So… Putting in effort to advance yourself should not be rewarded? I don’t get it.
A rising tide lifts all boats.
It does. It also lifts all the turds.
You know how to make them boats get lifted even quicker? Join the tide. Invest in yourself. Make yourself better.
It’s up to employers who they employ. It’s not for you or I to decide what job or what person are suitable.
But if your skilled enployees are switching to burger flipping because they can make the same money then you aren’t paying the new market rate.
Are the “turds” referenced here actual people? Because that’s really all that matters.
In what way is working a more physically demanding job “advancing yourself”?
Besides, I’d also argue that most customer facing jobs are just as demanding as most physical trade jobs. They just fuck you up mentally instead of physically.
Not even degrees mean much anymore, a lot of job positions require one cause they can, not cause you’d actually benefit from that knowledge. Spending all that time and money to get a piece of paper can Aldo hardly be called "advancing yourself’.
In what way is working a more physically demanding job “advancing yourself”?
It’s not the physical part - which isn’t even all that great of a difference - but getting familiar with physics. Working your brain rather than your muscle. That’s an advance.
There’s also a risk element - you fuck up on a powerline - you’re potentially dead. Fuck up a burger? You get yelled at.
Besides, I’d also argue that most customer facing jobs are just as demanding as most physical trade jobs. They just fuck you up mentally instead of physically.
All jobs suck the soul out of you. If you don’t want that - build a career. That requires one doing something one’s great at. It requires an internal drive.
Not even degrees mean much anymore, a lot of job positions require one cause they can, not cause you’d actually benefit from that knowledge. Spending all that time and money to get a piece of paper can Aldo hardly be called "advancing yourself’.
You’re not wrong about job requirements, but I’d argue your whole world view is skewed.
You get a degree to advance your understanding of a thing you give a shit about. If you get one because your parents told to or whatever - then of course it’s useless. Many reasons for that, but one of them is going that to that internal drive.
Quick personal example: I got a CS degree. Out of ~150 people who started ~40 graduated (which I think is probably usual), but of those 40 only 3 were people actually interested in computers. Others were there for all kinds of wrong reasons. Some of those people are now loudly screaming into the ether how degrees are useless. It worked out very well for the 3 of us. As of upcoming August, I will have literally 10x the income I had before starting my degree in 2016. Now, granted, small numbers are easy to get impressive multiplication on, but I’m still proud of it.
The fact that they managed to convince the US that people working a fast food job don’t deserve a living wage while CEOS are making millions to billions is utterly insane.
I remember all the conversations I’ve had that started with the other person saying, “Can you believe so-and-so gets paid $x million dollars for playing [sport]?!?” and ended quickly with me asking, “Can you believe the owner makes $X million dollars for doing NOTHING”?
I’d you are not management you should be in a union no matter your job (yes that includes cops).
yes that includes cops
Except cop “unions” aren’t labor unions.
Labor unions exist to advocate for fair pay and treatment for workers.
Cop “unions” exist to make sure that cops consistently get away with crimes up to and including murder.
The former is the foundation required for a more just society, whereas the latter is a cancer killing any possibility of it.
Any union can be a problem. On the extreme left, there’s tyranny of unions, and on extreme right, there’s tyranny of oligarchs. There needs to be balanced political leadership.
All us unemployed IT folks should infiltrate all the local jobs that are considered minimum wage and unionize them all.
Anybody that’s offended by burger flippers making as much as them should be pointing that anger in the right direction. Towards their employer.
I’m an EE with utility clients. If a lineman/wireman started making the same as me, I would feel the same way.
All the money is sucked out by equity holders.
This economy makes me think of Hamilton’s “Dragon”, where everyone sank most of their paycheck back into the company to get a high enough “stake”, to even get a chance at a meaningful job, at said company.
I’m not even sure when this good little Republican became radicalized. I’ve done pretty well for myself and yet I would happily watch it all burn down to the fucking ground if it meant everyone actually got a meaningful standard of living and healthcare.
If you want them to flip burgers for you, pay them what you’d want to make flipping burgers for them.
And I’ll even say, I don’t want to flip burgers. The thing I want to do most is my job, and other people can do other jobs. I feel like there’s always this fear, oh, who will do the skilled/educated jobs! Like, smart folks will not suddenly be like “Eh, I don’t want to be a doctor anymore because people can survive on flipping burgers.”
