- cross-posted to:
- anticorporate@lemmy.giftedmc.com
- cross-posted to:
- anticorporate@lemmy.giftedmc.com
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I wanna work in a library. Not much people, quiet, simple.
But it doesn’t pay, like, anything.
Then again, nothing I have ever done pays enough. Not even the things that used to be considered well-paying back in my father’s time.
I always wanted to be a teacher. I have a passion for teaching people new ways of looking at the world. I manage a team and used to open every Monday call with a chat about science news until the higher-ups started cracking down on “unproductive time.”
Then I got to know a few teachers, and the way they have to work one or two other jobs on the side so they can afford to bring their kids art supplies and science books and I just don’t have it in me. Massive respect to the men and women who stick with their teaching careers despite not being paid, respected or honored in any way by Western society.
“McDonald’s is a job for high schoolers, it’s not a career!”
Then why are they open during school hours, and why do you go there during your lunch break, Gladys, when kids are “at school” and can’t “flip burgers”?
I’m glad you asked, the answer is:
CHILD LABOR
Florida: Let’s expand the work experience program to backfill immigrant labor!
If a job at McDonald’s doesn’t pay your bills and groceries then who do you think would even do this job?
People who are already wealthy and do it just for the fun of flipping burgers?!
Maybe! I have long maintained that if I ever luck into being obscenely wealthy, I will absolutely open some manner of food service or retail establishment similar to those I’ve worked at in the past, but not give a fuck about turning a profit and make a cornerstone of my business telling off customers for being the rude, self-centered, and entitled little shits that so many of them are. I’ll consider it a much needed public service.
I’ve occasionally dreamt about doing this with a bar. I picture it like the sitcom Black Books, but with booze instead of books.
They are trying to get us to accept the the new American Economic Paradigm that ALL households require at least two paychecks to exist, and 3 or 4 if you want to get ahead.
Of course, employers want us to be enslaved to them for our entire schedule, so they don’t like us working second jobs or side hustle.
Time for Robin Hood economics (take from the rich, give to the poor).
If you think flipping burgers is easy, why aren’t you doing it yourself?
Pay all workers a living wage!
But if I don’t have my boot on somebody else’s face, how am I supposed to accept the boot on my face?
Checkmate, communists!
That’s the neat part .png
I think it should come paired with a heavily unionised workforce, otherwise you end up like the UK where the minimum wage keeps going up, but salaries of people who were previously not on the minimum wage stay the same, so now everyone else is actually earning less because prices are rising but salaries are only rising at the top and bottom, eliminating the middle class entirely. A doctor is NOT a minimum wage job, and yet doctors in the UK are earning almost below the minimum wage, given the number of hours they actually work.
That is an issue, but it’s still a better world than the one in which only two of the pay bands are making ends meet rather than all three.
Exactly. Don’t let perfection get in the way of progress.
It’s actually frustrating how some version of this “problem” is brought up whenever conditions become better for people who earn the least. Like, yes, it makes people like you or me feel poorer compared to the rich fucks of the world, but would you rather go back to poor folks being literally destitute, unable to care for their families?
Problem’s coming from t’other end, gov. Not those poor chaps.
Sorry not directed at you of course; just took the opportunity to go off lol. :P
In the US, people we have the same problem with college degree+ level jobs being underpaid, but people without them are just impoverished for life. And some of the ones with the college degree jobs too!
Starting pay at many office jobs isn’t much more than minimum wage, but at least young workers can tell their parents that they work in an office instead of running a cash register, and they wear a tie instead of an apron. That’s supposed to be worth a lifetime of student loan debt.
This comment doesn’t really mean a lot without context. The pay for doctors in the UK varies quite a bit depending on which level of their career they are at. Resident doctors (Foundation Year 1 & 2) earn anywhere between £33k and £37k, Trainees (training in a specialized area of medicine, CT 1-3, ST 1-9) can earn between £43k to £63k. All of these are considered Junior Doctors, who work under the supervision of a Senior Doctor. When they have completed full medical training in a specialized area of medicine (7-10 years), they are Consultant level, which is a Senior Doctor. This can pay between £93k and £126k per year.
For further context, the median individual wage in the UK is £37,430, which is about what second year Resident doctors earn on average. Much like the US, this can be good or bad, depending on where you live. In the North of England, an FY2 earning £37k is solidly middle-class. In London? He’s working-class, but still making far more than minimum wage, and his income will only increase from there.
