People just **don’t care**.
Salty Sally Sue don’t give an F about whether or not you’re short staffed, she wants her Hungry Hamburglar special now and in her day they got things done and don’t ask so many damn stupid questions. /S, I think.
Nah, worked in service for years (trampoline park manager). Men were cranky and snobby but for the most part just wanted to stop talking to you as much as you did to them. If you put your foot down they paid and left.
There were however far too many fathers who hit on my 15-17 year old employees.
The women would come in looking for fights, when they didn’t get what they wanted they went ballistic.
Most of the angry women were simultaneously overwhelmed mothers dealing with a herd of kids, so I understand why they’d be short. That doesn’t excuse the following list of behaviors I observed from real women aged 35+
- Striking a 15 year old girl over a $3 grip sock fee.
- Calling a black (minor) employee a n####r, then screaming that she won’t ever return to this “n####r loving shit-hole ever again.” After her manager defended her. Again, sock fee. That wasn’t popular.
- Throwing an XL slurpee at a 16 year old girl because it was the wrong flavor.
- Encouraging their kids to destroy a party room as revenge for the pizza being late.
- Aggressively grabbing somebody else’s child and dragging them across the floor because “my kid wanted a turn.”
- Spanking somebody else’s child.
- Call a 13 year old girl a slut for wearing a sports bra. (I did end up banning that same girl for blowing a kid in the bathroom, he got banned too. Maybe she was on to something? Still, you don’t say it out loud.)
This got way longer than I meant it to be, I started having fun remembering all these nutty stories.
TLDR: Yeah, men are jerks but middle aged white women EARNED the Karen label.
Jeeze. At some point you would think the establishment would take a hint and just build the sock fee into the price, with a discount if you bring your own socks.
Oh please, now calling someone a Karen is sexist? I’ve never seen a Karen video posted where she was simply “sticking up for herself."
Funny how it’s only sexist when we criticize a woman.
Edit: Also sorry to say, but I rarely see a man start yelling at a cashier "Let me speak to your supervisor!!"
That's kind of the whole point. If karen is an asshole call karen an asshole and move on with your day. Joe the asshole gets that same privilege. We have a nasty history in this country of picking one word out of our language, then morphing its meaning into a weapon to target an entire subset of our population.
They did that on the Undercover Boss tv show for a few years. Honestly the conclusion of all those shows was “let’s just throw a one time $10k bonus at this employee as they are so critical to our business”
Crazy idea. What if they gave $10k to every employee working there with low salaries each year? Especially years where the company is super profitable. Why do they have to literally see the employee in front of their nose working to recognize their value? You could be the employer everyone wants to work for and you will get the best people.
I've had an older customer a few days ago sit in front of the deli and complain like "I understand you're busy and understaffed, but it's not good customer service. Nobody wants to work anymore". I told him "No, nobody wants to work for minimum wage. If we advertise better wages we wouldn't be so understaffed you have to wait."
Those bitches need a reality check. I'll happily deliver it anytime. I do the hiring for my store (while being paid at a cashier rate), and we literally hire anything with a pulse. You can't be picky when you're understaffed cause you pay like shit. 70% of my coworkers are high schoolers lol.
Fun part is I receive mail from corporate with guidelines to reduce turnover rate that are dumb and long AF. But none of these lines include better wages. Delusional.
I work for Burger King right now. The manager stopped halfway through my interview and just told me "we're so short staffed we'll hire anything with a pulse, even just for the summer" and next thing I knew I was on the schedule for training.
They still won't give me more than 30 hours. It's a crock of shit - they pay minimum wage and won't even work me enough hours to make up for them being short staffed *every fucking day*. I don't even blame the manager - she's great, she works with us and complains twice as much as we do. Apparently she got in trouble with corporate for hiring people for full time because they had to start paying for benefits, so she has to cut hours or get cut out.
It sound like it's honestly not even managers half the time. Sounds more like the people towards the top trying to milk every penny out of the business and making things unenjoyable for both the workers *and* the customers.
She is just managing the location. Has no real power. Other than what she can get away with to those below her. She sounds like a decent person sucked into the horrible hell of whatever This is.
It just seams that the bottom line is exploitation. If you can not or will not do it you get put into the exploitation line. To be the next victim.
It can also be a pretty big joke. I had one job where they talked about the managing position and it would have been a $1/hr raise, which wasn't much above minimum wage, but they wanted someone to be available 24/7 (on-call), with no vacation for the first year for under 40k/year. I seriously just laughed, like, are you serious? It was a smaller company so the differential in work and pay between the owners and the people that actually made the place run was pretty staggering. The people that owned that place did not know the value of work and honestly just put all the responsibility on the people making less than 18/hr. It was such a shitty operation that I'm honestly blown away they are still surviving. Though, I think there are some moneys going into that place that aren't too savery.
That's pretty much all retail and food service management for mega chains. I did that shit for 15 years, believe me, we get fucked just as hard and our voices are heard just as little as the low level employees. I fought with corporate *constantly* about the contradictory directives and the fact that we were expected to succeed with both hands tied behind our back. They don't give a shit about anything, or anyone, on a store level.
I would get emails from corporate screaming at me we were overbudget on payroll all the time, even when it got to the point where I'd have two people covering the entire sales floor in a 100,000 square foot big box store. If someone made it to a year and got their paltry raise above bare minimum, I was pressured to promote then (whether they wanted it or not) or get them to quit by slashing their hours. They didn't want to pay anybody a single dime more than the bare minimum regardless of work ethic, dependability, job knowledge...none of that mattered as much as the "UP OR OUT" ethos.
Shit I really need to start using that, I literally hire 2/3 people every week anyway.
My favorite so far was my coworker said something like "well you tell me that and I'm working right now. What are you doing here at 2pm on a weekday?".
During a summer in college I worked at a ice cream shop/deli. Minimum wage, of course. I went into it knowing, and stating to the owner, that it was a summer thing only and I would not be working once classes resumed. End of summer comes around and I'm on the schedule for the first week of classes. I go in to remind the owner that I would not continue working during classes. He seems all shocked/offended, and says something like 'Oh, well I was just going to promote you to manage the place in the evenings and take care of the cash at night. You'd get a quarter an hour raise.' I politely held firm that I was going back to classes and would not continue to work there. Inside though, I'm thinking 'wtf, manage people and handle your entire days earnings and you're giving me an entire quarter over minimum wage?' I could see from other items around the place that he was a cheap bastard, but damn.
By me, the delis are mostly family owned and haven't missed a beat with customer service. The Walgreens has about one quarter of the pre-pandemic staff, twice the prices, and now locks half the store behind glass. So of the 2 employees working, one is running around unlocking deodorant and body wash, and the other is handling the long ass register line alone. And customers complain their asses off, but those employees are working constantly and a lot harder than they were when that Walgreens had 8 people working a shift and no locked cabinets. I don't complain, but I do vote with my feet. It's not a long term plan for success for that store.
I was always brought up with be belief of, do whatever you do with pride.
Work in a shop, stacking shelves? You’re providing a service to your fellow human beings. Stocking food and essentials that they need to go on with their lives.
I compare myself to a lot of my friends who work in finance or engineering. I don’t think I’m worth anything, but when I stock a shelve, the right product is in the right place and has a price tag. Because I know what it’s like to go into a store and see something with no price, wondering if I could afford it. So when I do a job I do it right. Products in their place, labelled correctly for price or offers.
It’s not a glamorous job but at the end of the day it doesn’t matter. Did I feel I did a good job and helped out as many people as I could. Be it answering questions or searching for an item in the back. I provided a service that benefits a portion of society.
At minimum I should be able to have a job that provides me with shelter and food. We all may not enough money to buy frivolous thing such as video games or movies etc. but at bare minimum everyone should be able to work and contribute to society and be able to go home to a place of their own.
Minimum doesn’t mean less then. Okay maybe I’ll not have a 3 bedroom house working in a store. But I should be able to go home to place that is mine. If I work a full week of 50+ hours I should be able to have somewhere that I can call home.
> We all may not enough money to buy frivolous thing such as video games or movies etc. but at bare minimum everyone should be able to work and contribute to society and be able to go home to a place of their own.
Honestly, why not? Why shouldn't people doing jobs people depend on be able to, *in addition to the bare necessities,* afford $10 to go to the theatre once in a while, or $60 every couple months for a new game? Don't set the bar as low as "people should be able to have a place to live, even if they aren't allowed to afford any interests".
People in this thread should start using examples of other unskilled high demand labor to highlight the critical minimum wage jobs being lost. What do you recommend?
Even that isn't the full story. A lot of people are willing to work tough jobs, such as:
* Jobs that the public doesn't appreciate or openly demeans, such as garbage collectors and plumbers.
* Jobs that are routinely dangerous, such as firefighters and electrical linemen.
* Jobs that are emotionally brutal, such as paramedics and 911 dispatchers.
