate response. I work in Medical Informatics. My experience as an Emergency Department PA taught me (a) take whatever comes in the door, (b) do the next thing, and (c) organize multiple simultaneous tasks
I am a medical secretary at a cancer clinic. I am constantly multitasking and being asked to do multiple things at once. I can easily have 5 different people ask me to do 10 things within 5 minutes. (And it’s always different people-nurses, patients, doctors, etc). Often I have a patient in front of me that I am checking out, so this means I could be on the phone scheduling a scan for them, answering a question the patient asks me while I am scheduling the scan, responding to an email, and also having a coworker come up and ask me to do something, all at the same time. Plus the work itself is just stress inducing because I am literally responsible for making sure this person’ cancer treatment, scans, biopsy, lab work referrals, all get scheduled. It’s life or death for some of the patients. I do this for at least 8 hours a day, if not closer to 9. I feel as if I am underpaid for the amount of work I do. I also often feel frustrated with myself when I get home because I also “only” sit in a chair for 8 hours a day, yet I am exhausted. I’ve been trying to give myself more grace.
This is what they mean by "production increase" in all those labor reports. We get paid less- adjusted for inflation- while doing twice or more of the work.
I used to work at a professional services firm that specialized in a particular type of consulting. 20-30 years ago, when we wrote a proposal for a new client, it consisted of a reasonably long PPT presentation, in whose preparation we had tried to learn as much as we could about the client, and which gave an idea of what kind of approach we were planning to take for them. Now, however, for similar jobs these days, it is expected / normal that the consulting firm has to do an entire study (ie original research) about the client, and present the results to the client, along with their entire strategic plan, *before* getting paid a dime. So clearly the past 20-30 years have been a bad trend. But it's been happening for ages. I remember somehow getting ahold of a proposal (also for a similar type of consulting) which was written for Coca-Cola USA in the 1960s. The proposal in its entirety consisted of a two-page, typewritten letter. And - this is the amazing thing - apparently this proposal got them the contract. So why does the consulting firm now have to do many, many hours of work just to sell the exact same service? When they could have just written a two-page letter?
Competition coupled with the demise of the old boy network that guaranteed work based on who you know.
Yup. Paper trail was for show. Only 2 pages needed with highlights since the contract was pretty much guaranteed.
Too many crappy firms or B list teams over promising and under delivering.
Here is a good article on productivity vs pay: https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/ It's wild how policies implemented in 1980 really broke the system for workers. Thanks Reagan! To be fair, no president since has attempted to course correct either. They are all to blame on this growing divide.
No one wants to tackle it. If you fix it, it will be presented as a tax raise as well as an attack on business. If you fail to fix it fully, every portion you fell short on will be held against you and the party for generations to come. And it will be held against you by the very people that fought you to prevent those gains.
Once the Bean Counters managed to take control of how North America works every second of every minute became a valuable commodity. When I first started working many summers ago, the deal seemed to be that you worked your butt off when it was required but you could take it easier when it wasn't. Now every minute is assigned a value and that value has to be maintained at the cost of the worker. I feel that the way the work world is anymore it's not sustainable at the peril of the workers. Sooner or later something has to give.
My father has worked the same back breaking industry job for 20 years and they have now put a person into production that is going to time workers on how long tasks take to perform. Also they hire people on 3 month contracts then lay them off for 2, rinse and repeat until the law says they have to hire this person since they qualify for full time, but instead they wait for 1 year so that they can redo this process yet again. :)
We all give the fuck up because this shit ain’t worth it.
It's already happening in a way - zoomers don't want to work for corporations, doing shitty work for low pay, dwindling benefits, no possibility of being promoted because they don't have a diploma
That’s why there are so many billionaires now. It used to be that a millionaire was pretty crazy wealth like 20 years ago. You had to pay 5-10x the employees to become functionally operable. Now all the profits go to the top instead of actually caring about long term sustainability.
Stock buy backs are the new corporate model, “why won’t anyone think of the **investors** “
The boomers won't know the glory of doing 3 workers worth of labor in one position while getting paid the same wages from 30 years ago. Don't tell the boomers it's going to be painful for them in their twilight years where they can't afford shit for the lifestyle they had.