Speaking of minimum wage… For people 21+ years old, it’s £12.21 an hour. At 40 hours a week, that’s £25,396 per year, or about £7k a year less than a first year resident. There are ZERO doctors in the UK earning “almost below the minimum wage, given the number of hours they actually work.” Unlike in the US where doctors work a billion hours a week, doctors in the UK are unionized (most with the BMA, but there are other unions), and their contracts prevent this. On average, the workload for FY1 & 2 (Residents) is 48 hours per week. They do occasionally get hit with longer weeks, but it’s not normal. Their union contracts are designed specifically to prevent overworking and allow them time to work and study/take exams. Doctors working 80 and 90 hour weeks is mostly a thing of the past.
The bottom line is that Doctors in the UK generally make a good living and have strong unions that ensure they continue to do so. That’s not to say things can’t or shouldn’t improve, but their situation is far from bleak. If the only reason you’re getting into medicine is to get rich, then please get the fuck out of medicine. There are much easier ways to get rich than spending the next 20 years studying while you watch people die in front of you.
Also UK doctors do not start out $250-500k in debt nor are they paying 25% of their practice’s income to malpractice insurance.
Yes, both are very important points. I’ve never met a British doctor who had to drive for Uber or suck dick on Backpage to pay off student loans.
Doctors do still work more hours than someone in an office, meaning their pay is much lower than their salary would first tell you. Also considering the hours they have to work, and the way shifts are operated, their pay needs to be much, much higher. There’s a reason doctors are fleeing the country to Australia where the pay is better and so are the conditions.
Yeah, this is a big problem with the early stages of practicing medicine in the UK. Once you make it past about the 7 year mark, it’s all well and good, but those early years, you’re kind of on par with retail workers, which can be demoralizing. A big mistake the UK made was when the pandemic hit, they didn’t raise wages for doctors to compensate for the absolute chaos. BMA should have gone to war over that the way the French did over retirement age.
Things definitely could be better, especially for young doctors, but I would still rather be a doctor in the UK than in the US. No amount of money is worth that kind of burnout, and I don’t want to be treated by any doctor who thinks it is.
Boomers still think fast-food jobs are part-time things that teenagers do for some pocket change. They literally do not grasp the idea that there are adults working there to pay rent and buy food.
Every food service place in my area fired their under-18 staff. Apparently it was a manager fad to declare minors “too much trouble” and so the only high schoolers I see are bagging groceries or camp counselors for little kids. My kids are 15 and want to start working but the best job in town that allows them is serving dinner and doing laundry at the fancy retirement community.
I cannot remember the last time I saw a high schooler working at a fast food joint.
Don’t worry. With Republicans working hard to repeal child labor laws, you should see more in fast food and also in the mines soon!
They dont realize that teenagers dont even have jobs anymore mostly
look can we stop with the boomer crap? that is a myth and disproved so many times. lets work together instead of insulting whole generations of people we don’t know
It’s not a myth. If it wasn’t so disgustingly true across the board I’d be in agreement. Class war over generational and all that, but I’ll also call out the systems and people that are actively (STILL) shitting all over progress. Their generation is at fault in large part to why we’re so utterly fucked and continue to be (see Reagan). The majority of our gov is run by geriatric fucks that refuse to align with their constituents and cling on to their positions until they’re literally in wheel chairs. Those are fucking boomers. They’re in charge still, and they’re the ones holding the reins on voting in any iota of progress in any number of categories, one being minimum wage. Fuck them.
Its a myth. but hey, lets not facts get in the way of anything. y know, like individual circumstances, actual ages of the people in charge running the government and tech companies, etc.
if you believe the myth, then you’ve been led around by the nose by big tech. y know the the predominately gen x’ers who run the tech world.
BTW I’m a gen xer. born in 68. know more about tech than most millennials( though probably less than many here of any age) and less about cars than most gen x’ers. Know what that says? Means I spent my time differently than others in my generation, same as every generation. Stop with the myth.
Yes, generalizations are usually bad, and there are exceptions to literally any group. Doesn’t mean it’s a myth. The term wouldn’t exist if it was a myth, and wouldn’t be so widely used if there wasn’t a large amount of truth attached to it. I’m also not discrediting the issues we have with corpo bullshit. Thats obviously it’s own issue, but I will point out that part of the reason corp interests are in our politics at all is again because of the same group voting in the ability for lobbying by those corps.
If a majority of boomers think Thing1, but you are a boomer who thinks Thing2 instead, you are not disproving a myth, you’re being an outlier. If you were to pick a random boomer off the street, there’s a very good chance that he thinks Thing1 instead of Thing2. So “boomers think Thing1” is a perfectly valid (if a bit casual) statment that adequately represents the underlying statistical facts of the situation.
