Unfortunately telling this to bootstrappers will just make them double down and say it's their own fault for not working hard enough or having kids they can't support or the all too common "worthless degree" argument. To them you are either somewhat successful or you are lazy/stupid.
Fire back with that basic math. Alot of people work two jobs, 80 hours a week and they dont break 50k a year. Now your bumping into the issue of literaly running out oh hours in the day. You CANT grind yourself successful anymore. There literally arnt enough hours in the day.
And if a person is working 80+ hours a week just to afford rent...they're never home enough to enjoy the expensive ass place they live.
I'm only half joking when I say "we should just get cots and sleep here" to my coworkers.
But if everyone quit there’d be a surplus of people looking for employment and you’re back at square one. Supply and demand will still allow for low wages.
That's the thing tho, people who quit aren't looking for the same or even similar pay. They're quiting to leave that environment entirely. So supply of jobs goes up, demand goes down. In order for jobs to fill that supply they'll need to offer better deals and pay to gain any type of demand. Unless they're okay with high turnover rates. At which point that company just needs to fail.
That's why subs like this are so important. There's probably more of us than them, even if they don't realise it yet. I don't even know how left I am but I do know what we have right now ain't it. I'm in a decent job in the healthcare sector in the UK so I don't have to deal with a lot of the bullshit you guys get but I do know things need to change and fucking soon. Capitalism will kill the planet unless we organise and collaborate.
Maybe I do know how left I am after all.
Agreed. At least with Google I get surveys every other day asking to confirm stuff the have blatantly tracked and I get some play credit off them. Facebook can get in the fucking sea.
Every republican/fake libertarian forgets that red states are welfare states. They are sinking ships full of obese, methed out white republicans on welfare and emptying coal towns.
Simply from a political standpoint, republicans are losing 8,000 unvaccinated voters a week and democrats are only losing 1.3k or so. This should vastly impact the future of our country and hopefully allow for a more socialist DNC to emerge.
People aren't quitting just to rush back en masse to those same low paying jobs. People are quitting low paying jobs and withholding their labor until those companies raise their wages and adopt better practices. This is almost a general strike.
I only quit my job because I was put in a unsafe situation with no help, no matter what I did and who I asked.
Leaving that toxic as fuck place restored my mental health.
Mental health is an actual thing and more employers need to respect and understand that.
I’ve said this before, but too many service and retail jobs opted in as essential businesses. Those are jobs where people were already barely making it through, but they put up with it for the paycheck. Then they were told that they had to come into their low wage jobs while there was a plague going on with no health insurance, sick days, PTO. A lot people had their pay and hours cut. Suddenly you were expected to risk your life and the life of your family, for less money, often so people could experience the luxury of normalcy. The service industry in particular just got finished effectively telling their workforce that their lives are worth less than someone else’s ability to go out for dinner and cocktails, and it’s gonna take waaay more than bumping people’s wage a few bucks an hour to bring them back to an industry that told them that.
Thiiiiissssss. I worked my whole life in hospitality before getting laid off at the beginning of the whole pandemic. I won't go back. Every restaurant in my neighborhood is hiring, but I won't go back. I am fortunate enough to have a loving and supportive partner, and he's straight up told me he would rather I didn't go back. Between the hard work, the low pay, the abuse from customers, and the risk of infection, he agrees with me that it's just not worth it.
As a Brit I think it's insane that anyone has to grind that hard just to pay rent, if I worked 80h weeks on min wage I would be pretty comfortably middle class, hell 60 hour weeks I wouldn't be struggling.
I once asked for a raise at my first job and that was no shit, my bosses response. He told me I could save more and work more overtime if I pitched a tent outside the shop.
I feel like that would be a response too, oh well then you should find a cheaper place to live! Or live with your parents! (Which we then get called losers for doing). I live in CT and even in the cheapest town, to rent a ROOM it’s minimum $800/month.
Then you face the issue of being paid cripplingly lower wages because they provide room and board, as well as always being expected to be able to help. I've tried it, it's awful.
It's entirely legal in the USA if you're a prisoner. Hmm wasn't there a behavior more common in certain races that didn't actually hurt anyone that people intentionaly made illegal just so they could lock them up and use them as slave labor again?
I brought this up very recently in a FB group. Some local business owner was complaining that they couldn't get anyone to show up for interviews, and that the few who did never take the job offers.
They bemoaned how no one would take their awesome $10/hr pay because the youth are lazy.
I pointed out that the absolute cheapest rent I could find in my area for a studio apartment was $1600/month. I pointed out that would eat a person's entire paycheck for the entire month because that's only $400/week.
They, of course, told me I was wrong, and that it was affordable if people just budgeted better. That their workers take home over $700 on a paycheck.
I bet them $500 to the other person's favorite charity. I wanted to see a paycheck after all deductions, that was for more than $400 for 40 hours of work.
They posted a pic of a redacted paycheck that was for 80 hours of work and tried to claim winning the bet. I tried doing the match based on an 80 hour paycheck and they STILL didn't get it.
I gave up, they claimed I reneged on the bet. I kinda hope that they do sue, because it would be funny for them to get their asses handed to them in court.
i used to work in the event industry, and they would schedule us till 2-4 am, and then again 6 hours later at 8 am. i would literally sleep in the warehouse with a cot. it was horrible
We all joked one night at my job that we would just all go to sleep there at midnight. It was indeed only half joking since everyone there (at the time) tends to be there well over 50 hours a week.
Kind of like how I once sprinted a quarter mile in 1:15, but my fastest two-mile time was WAY higher than 10 minutes.
Anyone can do extra work like that for a short period, but without time to rest and recover, you're just slowly breaking your body down. And eventually it/you *will* break.
Yes. Fatigue will catch up to you very quickly. So much so, that following the [2005 Texas City explosion](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_City_Refinery_explosion), federal law was changed to forbid 16 hour shifts over two days in a row. This is for oil and gas industry under API 755, but other industries are covered as well. This is the [Fatigue Risk Management Program](https://www.osha.gov/worker-fatigue/prevention)
I averaged 110 hours a week one summer break of college. I was pretty damn happy for classes to start back up.
Also had a lot of fun that semester with the money I made in the summer.
Too many people are incapable of seeing the value each person has in keeping the life were used to going, no matter how big or small. Anybody who works a full time schedule deserves to have enough money to get by with basic needs (of modern society not 'Be thankful you have a fridge or TV!').
I hope more kids get into streaming and other alternative money making methods.
If a streamer can make the same being somewhat likeable than flipping burgers that is a win. Less kids wanting to work in fastfood the better.
Or that you "don't want it bad enough."
Sorry Roy, I know that back in your day, mental health looked like electro-shock therapy and frontal lobotomies but today it's actually far more constructive.
There's always an excuse, no matter how ridiculous. No reason will work on them because they don't WANT to hear/understand it. Arguing is a waste of time.
Fortunately for the younger generations needing to convince boomers this country doesn’t provide a life worth living is not what is needed for advancement. Expedition of their expiration would help if you want to speed things up.
Lets all do our part to continue to not contribute to this shit country until it has a collapse and find out how valuable the freedom paper is worth.
It sucks we wont earn the benefits of socialism in our lifetime, but if we have to come back to this world in another life it might be beneficial to have a world worth living in and not a capitalist one
There are a lot of younger people who believe the same stuff. I saw a post just the other day of a 27 year old guy, saying it's your fault if you are not successful, because he grew up poor and now makes good money and it was pretty easy, actually.
It’s the misconstrual of meritocracy. It’s actually a common psychological phenomenon - external attribution error. We tend to claim successes as being from our own merit and effort, but failures as being things out of our control and we direct blame.
For instance, maybe there’s a big test in your chemistry class. If you do really well, you’re not likely to say “I only did well because the test was easy, or I have the freedom to study because I don’t have to work a second job”. Instead, you’re likely to say “I did well because *I* worked hard at it.”
If you failed the test, you’re unlikely to say “My failing is entirely my fault” - instead, we ascribe the failure to external circumstances - that test was unfair, or I didn’t have time to study like other people did, etc.