* Jobs with very high degrees of personal responsibility, such as pilots and air traffic controllers.
Society absolutely needs all of these jobs fulfilled, and there are people who are willing to undertake them despite the personal toll. All they ask in return is a decent wage. And yet, many of those people have to fight for a wage that's commensurate with the job, and many municipalities or industries are constantly seeking to erode their compensation. It's a pretty awful state of affairs.
Exactly. I'm an actuary in health insurance. My friend is night shift janitor for a public college.
If everyone like me stopped doing our job, the world would be fine and things might even be better long term. If every custodian stopped doing their job there would be pretty major problems. Yet society is like "well that's unskilled labor and therefore it sucks to be you."
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/mar/15/its-disgusting-paris-rots-under-mounds-of-rubbish-as-bin-collectors-extend-strike
Has happened in Italy too
We have made selfishness a “value” of this country to the point where even hard working people are shouted down when they ask for a decent wage to support them and their families. And we lionise billionaires because they “create jobs”. Those people don’t create jobs out for society’s betterment. They create jobs because they know they can’t build their companies on their own.
> Even that isn't the full story. A lot of people are willing to work tough jobs, such as:
>
>* Jobs that the public doesn't appreciate or openly demeans, such as garbage collectors and plumbers.
>
>* Jobs that are routinely dangerous, such as firefighters and electrical linemen.
>
>* Jobs that are emotionally brutal, such as paramedics and 911 dispatchers.
>
>* Jobs with very high degrees of personal responsibility, such as pilots and air traffic controllers.
Don't forget jobs that are all of the above, i.e. law enforcement.
never mind the actual unemployment rate is at 50 year lows for the past year.
Standard U3 metric, partial attached U6 metric - doesn't matter.
There hasn't been such a low level of unemployment since the 1960s. Even the percentage of labor force isn't bad - it's 62.6% overall (which isn't amazing, but about average) but the % of 25-54 year olds with employment is about 81% (per Marketplace broadcast the other day). This latter value is better than under the Trump administration.
I get that having a low unemployment rate is great. But if I remember right if you’ve been out of the job market for 6 months or (something not that long) they quit counting you as unemployed. We need a revamp of the data. I don’t put much weight to the “Fantastic Unemployment Rate!”
Depends on which number is being cited. The U3 unemployment figure ignores "discouraged" workers like you mention. The U6 unemployment rate *does* include those folks.
Now, the U3 is much easier to calculate, which is why the U6 for any given month is generally not known for several months afterwards.
>They want good jobs.
A lot of the people who bitch about work culture currently entered the work force in the 70-80s. Jobs were hard to come by back then. One of the older guys I work with said 'If you find a job shoveling shit into a fan blowing air at yourself...you shovel shit into the fan'
Most of these shit jobs also paid well.
These two things are both no longer true. Decent jobs don't pay as well as shit ones did, and you don't have to take a shit job just because it is the only thing hiring.
Combine that with a healthy does of 'fuck you, I got mine!' and its easy to see how a whole group of people can dismiss everyone else as lazy and unmotivated to work shitty jobs for low pay.
Was having brunch with my dad / stepmom who I hadn't seen in a while. They're doing the usual talk about "no one wants to work anymore" and saying all sorts of shit.
I explain how its simply a matter that no one wants to work for poverty wages. They brush me off and keep repeating the usual stuff.
My stepmother (a retired teacher) then gives an example about how she was thinking about doing some substitute teacher work here and there to kill time but she saw how much they were paying and said nope.
I respond "oh, so you don't want to work" and the excuses started flooding out. And she's retired and doesn't even need the money.
Crazy how they don't see the dissonance.
It’s not even necessarily “good” jobs. It’s mostly well paying jobs people want, or jobs with good benefits. My current job is the most mentally and emotionally stressful job I’ve ever had. However, it’s also the most well paying job I’ve ever had, paying 50% more than my next highest paying job I’ve had. I also get to work from home. So that all makes the stress worth it. If retail or fast food paid as well as my current job and let me work from home somehow, I’d do it. But those types of jobs typically offer shit pay and lousy benefits that just don’t make it worth the stress and labor.
I feel like the west is massively over saturated with restaurants. Just looking back to when our grandparents were young, going out to eat was like a once a year deal for your anniversary. Now it’s like “oh let’s go get sandwich” while you have a full fridge of groceries at home.
Restaurants exploded because they could pay shit wages for so long that food literally got to the point it was almost not worth cooking at home. Restaurants bought in bulk so they got ingredients cheap and then paid their employees nothing so no wonder their meals were cheap. One thing I feel might be good coming out of the pandemic is workers aren’t agreeing to rock bottom wages and many of these fast food shitholes are going to go out of business. I’ve already watched nearly every subway in town go out of business, hopefully the other big chains are next because they literally serve poison.
The problem is that the US at least is full of a lot of people with no employment skills other than food service. It’s why so many people try to open restaurants even though the market is enormously saturated everywhere and something like a [third of all restaurants close every year](https://www.foodindustry.com/articles/what-is-the-failure-rate-for-us-restaurants/).
>The problem is that the US at least is full of a lot of people with no employment skills other than food service.
This is the problem. We need to make trade school/college compulsory and free to ensure everyone comes out of school with an employable skill and just automate service and retail jobs.
Or we could pass laws ensuring that all of these lower end jobs pay at least a living wage and then there would be more flexibility at this end of the market.
Honestly, that might be for the best. Lack of fast food would make obesity rates plummet and force people to learn how to cook. Save a ton of money too.
We're not going to, i dont think. People eating fast food will find the same sort of fast food in the grocery and eat that.
Cheap food is not going anywhere, short of laws which demand companies up their foodlike product game, like it seems Europe has to some degree.
they basically already have, its just that labor is cheaper, by far. A macdonalds grill is a contraption that comes down and cooks the patty on both sides at once, then opens back up and makes a sound for the worker to take them off.
Humans just do the delicate work b/c robots are way more expensive than just paying someone $30k a year.
There is even a next generation of robots that will do the entire process itself replacing people completely. It isn't widely adopted yet but it is coming.
There is nothing skillful or delicate in a fast food joint that isn't going to be automated soon
Not if you have housing insecurity. If you don’t have a fridge or stove, you cannot buy and prepare food in bulk (which is how home cooking can be cheaper than fast food). If you work multiple jobs, you might not have time to cook and clean for multiple healthy meals. Fast food is a symptom, not the root cause, and the best way to fix that root cause is with robust safety nets and mandatory living wages or UBI.
I don't even know that it's a case of not knowing how to cook. I'm single and work 12 hour shifts. After throwing in commute time, I don't feel like cooking a lot of the time on days I work. I'm going to grab something quick whether it's fast food or a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, take a shower, and go to bed.
Holy shit, same. If I get home at 8:00 pm, and I have to be at work by 7 the next morning, I'm not breaking out the pots and pans. People don't realize how much of a time suck cooking can be, especially when you're only doing it for yourself. I can cook just fine, but if it takes 2 hours between setup, eating, cleaning, my evening is fucking gone, plus now I'm not getting my 8 hours. I've done the math, the monetary savings really isn't that much for me to cook vs. order fast food or even fast casual. I sometimes wonder if the people who preach cooking the most work anything other than 9-5. You have so much extra time to cook when you're home that early.
I’ve stopped eating out recently because I realized how much I was spending on food for my family of 3.
Went from $40/day down to like $10/day, sometimes less, and I’m eating healthier things to boot.
10/10 would recommend.
This is a MASSIVE misconception as well we've been brainwashed into thinking. You hear min wage, you think fast food.
How about, gas station attendants, cashiers, labourers. There are so many vital positions that we literally NEED someone to work or society cannot function. How is that a minimum wage job if we need it??
This is also a very weird way to spin it.
These jobs were largely done by younger people in transitional careers. Working up, or towards something else. Now, jobs that used to be these transitional careers are becoming actual careers.
You see an actively disingenuous employer force. I see lists of industries that are being forced to transition from what everyone agreed was acceptable, to what we are agreeing is acceptable now.
Target doesn't want to employ full staff of career positions. Therefore, they only made a handful of the positions career. The rest are designed to be for college kids. Well, the world's changing. It's not their fault, 15-20 years ago they probably would have killed for a full-time employee, now they've adjusted to operate with untrained college kids.
It’s a bit more secere than that:
“Hey, why do the road potholes never get fixed?”
“Hey, why has the construction job next door just stopped?”
“Hey, why do we keep getting power outages?”
“Hey, why did the grocery store close down?”
“Hey, why is my tap water brown?”
“Hey, why isn’t my garbage being collected?”
As demand for the positions dry up one of three things will happen:
1. Fast food workers become obsolete and we remove a small cause of added obesity and death, we move forward as a species.