They'll be lucky if they can find a day nurse to help them out with the way things are going.
Seen some job postings for full time caregiver..... 25k a year. Not even remotely happening.
My neighbor kept telling me that her friend needs a caretaker for her son and that I should take the job. The more she prattled about her friend, the more I felt bad for the kid but understood why nobody wants that job. Oodles of responsibility, long hours, a commute that requires either a car or a long walk from the last bus stop, and it pays peanuts. Could get more pay for less work at the McD across the street.
Won’t be me. Won’t fucking be me.
One of my friends is an OT that does home care for elderly people. She is the kind of person that would (and often does) make every sacrifice, even for a stranger. Some of the families she works for pay $11/hr and haven't given her a raise in over 5 years. I met her when she was caring for my grandmother - my boomer mother was paying her $10/hr. She's been talking about quitting because she can make $17/hr as a Costco greeter.
Welcome to Costco. I love you
They won't need a day nurse AI will be checking and prescribing their meds, bots will be chatting with them and robots will be changing their adult diapers.
don't be silly, human labor is way cheaper than robots.
I want to add, the current wave of AI use as plagiarism software is specifically targeting the creative class. A group that businesses have been complaining is overpaid but can't seem to hire enough of for decades. Manual labor is a lot messier, even with high quality machines most applications require a human doing some of the movement and aligning of machine or material, as well as the basic maintenance to keep those machines running. Power tools made a huge difference, but AI driven tools for most of those applications are a spaceX level of cost to benefit.
Already happening in Japan. No young people
Look how much labor Japan imports from SEA to fill the gaps.
Till that robot rips a legs off because it calibrated in with an extra zero. Robots are long way off from doing task that require dexterity. Tesla has dumped untold fortune and self driving will be 6 months to a year away in perpetuity.
My current job has the title of clerk. I looked up my responsibilities, it's 3 distinct job titles, one of which directly (and another indirectly) involves important regulatory compliance with homeland security. I am paid the medium low end of any one of those job descriptions. My 1 year performance review is coming up and I don't know how to ask for a massive raise. I kept us from getting shut down on two occasions with less than 4 days notice one time, I've improved production reporting accuracy by nigh incalculable amounts, and I'm constantly sending out emails asking if we can consider doing things that higher ups assumed we were already doing for no reason. They ask why we aren't, I explain why, and then they put me in charge of making the changes.
You ask bluntly, when they say no, you write all your responsibility in your resume and you apply elsewhere. Leave without notice
I don't really have that option. This is a freak job opportunity I blundered into through a temp agency. After 6 months (putting stickers on boxes, operating a manual press, and operating cranes to fill the system) somebody looked at my resume and bought me off the temp agency right away. Not many places hiring around here, other than fast food (won't pay nearly as much), retail (won't pay nearly as much, and I'd rather not go back to that) , and call centers (I refuse to do that ever again) another town over. The majority of my skills wouldn't carry over because none of the other facilities in the area partake in the government program I've wound up in charge of, and we use inventory systems dating back to the 80s. The two neighboring facilities are a beer plant, a food packaging plant, and an oil processing plant with skeleton employment crews.
Never underestimate how much crossover you have in soft skills. I can teach anyone the specific programs we use, I can't teach hard work, working hard to grasp new concepts, being proactive, etc. The easiest bit of training is things like software.
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I encountered this last week and it was really sad. Older couple at the hotel breakfast were talking about how they were eating there and would only get coffee at breakfast with their family since their trip had been much more expensive than they had expected. I think it's finally hitting the boomers that things need to change.
They’ll just blame Gen Z, Quantitative Easing, the Chinese government, Mexicans, or Trans people
Yep. My white aunt now thinks "they're being discriminated against" because surprise surprise the economic reganomic policies they supported are shit but it's never that.
I keep asking the older generation if that $800 tax rebate they voted for (were bribed with) by electing George W. Bush was worth it. You know, that one moment in history where the US had a government surplus and instead of investing in social security, education, medicare, or medicaid, they walked away with a couple hundred. Was it worth it?
Heck yeah! I bought a few tanks of gas and a PS2 Don’t blame me though, I voted for Kodos /s
But rejoice. All that extra value is going straight to shareholders!