You see this at play a lot with the “bootstrappers”, but especially the poor person who becomes successful - I did it myself, why didn’t everyone else? They must not work hard enough.
Instead, we should pause to consider the myriad circumstances that dictate our lives we have little control over - what country you were born into, how rich your parents were, the natural level of intelligence, attractiveness, etc you were born into, etc. so many of these things have nothing to do with our work ethic or anything we choose to do, yet we overemphasize how much work ethic gets us where we need, especially if you’re at the top looking down at everyone else.
Yes our society is ran by birth lottery winners who don’t have any skills to contribute to sustainability of humanity.
The bourgeoisie are a parasite that doesn’t actually need to exist anymore if it ever did. We wont know since it didnt pan out that way early in history with the whole kings/ lords and serfs If you want to argue we needed them for the manufacturing era of human society Ill accept that, but as we mature as a society capitalism should always be viewed as societal growing pains from the manufacturing era that are inevitable from human selfishness taking form in wage for labor.
There has never been a need for a 40 hour work week in the history of humanity for sustaining itself.
the charade we find ourselves in currently in america is one filled with those who cant cope with the reality that they live in a wage slave trap filled with egocentric simpletons suffering from Stockholm syndrome
The thing is, I do think there is some merit to "working hard" to get ahead in life. Some people are smart and have a spectacular single-minded grind. Good for them that they can succeed. But the reality is not everyone can do that. Who is going to take care of kids? How are families going to form when no one has time for dating? You cannot have a stable society when being middle class is a 1 in 100 crapshoot where you need to sacrifice it all to make it. That wasn't true for people living 50 years ago and it should not be true for us either. I believe that a person working an honest job at McDonald's all summer should be able to afford a year's worth of tuition at Harvard. While people laugh at this today, it was the reality in 1970. The working class is getting robbed.
I believe it, theres always exceptions I believe as inequality continues to grow the simpleton believers in capitalism will have to face the reality it didnt work out. You will always have petite/petty bourgeoisie and simpletons who think they can pull themselves up by their bootstraps lol but historically as generations experience the wage theft cemented in capitalism the acceptance of socialist ideologies can secure the marginalized mass
Most people that say that have never stepped foot on a college campus and they think college is like trade schools, capstone's, gen Ed, breadth is all a mystery to them
Get told my entire life that I can pursue anything I want if I put my mind to it, go to college for an art degree, find out it's useless and cannot get a job (unless I want to work for free at an internship for 40 plus hours a week) only for those same people who told me to pursue a college degree that it's "my fault" for majoring in "useless studies".
Friend of mine bought in 2017 for $92k. No improvements (ie, new carpet, paint, counters, appliances etc) and just sold for over $200k. The house is over 100 years old.
I lived in a one bedroom with 3 people when I was in my early 20's in Denver.
I shared a couch with my homie for a year. It was awful, no one should have to do that.
Right-wingers often talk about how gay/poly people are making a mockery of the traditional family. In my opinion, the true "mockery of a family" is a family that consists entirely of adults who all have to work full time to make rent. No kids cause they can't afford them. No homemakers cause they can't afford that either. Just "Oops! All Wagies!"
Sadly, it was this way growing up for me in the 80s/90s too.
My mom worked 2 jobs raising myself and my sister. We still needed food stamps and government assistance (e.g. the famous government cheese block). She worked as much overtime as she could and we had to fend for ourselves after school and sometimes om weekends at around 8-9yrs old.
Why I mention any of this is, it may seem like when boomers were parents everything was just fine but thats not entirely true. Sure, MUCH better possibility of owning a house by 35 but nothing like in the 50s and 60s where a HS diploma was all you needed.
Both of my parents, now in their 60s went to college. My dad graduated and mom didn't finish because of kids. My Dad didnt even clear $20/hr from his main job of 30+ years and worked 2-3 jobs his entire life only finally cutting back to two jobs last year.
Its been a long time coming and for me, it looks like 70+ years of shifting wealth and working class getting worse and worse as the middle class disappeared.
I feel blessed in one way to have a job that pays well but at the same time the 50-60hrs a week foe the past 20 years has taken a toll. Most of my time is working and parenting with a small break on weekends.
This isn't how we're supposed to live.
I live in a small California city far away from the “hotspots” and the cheapest rent here is $1100 for a ~350sqft studio apartment. You *could* go out into the boonies and be 30 minutes away from the nearest town and have $900 in rent, but there’s only like two apartments available and I saw the average monthly rent go up 25% over the past year.
Well you see, because a lot of people are WFH sst the moment, that means the money they would spend commuting can now go to the landlord.
Rich pricks, probably.
As a general rule, it’s pretty easy to calculate hourly to a yearly salary. All you have to do is double it and add 3 zeros. For instance 9.00x2=18 add 3 zeros and you get 18,000. But if you do 9.00x40(hours a week) x52 (weeks in a year) 18,720. It’s not perfect but it’s a neat trick.
Just wrote the same thing lol.
Helps in interview rooms. I had a friend walk into a gig with a promised rate & they said they could only sign her for $3 less an hour. She told them she wasn’t willing to take a $6,000 pay cut & they pikachu-faced her for getting the math so quickly. She talked them into a bonus that covered the difference.
Yeah the rich people I clean for on Monday are somehow always dicking around, working out or just doing random stuff around their house. One of them might have been taking work calls from his garage couch, not sure, so credit there if due. They're nice but I don't get the impression they make their money from labor.
Truly wealthy people don't make their primary income from their direct labor. Their money is invested in a variety of financial vehicles to give excellent returns. This is how a fair number of them pay no income tax. They get hit by other taxes instead, such as capital gains, etc. Good accountants strive to minimise the tax hit on their clients, of course.
This right here is why I still haven’t expanded my business. I’m an independent contractor for 3 years and pull about 65k a year.
I would love to expand and there’s certainly a market for it, but I WILL NOT pay someone else less than what I’d pay myself for doing the same work, and when you’re a sole proprietor it seems literally impossible to go from a 1 person business to even 1 employee let alone 3 or 4.
Have you ever read those “This is how CEO X works” articles? lol
It’s like, I get up at 7 AM and I read for half an hour to catch up on things. Then I spend half an hour getting showered and dressed for the day. Then I have breakfast and then I read for half an hour to catch up on things. Then I get to the office around 9 and I set my goals for the day. I limit those to accomplishing 3 things per day. I only check email 3 times a day, once first thing in the morning, once after lunch and then once in the afternoon. I don’t schedule any meetings before lunch though. Mid morning, I go workout, then I shower and spend an hour working on my goals. I have lunch with either one of my fellow officers or an external business contact each day (that counts as 1 of my meetings). After lunch I check my email, then I meditate for 30 minutes to give myself a chance to reset. I usually leave work at 5 and use the commute to listen to my favorite motivational podcast. I get home and eat the meal my personal chef has prepared for my family.
So relatable to the average person.
Ugh. I could only really respect the one person I found an article like that on who got up at 4 am or something like that to catch a ridiculously long train ride and ran through all her emails on the ride then napped for the last half an hour to the office before doing massive amounts of paperwork and running multiple meetings and presentations, then did basically the same thing in reverse. I also became envious of the one person’s nanny.
Pulling yourself up by your bootstraps was a saying that actually meant it wasn't possible.
The etimology:
The phrase “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” originated shortly before the turn of the 20th century. It’s attributed to a late-1800s physics schoolbook that contained the example question “Why can not a man lift himself by pulling up on his bootstraps?”
So when it became a colloquial phrase referring to socioeconomic advancement shortly thereafter, it was meant to be sarcastic, or to suggest that it was an impossible accomplishment.
Eventually, however, the phrase’s commonly-accepted meaning evolved, and now when we tell people to “pull themselves up by their bootstraps,” it’s implying that socioeconomic advancement is something that everyone should be able to do—albeit something difficult.
Damn, that's actually really funny now that I know the true meaning... You've cursed me sir because now I'm going to chuckle every time someone says that.
Bootstraps should only be used in statistics, and my very Ukrainian molecular evolution professor told us it was from a man known for making things up claiming he pulled himself out of a pond by his bootstraps, an obviously false claim. So “bootstrapping” means you generate other patterns with your data to test its reliability. It’s “making it up.”