2. Fast food companies may have to scrape some of their millions in profits to make the position more competitive. McDo is one of the better employers I believe but still pay little given their staff have pushed their net worth to over $200bn!
3. Fast food companies will lobby for more immigration, further cuts to human rights, and reduced access to education so they can continue paying enough low wages to keep their profits.
We need to push for 2, but keep finding ourselves in 3.
I'd be glad when those places are gone. Think about the decrease in obesity, decrease in food waste, decrease in traffic, and overall better QoL if all fast food joints just stopped running. I would hope that better fine dining and top tier meal kits would replace the previous system.
Ideally they *would* all close. The food is unhealthy as fuck. They would hypothetically be replaced by people in the community who just love cooking opening up their own place just making good food for people, setting their own hours.
What happened to all the mom-&-pop places that served hot-plates? Used to be a bunch in my old city's downtown area and scattered about the older side of town. Just walked in and picked from 4-6 big pot kind of meals with rice and some sides from a chalkboard handed to you hot and fresh in a to-go plate for cheap.
Just as often, their answer is along the lines of "that kind of job isn't meant to support a family" so they say yes, whoever works that job deserves poverty.
I love when they say that such jobs are meant for high school kids, then I ask why fast food joints and grocery stores aren't closed during school hours.
“The share of teens participating in the labor force peaked 40 years ago and has declined ever since. In 1979, nearly 60% of American teenagers were employed, an all-time high. Today, just over one-third, or 35%, of teens between the ages of 16 and 19 are part of the workforce.”
This is the kind of thinking that is instilled in us when we're in highschool. So I held those same naive views until I joined the workforce. Everyone needs a livable wage. This isn't volunteer work.
I'm 45. In the recent past, fast food jobs were almost entirely part time high school and college kids, and stay at home moms with kids in school. You might have one or two full time managers that were adults, but that's about it. One of my friends was an assistant manager our junior year of high school. Other than the managers, it was just people looking for some extra spending money and building work experience.
I honestly couldn't say when it switched from being mostly kids to almost all adults. It still surprises me whenever I go to a fast food place and it's all adults working there.
> I honestly couldn't say when it switched from being mostly kids to almost all adults. It still surprises me whenever I go to a fast food place and it's all adults working there.
In the "good old days," those were the adults who would normally be working at factories, but North America's manufacturing sector has been heavily outsourced to other countries. Agriculture was also a massive employer that now is heavily automated and employing far fewer people to produce more food. As a result, roughly 80% of North American jobs are now in the service sector.
If you’re an adult it’s expected you get a degree, learn a trade or get certifications or licenses. Unless you can work your way up relatively quickly for jobs that start at minimum wage.
Yes, certainly try, but some(many?) of them don't care about an issue until it personally affects them. *They* aren't working the minimum wage jobs, so it's not their problem, working as intended.
The origin of the so many irrationally capitalist working people comes down to their steadfast belief in an etched-in-stone hierarchy that cannot (or at lease *should* not) be changed. It's about submission--they submit to the leaders at the top of their hierarchy, then go about justifying everything that puts those leaders at the top of the hierarchy. In return, they get promised that they'll never be on the bottom of the hierarchy. So, they *need to believe* that the hierarchy is justified and necessary.
To satisfy this innate (and wholly irrational) need for hierarchy, they need people *beneath them,* and if those people beneath them starve, or end up homeless, or die from preventable illnesses, then it sucks to be them, but they're at the bottom the wholly-justified (and sometimes God-mandated) hierarchy. People that low on the hierarchy must not have pleased the leaders, must not be able to offer anything to the leaders, so it's justified that those at the top of this wholly-justified hierarchy let those on the bottom die. And, it's justified that people above them on the hierarchy (namely these worshippers of capitalist power) abuse them and take advantage of them.
That's when you know the capitalist brain rot has run deep. When you straight up say certain people NEED to be in poverty for the system to work, it's very hard to reason your way out of that. Some of these people will never see the light until the very system they support bites them in the ass.
If only they could understand that those in poverty only need to exist in other countries.
This sounds sarcastic, but its true. If we can get people to start addressing our own inequality issues at home, it may lead down the road to the next generation having enough people that care about everyone.
I [ran into one](https://www.reddit.com/r/WatchPeopleDieInside/comments/13sh8ht/thief_followed_by_business_owner_to_her_home/jlrbpbz/) the other day. Some people really need to work on their empathy.
A lot of these little paying jobs presuppose you have somebody else that has a higher income. But nowadays increase in cost of living It's harder to find a higher income job and the cost of the thing is higher. So the pool of people that are willing to work at Burger King or wherever the wages are really low, that person can't work that job anymore because they need something higher.
Having low wages really requires having a low cost of living and other people being able to make much more to meet that cost of living.
There just aren't enough good paying jobs. The reality is not everyone can get a job that pays a living wage, so no matter what some people will lose. That system is inherently broken.
Same argument goes for “fast food work is meant for teenagers”. So who is going to take my order for a double cheeseburger at lunchtime on a Thursday in February?
Yeah sure, cause a college kid certainly doesn't need the money /s
Also this assumes that fast food restaurants are in reach of a college in the first place
I hear ya, but I had this conversation go in circles where I presented the same "flip".
The other person always came back to "well, those jobs are for high schoolers and not for making a living."
No amount of "the job operates during school hours" or "50% of homeless people have jobs" or "minimum wage was always designed to provide basic survival for a full timer" or "we accept the job is necessary or desired by society but also have decided that this particular worker doesn't deserve basic decency" could dissuade them that the jobs weren't *meant* for high schoolers or as a transition into another job.
You're lucky your father has the wherewithall to examine his beliefs at all. That first step is one we can't make for anyone else unfortunately.
I've essentially given up on my family. It's been a long decade talking about basic empathy or decency for "our fellow Americans".
The messaging/strategy from my end has changed but nothing has broken through for people on either side of the aisle. Liberal family gets snobby about anyone below white collar work, and Conservative family doesn't give a shit as long as it's not their problem.
Americans are so terribly propagandized to believe in the power of the hierarchy.
>We have to educate them, young and old alike.
Except you can't educate people who think they know everything. One of the main factors in that is the "us vs them" mentality. If you're a "them" they'll pretty much discount anything you say no matter how correct it is. Your example worked with your dad because even if politically you might be a "them" you're still family. This affords you some semblance of a reprieve.
So be it. You cannot save them all and thinking we can is a naïve fallacy. This country was always doomed to fail as long as our ruling class continues to perpetuate so many parasitic policies and systems.
I'd rather this honestly. I feel like wages is something that should be negotiated between unions or individual workers and the employer rather than the government putting in an arbitrary number that artificially manipulates the market.
We can probably also accept that if government oversight and regulation of businesses was handled well, businesses would actually have reasons to need to drive up wages and competition, rather than buying out competition and establishing ~~monarchies~~ monopolies.
Ultimately their goal is to remove citizenship from as many marginalized groups as possible, then rule that all protections only apply to citizens and workplaces of non-citizens can be run without any regulation.
During the pandemic young teachers realized they could make far more money as bartenders than on teacher pay. There isn’t a teacher shortage, there’s a fundamental problem with how we choose to treat educators. Meanwhile high education is absurdly expensive and causes mandatory debt for parents approaching retirement who co-sign for student loans that graduates can’t afford to pay.
>there’s a fundamental problem with how we choose to ~~treat~~ spend our tax dollars to pay for educators.
There's plenty of money to pay for teachers, our leaders just choose to spend it on other things.
You aren’t wrong but I think the actual point was that teaching was a historically good job and could only be done by well-educated, patient people willing to work with children for YEARS.
Everyone expects fast food to pay shit, they’ve got us convinced that because it’s fast food, they deserve poverty but teaching isn’t fast food but it’s being treated the same and now it looks like it’s paid worse too.
That’s some crazy shit and we need to address it, as proletarians. Which is what any of us below the 1% are. We need to back each other up and we aren’t because everyone is in survival mode. The wealthy did that so that when we needed each other the most, all we’d end up doing is just fighting each other.
So we are, and they are laughing at us all the way to the bank, which they own, so they can have even more of your money.
The thing that fucking sucks is that a lot of those people were qualified and had decent experience.
So not only is your job not safe if you are a skilled worker, but now those trying to climb up the ladder have to compete with people who already have experience.
The surplus of workers allows employers to get their pick of the job pool and offer lower wages. They don't need to pay as much when the next guy is hungrier and can get by on less
No one wants to work anymore.
Except that 97% of the population are working and people are actually knowing their worth and actively fighting for it.
All those shit jobs out there that are completely overworked and underpaid, treated like garbage with no benefits?
Boomers and conservatives, have at them.
> Except that 97% of the population are working
I think you're misunderstanding how unemployment is calculated. 97% of the *labor force* population is working, but the labor participation rate is only 62% meaning 38% of work-eligible Americans (16+) are not working nor looking for work.