It can be frustrating as a Thing2 boomer, but that’s just how it is. The world thinks Amercans are hateful, disgusting ghoulish greedy misanthopists, and it feels bad to hear that as an American who didn’t vote for Trump, but I accept the logic behind the generalization.
ok boomer
You should look into the Pew Charitable Trust paper about why they are abandoning generational studies. In short they are inaccurate and wrong for every generation except one. Want to guess which generation bucks the trends?
L+ratio
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Why should a full-time employer be permitted to pay an employee less than it costs to merely survive? It’s like you WANT to live in a culture where humans are exploited and thrown away when they break.
Edit: NVM, I see from the rest of the thread that you are not participating in good faith, and your responses will be blocked from reaching me.
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You sounds like you’ve never held a job before and these terms are brand new to you. You’re using them wrong.
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You still don’t realize how ignorant you come across
Hourly can be fulltime.
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No, you’re a fucking idiot.
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You are wrong and have always been wrong. It is based on worked (scheduled hours) in a week. Above a threshold, and it is considered full-time.
I get paid by the hour, 50 years old. And the same job for 20 years. Full time.
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Fulltime is typically defined as 40 hours a week max, but the threshold is lower for definitions like the ACA, you can be eligible as low as 30, and sometimes employers have to make you eligible as high as 36, it’s complicated.
It’s not really complicated, it’s just that companies want to find (or make!) loopholes to shirk their responsibilities.
50 hrs ago week isn’t full time? Get fuckt
I’m hourly and make a good living wage, are you implying that hourly means you don’t work full time or should be entitled to a livable wage?
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The workers who are responsible for the continued function of society aren’t owed anything?
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If you work 40 hours a week and paid hourly that is full time. You don’t have to be salary to be full time employee.
Just go away. We don’t want you here.
You’re either a troll or lack all empathy for others. Neither are anything to society.
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Damn. Look everyone, it’s a shit stain of a human
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You’re right. I’ll quit my job tomorrow and apply to be the next Elon Musk. Give me 6 million in seed money now please.
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Yeah i will earn it, and more, at my Elon Musk job. Now gimme.
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Lmao. Look at this poor mfer unable to afford giving me 6 million in seed money so I can quit my burger job and be the next Elon Musk. What a loser.
Maybe he should quit his job and get a better paying one to afford my seed money, like normal people do.
How out of touch are you?
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nobody works there because it’s their life dream. If they work there it’s because of some benefit like having some money vs no money.
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who should be working there then? Like, someone has to. Who do you think belongs there?
Personally, I don’t mind doing an reasonable amount of work - it can be cathartic like exercise or give a sense of purpose. The problem is, the employers want people to be like hamsters on a wheel, driven to exhaustion and then disposed of for the next rodent to be worked to death.
Workers are being abused - ghost jobs, inconsiderate scheduling, impossible requirements, no overtime pay, manipulation, and so forth has corroded the social contract. At some point, there is just no point in working.
I belong there, as would many other people, if society was willing to treat us fairly.
I agree. I wasn’t trying to shit on the job itself, but point out how fast food workers are treated. If fast food workers were treated like human beings, i bet people would love to work there.
No, nobody has to. The problem of them under paying would solve itself if nobody was willing to work for them at those low wages.
Maybe if we had UBI or something, which is why the powers that be are so against it, because being homeless and hungry are powerful motivators to put up with more bullshit.
Collective action? Now that sounds like communism to me…
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If I don’t do something, than fuck everyone who does it, let 'em burn. Definitely big brain time.
The root cause of the problem IS the mega-corp fast food chain that sells us expensive shitty unhealthy food and pays slave wages to its labor force that it treats like annoying obstacles and constantly threatening to automate away. They take away jobs from real restaurants too, until they shut down, and all you have left is fucking McDonald’s.
Dismissing that people work there out of desperation is out of touch, but to disagree with “let fastfood restaurants go bankrupt” is where the REAL BIG brains are at.
Why can’t we just have a discussion without insults. These corporations are the problem, convincing them to pay you more until they automate you away is not a solution, the solution IS for them to be bankrupt.
I also don’t eat there, and think it’s morally outrageous to give them any profit that helps them achieve the distopian future they’re working so hard towards.
Why can’t we just have a discussion without insults
Let’s be honest, “I don’t eat fast food so they should be allowed to pay slave wages” isn’t really a compelling discussion with nuanced talking points.