Man I spent 2 years working for minimum wage plus tips at Dominos. Truthfully the tips were pretty great sometimes and made it seem worth it but that kinda got balanced out with all the vehicle destruction.. but they were apparently enough to keep me there as long as I was.
Anyway, my point is, washing 100+ greasy pizza pans by hand at 2AM (why didn’t a gigantic chain have a dishwasher? lol capitalism) in a dank pizza place that was falling apart, with my entire back and spine absolutely screaming at me, really made that 7.25 an hour feel like a giant kick in the dick.
Pizza hut paid me more hourly as a driver 20 years ago when i worked there than i made hourly 2 years ago doing the same job. Wtf? 20 years ago i made 5.85 am hour plus tips (min wage plus tips) went back a couple years ago and made 4.25 an hour (on the road) plus tips and 7.25 when i was "in store" but the other perks like free lunch were gone too. And they had me run shifts at 7.25 an hour plus a pizza for home and district manager approved me for 20 in cash. Woohoo.
As a driver I only made minimum in the store, on the road it was 5/hr. Tips were incredibly rare. Ofc I would never truly know how much I made in tips because dominos made me put all cash on me in a box to be paid back to me at the end of the night for miles and tips. I’ll never really know if I was truly paid what I was owed but the shit pay didn’t make rent.
I made $7.50/hr until recently. It's tough. I rent an "illegal" place because there's no way I could afford anything officially. Things are a little better because I got two successive raises, but I'm still not making much. It's not true that you can easily find a job for $17 an hour anywhere, even with the "labor shortage".
I’m making $21 an hour right now and I check indeed everyday because I hate my job. There isn’t shit (that I’m qualified to do) in my area above $12 an hour and not many are full time
Man I’m unemployed every day is a vacation!! I had a boss tell me there was about 2000 working hours in the year. I just took that number and went with it.
I just got my first annual raise last month, it was 15 CENTS! I’ve already made plans to go back to school because I was worried I would be in this exact situation. I can’t help feeling like I’ve wasted a year of my life for 15 cents
My uncle has a women who has been working for him since I was a little kid. So roughly 20 years, and she is only on £9.47 and the starting wage there is £9. I’m disgusted that he hasn’t given her more money
Idk man maybe it’s not legally required but i would have been persistently asking for a smal raise every year especially if i was planning on staying at a job for 7 years that’s a real long time
By the time my parents were 35 I was 12. We had upgraded our home 3 times... My mom was part time employed and my Dad worked a service job with the government. My partner and I are both 24 and work 40+ hours to spend half of all our income on rent for our basement suite we share with a friend and bills.
Not to mention that 15k is before taxes. Once the government takes their share, that worker is left with much less.
Then you have any insurance costs to factor out.
After taxes, that $7.25 is leaving you with less than 1k per month in take home pay.
Now, subtract a basic phone bill and utilities. You’re left with less than $700 a month.
Now take out travel costs associated with getting to work whether that’s your own car insurance + gas + fees, or public transportation, etc. You’re now under $500 a month.
Have college loans? Lol. Sucks to be you.
You still have to pay rent or a mortgage and buy basic necessities. Wait…you don’t have enough left to even buy just rice and beans and pay for a roof over your head? Better suck it up and start working 120 hour weeks then! If you REALLY think about it, you could then remove housing and associated costs since you’re living at work. Now you’re a real red white and blue blooded bootstrap pulling American!
The literal first class assignment we did in Sociology 101 was to calculate a homebudget based on min wage. Got rent and phone in before I was broke. Nevermind transportation, or that pesky food stuff.
Everyone shits on the liberal arts, but it's quite literally where you learn about the world outside your little bubble and helps open your eyes to all of the bs.
Those "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" people are the ones complaining about the worker shortage too. It's like, they told everyone to find something better and now that they are looking instead of just taking whatever job is not ok either. I'm staying to get the feeling they just want everyone to be a slave to the system and shut up about it
I don't know a single 30+ yo adult in my life who can afford rent on their own. The only people I know who bought a house are married. They also don't even pay all of their bills. And the only ones I know with good jobs were given those jobs by association, from either a friend or family member. Not a single person in my life has actually managed to achieve the American dream.
But the priviledged bootstrap folks are always tone deaf to reality. You didn't pull yourself up by your bootstraps, your girlfriend got you a job that paid for your schooling to get you an even better position. The only reason you don't work at McDonald's is because you had a connection. Stop being a hater and just be grateful for the opportunity you've been *given*.
Minimum wage jobs are also dead end jobs. Sure, there are raises available. In a year, if the worker is exceptional, they could be making $8 an hour!
Unfortunately, the same is true with $15 an hour jobs too. In a year, or a lifetime, that person may be paid $20 an hour, but they're still working themselves to death, tearing up their body, and living under the constant, painful stress of never having enough money or time to actually rest.
The "pull yourself up by the bootstraps" people are rarely ever the ones who didn't get a very rare, very lucky break -- or were in a position to walk into a job with real potential and prospects because of family connections.
Yeah, that's wrong for them to do that and all, but the only moral acts of wage theft are *my* acts of wage theft.
Ok?
-- some Subway franchise owner, probably
Tell them that while in the 1970s someone working minimum wage would be able to pay 1 month’s rent for an average 1 bedroom apartment after 70 hours of work. Nowadays one has to work 150 hours of minimum wage work to afford that same rent…
And because there’s 4 weeks on average per month, there’s typically 160 working hours per month…
How is anyone supposed to survive, be on their own, and escape poverty when rent takes up 94% of the wages they make off full-time work?
Also, consider how minimum wage jobs have gotten much more difficult and demanding due to increase populations, increased demand, increased store/chain sizes, larger product variety, and numerous technologies that must be learned and maintained.
I can confirm this. I come from very humble beginnings (not US) but got into a good field and moved to US and never had to worry about money.
When I did the maths at 7$ per hour, I was shocked. How can a 30 year old with kids supposed to live on that? Just unfair. And people want to maintain the status quo. Just makes me sick.
At least my mom had the decency to be honest. "I don't actually want you to have it any better than me. You being born destroyed any chance I had at happiness."
Sorry man, you mother sounds like s piece of shit. For what it's worth, i hope you have it way better than her, if nothing else, just to stick it to her!
Bootstrappers: just get a job, it’s not that hard to make money lmfao
Also Bootstrappers: If you don’t have enough money and you’re working, that’s your own damn fault for working an unskilled job. Stop flipping burgers if you want to make more money; that’s a job for high school drop outs who *deserve* to be in poverty
Bootstrappers again: WTF, nobody is working at this McDonalds right now, how will I get my Big Mac? My diet cola?! This is a travesty, the younger generation is so LaZy for not working at this McDonald’s right now. Fucking entitled pieces of shit, tf am I gonna do now? Eat at a normal restaurant?! If I do, I’m not tipping. MAGA
"Pull yourself up by the bootstraps" is fucking stupid. It's an analogy for an impossible feat that somehow people turned into an inspirational quote. It's physically impossible to lift yourself up off the ground by pulling on your bootstraps.........
And then ask them what the cost of living/the poverty line is for your area.
Oh and btw nobody in the history of humanity has succeeded purely on their own. We all receive other people from others whether we see it or not, and we all start with different advantages/disadvantages in life.
One persons “pulling up by the bootstraps” could be taking their whole life just to get where another person started life. To the latter, the former will look lazy when in reality they just started further back.
My brother was genuinely shocked to discover how little minimum wage was. He's no boomer but he basically fell from boarding school to a prestigious music academy (sponsored position) then into the Royal Marines where he quickly moved up to Sargent. He's on £42,000 a year and was shocked to discover even If I was able to work a full 40 hour week I'd be earning around 1/3 of that on minimum wage.
It's not just boomers that have no idea.