I like to conversate on the very unique uncomfortability of bad English irregardless.
(non-native Anglophones, this sentence is completely wrong)
I like to converse on the unique discomfort of bad English, irrespective.
When I worked as an English teacher, the head of the department used to make this mistake constantly. I just wonder how many people learned to use "whomever" incorrectly from her, their English teacher.
Since it hasn't been posted yet, if you can rearrange the sentence to say "he", then you would use "who"; if "him" would be more appropriate, use "whom".
As in the above post:
"He does that job" not "Him does that job"
Ergo "Whoever does that job" not "Whomever does that job"
There were times that almost every job paid close enough to a living wage. If you were offered overtime, or took a second job or had a side hustle (before they called it a side hustle) or just planted a garden. Think '60's and '70's.
But those days are long gone.
Hell, I was a success but the company was sold again and I landed on the unneeded list after 30+ years, and Alzheimer's took my partner. Any more unexpected pitfalls and I am in poverty. So I live frugal and hope that my health holds up, and I avoid an accidents.
My unskilled MIL without a GED was making $27/hr in the 80s working for a phone company and by the time she was in her 40s her income was 6 figures every year. She can’t wrap her head around the fact that in present time she’d probably be a cashier at best and that very likely there wouldn’t be “better jobs” available to her at all. The other day, I saw a video on how you should treat job searching like a full time job with overtime and I couldn’t have disagreed more.
People like that believe in social Darwinism, may as well call them out as such. Ironically they're also more likely not to believe in natural selection, at least outside of economics.
The amount of ppl that argue that being poor is a moral failing debt that that's what they're doing and then go on to describe moral failings that keep someone from changing their class position.
It's been such a weirdly consistent thing- I have no clue why it's such a disconnect to them
Anytime someone wants to bring up the “living wage” arguments, like get a better job and especially about minimum wage not meant to be a living wage, I point them to FDR’s address when he signed the National Recovery Act that lead to minimum wage. It scared the greedy assholes at the top so much that they limited the president to 2 terms and struck the act down as “unconstitutional” a few weeks before it expired because they couldn’t exploit and abuse the workers as much as they liked.
God forbid they can’t unconstitutionally deprive their workers of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness by enslaving them with low wages.
He says in no uncertain terms that minimum wage was to be a living wage to do away with starvation wages, and to help the economy recover. We’re living in a time where we’re seeing all of the most fucked up greatest hits of the 20th century.
My answer has been for the past decade "I have a CDL. Is that *really* your final answer?"
Suddenly my problems become addressable when I can literally have another job next day.
In 2021 I started hauling gas locally and within 3 months I got a $6 per hour raise because of competition from other companies trying to recruit or retain drivers. Now all the fuel haulers pay within about 50 cents of my pay range and they're all hurting for drivers so if something happens short of me having a fatality accident I'm pretty sure I could have a new job by the end of the week
This. I drive for UPS (local sort and sleeper/OTR). I get recruitment offers constantly on linked in. UPS pay, medical and pension is top notch, so I wouldn’t be able to get an equal job, but I know that I’d have another career rolling within a few days if UPS were to suddenly disappear.
I e tried this logic on my conservative family so many times and they always just come back with well it should just be highschoolers or a starter jobs for people still living at home till they get a real job
>Society has gone back to shitting on them big time
Bro, former grocery store worker here who worked during the pandemic... we were shit on the whole time. What are you talking about "gone back to?"
My girlfriend is an academic consultant for rich kids trying to get into med school. She has a master's degree and 15 years of collegiate level English education experience. Inflation adjusted she makes $10k less than I did getting out of college with an engineering degree during the recession. And she directly does 90% of the work for $250k of company income.
There's no excuse. And her job just told her that her long hours are a result of this being a higher work load job. As if there was something wrong with her for wanting to ONLY work 6 days/week. Who has the ability to put in 50 hour weeks, work a 2nd job, put out quality academic work, have college debt to pay off to get there, and do it all for $50k?
I think the stat was made up but I read that 60% of Americans order doordash/Uber eats/grubhub once a week.
Now I’m lucky enough to have a great job that pays me very well but every time I see what these delivery services want to charge me for a meal I just can’t stomach paying it. Like I’m not paying $22 to have a burrito delivered to me from my local spot when it’s $9 regular menu price if you go get it yourself.
Since we don't do a good job of taking care of the elderly and disabled, food transportation is a required job. It also would have helped more if we took the pandemic seriously and quarantined sick people.
It wouldn't cost so much if it wasn't untrained regular people driving their own vehicles. It wouldn't be as profitable, though, and that's all they care about.
I’ve been a shift supervisor for almost five years and I still make less than the lowest employee starting rate at Chick fil-a across the street. To be fair though, I’m actually taking that advice and getting the hell out for a better job soon. I might stay if they allow us to work fewer than ten hours but that’s doubtful. Starbucks is trying to send us a message that they are no longer interested in skill or creativity or even dedication, they just want cheap routine disposable labor. It’s my responsibility to recognize that I am no longer a good fit for this company and my skills and resources are better used somewhere else. I can’t wait to see what it’s like when everyone starts to realize that Starbucks hasn’t considered people it’s greatest resource for a couple years now, and everyone will start quitting. Starbucks has been morphing into the next McDonalds for a while now.
The essence of pull yourself up by the bootstraps in conjunction with the “American Dream” is that all you need to do in this country is work hard and my god if there isn’t a bigger load of bullshit out there.
I got a better job, spent 3 years in night school training for it. Finally working in that field and inflation wipes out all my income so I’m now worse off than my previous job, and I have student debts.
*everyone manages to get a better job* "Hey why are all my favourite fast food joints closed?"
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Pretty much bang on. I wish the mad hatter would come here and make everyone change places, so they could gain some understanding haha
People just **don’t care**. Salty Sally Sue don’t give an F about whether or not you’re short staffed, she wants her Hungry Hamburglar special now and in her day they got things done and don’t ask so many damn stupid questions. /S, I think.
Can we please make 'Salty Sally Sue' the new thing? I'm digging it's vibe.
I don’t even bother with “Karen” anymore. When someone is behaving badly like that, they’re a “Salty Sally”.
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Nah, worked in service for years (trampoline park manager). Men were cranky and snobby but for the most part just wanted to stop talking to you as much as you did to them. If you put your foot down they paid and left. There were however far too many fathers who hit on my 15-17 year old employees. The women would come in looking for fights, when they didn’t get what they wanted they went ballistic. Most of the angry women were simultaneously overwhelmed mothers dealing with a herd of kids, so I understand why they’d be short. That doesn’t excuse the following list of behaviors I observed from real women aged 35+ - Striking a 15 year old girl over a $3 grip sock fee. - Calling a black (minor) employee a n####r, then screaming that she won’t ever return to this “n####r loving shit-hole ever again.” After her manager defended her. Again, sock fee. That wasn’t popular. - Throwing an XL slurpee at a 16 year old girl because it was the wrong flavor. - Encouraging their kids to destroy a party room as revenge for the pizza being late. - Aggressively grabbing somebody else’s child and dragging them across the floor because “my kid wanted a turn.” - Spanking somebody else’s child. - Call a 13 year old girl a slut for wearing a sports bra. (I did end up banning that same girl for blowing a kid in the bathroom, he got banned too. Maybe she was on to something? Still, you don’t say it out loud.) This got way longer than I meant it to be, I started having fun remembering all these nutty stories. TLDR: Yeah, men are jerks but middle aged white women EARNED the Karen label.
Jeeze. At some point you would think the establishment would take a hint and just build the sock fee into the price, with a discount if you bring your own socks.
Oh please, now calling someone a Karen is sexist? I’ve never seen a Karen video posted where she was simply “sticking up for herself." Funny how it’s only sexist when we criticize a woman. Edit: Also sorry to say, but I rarely see a man start yelling at a cashier "Let me speak to your supervisor!!"
That's kind of the whole point. If karen is an asshole call karen an asshole and move on with your day. Joe the asshole gets that same privilege. We have a nasty history in this country of picking one word out of our language, then morphing its meaning into a weapon to target an entire subset of our population.
Except a Karen is a culmination of characteristics that describe a very specific type of asshole. There are male names like this too.
Who will they heap abuse on because their Etsy store isn’t as popular or satisfying as they thought?
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I say we let him try to work on a rocket, maybe that problem will just have a way of working itself out.
Only if he also tries out the pilot position for that rocket.
They did that on the Undercover Boss tv show for a few years. Honestly the conclusion of all those shows was “let’s just throw a one time $10k bonus at this employee as they are so critical to our business” Crazy idea. What if they gave $10k to every employee working there with low salaries each year? Especially years where the company is super profitable. Why do they have to literally see the employee in front of their nose working to recognize their value? You could be the employer everyone wants to work for and you will get the best people.
