Legitimately curious what she is expecting. My kindest interpretation is she thinks students or teens should get work experience. Maybe she thinks people should have to work several jobs if it’s too… Easy?
Not that students should have to work…
Customer service jobs are some of the worst outside of Malaysian ship breaker or Siberian lumberjack.
In my experience dealing with these sorts of people trying to to justify this argument, it’s a combination of:
These are not supposed to be permanent jobs for anyone, i.e. only high school and college students should work them.
These are jobs that should be worked by >!non-white!< people who are comfortable with lower standards of living.
You should work a second job to supplement your income if you aren’t earning enough.
For #1, they believe that because they (or people they know) treated lower paying jobs as a foot in the door/stepping stone at a time in their lives where they had a social safety net looking out for them, then everyone else can do that, too.
For #2, they believe that there are people who don’t need to live well and are okay with that. Typically this comes down to racial distinctions and the idea that non-whites must love poverty because so many of them live in it.
For #3, they’ll dig up some anecdote about some random family member in the past who used to work two jobs where they had to walk uphill both ways there and back and that’s what a real work ethic looks like, then go off on a tangent about how people today are just too damn lazy.
The idea that younger people just need “work experience” is a vestige of a bygone world, when just having that little bit of experience would make you qualified for the job – THE job – that you would continue to do forever, because companies paid for loyalty with loyalty. That isn’t how the world works now and every job, entry level, dead end, or otherwise, is the job that you might need to do forever. That’s why a living wage is more important now than perhaps it was in previous years.
If easy jobs become living wage then victims of abuse can better escape via building an escape and self sustainability purse.
Being able to escape the household head’s abuse is anathema to the “family values” system conservatives try to appeal to whenever gays are allowed more freedom than being sent to Jesus camp or force married by their parents.
And I think you hinted at it, but also women in abusive relationships, even if they’re too indoctrinated to realize it. Even without physical violence, being expected to be subservient to your spouse is very common abuse in conservative USA.
Yeah, I charitably hope she is interpreting “living wage” as living super comfortably in a mini McMansion in the suburbs with a pool in the back yard and a new car in the driveway every 5 years or so. I mean, that’s how many of this generation experienced success, so it makes sense if that’s her frame of reference. But a literal _living _wage is something you can…you know …live off of. With super extraneous purchases like food and clothes and a roof over your head. They don’t stop and think what they’re expecting people to do - work all day or night long so she can have her ice cream and still not be able to afford rent. It’s cruel and dehumanizing.
She wants underpaid service jobs so the services they provide remain cheap for her personally. And the teens and work experience thing is just a lie they tell everyone, in reality what they see as worthless jobs don’t deserve to live well. Finally they see others gaining position and wealth as a direct threat to their level of privilege.
I kinda agree in the aspect that a passing fries and a burger out a drive-thru window shouldn’t be the standard of job people expect to live off forever, and that there should be room for starter-jobs.
But, the costs of living have gone up while the number of viable of decent jobs has gone down. Maybe the issue isn’t that a burger job isn’t meeting the bare minimum but that people expect you to work an office job for barely more than the burger one, while often also asking for some pretty hefty credentials/experience to boot.
Even in the McJobs, there should be some path for workers to have stepping stones to better positions. And yeah, there should also be no tolerance of assholes. Fuck “the customer is always right” and make it “we strive for customer satisfaction, but if you’re an awesome we have the right to refuse service”
The thing that bothers me about comments like this is that it has the underlying attitude that everyone should eventually “be someone” and “do something with their life”
There is absolutely nothing wrong with wanting to go to work, work your 8 hours a day, clock out, leave work at work and enjoy or do whatever you want for the rest of your hours that day.
These McJobs seem to be jobs “people trying to succeed in life” don’t want to do, but are services and products they expect to be able to purchase and enjoy.
There is nothing wrong, lazy, or ignorant about people whose priorities are not about work and “getting ahead” - Maybe they want to do their hobbies, or hang out with people they like, or sit in their backyard and no nothing. Not everyone wants to, should, or is frankly qualified to meet some arbitrary measure of success
People doing the McJobs should still be able to eat, live in a safe home, and raise a family and not have to work 2 or more jobs, or be treated like they are worthless. They are stepping up and doing the jobs we all want done in society.
And yes, someone’s McJob in middle of nowhere, flyover state might be liveable at minimum wage, and that exact same job be 3 or 4 times that in a big city. It doesn’t change the fact that it should pay whatever it costs to be liveable in the place the job is located. If a company can’t afford to pay it’s employees a liveable wage, it can’t afford to do business there. Same as if the business can’t afford the electricity or clean water.
Did anyone watch Office Space? Sometimes happiness is found leaving the rat race and TPS reports and doing a McJob that directly benefits others and doesn’t follow you home or ask if you have a case of the Mondays.
They factually aren’t starter jobs because the people overwhelmingly doing them are people that need to live on those wages.
Low end jobs cannot meaningfully structurally serve as stepping stones within an organization because such professions/companies need massive amounts of low wage labor, very few better paid workers, and most of the actually well paid positions are available via an expensive education not earned by hard work within the org. That is to say Burger Bob’s thousands of franchises need tens of thousands of flunkies, hundred of slightly higher paid flunkies, and dozens of high paid people who are mostly recruited out of college or industry.
This is to say statistically approaching zero of Bob’s employees can escape poverty by working hard for Bob. The alternative is imagining that a peanut butter sandwich can feed a stadium full of people because in theory any one of them could eat it.