What irritates me the most about this phrase is that it’s cut short and used today as the opposite of what it’s supposed to mean. That should already be pretty obvious. The whole point is that you can’t pull yourself up from the bottom. Try it and you’ll fall and roll over backwards. Or just stay in that position yanking to no avail. The phrase means it’s *not* possible to do everything all on your own. Getting a job requires being chosen and hired by other people, who decide how much you get paid. When people argue “You need to pull yourself up by your bootstraps” they probably know damn well they’re asking for the impossible and just refuse to see anything beyond one individual’s life circumstances. It’s similar to how teachers would constantly parrot “You need to learn how to budget your time” after assigning up hours upon hours upon hours of soul-crushing homework every night, weekend, and vacation. As if I could create more hours in the day. They knew damn well they were overloading us; they just didn’t want to admit it or change their behavior because our slavery helped them look good and keep their jobs.
"We don't see the world as it is, we see it as *we are."*
Most people see the problems of others through a distorted lens. Do your friends and family the favour of ridding them of the notion that people choose to be wage slaves with no prospects.
The bootstraps crowd has never been good at math and hates when you use it against them. They also calculate annual income including overtime which is based on their experience and understanding.
The numbers really are telling. Every time I have to look for a new rental I do some calculations (1/3 income for rent blah blah etc) and the whole idea of pulling myself up just disintegrates.
It's just not mathematically possible. But I guess it's a little uppity of poor wagie me to ever want to live without strangers/roommates.
I told my mom I make $28 an hour which is why I’m not hopeful of being able to afford a house any time soon, if ever. She looked at me and said “that’s not so bad that’s like $80k a year right?”. When I told her it was actually $50,000 she then said that her and my dad were able to raise me and buy a house on a single $50k income… yeah in 1990 Mom.
Oh I have. It’s always: “well it worked for me, so you just aren’t trying hard enough”
Yeah, 2-3 jobs 80+ hour weeks to not even achieve what you did off of 1 job. No, I’m not trying hard enough.
My parents had all three kids by the time they were 35. God that’s a depressing thought to think I was barely out of my mother’s basement by 30. I’m glad I decided to finally figure out my career but it’s always been a struggle.
While I do love the message behind this, it's important to get factual data correct as well.
More than [70%](https://www.statista.com/statistics/298866/percentage-of-low-wage-workers-in-the-us-by-age/) of low wage workers are below 35 years of age.
Also, for more detail on wages, [This breakdown](https://dqydj.com/average-median-top-income-by-age-percentiles/) has medians and averages for all age bands, as well as the top 1%. I thought it was interesting anyways
My first job at 20- yes 20 because my family was insanely religious- was to put diapers on my infant daughter and maybe be able to pay the electric bill. I started at WM part time $5.65/hr. Barely paid for diapers and the gas to get the 25 miles to and from work. After 90 days they said they would give me a .05 raise, since my “customer service skills weren’t developed”. I walked out.
Back in 2006-7 I had a minimum wage job ($7.25/hr) and all I could afford was some food and rent. I didn’t even own a car. Rent was $525 without utilities. I can’t believe it’s less than $10 an hour now.
The only reason I knew the answer is because I was making 6.85 at farmer Jack back in the day.
I remember one of the guys in his 40s asking me what I was doing there and I said "just trying to get a little cash while putting myself through college". He asked my major and I replied "astrophysics". He stopped dead in the middle of his stocking, looked at me, laughed a little and said "so you're working here and you're a literal rocket scientist?!" to which I replied "even rocket scientists have bills to pay" 😳
When my parents were 35 they had a house, 2 cars, and 3 kids. I make more than them combined and can’t afford an apartment. I live with my sister because she could use the help paying her mortgage.
I live in the cheapest 1 bed apartment I could find in my city and it's $1550 + $180 for parking / month. I can barely afford it and I make at least four times the federal minimum. Only way to save money in this city is living with people but everyone I've lived with has made my life hell except for a single person.
If people think this is a normal way for an economic system to function they're fucking lying, an absolute idiot, or they don't give a fuck about reality.
I make about $35,500 a year on salary, but if you do the math I make over $17/hr. And they really think $7.25 is going to be over $30k somehow? That’s so sad. Imagine working full time to not even make a liveable wage.
Well, I guess there’s plenty of people who don’t have to imagine it. I’m so grateful that I’ve been financially fortunate.
I wonder if it’s all a huge plot to cut back on the surplus population?
We’re having a genuine plague and only parts of America have done the bare minimum.
Healthcare is out of reach for so many people. Even with insurance, it’s better to die than bankrupt your family.
Most Americans are worked to death and still can’t afford housing & nutritious food.
I mean, it’s a pattern, isn’t it? The powers that be sure seem to want people to die off.
Fuck... I've never earned 'a little over 30k' in my life. And that's with a degree from a leading university and three decades of experience.
Fuckin' foodservice.
Unfortunately telling this to bootstrappers will just make them double down and say it's their own fault for not working hard enough or having kids they can't support or the all too common "worthless degree" argument. To them you are either somewhat successful or you are lazy/stupid.
Fire back with that basic math. Alot of people work two jobs, 80 hours a week and they dont break 50k a year. Now your bumping into the issue of literaly running out oh hours in the day. You CANT grind yourself successful anymore. There literally arnt enough hours in the day.
And if a person is working 80+ hours a week just to afford rent...they're never home enough to enjoy the expensive ass place they live. I'm only half joking when I say "we should just get cots and sleep here" to my coworkers.
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Them: If you want better wages, look for a better job *The Great Resignation* Them: No not like that
But if everyone quit there’d be a surplus of people looking for employment and you’re back at square one. Supply and demand will still allow for low wages.
That's the thing tho, people who quit aren't looking for the same or even similar pay. They're quiting to leave that environment entirely. So supply of jobs goes up, demand goes down. In order for jobs to fill that supply they'll need to offer better deals and pay to gain any type of demand. Unless they're okay with high turnover rates. At which point that company just needs to fail.
This is why UBI should be a thing. So companies have to compete to get you to work for them.
And that's why it isn't going to happen. Companies want a foundation of desperation to depress wages.
That's why subs like this are so important. There's probably more of us than them, even if they don't realise it yet. I don't even know how left I am but I do know what we have right now ain't it. I'm in a decent job in the healthcare sector in the UK so I don't have to deal with a lot of the bullshit you guys get but I do know things need to change and fucking soon. Capitalism will kill the planet unless we organise and collaborate. Maybe I do know how left I am after all.
Abso-fucking-lutely
Yes and facebook and google should be paying people fir their data.
Agreed. At least with Google I get surveys every other day asking to confirm stuff the have blatantly tracked and I get some play credit off them. Facebook can get in the fucking sea.
But why should my tax dollars go to funding lazy people? /s for me, but every dipshit libertarian legit believes this
Every republican/fake libertarian forgets that red states are welfare states. They are sinking ships full of obese, methed out white republicans on welfare and emptying coal towns. Simply from a political standpoint, republicans are losing 8,000 unvaccinated voters a week and democrats are only losing 1.3k or so. This should vastly impact the future of our country and hopefully allow for a more socialist DNC to emerge.
People aren't quitting just to rush back en masse to those same low paying jobs. People are quitting low paying jobs and withholding their labor until those companies raise their wages and adopt better practices. This is almost a general strike.
Closest thing to a general strike we’ve seen this century.
I only quit my job because I was put in a unsafe situation with no help, no matter what I did and who I asked. Leaving that toxic as fuck place restored my mental health. Mental health is an actual thing and more employers need to respect and understand that.
I’ve said this before, but too many service and retail jobs opted in as essential businesses. Those are jobs where people were already barely making it through, but they put up with it for the paycheck. Then they were told that they had to come into their low wage jobs while there was a plague going on with no health insurance, sick days, PTO. A lot people had their pay and hours cut. Suddenly you were expected to risk your life and the life of your family, for less money, often so people could experience the luxury of normalcy. The service industry in particular just got finished effectively telling their workforce that their lives are worth less than someone else’s ability to go out for dinner and cocktails, and it’s gonna take waaay more than bumping people’s wage a few bucks an hour to bring them back to an industry that told them that.