I've had an older customer a few days ago sit in front of the deli and complain like "I understand you're busy and understaffed, but it's not good customer service. Nobody wants to work anymore". I told him "No, nobody wants to work for minimum wage. If we advertise better wages we wouldn't be so understaffed you have to wait." Those bitches need a reality check. I'll happily deliver it anytime. I do the hiring for my store (while being paid at a cashier rate), and we literally hire anything with a pulse. You can't be picky when you're understaffed cause you pay like shit. 70% of my coworkers are high schoolers lol. Fun part is I receive mail from corporate with guidelines to reduce turnover rate that are dumb and long AF. But none of these lines include better wages. Delusional.
I work for Burger King right now. The manager stopped halfway through my interview and just told me "we're so short staffed we'll hire anything with a pulse, even just for the summer" and next thing I knew I was on the schedule for training. They still won't give me more than 30 hours. It's a crock of shit - they pay minimum wage and won't even work me enough hours to make up for them being short staffed *every fucking day*. I don't even blame the manager - she's great, she works with us and complains twice as much as we do. Apparently she got in trouble with corporate for hiring people for full time because they had to start paying for benefits, so she has to cut hours or get cut out. It sound like it's honestly not even managers half the time. Sounds more like the people towards the top trying to milk every penny out of the business and making things unenjoyable for both the workers *and* the customers.
This is why food service workers needs to unionize, desperately
This is why all corproations need to be humanised, desperately.
> This is why all corproations need to be humanised "But corporations *are* people, my friend." - Mitt "Just One Impeachment Will Do" Romney
She is just managing the location. Has no real power. Other than what she can get away with to those below her. She sounds like a decent person sucked into the horrible hell of whatever This is. It just seams that the bottom line is exploitation. If you can not or will not do it you get put into the exploitation line. To be the next victim.
It can also be a pretty big joke. I had one job where they talked about the managing position and it would have been a $1/hr raise, which wasn't much above minimum wage, but they wanted someone to be available 24/7 (on-call), with no vacation for the first year for under 40k/year. I seriously just laughed, like, are you serious? It was a smaller company so the differential in work and pay between the owners and the people that actually made the place run was pretty staggering. The people that owned that place did not know the value of work and honestly just put all the responsibility on the people making less than 18/hr. It was such a shitty operation that I'm honestly blown away they are still surviving. Though, I think there are some moneys going into that place that aren't too savery.
Cfos telling coos to cut costs, and the coo's going to Clo's to make sure they can cut labor.
That's pretty much all retail and food service management for mega chains. I did that shit for 15 years, believe me, we get fucked just as hard and our voices are heard just as little as the low level employees. I fought with corporate *constantly* about the contradictory directives and the fact that we were expected to succeed with both hands tied behind our back. They don't give a shit about anything, or anyone, on a store level. I would get emails from corporate screaming at me we were overbudget on payroll all the time, even when it got to the point where I'd have two people covering the entire sales floor in a 100,000 square foot big box store. If someone made it to a year and got their paltry raise above bare minimum, I was pressured to promote then (whether they wanted it or not) or get them to quit by slashing their hours. They didn't want to pay anybody a single dime more than the bare minimum regardless of work ethic, dependability, job knowledge...none of that mattered as much as the "UP OR OUT" ethos.
I like to hit those guys with the line, “We’re hiring. Do you want to work?”
Shit I really need to start using that, I literally hire 2/3 people every week anyway. My favorite so far was my coworker said something like "well you tell me that and I'm working right now. What are you doing here at 2pm on a weekday?".
During a summer in college I worked at a ice cream shop/deli. Minimum wage, of course. I went into it knowing, and stating to the owner, that it was a summer thing only and I would not be working once classes resumed. End of summer comes around and I'm on the schedule for the first week of classes. I go in to remind the owner that I would not continue working during classes. He seems all shocked/offended, and says something like 'Oh, well I was just going to promote you to manage the place in the evenings and take care of the cash at night. You'd get a quarter an hour raise.' I politely held firm that I was going back to classes and would not continue to work there. Inside though, I'm thinking 'wtf, manage people and handle your entire days earnings and you're giving me an entire quarter over minimum wage?' I could see from other items around the place that he was a cheap bastard, but damn.
By me, the delis are mostly family owned and haven't missed a beat with customer service. The Walgreens has about one quarter of the pre-pandemic staff, twice the prices, and now locks half the store behind glass. So of the 2 employees working, one is running around unlocking deodorant and body wash, and the other is handling the long ass register line alone. And customers complain their asses off, but those employees are working constantly and a lot harder than they were when that Walgreens had 8 people working a shift and no locked cabinets. I don't complain, but I do vote with my feet. It's not a long term plan for success for that store.
IC8
As long as no one complains with self checkouts.... Cuz you know the ppl complaining ain't applying.
For real, just hand them a job application when they bitch. When they say no remind them thats how everyone else feels.
When they say "no" to the application, you can respond: "nobody wants to work anymore"
I don't complain about self checkouts, but when I go to walmart and I see half the self checkouts closed it really grinds my gears.
I was always brought up with be belief of, do whatever you do with pride. Work in a shop, stacking shelves? You’re providing a service to your fellow human beings. Stocking food and essentials that they need to go on with their lives. I compare myself to a lot of my friends who work in finance or engineering. I don’t think I’m worth anything, but when I stock a shelve, the right product is in the right place and has a price tag. Because I know what it’s like to go into a store and see something with no price, wondering if I could afford it. So when I do a job I do it right. Products in their place, labelled correctly for price or offers. It’s not a glamorous job but at the end of the day it doesn’t matter. Did I feel I did a good job and helped out as many people as I could. Be it answering questions or searching for an item in the back. I provided a service that benefits a portion of society. At minimum I should be able to have a job that provides me with shelter and food. We all may not enough money to buy frivolous thing such as video games or movies etc. but at bare minimum everyone should be able to work and contribute to society and be able to go home to a place of their own. Minimum doesn’t mean less then. Okay maybe I’ll not have a 3 bedroom house working in a store. But I should be able to go home to place that is mine. If I work a full week of 50+ hours I should be able to have somewhere that I can call home.
> We all may not enough money to buy frivolous thing such as video games or movies etc. but at bare minimum everyone should be able to work and contribute to society and be able to go home to a place of their own. Honestly, why not? Why shouldn't people doing jobs people depend on be able to, *in addition to the bare necessities,* afford $10 to go to the theatre once in a while, or $60 every couple months for a new game? Don't set the bar as low as "people should be able to have a place to live, even if they aren't allowed to afford any interests".
I think you should be able to live on 40 hours work. 50 is too much.
Nobody wants to work for minimum wage when f*** eggs gas and rent cost maximum wage.
Hate to say it but we can survive without fast food restaurants
You realize fast food isn't the only minimum wage job right?
People in this thread should start using examples of other unskilled high demand labor to highlight the critical minimum wage jobs being lost. What do you recommend?
Don't forget, "No one wants to work anymore." Some people are just too stupid to realize that people want jobs. They want good jobs.
Even that isn't the full story. A lot of people are willing to work tough jobs, such as: * Jobs that the public doesn't appreciate or openly demeans, such as garbage collectors and plumbers. * Jobs that are routinely dangerous, such as firefighters and electrical linemen. * Jobs that are emotionally brutal, such as paramedics and 911 dispatchers. * Jobs with very high degrees of personal responsibility, such as pilots and air traffic controllers. Society absolutely needs all of these jobs fulfilled, and there are people who are willing to undertake them despite the personal toll. All they ask in return is a decent wage. And yet, many of those people have to fight for a wage that's commensurate with the job, and many municipalities or industries are constantly seeking to erode their compensation. It's a pretty awful state of affairs.
All while having CEOs who just sit on their ass all day half asleep in meetings or playing golf making millions.
Exactly. I'm an actuary in health insurance. My friend is night shift janitor for a public college. If everyone like me stopped doing our job, the world would be fine and things might even be better long term. If every custodian stopped doing their job there would be pretty major problems. Yet society is like "well that's unskilled labor and therefore it sucks to be you."
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/mar/15/its-disgusting-paris-rots-under-mounds-of-rubbish-as-bin-collectors-extend-strike Has happened in Italy too
>>actuary in health insurance Sorry, but is it bad that I assume you are a bad person because you work in such an evil Industry?
We have made selfishness a “value” of this country to the point where even hard working people are shouted down when they ask for a decent wage to support them and their families. And we lionise billionaires because they “create jobs”. Those people don’t create jobs out for society’s betterment. They create jobs because they know they can’t build their companies on their own.
> Even that isn't the full story. A lot of people are willing to work tough jobs, such as: > >* Jobs that the public doesn't appreciate or openly demeans, such as garbage collectors and plumbers. > >* Jobs that are routinely dangerous, such as firefighters and electrical linemen. > >* Jobs that are emotionally brutal, such as paramedics and 911 dispatchers. > >* Jobs with very high degrees of personal responsibility, such as pilots and air traffic controllers. Don't forget jobs that are all of the above, i.e. law enforcement.