Legitimately curious what she is expecting. My kindest interpretation is she thinks students or teens should get work experience. Maybe she thinks people should have to work several jobs if it’s too… Easy?
Not that students should have to work…
Customer service jobs are some of the worst outside of Malaysian ship breaker or Siberian lumberjack.
In my experience dealing with these sorts of people trying to to justify this argument, it’s a combination of:
These are not supposed to be permanent jobs for anyone, i.e. only high school and college students should work them.
These are jobs that should be worked by >!non-white!< people who are comfortable with lower standards of living.
You should work a second job to supplement your income if you aren’t earning enough.
For #1, they believe that because they (or people they know) treated lower paying jobs as a foot in the door/stepping stone at a time in their lives where they had a social safety net looking out for them, then everyone else can do that, too.
For #2, they believe that there are people who don’t need to live well and are okay with that. Typically this comes down to racial distinctions and the idea that non-whites must love poverty because so many of them live in it.
For #3, they’ll dig up some anecdote about some random family member in the past who used to work two jobs where they had to walk uphill both ways there and back and that’s what a real work ethic looks like, then go off on a tangent about how people today are just too damn lazy.
The idea that younger people just need “work experience” is a vestige of a bygone world, when just having that little bit of experience would make you qualified for the job – THE job – that you would continue to do forever, because companies paid for loyalty with loyalty. That isn’t how the world works now and every job, entry level, dead end, or otherwise, is the job that you might need to do forever. That’s why a living wage is more important now than perhaps it was in previous years.
If easy jobs become living wage then victims of abuse can better escape via building an escape and self sustainability purse.
Being able to escape the household head’s abuse is anathema to the “family values” system conservatives try to appeal to whenever gays are allowed more freedom than being sent to Jesus camp or force married by their parents.
And I think you hinted at it, but also women in abusive relationships, even if they’re too indoctrinated to realize it. Even without physical violence, being expected to be subservient to your spouse is very common abuse in conservative USA.
Yeah, I charitably hope she is interpreting “living wage” as living super comfortably in a mini McMansion in the suburbs with a pool in the back yard and a new car in the driveway every 5 years or so. I mean, that’s how many of this generation experienced success, so it makes sense if that’s her frame of reference. But a literal _living _wage is something you can…you know …live off of. With super extraneous purchases like food and clothes and a roof over your head. They don’t stop and think what they’re expecting people to do - work all day or night long so she can have her ice cream and still not be able to afford rent. It’s cruel and dehumanizing.
She wants underpaid service jobs so the services they provide remain cheap for her personally. And the teens and work experience thing is just a lie they tell everyone, in reality what they see as worthless jobs don’t deserve to live well. Finally they see others gaining position and wealth as a direct threat to their level of privilege.
I kinda agree in the aspect that a passing fries and a burger out a drive-thru window shouldn’t be the standard of job people expect to live off forever, and that there should be room for starter-jobs.
But, the costs of living have gone up while the number of viable of decent jobs has gone down. Maybe the issue isn’t that a burger job isn’t meeting the bare minimum but that people expect you to work an office job for barely more than the burger one, while often also asking for some pretty hefty credentials/experience to boot.
Even in the McJobs, there should be some path for workers to have stepping stones to better positions. And yeah, there should also be no tolerance of assholes. Fuck “the customer is always right” and make it “we strive for customer satisfaction, but if you’re an awesome we have the right to refuse service”
The thing that bothers me about comments like this is that it has the underlying attitude that everyone should eventually “be someone” and “do something with their life”
There is absolutely nothing wrong with wanting to go to work, work your 8 hours a day, clock out, leave work at work and enjoy or do whatever you want for the rest of your hours that day.
These McJobs seem to be jobs “people trying to succeed in life” don’t want to do, but are services and products they expect to be able to purchase and enjoy.
There is nothing wrong, lazy, or ignorant about people whose priorities are not about work and “getting ahead” - Maybe they want to do their hobbies, or hang out with people they like, or sit in their backyard and no nothing. Not everyone wants to, should, or is frankly qualified to meet some arbitrary measure of success
People doing the McJobs should still be able to eat, live in a safe home, and raise a family and not have to work 2 or more jobs, or be treated like they are worthless. They are stepping up and doing the jobs we all want done in society.
And yes, someone’s McJob in middle of nowhere, flyover state might be liveable at minimum wage, and that exact same job be 3 or 4 times that in a big city. It doesn’t change the fact that it should pay whatever it costs to be liveable in the place the job is located. If a company can’t afford to pay it’s employees a liveable wage, it can’t afford to do business there. Same as if the business can’t afford the electricity or clean water.
Did anyone watch Office Space? Sometimes happiness is found leaving the rat race and TPS reports and doing a McJob that directly benefits others and doesn’t follow you home or ask if you have a case of the Mondays.
They factually aren’t starter jobs because the people overwhelmingly doing them are people that need to live on those wages.
Low end jobs cannot meaningfully structurally serve as stepping stones within an organization because such professions/companies need massive amounts of low wage labor, very few better paid workers, and most of the actually well paid positions are available via an expensive education not earned by hard work within the org. That is to say Burger Bob’s thousands of franchises need tens of thousands of flunkies, hundred of slightly higher paid flunkies, and dozens of high paid people who are mostly recruited out of college or industry.
This is to say statistically approaching zero of Bob’s employees can escape poverty by working hard for Bob. The alternative is imagining that a peanut butter sandwich can feed a stadium full of people because in theory any one of them could eat it.
The short answer is her idea of a “healthy society” is not an equitable one.