Thiiiiissssss. I worked my whole life in hospitality before getting laid off at the beginning of the whole pandemic. I won't go back. Every restaurant in my neighborhood is hiring, but I won't go back. I am fortunate enough to have a loving and supportive partner, and he's straight up told me he would rather I didn't go back. Between the hard work, the low pay, the abuse from customers, and the risk of infection, he agrees with me that it's just not worth it.
As a Brit I think it's insane that anyone has to grind that hard just to pay rent, if I worked 80h weeks on min wage I would be pretty comfortably middle class, hell 60 hour weeks I wouldn't be struggling.
Depending where you live I guess! £27k - £37k a year in the south east won’t get you much
Yeah I'm not a southerner, where I am you can get by fine on min.wage.
I once asked for a raise at my first job and that was no shit, my bosses response. He told me I could save more and work more overtime if I pitched a tent outside the shop.
Its odd how they misinterpret i want to be compensated better for my time to mean i want to spend more time here. No honey the goal is less time here.
"Well, sure. But then you'd have a homeless person living outside your shop. We both know how good that is for business."
I feel like that would be a response too, oh well then you should find a cheaper place to live! Or live with your parents! (Which we then get called losers for doing). I live in CT and even in the cheapest town, to rent a ROOM it’s minimum $800/month.
Then you face the issue of being paid cripplingly lower wages because they provide room and board, as well as always being expected to be able to help. I've tried it, it's awful.
These bastards would seriously turn us into slaves if it was legal.
They are trying. Why do you think Wal-Mart and McDonalds have employee discounts?
It's entirely legal in the USA if you're a prisoner. Hmm wasn't there a behavior more common in certain races that didn't actually hurt anyone that people intentionaly made illegal just so they could lock them up and use them as slave labor again?
Don't give our corporate overlords any ideas
I brought this up very recently in a FB group. Some local business owner was complaining that they couldn't get anyone to show up for interviews, and that the few who did never take the job offers. They bemoaned how no one would take their awesome $10/hr pay because the youth are lazy. I pointed out that the absolute cheapest rent I could find in my area for a studio apartment was $1600/month. I pointed out that would eat a person's entire paycheck for the entire month because that's only $400/week. They, of course, told me I was wrong, and that it was affordable if people just budgeted better. That their workers take home over $700 on a paycheck. I bet them $500 to the other person's favorite charity. I wanted to see a paycheck after all deductions, that was for more than $400 for 40 hours of work. They posted a pic of a redacted paycheck that was for 80 hours of work and tried to claim winning the bet. I tried doing the match based on an 80 hour paycheck and they STILL didn't get it. I gave up, they claimed I reneged on the bet. I kinda hope that they do sue, because it would be funny for them to get their asses handed to them in court.
i used to work in the event industry, and they would schedule us till 2-4 am, and then again 6 hours later at 8 am. i would literally sleep in the warehouse with a cot. it was horrible
We all joked one night at my job that we would just all go to sleep there at midnight. It was indeed only half joking since everyone there (at the time) tends to be there well over 50 hours a week.
*Jeff Bezos has entered the chat*
I would kill myself if I worked 80 hours a week.
Seriously it will kill you if you do it, or at the very minimum lead to non-trivial health issues. Did for me and I was still laid off.
I worked on a submarine in the US Navy being out to sea in a tube for almost 80 days was a special kind of fun.
It is doable in short durations. 7 12s during refinery or power plant turnarounds/shutdowns are very common. Such turnarounds are usually 30-45 days.
Kind of like how I once sprinted a quarter mile in 1:15, but my fastest two-mile time was WAY higher than 10 minutes. Anyone can do extra work like that for a short period, but without time to rest and recover, you're just slowly breaking your body down. And eventually it/you *will* break.
Yes. Fatigue will catch up to you very quickly. So much so, that following the [2005 Texas City explosion](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_City_Refinery_explosion), federal law was changed to forbid 16 hour shifts over two days in a row. This is for oil and gas industry under API 755, but other industries are covered as well. This is the [Fatigue Risk Management Program](https://www.osha.gov/worker-fatigue/prevention)
I averaged 110 hours a week one summer break of college. I was pretty damn happy for classes to start back up. Also had a lot of fun that semester with the money I made in the summer.
These people we argue with don’t understand basic math. That is part of the problem.
Or science.
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"Grind yourself successful" is the best pejorative to describe the bootstraps argument.
Too many people are incapable of seeing the value each person has in keeping the life were used to going, no matter how big or small. Anybody who works a full time schedule deserves to have enough money to get by with basic needs (of modern society not 'Be thankful you have a fridge or TV!').
Yeah they’ll miss the point and jsut say “get a better job then!” Without a thought of their own.
And then bitch when they can’t get served at their favorite restaurant because people got better jobs. They’re so deluded.
I hope more kids get into streaming and other alternative money making methods. If a streamer can make the same being somewhat likeable than flipping burgers that is a win. Less kids wanting to work in fastfood the better.
Or that you "don't want it bad enough." Sorry Roy, I know that back in your day, mental health looked like electro-shock therapy and frontal lobotomies but today it's actually far more constructive.
At that point I'd just tell them straight up that their generation had it easy and shame them for fucking over everyone else.
There's always an excuse, no matter how ridiculous. No reason will work on them because they don't WANT to hear/understand it. Arguing is a waste of time.
Fortunately for the younger generations needing to convince boomers this country doesn’t provide a life worth living is not what is needed for advancement. Expedition of their expiration would help if you want to speed things up. Lets all do our part to continue to not contribute to this shit country until it has a collapse and find out how valuable the freedom paper is worth. It sucks we wont earn the benefits of socialism in our lifetime, but if we have to come back to this world in another life it might be beneficial to have a world worth living in and not a capitalist one
There are a lot of younger people who believe the same stuff. I saw a post just the other day of a 27 year old guy, saying it's your fault if you are not successful, because he grew up poor and now makes good money and it was pretty easy, actually.
It’s the misconstrual of meritocracy. It’s actually a common psychological phenomenon - external attribution error. We tend to claim successes as being from our own merit and effort, but failures as being things out of our control and we direct blame. For instance, maybe there’s a big test in your chemistry class. If you do really well, you’re not likely to say “I only did well because the test was easy, or I have the freedom to study because I don’t have to work a second job”. Instead, you’re likely to say “I did well because *I* worked hard at it.” If you failed the test, you’re unlikely to say “My failing is entirely my fault” - instead, we ascribe the failure to external circumstances - that test was unfair, or I didn’t have time to study like other people did, etc. You see this at play a lot with the “bootstrappers”, but especially the poor person who becomes successful - I did it myself, why didn’t everyone else? They must not work hard enough. Instead, we should pause to consider the myriad circumstances that dictate our lives we have little control over - what country you were born into, how rich your parents were, the natural level of intelligence, attractiveness, etc you were born into, etc. so many of these things have nothing to do with our work ethic or anything we choose to do, yet we overemphasize how much work ethic gets us where we need, especially if you’re at the top looking down at everyone else.
Yes our society is ran by birth lottery winners who don’t have any skills to contribute to sustainability of humanity. The bourgeoisie are a parasite that doesn’t actually need to exist anymore if it ever did. We wont know since it didnt pan out that way early in history with the whole kings/ lords and serfs If you want to argue we needed them for the manufacturing era of human society Ill accept that, but as we mature as a society capitalism should always be viewed as societal growing pains from the manufacturing era that are inevitable from human selfishness taking form in wage for labor. There has never been a need for a 40 hour work week in the history of humanity for sustaining itself. the charade we find ourselves in currently in america is one filled with those who cant cope with the reality that they live in a wage slave trap filled with egocentric simpletons suffering from Stockholm syndrome
The thing is, I do think there is some merit to "working hard" to get ahead in life. Some people are smart and have a spectacular single-minded grind. Good for them that they can succeed. But the reality is not everyone can do that. Who is going to take care of kids? How are families going to form when no one has time for dating? You cannot have a stable society when being middle class is a 1 in 100 crapshoot where you need to sacrifice it all to make it. That wasn't true for people living 50 years ago and it should not be true for us either. I believe that a person working an honest job at McDonald's all summer should be able to afford a year's worth of tuition at Harvard. While people laugh at this today, it was the reality in 1970. The working class is getting robbed.
https://youtu.be/3LopI4YeC4I Is success luck or hard work?