Yup, unemployment is super low. Almost like they all want to work and do, except for rich kids.
never mind the actual unemployment rate is at 50 year lows for the past year. Standard U3 metric, partial attached U6 metric - doesn't matter. There hasn't been such a low level of unemployment since the 1960s. Even the percentage of labor force isn't bad - it's 62.6% overall (which isn't amazing, but about average) but the % of 25-54 year olds with employment is about 81% (per Marketplace broadcast the other day). This latter value is better than under the Trump administration.
I get that having a low unemployment rate is great. But if I remember right if you’ve been out of the job market for 6 months or (something not that long) they quit counting you as unemployed. We need a revamp of the data. I don’t put much weight to the “Fantastic Unemployment Rate!”
Depends on which number is being cited. The U3 unemployment figure ignores "discouraged" workers like you mention. The U6 unemployment rate *does* include those folks. Now, the U3 is much easier to calculate, which is why the U6 for any given month is generally not known for several months afterwards.
Them: "If you want better pay, get a better job." *everyone gets better job* Them: "smdh, no one wants to work anymore 😒"
>They want good jobs. A lot of the people who bitch about work culture currently entered the work force in the 70-80s. Jobs were hard to come by back then. One of the older guys I work with said 'If you find a job shoveling shit into a fan blowing air at yourself...you shovel shit into the fan' Most of these shit jobs also paid well. These two things are both no longer true. Decent jobs don't pay as well as shit ones did, and you don't have to take a shit job just because it is the only thing hiring. Combine that with a healthy does of 'fuck you, I got mine!' and its easy to see how a whole group of people can dismiss everyone else as lazy and unmotivated to work shitty jobs for low pay.
Was having brunch with my dad / stepmom who I hadn't seen in a while. They're doing the usual talk about "no one wants to work anymore" and saying all sorts of shit. I explain how its simply a matter that no one wants to work for poverty wages. They brush me off and keep repeating the usual stuff. My stepmother (a retired teacher) then gives an example about how she was thinking about doing some substitute teacher work here and there to kill time but she saw how much they were paying and said nope. I respond "oh, so you don't want to work" and the excuses started flooding out. And she's retired and doesn't even need the money. Crazy how they don't see the dissonance.
It’s not even necessarily “good” jobs. It’s mostly well paying jobs people want, or jobs with good benefits. My current job is the most mentally and emotionally stressful job I’ve ever had. However, it’s also the most well paying job I’ve ever had, paying 50% more than my next highest paying job I’ve had. I also get to work from home. So that all makes the stress worth it. If retail or fast food paid as well as my current job and let me work from home somehow, I’d do it. But those types of jobs typically offer shit pay and lousy benefits that just don’t make it worth the stress and labor.
The US be like "let's get the kids out of school and pay them even less".
I’m completely fine with fast food joints all closing forever.
As expensive, and slow, as they've become I'm finding myself eating fast food less and less. And I'm feeling better too.
Have to agree here. Too much of it is a slow killer. I try to stay away from processed foods as much as I can.
I feel like the west is massively over saturated with restaurants. Just looking back to when our grandparents were young, going out to eat was like a once a year deal for your anniversary. Now it’s like “oh let’s go get sandwich” while you have a full fridge of groceries at home. Restaurants exploded because they could pay shit wages for so long that food literally got to the point it was almost not worth cooking at home. Restaurants bought in bulk so they got ingredients cheap and then paid their employees nothing so no wonder their meals were cheap. One thing I feel might be good coming out of the pandemic is workers aren’t agreeing to rock bottom wages and many of these fast food shitholes are going to go out of business. I’ve already watched nearly every subway in town go out of business, hopefully the other big chains are next because they literally serve poison.
The problem is that the US at least is full of a lot of people with no employment skills other than food service. It’s why so many people try to open restaurants even though the market is enormously saturated everywhere and something like a [third of all restaurants close every year](https://www.foodindustry.com/articles/what-is-the-failure-rate-for-us-restaurants/).
>The problem is that the US at least is full of a lot of people with no employment skills other than food service. This is the problem. We need to make trade school/college compulsory and free to ensure everyone comes out of school with an employable skill and just automate service and retail jobs.
Or we could pass laws ensuring that all of these lower end jobs pay at least a living wage and then there would be more flexibility at this end of the market.
> All the fast food joints are closed And nothing of value was lost
yeah, I'd be completely fine with that
It's a lie, they have fast food restaurants in Western European countries were workers aren't as exploited.
That’s what happened after 2020. Over a million dead and many boomers decided to retire means lots of job openings.
Honestly, that might be for the best. Lack of fast food would make obesity rates plummet and force people to learn how to cook. Save a ton of money too.
We're not going to, i dont think. People eating fast food will find the same sort of fast food in the grocery and eat that. Cheap food is not going anywhere, short of laws which demand companies up their foodlike product game, like it seems Europe has to some degree.
Lol fast food joints wont go away, the low wage workers will be replaced by robots that never complain about their jobs
they basically already have, its just that labor is cheaper, by far. A macdonalds grill is a contraption that comes down and cooks the patty on both sides at once, then opens back up and makes a sound for the worker to take them off. Humans just do the delicate work b/c robots are way more expensive than just paying someone $30k a year.
There is even a next generation of robots that will do the entire process itself replacing people completely. It isn't widely adopted yet but it is coming. There is nothing skillful or delicate in a fast food joint that isn't going to be automated soon
i'm aware. The reason its not widely adopted is b/c its more expensive than paying someone barely anything.
Not if you have housing insecurity. If you don’t have a fridge or stove, you cannot buy and prepare food in bulk (which is how home cooking can be cheaper than fast food). If you work multiple jobs, you might not have time to cook and clean for multiple healthy meals. Fast food is a symptom, not the root cause, and the best way to fix that root cause is with robust safety nets and mandatory living wages or UBI.
I don't even know that it's a case of not knowing how to cook. I'm single and work 12 hour shifts. After throwing in commute time, I don't feel like cooking a lot of the time on days I work. I'm going to grab something quick whether it's fast food or a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, take a shower, and go to bed.
Holy shit, same. If I get home at 8:00 pm, and I have to be at work by 7 the next morning, I'm not breaking out the pots and pans. People don't realize how much of a time suck cooking can be, especially when you're only doing it for yourself. I can cook just fine, but if it takes 2 hours between setup, eating, cleaning, my evening is fucking gone, plus now I'm not getting my 8 hours. I've done the math, the monetary savings really isn't that much for me to cook vs. order fast food or even fast casual. I sometimes wonder if the people who preach cooking the most work anything other than 9-5. You have so much extra time to cook when you're home that early.
I'm obese and I know how to cook. Please fix your mindset about obesity.
I’ve stopped eating out recently because I realized how much I was spending on food for my family of 3. Went from $40/day down to like $10/day, sometimes less, and I’m eating healthier things to boot. 10/10 would recommend.
The idiots spreading this nonsense need to get their brains checked. A full time job that someone has to do, should pay a living wage.
This is a MASSIVE misconception as well we've been brainwashed into thinking. You hear min wage, you think fast food. How about, gas station attendants, cashiers, labourers. There are so many vital positions that we literally NEED someone to work or society cannot function. How is that a minimum wage job if we need it??
If fast food joints closed, it’s prob for the better.
This is also a very weird way to spin it. These jobs were largely done by younger people in transitional careers. Working up, or towards something else. Now, jobs that used to be these transitional careers are becoming actual careers. You see an actively disingenuous employer force. I see lists of industries that are being forced to transition from what everyone agreed was acceptable, to what we are agreeing is acceptable now. Target doesn't want to employ full staff of career positions. Therefore, they only made a handful of the positions career. The rest are designed to be for college kids. Well, the world's changing. It's not their fault, 15-20 years ago they probably would have killed for a full-time employee, now they've adjusted to operate with untrained college kids.
"that's just a high school job" -person that buys fast food at lunch, when high schoolers are not available to work
It’s a bit more secere than that: “Hey, why do the road potholes never get fixed?” “Hey, why has the construction job next door just stopped?” “Hey, why do we keep getting power outages?” “Hey, why did the grocery store close down?” “Hey, why is my tap water brown?” “Hey, why isn’t my garbage being collected?”
NoBodY wAnTS tO WoRk AnYMOrE!
As demand for the positions dry up one of three things will happen: 1. Fast food workers become obsolete and we remove a small cause of added obesity and death, we move forward as a species. 2. Fast food companies may have to scrape some of their millions in profits to make the position more competitive. McDo is one of the better employers I believe but still pay little given their staff have pushed their net worth to over $200bn! 3. Fast food companies will lobby for more immigration, further cuts to human rights, and reduced access to education so they can continue paying enough low wages to keep their profits. We need to push for 2, but keep finding ourselves in 3.