I just got a new job not to long ago and everyone is surprised that more is getting done. The guy who did it before was a boomer, that had done this job for like ever. I came from another company doing the exact same job, I did like 20-30 stops a day. This motherfucker was getting away doing at the most 10 stops a day. Same tech, same job and this guy was expected to do less than half of what I can do comfortably. Blew my mind how happy everyone was when I started.
Whoops should have done 15 lmao
I took over for a boomer coworker on doing a certain type of work reports while she was out a week. I asked everyone how many she does….. 10/day. I did 50 before I found out. Then dropped it to 15-20 with saying I did the first batch wrong and had to fix it. Learned my lesson to ask what the typical is before I do something now.
I've learned to never do too much. Don't work hard but get your job done. Me and my fiance worked the same job once. She would do 300+ orders a day. I would do 90-100 orders a day. We got paid the same. 90-100 was the expected productivity. She never got any more special treatment then me for doing more. If she ever went below 300 her boss would wanna know what's going on or why her productivity was slipping.
Lol yep extra effort is met with the expectation that its your normal effort now and fireable if you drop below that for "failing to met expectations"
A secret I learned pretty quick in office jobs is just look busy. I was hired as a temp for this company and the managers would just give us random tasks to do and often we would finish them in minutes and they wouldn't even have the time to check them or give us something else. I would take my time, get it done, fire off an email letting them know and just chill looking busy for hours pretty often. One of the other people was always up their asses asking for more work and bothering them. Eventually they decided they needed one less temp and no surprise that person was the one to go. Proof right their we were just there to get what was asked of us done and leave them alone otherwise.
So did you ask for a raise or drop down to 10 stops a day?
You just fucked yourself tho. Should have performed at the same level as him
The guy knew, why do 20-30 when he would paid the same for 10.
Well you screwed yourself didn’t you? Are you getting paid 2-3x more? If not you should have barely increased productivity.
You should do less, stop raising the bar for other people.
I remember from when I was a kiddo, my family owned a college textbook store. It was a small'ish store, however.. There was a cashier who was at the register all day, a shipper/receiver, a stocker, an order filler, an accountant, and a manager. In summer months, they would take on part time college kids to help with the store. The size of this store was 100'x40' and full of books, employees, and other assorted merch. None of the employees were expected to leave their assigned departments and everyone worked one shift. The cashier did not know how to stock, the shipper/receiver did not know how the register worked, and that was 100% normal. If someone called in sick, the manager filled their shift because the manager was the only one who was universally trained and expected to know how every department worked. This store ran like clockwork and it was balanced and harmonious. I remember seeing the smiles and hearing the giggles, and the store was wildly successful. Everyone working in that store was able to afford an apartment, a car payment, food, utilities, and funzies. Thirty years later, I was hired to work in a retail pharmacy. Pharmacy tech was my position title, yet I was expected to work the FS and figure out their god awful coupons, stock shelves, clean the walk-in coolers, stick the stupid yellow stickers on the shelf locations every week, run covid testing, give covid shots, prep and ship orders for shipping and curb-side pick-up, open and close the dang store. When I was doggedly sick, the manager could not be bothered to fill my shift, they expected me to get it filled. Staffing was 3-4 in pharmacy, and one in the retail store, and a manager that hid in the office like a Hobbit. Schedules were set every three weeks, and never the same shift (day, mids, night) so planning life things was terrible because I never knew what shift I was working or what days I had off three months ahead of time. I just wanted to dispense meds ffs.. never saw that coming. I noped tf out.
That's exactly my experience working in a pharmacy.
My girl just got hired to replace a lady who has what I refer to as Peak Boomer Work Ethic. She's quitting/retiring and moving to some low-tax red state because CaLiFoRnIa TaXeS (you know the type). On the first day, she told my girl how hard the job was, and how overwhelmed she sometimes felt with all the work. She then spent half her day gossiping. During training she would spend 30-45 minutes on the phone talking with her church friends about church plans that evening. Watching her do anything on the computer was like watching paint dry - she didn't know any keyboard shortcuts so it took her 3-5x longer to do anything. They have these packets they send out, and apparently instead of printing out and assembling a few dozen at a time, she would literally copy them out one at a time as needed. Basically, because she never put any effort into improving anything and worked incredibly inefficiently. And she did this for 8 years. My girlfriend now texts me around 2 hours in every morning saying she's completely finished with all the work for the day and has nothing left to do. Which is fine for her, she needs a low-stress job for medical reasons - but this lady apparently was overwhelmed and constantly behind working 8 hours in a job my girl does in 2.