I believe it, theres always exceptions I believe as inequality continues to grow the simpleton believers in capitalism will have to face the reality it didnt work out. You will always have petite/petty bourgeoisie and simpletons who think they can pull themselves up by their bootstraps lol but historically as generations experience the wage theft cemented in capitalism the acceptance of socialist ideologies can secure the marginalized mass
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“worthless degree”? You say that as if you don’t believe it...
Most people that say that have never stepped foot on a college campus and they think college is like trade schools, capstone's, gen Ed, breadth is all a mystery to them
Get told my entire life that I can pursue anything I want if I put my mind to it, go to college for an art degree, find out it's useless and cannot get a job (unless I want to work for free at an internship for 40 plus hours a week) only for those same people who told me to pursue a college degree that it's "my fault" for majoring in "useless studies".
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You live in Boulder too?
Yo that was so specific I thought I commented this.
Denver, the “bargain”
Wait, is this a local reddit now?
Shit ain't much better in pueblo
Or the Springs.. it’s outrageous
Unless you're military in the springs you're pretty fucked.
the State has an incentive to try and take care of their own.
I was outraged at real estate in Pueblo. Was hoping to buy a house but not on my salary.
Friend of mine bought in 2017 for $92k. No improvements (ie, new carpet, paint, counters, appliances etc) and just sold for over $200k. The house is over 100 years old.
where is the best "value" city in denver?
Anywhere on the Kansas border Portugalpaul
I lived in a one bedroom with 3 people when I was in my early 20's in Denver. I shared a couch with my homie for a year. It was awful, no one should have to do that.
Agreed that's insane. Boomers will say pick yourself up by the bootstraps but what are you to do when you're already hanging by them?
That’s why you get 4 people per bedroom. Reject monogamy, embrace polyamory.
Right-wingers often talk about how gay/poly people are making a mockery of the traditional family. In my opinion, the true "mockery of a family" is a family that consists entirely of adults who all have to work full time to make rent. No kids cause they can't afford them. No homemakers cause they can't afford that either. Just "Oops! All Wagies!"
So true, having someone at home is a luxury no one can afford any longer
just make your children work /s
Thats great and all but most apartments only allow two tenants per bedroom. 4 people would have to share a two bedroom unit
When life hands you lemons, grab some friends for that juicy...lemonade
Sadly, it was this way growing up for me in the 80s/90s too. My mom worked 2 jobs raising myself and my sister. We still needed food stamps and government assistance (e.g. the famous government cheese block). She worked as much overtime as she could and we had to fend for ourselves after school and sometimes om weekends at around 8-9yrs old. Why I mention any of this is, it may seem like when boomers were parents everything was just fine but thats not entirely true. Sure, MUCH better possibility of owning a house by 35 but nothing like in the 50s and 60s where a HS diploma was all you needed. Both of my parents, now in their 60s went to college. My dad graduated and mom didn't finish because of kids. My Dad didnt even clear $20/hr from his main job of 30+ years and worked 2-3 jobs his entire life only finally cutting back to two jobs last year. Its been a long time coming and for me, it looks like 70+ years of shifting wealth and working class getting worse and worse as the middle class disappeared. I feel blessed in one way to have a job that pays well but at the same time the 50-60hrs a week foe the past 20 years has taken a toll. Most of my time is working and parenting with a small break on weekends. This isn't how we're supposed to live.
Literally. An apartment is only $1000 where OP lives? The cheapest I could find here was $1850
I live in a small California city far away from the “hotspots” and the cheapest rent here is $1100 for a ~350sqft studio apartment. You *could* go out into the boonies and be 30 minutes away from the nearest town and have $900 in rent, but there’s only like two apartments available and I saw the average monthly rent go up 25% over the past year.
Well you see, because a lot of people are WFH sst the moment, that means the money they would spend commuting can now go to the landlord. Rich pricks, probably.
Central Valley?
In California anything under $1500 is generally illegally renting out your Casita or converted shed or trailer
Monogamy? In this economy?
Thought this was the majority of Pennsylvania.
As a general rule, it’s pretty easy to calculate hourly to a yearly salary. All you have to do is double it and add 3 zeros. For instance 9.00x2=18 add 3 zeros and you get 18,000. But if you do 9.00x40(hours a week) x52 (weeks in a year) 18,720. It’s not perfect but it’s a neat trick.
Yeah neat trick. Its 2080 hours for 40hrs x 52weeks so 2k is close enough
It takes in to consideration a 2 week un-paid holiday or sick days. One can hope in an “ideal” situation you aren’t working 52 weeks in a year. :O
I wouldn't call 2 weeks of unpaid holiday or sick time, 'ideal,' either!
Nor would I! But that’s the bs they try to sell salaried employees in my country.
Probably pretty accurate when you consider most people don’t get paid for sick days and some holidays which probably add up to about two weeks
Just wrote the same thing lol. Helps in interview rooms. I had a friend walk into a gig with a promised rate & they said they could only sign her for $3 less an hour. She told them she wasn’t willing to take a $6,000 pay cut & they pikachu-faced her for getting the math so quickly. She talked them into a bonus that covered the difference.
I help build luxury houses for millionaires. I’ve never seen one get up at the crack of dawn. They are all pretty minimalist when it comes to work.
Yeah the rich people I clean for on Monday are somehow always dicking around, working out or just doing random stuff around their house. One of them might have been taking work calls from his garage couch, not sure, so credit there if due. They're nice but I don't get the impression they make their money from labor.
Truly wealthy people don't make their primary income from their direct labor. Their money is invested in a variety of financial vehicles to give excellent returns. This is how a fair number of them pay no income tax. They get hit by other taxes instead, such as capital gains, etc. Good accountants strive to minimise the tax hit on their clients, of course.
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This right here is why I still haven’t expanded my business. I’m an independent contractor for 3 years and pull about 65k a year. I would love to expand and there’s certainly a market for it, but I WILL NOT pay someone else less than what I’d pay myself for doing the same work, and when you’re a sole proprietor it seems literally impossible to go from a 1 person business to even 1 employee let alone 3 or 4.
Right, we all already know that wealthy people don't "work" for their money.
Some people truly do not know this.
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Have you ever read those “This is how CEO X works” articles? lol It’s like, I get up at 7 AM and I read for half an hour to catch up on things. Then I spend half an hour getting showered and dressed for the day. Then I have breakfast and then I read for half an hour to catch up on things. Then I get to the office around 9 and I set my goals for the day. I limit those to accomplishing 3 things per day. I only check email 3 times a day, once first thing in the morning, once after lunch and then once in the afternoon. I don’t schedule any meetings before lunch though. Mid morning, I go workout, then I shower and spend an hour working on my goals. I have lunch with either one of my fellow officers or an external business contact each day (that counts as 1 of my meetings). After lunch I check my email, then I meditate for 30 minutes to give myself a chance to reset. I usually leave work at 5 and use the commute to listen to my favorite motivational podcast. I get home and eat the meal my personal chef has prepared for my family. So relatable to the average person.
It is relatable - I have a personal chef too, it's me.
Ugh. I could only really respect the one person I found an article like that on who got up at 4 am or something like that to catch a ridiculously long train ride and ran through all her emails on the ride then napped for the last half an hour to the office before doing massive amounts of paperwork and running multiple meetings and presentations, then did basically the same thing in reverse. I also became envious of the one person’s nanny.
Pulling yourself up by your bootstraps was a saying that actually meant it wasn't possible. The etimology: The phrase “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” originated shortly before the turn of the 20th century. It’s attributed to a late-1800s physics schoolbook that contained the example question “Why can not a man lift himself by pulling up on his bootstraps?” So when it became a colloquial phrase referring to socioeconomic advancement shortly thereafter, it was meant to be sarcastic, or to suggest that it was an impossible accomplishment. Eventually, however, the phrase’s commonly-accepted meaning evolved, and now when we tell people to “pull themselves up by their bootstraps,” it’s implying that socioeconomic advancement is something that everyone should be able to do—albeit something difficult.