I just said something along these lines in a different comment, but … I have been both a barista (1 week of training-ish) and a physical therapist (4 year bachelor’s and 3 year clinical doctorate). At times, I really enjoyed both. However, doing either full time either bored me or burned me out. I would love to swip-swap between those positions (and others) just because I could because my ability to stay in my home would not be dependent on having a “high skill” job.
I get it, I love my career, but burning out is a real problem in high skill labor as is. This is especially the case for medicine. But I think the bigger concern is people dropping out of the education. Engineering school was brutal, and there were points I considered dropping out, but stuck around because it offered a better life than anything I could hope for if I dropped out. Medical school is even worse for that. Trades are physically difficult, often dangerous, and require education.
I don’t think even most people would drop their career in that scenario, but I do think we’d find ourselves in a position where there’s very little competition for jobs like these and a lot of competition for currently low wage jobs, though that would probably push more people into training for more stable employment.
Minimum wage still needs to be livable though
I make waaaaaay too much money for the value I provide to society, especially compared to e.g. a teacher.
It’s something I am struggling with so much right now. A huge part of me (like almost every fiber of my being) wants to walk away and dedicate my entire life to something more meaningful, but I have 4 other people counting on me right now. In truth, I could probably still provide for them, but I wrestle with forcing them to drastically reduce their standard of living just because I am ready to.
It’s not like I’m rich or even comfortably wealthy. But in this society, in this economy, I am certainly uncomfortably wealthy.
Or from a more selfish perspective: an increase in burger flipping wages greatly increases your bargaining power in your own salary negotiations.
“For that wage I could just as well be flipping burgers, and that comes with much lower risk of personal injury.”
Never forget that solidarity benefits you personally, no matter how much the owning class and media try to pit us against each other. Also death to Israel.
My thought, if you don’t think someone preparing your food deserves to make a living wage to prepare your food, you shouldn’t get that food…
I don’t care how simple a job is time is not free, we should all make a living wage
Yeah it’s weird when people typically assume you would resent people getting something you don’t have, or getting it with less effort than it took you - because they would resent this and they assume your mind must work the same way theirs does.
Genuinely I think building power lines sounds like an easier job. A lot less stressful at least. Assuming that both have the exact same hours and wage, I know which one I’d choose. If anything the burger flipper should earn more.
I don’t care, go live in your fancy gold mansions, just let me have a decent, low-maintenance room with AC and air filtration. I will sleep my ass off, then go volunteer for something.
Too much to ask for, sadly.
Oddly, though, they’re all massive bootlickers and will try to find any reason why billionaires are totally fair and good hardworkers. TheyMre just pathetic.
Oddly not tho. Surprisingly I also see this very clear assumption coming from people who are very anti-billionaire.
It’s more about the owner class than anything. If you deny support to politicians seeking to raise the minimum wage and/or vote for politicians who talk about how the minimum wage concept is evil then you almost certainly are not taking any actions which are anti-billionaire/anti-owner class.
They think rich people are really smart and deserve what they “worked very hard for”. They genuinely believe that the rich “assume the risk so deserve the money” despite them never facing consequences while having incredibly basic ideas. They hate that someone “beneath” them would make money and can’t think hard enough to understand that that would mean they’d get to demand more pay, too. There are even people who think that owners can do whatever they want as long as its legal and they deliberately ignore any nuance regarding what legality is and they jump straight over the concept of baseline morality to tell you that it’s your fault for not changing jobs, as if that’s something you can just do easily(and is if there are better bosses readily available).
All of those examples are what you get when you listen to centrist and conservative media that’s shilling for aggressive capitalism(with state-funded safety nets for corporations, of course). If you say “I don’t think billionaires should be allowed, but all the systems which lead to them are fine” then you’re a complete moron.
Having more than your neighbors is a huge drive to human happiness. House size has no impact on happiness. Having the biggest house on the block is a huge happiness boost. Above the level needed for minimum sustainable food and shelter, wages have no impact on happiness. Making more money than your friends is a huge happiness boost.
It’s something about how we are wired as humans. Many of us have other drivers that are stronger than the drive to have more than others in our community, but to get social support any strategy for raising the living standard floor needs to acknowledge the issue of this hard-wired drive.