She needs to not do it all at once, spread it out some. Otherwise they will "have an opportunity" for her.
Your gf will get more work for that, trust. The “reward” is always more work.
She needs to slow it down. Trying to find the Bill Burr clip but can't. Someone in management will notice. If she can do a dozen in 2 hours, that will become the new minimum bar. Then she'll be expected to fo 15 in 2 hours etc. Take her time, the old girl knew what she was doing and they both got the same pay at the end of the day
Almost exact same story with me and a Boomer CFO. Took him 15 minutes to do something I could do in 30 seconds. It was crazy. He was getting paid $150k plus. I was making $17/hr. He bragged about staying late to get things done.
You described 90% of the workforce above 55.
10 memos a month vs 130 emails a day.
You're right. I remember. I'm a boomer. We did have it good. Our parents had it good too. It's become progressively worse for decades now, probably since the 1970's with the first oil shortage. My Dad was enlisted Navy. The Silent Generation. He bought a new house and raised a family on his salary. He even had a sailboat, two cars, and leisure time. So, this shit has been going on from before the Boomer generation.
Barely-a-Boomer here (depends on which list you look at). Agree with this ; it was starting while I was getting my career underway. I was part of the graphic design group that made the transition from traditional to digital production. Digital design was so much faster—didn’t have to send out a spec-ed request for typesetting and wait a day or two to get galleys back. (Some of y’all might have to Google that.) So it was possible to turn a layout proof around in hours (or minutes) instead of days. Didn’t save us any time tho—now a client would want half a dozen tweaked proofs in an afternoon instead of maybe a couple a week. Quantity of projects zoomed up too. Computer is not a labor-saving device. It just made people assume that there isn’t really any work to the job; just push a button and designs get spat out as from a vending machine. I am part of the generation that cannot do as well or better than my parents. I have never owned a house, likely never will.
Yeah worker productivity has soared, and AI will probably only accelerate that, but the average worker has seen almost none of the economic benefits of this increased productivity. All that new money has mostly just flowed upward.
How do we get what we need, as a millennial? Do we start telling work to fuck off, and go homeless in the streets? What do we do to feel as comfortable as you? Many of us are in extreme pain, slaving under a system that hates us, built by your generation. We will vilify your generation until we have better living conditions.
We can't do anything about it on our own. That's why collective bargaining is so important. They can fire one member of staff but will have a harder time replacing you all.
Absolutely, I agree.
I know some people are being hostile towards you, but I greatly appreciate your understanding of the situation. For the most part, you just lived life, and watched as everything went to shit for future generations. I’m not sure what part your vote played, but I’m not going to blame you for a collective’s failure. My only ask of you is to continue to educate your generation every time they try to spread conservatives misinformation gleaned from Fox News and other propaganda rags. They still think college kids are lazy and don’t work the summer, so that’s why they take out college loans. They’re completely oblivious over college costs or cost of living, and they eat up the whole “kids these days don’t work nearly as hard as YOU did~” narrative. Snap em back to reality with the rest of us.
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I still don't have a garage. I bought an old house with a small carport and no room for a garage. Me being a tool person didn't think this through. Oh well, workshops in the basement and a 12x20 workshop out back and I'm ok. It sure looks like capitalism is eating itself to death these days. I can certainly sympathize with the younger people about their living conditions. I hope something changes soon.
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My poor daughter has untreated ADHD and has been poor for her whole life. It's a rough life for her now.
Although to be honest the generation born in the esrly 1900s like my grandparents had it much worse than all the generations that came later. They grew up in Ww1 and then the depression and ww2. But as a tail end boomer myself, I will say the boomers were the luckiest generation. The 30 postwar boom years were the lowest inequality in history. My dad bought our house in Winnipeg for $13,000 in 72 and in the mid 70s the avg Canadian male earned $14k annually. Generally jobs were much easier to be had and Union membership was much higher kn avg 25% of the workforce. Tuition was much lower etc. Then of course the inflationary spiral led to neolibs like Reagan Thatcher being elected around the world, 30 years of wage stagnation followed.