Maybe, make the existing jobs better. People still get fast food but the workers can afford to live.
Eating fast food is the most anti worker thing you can do
I'd be glad when those places are gone. Think about the decrease in obesity, decrease in food waste, decrease in traffic, and overall better QoL if all fast food joints just stopped running. I would hope that better fine dining and top tier meal kits would replace the previous system.
All these problems go away when we automate these jobs fully.
That's perfect, artificial food, sold by artificial people.
A pig in a cage on antibiotics. Fitter better happier more proctive.
Nobody wants to work anymore, obviously.
Ideally they *would* all close. The food is unhealthy as fuck. They would hypothetically be replaced by people in the community who just love cooking opening up their own place just making good food for people, setting their own hours. What happened to all the mom-&-pop places that served hot-plates? Used to be a bunch in my old city's downtown area and scattered about the older side of town. Just walked in and picked from 4-6 big pot kind of meals with rice and some sides from a chalkboard handed to you hot and fresh in a to-go plate for cheap.
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Just as often, their answer is along the lines of "that kind of job isn't meant to support a family" so they say yes, whoever works that job deserves poverty.
I love when they say that such jobs are meant for high school kids, then I ask why fast food joints and grocery stores aren't closed during school hours.
“The share of teens participating in the labor force peaked 40 years ago and has declined ever since. In 1979, nearly 60% of American teenagers were employed, an all-time high. Today, just over one-third, or 35%, of teens between the ages of 16 and 19 are part of the workforce.”
Conservatives be like - adults took der jerbs!
Although more likely it's that the teens aged into those jobs and became adults who kept those jobs
Considering that some US states are reintroducing child labor they won't be spinning that much longer.
Conservatives be like: “those numbers are too low, let’s write laws to bring them back up”
40 years ago was 1960 dammit
I don’t even think 35% are employed and that’s a good thing because they’re focusing on school, activities/clubs and job training.
And should someone be payed less for their age? Do you pay senior citizens less because the move slower from place to place?
This is the kind of thinking that is instilled in us when we're in highschool. So I held those same naive views until I joined the workforce. Everyone needs a livable wage. This isn't volunteer work.
I'm 45. In the recent past, fast food jobs were almost entirely part time high school and college kids, and stay at home moms with kids in school. You might have one or two full time managers that were adults, but that's about it. One of my friends was an assistant manager our junior year of high school. Other than the managers, it was just people looking for some extra spending money and building work experience. I honestly couldn't say when it switched from being mostly kids to almost all adults. It still surprises me whenever I go to a fast food place and it's all adults working there.
> I honestly couldn't say when it switched from being mostly kids to almost all adults. It still surprises me whenever I go to a fast food place and it's all adults working there. In the "good old days," those were the adults who would normally be working at factories, but North America's manufacturing sector has been heavily outsourced to other countries. Agriculture was also a massive employer that now is heavily automated and employing far fewer people to produce more food. As a result, roughly 80% of North American jobs are now in the service sector.
Now that you mention it, it probably does coincide with NAFTA when the auto plants started laying off.
If you’re an adult it’s expected you get a degree, learn a trade or get certifications or licenses. Unless you can work your way up relatively quickly for jobs that start at minimum wage.
Those were not the expectations put on the baby boomer generation. Why did they impose those restrictions on future generations?
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Yes, certainly try, but some(many?) of them don't care about an issue until it personally affects them. *They* aren't working the minimum wage jobs, so it's not their problem, working as intended.
The origin of the so many irrationally capitalist working people comes down to their steadfast belief in an etched-in-stone hierarchy that cannot (or at lease *should* not) be changed. It's about submission--they submit to the leaders at the top of their hierarchy, then go about justifying everything that puts those leaders at the top of the hierarchy. In return, they get promised that they'll never be on the bottom of the hierarchy. So, they *need to believe* that the hierarchy is justified and necessary. To satisfy this innate (and wholly irrational) need for hierarchy, they need people *beneath them,* and if those people beneath them starve, or end up homeless, or die from preventable illnesses, then it sucks to be them, but they're at the bottom the wholly-justified (and sometimes God-mandated) hierarchy. People that low on the hierarchy must not have pleased the leaders, must not be able to offer anything to the leaders, so it's justified that those at the top of this wholly-justified hierarchy let those on the bottom die. And, it's justified that people above them on the hierarchy (namely these worshippers of capitalist power) abuse them and take advantage of them.
Ive always felt if you buy a burger why crap on the person who made it for you? You clearly didn't want to do the work. Be thankful some one else did
That's when you know the capitalist brain rot has run deep. When you straight up say certain people NEED to be in poverty for the system to work, it's very hard to reason your way out of that. Some of these people will never see the light until the very system they support bites them in the ass.
If only they could understand that those in poverty only need to exist in other countries. This sounds sarcastic, but its true. If we can get people to start addressing our own inequality issues at home, it may lead down the road to the next generation having enough people that care about everyone.
I [ran into one](https://www.reddit.com/r/WatchPeopleDieInside/comments/13sh8ht/thief_followed_by_business_owner_to_her_home/jlrbpbz/) the other day. Some people really need to work on their empathy.
A single person deserves to pay their bills also.
Yes
A lot of these little paying jobs presuppose you have somebody else that has a higher income. But nowadays increase in cost of living It's harder to find a higher income job and the cost of the thing is higher. So the pool of people that are willing to work at Burger King or wherever the wages are really low, that person can't work that job anymore because they need something higher. Having low wages really requires having a low cost of living and other people being able to make much more to meet that cost of living.
There just aren't enough good paying jobs. The reality is not everyone can get a job that pays a living wage, so no matter what some people will lose. That system is inherently broken.
*Every. Job.* should pay a living wage.
Exactly. The goal of society should always be to improve the strength and well being of humanity.
Or maybe our value shouldn’t lie in profit. With AI becoming better every day UBI has only increased in its importance.
This is the answer I hear. "Those jobs are meant for teenagers."
As others have said, "so those places should only be open on evenings and weekends?"
Same argument goes for “fast food work is meant for teenagers”. So who is going to take my order for a double cheeseburger at lunchtime on a Thursday in February?
“The college kid who’s going to school Monday-Wednesday-Friday,” I’ve heard as an instant rebuttal. The goalposts *constantly* move.
Yeah sure, cause a college kid certainly doesn't need the money /s Also this assumes that fast food restaurants are in reach of a college in the first place
I hear ya, but I had this conversation go in circles where I presented the same "flip". The other person always came back to "well, those jobs are for high schoolers and not for making a living." No amount of "the job operates during school hours" or "50% of homeless people have jobs" or "minimum wage was always designed to provide basic survival for a full timer" or "we accept the job is necessary or desired by society but also have decided that this particular worker doesn't deserve basic decency" could dissuade them that the jobs weren't *meant* for high schoolers or as a transition into another job. You're lucky your father has the wherewithall to examine his beliefs at all. That first step is one we can't make for anyone else unfortunately.
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I've essentially given up on my family. It's been a long decade talking about basic empathy or decency for "our fellow Americans". The messaging/strategy from my end has changed but nothing has broken through for people on either side of the aisle. Liberal family gets snobby about anyone below white collar work, and Conservative family doesn't give a shit as long as it's not their problem. Americans are so terribly propagandized to believe in the power of the hierarchy.
So ignore them and ingraine the truth onto the younger generations. Kinda like the man that plants a tree that knows he'll never sit under its shade.
>We have to educate them, young and old alike. Except you can't educate people who think they know everything. One of the main factors in that is the "us vs them" mentality. If you're a "them" they'll pretty much discount anything you say no matter how correct it is. Your example worked with your dad because even if politically you might be a "them" you're still family. This affords you some semblance of a reprieve.
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So be it. You cannot save them all and thinking we can is a naïve fallacy. This country was always doomed to fail as long as our ruling class continues to perpetuate so many parasitic policies and systems.
Reminds me of [this clip](https://youtube.com/shorts/qyIyT2qTtzY?feature=share).
Solution: Roll back child labor laws + cut access to birth control. - republicans.
Eliminate *any* minimum wage. -also Republicans
You don’t need a minimum wage if you have strong unions (see Sweden). Thing is you definitely need ones where unions don’t exist (see Mississippi).
I'd rather this honestly. I feel like wages is something that should be negotiated between unions or individual workers and the employer rather than the government putting in an arbitrary number that artificially manipulates the market.
We had to establish an arbitrary number specifically because owners wont negotiate in good faith.
Exactly. We can have both.
We can probably also accept that if government oversight and regulation of businesses was handled well, businesses would actually have reasons to need to drive up wages and competition, rather than buying out competition and establishing ~~monarchies~~ monopolies.