Well I come from a long line of bucket crabs
If a bunch of burger flippers started making what I make I would demand a raise. If my raise was denied I’d go get a job as a burger flipper and probably be a lot less stressed out than I am currently.
Fast food work is pretty stressful, IMO.
It can be but it’s a different kind than what I’m dealing with though. It’s repetitive busy work and stupid scheduling bullshit vs. big projects that go on for months with deadlines and coordination between vendors and half a dozen internal teams where nobody wants to take ownership of anything. Fast food work never kept me up at night.
Get a union job, and you won’t have to take your work home either
We take our work home because we’re thinking about the problems and how to solve them all the time, some of my best solutions came to me in the shower.
I have a home lab and I often carry what I learn from my lab to work, I’m not working my job when I’m working on my lab, but there mental overlap is there.
I can’t imagine I’ll be solving many burger flipping problems in the shower.
Fair enough, if that works for you.
I enjoy the work/life balance too much, and love being able to leave my work at work. And being in a union makes that a reality for me.
I don’t know how being in a union would stop my brain from thinking about a problem I haven’t solved in my work day… It’s not my employer dictating it, it’s my brain.
No unions in my field as far as I’m aware.
This. Having homework is stressful. Being responsible for the uptime of systems and the inevitability of getting calls in the middle of the night is stressful. Having stuff follow you home is a different kind of added stress.
If fast-food workers began earning wages comparable to electricians, I wouldn’t necessarily expect electricians to become poorer. I’d expect employers who depend on skilled labor to increase compensation to remain competitive. The question then becomes whether those higher labor costs come from reduced profits, increased prices, greater productivity, or some combination of all three.
Anyway, it is better for all workers.
what you’d actually see is increased unemployment, because that’s the most effective regulator of salaries. the system requires a mass of people without jobs in order to balance itself.
the system requires a mass of people without jobs in order to balance itself.
I don’t know where you got this idea, it seems more like the system requires desperate people and lack of jobs does help in causing that. However, fuck the system
it’s pretty simple; given offers of two identical jobs with different benefits, you’d pick the better one. if there isn’t enough people to fill all open positions, employers need to compete by raising benefits. in short, price follows demand. the more people that are looking for jobs, the lower employers can push salaries and still hire someone.
when neolibs campaign on how “everyone should have a job” and use that as an excuse to cut unemployment benefits, that’s them trying to distract from the fact that unemployment is necessary for the system they built to function. as unemployment approaches zero, salaries approach infinity.
so yeah, fuck that system.
A few percent of job seekers as structural unemployment supports a healthy economy where people change jobs and careers to match changes in labor needs.
That doesn’t mean an increase in minimum wage increases unemployment. There are hundreds of academic studies investigating that question, and it seems the increased economic activity of low-income people having more money generates enough new jobs to at least balance whatever job cuts happen due to the higher labor costs (low-income people tend to spend all their money, so they are more effective agents of short term economic stimulus than higher-income households that tend to save some of it).
i was more thinking the other way round, that an increase in unemployment decreases wages.
Increased unemployment can lead to decreased wages, depending on other factors. I had read your post above as claiming a multipart chain of higher minimum wage -> increased unemployment -> decreased wages, and my post was intended to address the first link (higher minimum wage -> increased unemployment), not the second.
If the floor were higher for everyone, I wouldn’t see a problem with some jobs earning more necessarily. What you’re describing will probably always be with us: some work is just harder or less pleasant.
Yes, to be clear I’m saying the floor being raised would be a benefit to me and others like me as well. Either I make more money or I can go to a less stressful job without losing income. Regardless of if it benefits me or not everyone should make a living wage for a full days work.
When the minimum wage was instituted, the intention was one full-time worker would be able to support the family of four suburban lifestyle. They’ve been gaslighting us for a long time.
The ONLY risk of a minimum wage or Living Wage is that companies that highly skilled workers earning the same might move to less skilled jobs. For this, the only rational action is to pay your skilled workers accordingly. FAIR PAY is not difficult when an executive team earn millions or billions.
Also, Tax Wealth, Not Work.
FAIR PAY is difficult when the exec team funnels the money to themselves. Funding of their raises/bonuses shouldn’t be at the expense of ours