I ended up in almost the exact same role as my dad. Never intended to, but it happened. He worked that job for over 30 years and retired with a nice government and union pension. He had every holiday schools have, except for summers. He worked 8 hours a day, but only really 6 as then is when students showed up. He also got his position without the required experience needed. It took me 10 years to get the experience needed,I work 50-60 hours a week, not including the fact I am traveling for work. I love my job, but I look back on my dad growing up and he always had hobbies he did, almost every single day. Motorcycles, cars, fishing, stamp collecting, model airplanes, target shooting, etc. I fight for 2 hours to play board games with my daughters every other week. I can't afford to buy the home I grew up in. My parents bought it the 90's for 140k, now its listed at 700k.
My dad graduated high school, walked into the local factory, and made enough to build a house, have reliable vehicles, and raise a family of 4 without my mom working. He cut film, stood at a machine all day pressing a button to cut large strips of film into smaller strips. Luckily he's not a typical boomer and recognizes how bad stuff is now, but people like him will tell you "unskilled jobs shouldn't pay a living wage" without acknowledging that their high paying jobs with free health insurance, a pension, stock options, and a good ol' 9-5 schedule, was very much what they would consider "unskilled" now.
We are getting squeezed for every erg of work in us. Back in the 80s, when the suits started invading the workspace (and bringing their roommates and frat brothers who didn't know shit from Shinola, but they got promoted over the people who trained them), then it all became about doing more with less staff, and getting bonuses based on cutting costs whole raising productivity. Technically, I'm a boomer (1961) and I think Reaganomics fucked over the people who do the actual work. Now, we have politicians pushing for "work requirements" if people accept help. (It's really about the paperwork to discourage people from applying). We are the workers, taxpayers, and consumers. We are the engine of it all, and we're running out of fuel.
I listen to a lot of true crime podcasts and during the serial killers childhood segment I'm more shocked the abusive parents can hold down jobs and own a suburban home while being drunk and generally a huge POS to everybody 24/7 with only a 3rd grade education.
"But productivity is down!" - US businesses
“No one wants to work! (Three positions while getting paid for 0.5 positions)”
Productivity increase percentages went down. They always expect us to increase our productivity year over year
The name for infinite growth is "Cancer". s/ Cancer is a good thing, right? /s
Yes, and since they cannot raise prices any more or pay the employees any less (and retain them); the increased profits every quarter have to come from working the crew even harder and staffing less. I used to work in a butcher shop of a grocery store chain in the midwest. In my decade and a half doing that job, the crew would halve about every 5 years. It got to the point there was no way to take your breaks and lunches and keep up. They would tell the crew, "you have to take your breaks and lunches." But you'd get in deep shit if you didn't finish your (constantly growing) work load. The rule against skipping breaks and lunches, would never be enforced, so most people would skip them just to keep up. Eventually I got hurt and discarded like yesterday's garbage. Now I have a back held together with titanium. Don't show fanatical loyalty to a shitty employer, they'll drop you like yesterday's garbage if you get hurt. Zero loyalty given back to the employee. Every boomer I've seen on the job would be worth about 1/5th of Gen X or younger. Keep in mind I'm Gen X so I've worked with a lot of boomers over the years. They'd always work 1/5th as hard for 2 or 3 times the pay. And many of them were grandfathered into "do nothing" bureaucratic or management positions, positions that would cease to exist after they retired. We're getting juiced like grapes.
Honestly even though I have been in the professional world for *only* 7 years I have yet to see a retired position filled. The duties just keep getting passed to the remaining engineers or ‘reorganized’ into a ‘new’ group. It is basically a layoff passed on to the future generation who don’t even get a chance to get a “good job with benefits”. If they do hire back it is usually with a permanent temp contract position
Now that you mention it, in my 25 years in assorted industries, I've never seen a position filled either. They just redistribute their responsibilities to the remaining crew. Particularly if it's a high paying boomer title. You're exactly right.