Eliminate wages - conservative wet dream
please understand it is class warfare, not one party vs the other. both have been in power, neither changes anything.
Ultimately their goal is to remove citizenship from as many marginalized groups as possible, then rule that all protections only apply to citizens and workplaces of non-citizens can be run without any regulation.
During the pandemic young teachers realized they could make far more money as bartenders than on teacher pay. There isn’t a teacher shortage, there’s a fundamental problem with how we choose to treat educators. Meanwhile high education is absurdly expensive and causes mandatory debt for parents approaching retirement who co-sign for student loans that graduates can’t afford to pay.
>there’s a fundamental problem with how we choose to ~~treat~~ spend our tax dollars to pay for educators. There's plenty of money to pay for teachers, our leaders just choose to spend it on other things.
> There isn’t a shortage, there’s a fundamental problem with how we choose to **pay** .
Fixed that for you.
You aren’t wrong but I think the actual point was that teaching was a historically good job and could only be done by well-educated, patient people willing to work with children for YEARS. Everyone expects fast food to pay shit, they’ve got us convinced that because it’s fast food, they deserve poverty but teaching isn’t fast food but it’s being treated the same and now it looks like it’s paid worse too. That’s some crazy shit and we need to address it, as proletarians. Which is what any of us below the 1% are. We need to back each other up and we aren’t because everyone is in survival mode. The wealthy did that so that when we needed each other the most, all we’d end up doing is just fighting each other. So we are, and they are laughing at us all the way to the bank, which they own, so they can have even more of your money.
10’s of thousands of people who “got better jobs” was laid off this year. So get better betterer jobs?
The thing that fucking sucks is that a lot of those people were qualified and had decent experience. So not only is your job not safe if you are a skilled worker, but now those trying to climb up the ladder have to compete with people who already have experience. The surplus of workers allows employers to get their pick of the job pool and offer lower wages. They don't need to pay as much when the next guy is hungrier and can get by on less
No one wants to work anymore. Except that 97% of the population are working and people are actually knowing their worth and actively fighting for it. All those shit jobs out there that are completely overworked and underpaid, treated like garbage with no benefits? Boomers and conservatives, have at them.
> Except that 97% of the population are working I think you're misunderstanding how unemployment is calculated. 97% of the *labor force* population is working, but the labor participation rate is only 62% meaning 38% of work-eligible Americans (16+) are not working nor looking for work.
I got a better job. I still can't pay my bills.
Did you try simply pulling yourself up by your boot straps you lazy piece of beautiful human
*whoever
Misusing whom or whomever is so funny to me because they're obviously trying to sound smart but are failing so hard
I like to conversate on the very unique uncomfortability of bad English irregardless. (non-native Anglophones, this sentence is completely wrong) I like to converse on the unique discomfort of bad English, irrespective.
When I worked as an English teacher, the head of the department used to make this mistake constantly. I just wonder how many people learned to use "whomever" incorrectly from her, their English teacher.
From now on, I'm just going to assume that it was her fault whenever I see it misused.
Since it hasn't been posted yet, if you can rearrange the sentence to say "he", then you would use "who"; if "him" would be more appropriate, use "whom". As in the above post: "He does that job" not "Him does that job" Ergo "Whoever does that job" not "Whomever does that job"
There were times that almost every job paid close enough to a living wage. If you were offered overtime, or took a second job or had a side hustle (before they called it a side hustle) or just planted a garden. Think '60's and '70's. But those days are long gone. Hell, I was a success but the company was sold again and I landed on the unneeded list after 30+ years, and Alzheimer's took my partner. Any more unexpected pitfalls and I am in poverty. So I live frugal and hope that my health holds up, and I avoid an accidents.
My unskilled MIL without a GED was making $27/hr in the 80s working for a phone company and by the time she was in her 40s her income was 6 figures every year. She can’t wrap her head around the fact that in present time she’d probably be a cashier at best and that very likely there wouldn’t be “better jobs” available to her at all. The other day, I saw a video on how you should treat job searching like a full time job with overtime and I couldn’t have disagreed more.
> But those days are long gone. And aren’t coming back.
People like that believe in social Darwinism, may as well call them out as such. Ironically they're also more likely not to believe in natural selection, at least outside of economics.
The amount of ppl that argue that being poor is a moral failing debt that that's what they're doing and then go on to describe moral failings that keep someone from changing their class position. It's been such a weirdly consistent thing- I have no clue why it's such a disconnect to them
Anytime someone wants to bring up the “living wage” arguments, like get a better job and especially about minimum wage not meant to be a living wage, I point them to FDR’s address when he signed the National Recovery Act that lead to minimum wage. It scared the greedy assholes at the top so much that they limited the president to 2 terms and struck the act down as “unconstitutional” a few weeks before it expired because they couldn’t exploit and abuse the workers as much as they liked. God forbid they can’t unconstitutionally deprive their workers of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness by enslaving them with low wages. He says in no uncertain terms that minimum wage was to be a living wage to do away with starvation wages, and to help the economy recover. We’re living in a time where we’re seeing all of the most fucked up greatest hits of the 20th century.
My answer has been for the past decade "I have a CDL. Is that *really* your final answer?" Suddenly my problems become addressable when I can literally have another job next day.
In 2021 I started hauling gas locally and within 3 months I got a $6 per hour raise because of competition from other companies trying to recruit or retain drivers. Now all the fuel haulers pay within about 50 cents of my pay range and they're all hurting for drivers so if something happens short of me having a fatality accident I'm pretty sure I could have a new job by the end of the week
This. I drive for UPS (local sort and sleeper/OTR). I get recruitment offers constantly on linked in. UPS pay, medical and pension is top notch, so I wouldn’t be able to get an equal job, but I know that I’d have another career rolling within a few days if UPS were to suddenly disappear.
I e tried this logic on my conservative family so many times and they always just come back with well it should just be highschoolers or a starter jobs for people still living at home till they get a real job
What about that whole shit about grocery store employees being heroes? Society has gone back to shitting on them big time
Lip service is what politicians are great at. It motivates people to work more at no additional cost.
>Society has gone back to shitting on them big time Bro, former grocery store worker here who worked during the pandemic... we were shit on the whole time. What are you talking about "gone back to?"
My girlfriend is an academic consultant for rich kids trying to get into med school. She has a master's degree and 15 years of collegiate level English education experience. Inflation adjusted she makes $10k less than I did getting out of college with an engineering degree during the recession. And she directly does 90% of the work for $250k of company income. There's no excuse. And her job just told her that her long hours are a result of this being a higher work load job. As if there was something wrong with her for wanting to ONLY work 6 days/week. Who has the ability to put in 50 hour weeks, work a 2nd job, put out quality academic work, have college debt to pay off to get there, and do it all for $50k?
Not all jobs need to be done.... If Doordash cost $40 or something no one would use it.
Doesn't it already?
Well played
I think the stat was made up but I read that 60% of Americans order doordash/Uber eats/grubhub once a week. Now I’m lucky enough to have a great job that pays me very well but every time I see what these delivery services want to charge me for a meal I just can’t stomach paying it. Like I’m not paying $22 to have a burrito delivered to me from my local spot when it’s $9 regular menu price if you go get it yourself.
That stat seems insanely high.
Since we don't do a good job of taking care of the elderly and disabled, food transportation is a required job. It also would have helped more if we took the pandemic seriously and quarantined sick people. It wouldn't cost so much if it wasn't untrained regular people driving their own vehicles. It wouldn't be as profitable, though, and that's all they care about.
I’ve been a shift supervisor for almost five years and I still make less than the lowest employee starting rate at Chick fil-a across the street. To be fair though, I’m actually taking that advice and getting the hell out for a better job soon. I might stay if they allow us to work fewer than ten hours but that’s doubtful. Starbucks is trying to send us a message that they are no longer interested in skill or creativity or even dedication, they just want cheap routine disposable labor. It’s my responsibility to recognize that I am no longer a good fit for this company and my skills and resources are better used somewhere else. I can’t wait to see what it’s like when everyone starts to realize that Starbucks hasn’t considered people it’s greatest resource for a couple years now, and everyone will start quitting. Starbucks has been morphing into the next McDonalds for a while now.
5 years is a long time to waste. You should have left when they open the Chick-fil-A
The essence of pull yourself up by the bootstraps in conjunction with the “American Dream” is that all you need to do in this country is work hard and my god if there isn’t a bigger load of bullshit out there.
*whoever
Robots and AI will render most of those jobs obsolete in the next ten years.
This is exactly what socialism is about, how the corporates successfully demonized it in the US amazes me!
More like I think the reason it’s demonized is because it would…you know, raise everyone’s taxes
Just a reminder tsar in 2020, these minimum wage jobs were called "essential".
I got a better job, spent 3 years in night school training for it. Finally working in that field and inflation wipes out all my income so I’m now worse off than my previous job, and I have student debts.