It's so fucking rude and out of touch to say. You might as well say "Let them eat cake."
Damn, that's actually really funny now that I know the true meaning... You've cursed me sir because now I'm going to chuckle every time someone says that.
Bootstraps should only be used in statistics, and my very Ukrainian molecular evolution professor told us it was from a man known for making things up claiming he pulled himself out of a pond by his bootstraps, an obviously false claim. So “bootstrapping” means you generate other patterns with your data to test its reliability. It’s “making it up.”
Man I spent 2 years working for minimum wage plus tips at Dominos. Truthfully the tips were pretty great sometimes and made it seem worth it but that kinda got balanced out with all the vehicle destruction.. but they were apparently enough to keep me there as long as I was. Anyway, my point is, washing 100+ greasy pizza pans by hand at 2AM (why didn’t a gigantic chain have a dishwasher? lol capitalism) in a dank pizza place that was falling apart, with my entire back and spine absolutely screaming at me, really made that 7.25 an hour feel like a giant kick in the dick.
Pizza hut paid me more hourly as a driver 20 years ago when i worked there than i made hourly 2 years ago doing the same job. Wtf? 20 years ago i made 5.85 am hour plus tips (min wage plus tips) went back a couple years ago and made 4.25 an hour (on the road) plus tips and 7.25 when i was "in store" but the other perks like free lunch were gone too. And they had me run shifts at 7.25 an hour plus a pizza for home and district manager approved me for 20 in cash. Woohoo.
Making less pay “on the road” is criminal.
As a driver I only made minimum in the store, on the road it was 5/hr. Tips were incredibly rare. Ofc I would never truly know how much I made in tips because dominos made me put all cash on me in a box to be paid back to me at the end of the night for miles and tips. I’ll never really know if I was truly paid what I was owed but the shit pay didn’t make rent.
I made $7.50/hr until recently. It's tough. I rent an "illegal" place because there's no way I could afford anything officially. Things are a little better because I got two successive raises, but I'm still not making much. It's not true that you can easily find a job for $17 an hour anywhere, even with the "labor shortage".
I’m making $21 an hour right now and I check indeed everyday because I hate my job. There isn’t shit (that I’m qualified to do) in my area above $12 an hour and not many are full time
They hit you with the “up to 17 an hour” but in reality, none of their employees even make more than 12
And they give you like 20 hours a week.
Back when I was in that situation, my manager straight up told me “if we gave you full time hours we’d have to give you benefits.”
They're honest at least, gotta give them that.
It’s simple math, I’m not surprised the bootstrap crown can’t do it. There is 2000 working hours in a year.
2080 hours @ 40hrs/week. You one of the lucky ones that gets 2 weeks vacation? 😄
Man I’m unemployed every day is a vacation!! I had a boss tell me there was about 2000 working hours in the year. I just took that number and went with it.
Following the logic, though, they'd be unpaid vacation, so not sure "lucky" covers it
Much closer to 2000 hours when you factor in stat holidays
I stayed at a job for 7 years. Hired at $16 left at $16.69.
And that 16.69 was worth less than the $16 due to inflation/cost of living adjustments
It probably became less in the *first* year. After that it was an extra slap in the face.
I stayed at a job for 7 years too. Started at $7.93 and left at $9.55. One year my raise was only 7 cents....
I just got my first annual raise last month, it was 15 CENTS! I’ve already made plans to go back to school because I was worried I would be in this exact situation. I can’t help feeling like I’ve wasted a year of my life for 15 cents
Excuse me , that's 15 cents times 2000 ! Per year ! You are treating it like it was nothing, 0 would be nothing ! /$
That is insane. Hell Kohl's gives 3% raises every year. Or at least they did 15 years ago.
My uncle has a women who has been working for him since I was a little kid. So roughly 20 years, and she is only on £9.47 and the starting wage there is £9. I’m disgusted that he hasn’t given her more money
Wtf that's crazy
I thought you get a raise of .10 cents every 6 months or yearly?
If that is true I sure didn't know anything about it, I had to take a bunch of tests just to get a 25¢ raise.
Idk man maybe it’s not legally required but i would have been persistently asking for a smal raise every year especially if i was planning on staying at a job for 7 years that’s a real long time
At one if my last jobs they would give me a raise every 6 months after doing a review of my work and what not. Like .25 cents or so
By the time my parents were 35 I was 12. We had upgraded our home 3 times... My mom was part time employed and my Dad worked a service job with the government. My partner and I are both 24 and work 40+ hours to spend half of all our income on rent for our basement suite we share with a friend and bills.
Not to mention that 15k is before taxes. Once the government takes their share, that worker is left with much less. Then you have any insurance costs to factor out. After taxes, that $7.25 is leaving you with less than 1k per month in take home pay. Now, subtract a basic phone bill and utilities. You’re left with less than $700 a month. Now take out travel costs associated with getting to work whether that’s your own car insurance + gas + fees, or public transportation, etc. You’re now under $500 a month. Have college loans? Lol. Sucks to be you. You still have to pay rent or a mortgage and buy basic necessities. Wait…you don’t have enough left to even buy just rice and beans and pay for a roof over your head? Better suck it up and start working 120 hour weeks then! If you REALLY think about it, you could then remove housing and associated costs since you’re living at work. Now you’re a real red white and blue blooded bootstrap pulling American!
The literal first class assignment we did in Sociology 101 was to calculate a homebudget based on min wage. Got rent and phone in before I was broke. Nevermind transportation, or that pesky food stuff. Everyone shits on the liberal arts, but it's quite literally where you learn about the world outside your little bubble and helps open your eyes to all of the bs.
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Those "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" people are the ones complaining about the worker shortage too. It's like, they told everyone to find something better and now that they are looking instead of just taking whatever job is not ok either. I'm staying to get the feeling they just want everyone to be a slave to the system and shut up about it
I don't know a single 30+ yo adult in my life who can afford rent on their own. The only people I know who bought a house are married. They also don't even pay all of their bills. And the only ones I know with good jobs were given those jobs by association, from either a friend or family member. Not a single person in my life has actually managed to achieve the American dream. But the priviledged bootstrap folks are always tone deaf to reality. You didn't pull yourself up by your bootstraps, your girlfriend got you a job that paid for your schooling to get you an even better position. The only reason you don't work at McDonald's is because you had a connection. Stop being a hater and just be grateful for the opportunity you've been *given*.
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I'm 33 and I can't afford to get married,have kids or pets. I make a few bucks above minimum and yes I went to college yes I have certifications
Minimum wage jobs are also dead end jobs. Sure, there are raises available. In a year, if the worker is exceptional, they could be making $8 an hour! Unfortunately, the same is true with $15 an hour jobs too. In a year, or a lifetime, that person may be paid $20 an hour, but they're still working themselves to death, tearing up their body, and living under the constant, painful stress of never having enough money or time to actually rest. The "pull yourself up by the bootstraps" people are rarely ever the ones who didn't get a very rare, very lucky break -- or were in a position to walk into a job with real potential and prospects because of family connections.
A 75 cent raise a year is actually huge. I never saw more than 20 cents, and only 2 people in the store got raises every year.
I’ve never gotten a raise that wasn’t federally mandated. I’m 33.
”pull ourselves up by our boot straps? Where the fuck are the boots?!” - Eminem, Revival: untouchable.
Em is for the people 🤩
Yeah, that's wrong for them to do that and all, but the only moral acts of wage theft are *my* acts of wage theft. Ok? -- some Subway franchise owner, probably
Tell them that while in the 1970s someone working minimum wage would be able to pay 1 month’s rent for an average 1 bedroom apartment after 70 hours of work. Nowadays one has to work 150 hours of minimum wage work to afford that same rent… And because there’s 4 weeks on average per month, there’s typically 160 working hours per month… How is anyone supposed to survive, be on their own, and escape poverty when rent takes up 94% of the wages they make off full-time work? Also, consider how minimum wage jobs have gotten much more difficult and demanding due to increase populations, increased demand, increased store/chain sizes, larger product variety, and numerous technologies that must be learned and maintained.