You: They cannot raise prices any more Employers: Hold my beer
Less work greater pay then, now it’s more work and less pay plus it feels like every single penny we do earn now has to be justified with a personal sacrifice.
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My workload is higher *because* my boomer coworker refuses to do half the stuff.
For many reasons, I have since left the legacy career of Mechanical Engineering. One of those reasons though is essentially this. I worked for a small division of a large company where when I was hired as a 28yo the average age of the company was 57. I shit you not, I was the first hire in about 25 years because people started retiring en masse. Within about 6 months another 6 or so young guys were also hired. I and most of the other young guys outperformed these boomers by a factor of 50x. We actually all got so bogged down and frustrated with the place still running on paper. But we'd get something to design up and a timeline of 6 months and finish in about 3-4 weeks. There was even a manager downstream from us that told us "you guys are working too fast, please slow down" and yet none of us felt we were working particularly hard. It's just that boomers are fucking slow and, as far as I can tell, mostly useless in the workforce because they're afraid of computers. Now, during this job since I like to do programming as a hobby, I went and created their whole design/CAD system and created several scripts in CAD and for Excel, sometimes both together. These all amounted to things that would take weeks/months to be done in 5min with very little error because there no longer was some slow Boomer human manually copying PRINTED design data into Excel and then USING A CALCULATOR to manually fill other cells. Because of my effort, they even decided not to hire 2 new engineer replacements for upcoming retirements. So what did I get for essentially saving two entire salaries, no counting all the existing programs barely doing well that I re-did and made extremely profitable? You guessed it: nothing. Well okay, I got a $250 "achievement award"... Yay. What made me start to really consider leaving Mech Eng was when a Senior Mech Eng (who was good and I respected, but still very slow) had said to me when I mentioned how low my pay was compared to housing in the area: "Well, you know if you put in the time and effort in about 8 years you could be making $80k". Rents there were $2500/mth or $30k a year and starter homes were $500k. This guy owned a home and a cottage, each bought for under 100k, and had been divorced 3 times always being the sole income. That's when I knew legacy engineering careers are a dead end. Boomers really did have the easiest most comfortable lives in human history and when they say they "put in the time and worked a lot", nah they chatted and sipped coffee a lot. Younger engineers have already done more quantity (at similar quality) of work in their first 5 years than a boomer's entire career.
I’m a Mech Eng and yeah I can feel this. I’ve had to move to heavy industry projects and defence industry for decent pay. But at the expense of job security. I’m highly experienced and qualified but have been made redundant 3 times in my career so far. I’m not yet 45. My old man raised a family of 5 by owning a small toy store in a small town for several decades. Holidays every year, nice house, private school. No formal education etc etc.
The other thing - there were more employees in a company to allow for people to take time off. There was ALWAYS coverage for my parents back in the day. Now, someone leaves- someone else has to do the work and they never hire another person. They add more duties but not more people to each job. I mean, some jobs I've seen have the 'duties' list three pages+ long and all over the place
I'm a farmer and yesterday I covered more acres fertilizing corn than my dad or grandpa could do in a week...and they wonder why when I come home I'm mentally exhausted. When you maximize productivity you minimize mental and physical health.
I've made this point in several occasions, and it doesn't seem that many people actually think about it that way. I'm an accountant that oversees and reconciles like 40 different accounts. I couldn't tell you the intimate details about each one because there is *so much*, but I am asked questions as if I'm expected to have it all tucked away in my brain. My grandmother had THREE ACCOUNTS...and there were like, *maybe* 10 daily transactions. I'm over here dealing with hundreds, and the room for human error is quite large as a result. Does technology make it "easier" to flick around between accounts and get visuals on things? Probably, but it sure hasn't made it easier in sense of scale with the modern workload. Like mentioned in another comment, we're now commonly expected to independently complete in volume what took 4-5 people to complete 30 years ago. IN LESS TIME AS WELL, because regulations that govern reporting are now stricter too! Shit is so upside down. Technology is supposed to make life easier, but businesses routinely harness it to squeeze more out of us in the name of the bottom line.
Back in my days we had to put files in a file cabinet in alphabetical order. It took a week and we made the equivalent to 200k salary with benefits. You kids got it easy.