Why is it on the shoulders of the desperate to not take any job they can get, and on the shoulders of the desperate to not get whatever food they can afford and have time for in between their 3 jobs?
You know what would also kill the business model of “under pay and over work staff for low quality results then just replace them”? Laws preventing such behavior.But they didn’t say that, they said the opposite… They’re saying they’d rather not support this awful business, and would rather watch it die so it can be replaced with real jobs that people can live off of. That’s how I interpreted it anyway.
Close. The issue is corporate socialism
there ya go. here’s a guy/gal who understands the issues.
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Brother if you’re ever in the UK I’d love to link up and see if you’re so quick to talk to people like shit IRL, cause you’ll quickly get your shit rocked.
HMU if you ever in Manchester.
It’s obvious from this thread that they get little to no irl interaction.
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You seem really offended at the idea that “someone who works a job should be able to afford living” for some reason…
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Yes. Minimum wage is supposed to cover every basic living necessity at the very least - from rent to food to even a modest amount of leftover money meant for a bit of fun here and there. It’s not supposed to allow a lavish lifestyle or allow one to eat at restaurants every day, obviously, but it should allow you to live modestly and support your household regardless of you living with others or alone.
So for these McDonald’s overlords who live lavish livestyles thanks to the thankless work these workers put in, then why should they even work at a McDonald’s in the first place? With inflation constantly rising and wages staying where they are someday even a McDonald’s job won’t be worth the hassle for the non-livable pitance of money they receive in return.
Down with overly rich billionaires living off other people’s misery. If your business allows for you to live the most lavish and extravagant life while your workers barely have enough to make ends meet, you are not a successful businessperson, but a grifter to society and use your power to keep the status quo as it currently is. Flipping burgers on a McDonald’s or working in garbage disposal are still essential jobs to serve society, and people are needed for them.
So they should still be properly valued and compensated as humans trying to live their lives while they supply the vital workforce for those same jobs - those positions have to be filled anyway and are of importance to society at large, so let’s not pretend we don’t need people for them and treat them like less-than-humans. Plain and simple - there’s more than enough for the rich to still be rich and live their lavish lives while regular people maintain a satisfactory level of life, and no need to ghoulishly hoard all the wealth (in many cases through tax loopholes which should not be legal whatsoever) like they were gonna live eternally.
And no, I’m not a minimum wage worker, so with this I’m not advocating for myself, but for what’s right for us as a society.
Right-wingers remind me of that meme template where the dog has the ball and it’s going “Throw! No Take! Only throw!”
They want a thriving economy, but they don’t want to pay people wages. No pay. Only spend.
That’s the part I don’t understand. Why do they not realize that if you give people enough money to pay living expenses and then some, they will spend more money. What is the point of having all the money stuck at the top? A thriving economy requires money to circulate, but its getting caught between the same handful of greedy assholes. And they seem to just want to make the problem worse. If they do that, the economy will collapse and then all that money will be worthless anyway.
Because the most wealthy people are hoarders. At that point it’s a mental issue. They are it as a zero sun game and think having the biggest percentage of the pie means they win. They didn’t care about making the pie itself bigger.
If you work, you and your family should have their needs met, aka, we should all be able to help our community have all of our basic needs met
This same worker should also have capital F free health care a house or condo he and his family like or she and her family, or their family, yours or mine
This worker should be able to have paid leave, both vacation and sick.
…
I’ll do you one better. If you exist you and your family should have their needs met. We have the ability to feed, provide medical care, and house everyone on the planet many times over yet we don’t. I’ll leave it as an exercise to the reader to figure out why we don’t.
We should put the psychopaths that can’t care about others in a reserve, where they can make their own hellscape, away from normal people.
So we can have a normal society without some insane psychopath arguing about healthcare, because he happens to not need it.
We will see who’s society is better
We will see who’s society is better
Did you ever read “A libertarian walks into a bear”? It’s a non-fiction book about a bunch of libertarians that moved to a small town, and used their new voting bloc to try to bring about their libertarian paradise. It went badly. There were bears.
The author points out how a nearby town that was otherwise very similar. It had prospered during the time libertarians were driving their town into the ground
Funny enough, I hear it worked decently until then.
A dude died of exposure because he couldn’t afford his heating bill. If you think people who don’t have money should simply die, then I guess it was working decently.
Umm yeah…Libertarians are ok with that. The question is if their society can run at all, and it seems that is unlikely. Now, it is a pretty shit system.