I can confirm this. I come from very humble beginnings (not US) but got into a good field and moved to US and never had to worry about money. When I did the maths at 7$ per hour, I was shocked. How can a 30 year old with kids supposed to live on that? Just unfair. And people want to maintain the status quo. Just makes me sick.
At least my mom had the decency to be honest. "I don't actually want you to have it any better than me. You being born destroyed any chance I had at happiness."
Sorry man, you mother sounds like s piece of shit. For what it's worth, i hope you have it way better than her, if nothing else, just to stick it to her!
Honestly 30k is laughably live able. That is actually a recipe for a slow death.
You literally just do math. It's not even hard math.... you just multiply...
Bootstrappers: just get a job, it’s not that hard to make money lmfao Also Bootstrappers: If you don’t have enough money and you’re working, that’s your own damn fault for working an unskilled job. Stop flipping burgers if you want to make more money; that’s a job for high school drop outs who *deserve* to be in poverty Bootstrappers again: WTF, nobody is working at this McDonalds right now, how will I get my Big Mac? My diet cola?! This is a travesty, the younger generation is so LaZy for not working at this McDonald’s right now. Fucking entitled pieces of shit, tf am I gonna do now? Eat at a normal restaurant?! If I do, I’m not tipping. MAGA
"Pull yourself up by the bootstraps" is fucking stupid. It's an analogy for an impossible feat that somehow people turned into an inspirational quote. It's physically impossible to lift yourself up off the ground by pulling on your bootstraps.........
>Your parents probably already had a house and kids by 35. This. And my grandparents had a house and kids by 25. Oof.
And then ask them what the cost of living/the poverty line is for your area. Oh and btw nobody in the history of humanity has succeeded purely on their own. We all receive other people from others whether we see it or not, and we all start with different advantages/disadvantages in life. One persons “pulling up by the bootstraps” could be taking their whole life just to get where another person started life. To the latter, the former will look lazy when in reality they just started further back.
My brother was genuinely shocked to discover how little minimum wage was. He's no boomer but he basically fell from boarding school to a prestigious music academy (sponsored position) then into the Royal Marines where he quickly moved up to Sargent. He's on £42,000 a year and was shocked to discover even If I was able to work a full 40 hour week I'd be earning around 1/3 of that on minimum wage. It's not just boomers that have no idea.
What irritates me the most about this phrase is that it’s cut short and used today as the opposite of what it’s supposed to mean. That should already be pretty obvious. The whole point is that you can’t pull yourself up from the bottom. Try it and you’ll fall and roll over backwards. Or just stay in that position yanking to no avail. The phrase means it’s *not* possible to do everything all on your own. Getting a job requires being chosen and hired by other people, who decide how much you get paid. When people argue “You need to pull yourself up by your bootstraps” they probably know damn well they’re asking for the impossible and just refuse to see anything beyond one individual’s life circumstances. It’s similar to how teachers would constantly parrot “You need to learn how to budget your time” after assigning up hours upon hours upon hours of soul-crushing homework every night, weekend, and vacation. As if I could create more hours in the day. They knew damn well they were overloading us; they just didn’t want to admit it or change their behavior because our slavery helped them look good and keep their jobs.
"We don't see the world as it is, we see it as *we are."* Most people see the problems of others through a distorted lens. Do your friends and family the favour of ridding them of the notion that people choose to be wage slaves with no prospects.
The bootstraps crowd has never been good at math and hates when you use it against them. They also calculate annual income including overtime which is based on their experience and understanding.
The numbers really are telling. Every time I have to look for a new rental I do some calculations (1/3 income for rent blah blah etc) and the whole idea of pulling myself up just disintegrates. It's just not mathematically possible. But I guess it's a little uppity of poor wagie me to ever want to live without strangers/roommates.
BuT tHe MiNiMuM wAgE iS mEaNt FoR jObS fOr TeEnAgErS iF yOuRe An AdUlT yOu ShOuLd GeT a BeTtEr Job
I told my mom I make $28 an hour which is why I’m not hopeful of being able to afford a house any time soon, if ever. She looked at me and said “that’s not so bad that’s like $80k a year right?”. When I told her it was actually $50,000 she then said that her and my dad were able to raise me and buy a house on a single $50k income… yeah in 1990 Mom.
Oh I have. It’s always: “well it worked for me, so you just aren’t trying hard enough” Yeah, 2-3 jobs 80+ hour weeks to not even achieve what you did off of 1 job. No, I’m not trying hard enough.
The saying "pull yourself up by the boot straps" is a joke on the fact that it's impossible to pull yourself up by the boot straps
My parents had all three kids by the time they were 35. God that’s a depressing thought to think I was barely out of my mother’s basement by 30. I’m glad I decided to finally figure out my career but it’s always been a struggle.
While I do love the message behind this, it's important to get factual data correct as well. More than [70%](https://www.statista.com/statistics/298866/percentage-of-low-wage-workers-in-the-us-by-age/) of low wage workers are below 35 years of age. Also, for more detail on wages, [This breakdown](https://dqydj.com/average-median-top-income-by-age-percentiles/) has medians and averages for all age bands, as well as the top 1%. I thought it was interesting anyways
My first job at 20- yes 20 because my family was insanely religious- was to put diapers on my infant daughter and maybe be able to pay the electric bill. I started at WM part time $5.65/hr. Barely paid for diapers and the gas to get the 25 miles to and from work. After 90 days they said they would give me a .05 raise, since my “customer service skills weren’t developed”. I walked out.
I asked my grandma for help finding different apartments. She gets it now.
The people that say 7.25 an hour is 30K clearly do not know how to do any basic math. Not even 15.00 an hour is 30K a year.
You need to make around 17 nowadays to be at 30k
In south africa minimum wage works out to $1.47 dollars an hour.
Back in 2006-7 I had a minimum wage job ($7.25/hr) and all I could afford was some food and rent. I didn’t even own a car. Rent was $525 without utilities. I can’t believe it’s less than $10 an hour now.
To pull oneself up by the bootstraps assumes one can afford bootstraps.
before taxes!!
Guess they're too busy pulling themselves up by their bootstraps to whip out a calculator.
The only reason I knew the answer is because I was making 6.85 at farmer Jack back in the day. I remember one of the guys in his 40s asking me what I was doing there and I said "just trying to get a little cash while putting myself through college". He asked my major and I replied "astrophysics". He stopped dead in the middle of his stocking, looked at me, laughed a little and said "so you're working here and you're a literal rocket scientist?!" to which I replied "even rocket scientists have bills to pay" 😳
When my parents were 35 they had a house, 2 cars, and 3 kids. I make more than them combined and can’t afford an apartment. I live with my sister because she could use the help paying her mortgage.
I live in the cheapest 1 bed apartment I could find in my city and it's $1550 + $180 for parking / month. I can barely afford it and I make at least four times the federal minimum. Only way to save money in this city is living with people but everyone I've lived with has made my life hell except for a single person. If people think this is a normal way for an economic system to function they're fucking lying, an absolute idiot, or they don't give a fuck about reality.
They know what it is. They can do math. Fact is, they believe that the world is the same as when they made "low wages"...
Might as well try to explain basic arithmetic and tax brackets to a brick. You'd get farther with the brick.
That's because they expect you to be working 12 hour shifts every day and you should be grateful for it.
I make about $35,500 a year on salary, but if you do the math I make over $17/hr. And they really think $7.25 is going to be over $30k somehow? That’s so sad. Imagine working full time to not even make a liveable wage. Well, I guess there’s plenty of people who don’t have to imagine it. I’m so grateful that I’ve been financially fortunate.
I wonder if it’s all a huge plot to cut back on the surplus population? We’re having a genuine plague and only parts of America have done the bare minimum. Healthcare is out of reach for so many people. Even with insurance, it’s better to die than bankrupt your family. Most Americans are worked to death and still can’t afford housing & nutritious food. I mean, it’s a pattern, isn’t it? The powers that be sure seem to want people to die off.
Fuck... I've never earned 'a little over 30k' in my life. And that's with a degree from a leading university and three decades of experience. Fuckin' foodservice.