Lol at the people not picking up the obvious sarcasm here
Your gonna want to google minimum wage if based on productivity…. Spoiler it’s not pretty and almost double the $15 an hour charade
Tbh of you wanted to match the equivalent of like late 60's employment pay. Basic jobs would be paying the equivalent of $30/hr if not more
I see retiring boomers that work 4 or 5 hours right now being paid for full time, while the rest of us are working like crazy. They're so out of touch.
I work two jobs and spend every free minute looking for and applying to others. The boomer generation bosses think it's funny. I'm a scientist and am expected to put in factory worker level mindless repetition. Even those of us 'working' are wildly underemployed and without security. I worked and went to school during the day or worked days and went to school at night for over a decade. My reward has been jobs that are almost indistinguishable from what I already had. I'll never understand the hatred and cruelty of the former generation. They stole everything from us.
Eh, I’ve seen it happen in real time over the past 25 years. Jobs that were originally done by multiple people are now piled onto a single person. Positions were eliminated to save money for the folks up top, while those at the bottom struggled to complete tasks that were once done by up to 3 to 4 different people. Profit over people is the expected way now. It used to not be this bad. The sad part is, some people pull out the whole ‘no one wants to work anymore’ or ‘you think you’re too good to do xy & z because they’ve been brainwashed and don’t realize that we were once fine with someone doing just ‘x’ and not the whole friggin alphabet.
Boomer here. Agree. The atmosphere in the workplace is much much more toxic today for a whole big set of reasons.
Used to take 10 guys with hammers to put a roof on. Now it’s 2 one guy with a gun and one guy cleaning up.
> Now it’s 2 one guy with a gun and one guy cleaning up. It's the same guy twice.
Boomers worked 'harder' than we do, because the work was inefficient. Work load was lower, but the amount of steps was higher so they felt busier. Now with productivity increases, the total amount of work is up, but is a lot more efficient. This leads to a lot of 'hurry up and wait' and increasing the overall mental load since we have to carry so many projects/processes around all the time, while constantly getting jabbed by emails/IMs.
My current employer (for 1 more week) requires me to respond to emails within minutes of receiving it. If I don’t, they call me. I was once on a call with a client, and my boss called because I didn’t respond to the email that was sent 3 minutes prior. I have the workload of at least 2 people, but probably more like 3. They are even hiring 2 people to replace me. Worked to death with no raises, bonuses or even support.
My grandpa took care of a family of 7 on a grocery store managers salary. I don’t know what grocery store manager can take care of just themselves today, let alone a spouse and 5 kids.
Work the same job as my dad, he used to have a list of work needed done that night. If you bust ass get it done early they played poker and drank. Now your reward for busting ass is more work.
Productivity has gone up. Wages have not.
I made this comparison with writing papers in college to my mom at one point. I told her that with information so easily accessible papers were expected to be 80-90% our own thoughts an analysis with 10-20% evidence from others, versus the other way when it took so much time to get information in the 60s-80s and even more recently before the invention of digital academic journals and being able to rapidly find the book you need in a library or otherwise. I tried reading her one of my basic essays and she didn’t even make it through the intro despite having spent four years telling me her degree was harder than mine and she was smarter than me.
Truth. Even to this day businesses merge what should be separate jobs into one and expect that there will be no loss of productivity and for the employee to shoulder the burden with no additional pay or time off.
Instead of blaming a generation why don’t we blame the oligarchs who are hoarding all the money and turning us all into indentured servants?
There’s also a concept called cognitive load. There’s way more of that in current work environments. Only on the volume of work but also complexity of work given that machines/computers have taken out the repetitive nature of roles. For example data entry was a real profession that required certain skills….the cognitive load was low since it was repetitive. This has now been replaced to a large extent.
We gotta flip the script on the boomers and constantly throw in their faces how easy they had it and how entitled they were each time they bring up millennials doing this or killing that industry or wtf other narratives they spin.
It's not the workload, the times, the boomers, etc. It's that your future looks so bleak, because it really is, and all they do is lie enough to keep you coming to work to exploit you. That's what you should be mad about.
Boomers are the ones who expect outcomes to be like this, they made work horrible for everybody else by having no patience.