I don’t read proper books very often but the title of that book got my curiosity, and tried the first three chapters and I don’t know if I have a really fucked sense of humor but it really got me laughing at how absurd early US history is in hindsight, not having to live through it. Anyway thanks for that, probably gonna finish it.
This sounds like a fascinating read lol. I’ve never heard of that before!
Regardless of ideology, I do find those “let’s start our own society” accounts very educational, because everybody thinks they can do it better, but there’s a lot of pitfalls and footguns to learn from.
Have a look at this: https://newrepublic.com/article/159662/libertarian-walks-into-bear-book-review-free-town-project
It’s about the book, about that town, Grafton. Great read. The book itself is great too.
We should put the psychopaths that can’t care about others in a reserve, where they can make their own hellscape, away from normal people.
Digitally, we’ve already done this, and called it LinkdIn!
But somehow we got pulled into having to play their stupid games. :(
But if no one has to struggle, how will we know who’s beneath us??
Hint: we’re all at the bottom and there’s only another layer
Lateral poverty
He struggles so the billionaire can own a yacht.
Third yacht.
their con man idols tell them that the reason their lives are shitty is because of the mexicans, gays, black people, women, librarians, immigrants…everyone except the people who are literally paying them nothing and laughing at them for it.
and the people are all too happy to believe it
Cookie clicker irl
I think a lot about something i read somewhere - “you hate every piece of capitalism but won’t connect the dots to see that’s the picture”.
I have this conversation with people all the time.
Everything always boils down to people being dumb and if magically the people would become smart, all problems would just get fixed.
Not even smart , in a genius-like sense. I’d settle for merely cooperative.
Like if people could drop the petty “movement purity” squabbles and just rustle up that meme energy “apes together strong” for each other as the working class, instead of individualizing their struggles and settling for misery, we could really get somewhere!
You mean unions?
Communist!
Well… You ought to know to listen to your betters, too!
It’s this, and it’s also more than this: there has to be a limitation put on profit, a place at which the corporation achieves balance and success- enough to not feel the need to continually chip away at wages and working conditions or increasing enshittification in search of immediate short-term profits.
If enough profit is never enough, it will forever remain a constant battle between corporations and workers, and corporations and the public.
This is even my problem with the system when it comes to “the little guy.” Say you make a coffee shop, or release art, or a videogame, or an invention… There’s always this looming pressure to scale . No matter how much of a home run, that success is almost designed to “dry up.”
Wow, one in a million success! You can chill now right? No, it’s gotta be bigger, better, repeated, infinitely! Franchises, chains, out of place sequels nobody asked for! Overly enthusiastic merch destined for the Pacific Garbage Patch!
It feels like the system forces greed upon people as the state religion because they are not naturally greedy themselves if they’re otherwise taken care of. Savvy business of the modern age has the mentality of cancer.
Even the wealthy need to be imbued with the pathological fear that all they have might get taken from them, so they must amass more and more. It doesn’t even end with their own lives! They must aim for generational private wealth now.
It’s feels like it’s such an outlier mentality to want to find “just enough success to support my people and do some good.”
And you’re right about the adversarial relationship between employers and workers. “Honest work” is almost an oxymoron anymore, because it doesn’t matter how nice a person sits in the manager’s chair. Their win condition to provide for themselves is to screw you as much as possible and get away with it.
People will point out that it makes more sense to punch up than to punch down but the later is significantly easier and better paid.
These is why the alt right pipeline for women is transphobia/TERF shit.
Sexism is real, lots of teenage girls and young women feel frustrated and powerless, but they get easy wins going after trans women. They can’t get Dobbs reversed, but forcing trans people to detransition is an explicit goal of conservative power structures. They get to feel like they “won” with that UK court ruling - that “women’s rights” were won by something that did nothing to actually meaningfully help women.
Punching down gives the monkey brain that sweet squirt of dominance when you see the suffering of your subject. Punching up is unrewarding because you don’t get results unless everyone else does it, and then you have to share the victory with everyone else.
Focusing your wrath where it belongs doesn’t make the million year old monkey brain squirt the reward chemicals.
they run them down a conveyer belt or something now i think, they got a location thats totally automated and has no employees
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You’re a part of the problem
They’re a troll & not worth engaging. Funnily enough, their sole argument for seemingly every interaction is “well why don’t YOU do it”.
Willfully ignorant.
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This one is defective, a shame we can’t RMA you.
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We do. Have you not noticed the prices? In 2000 a bigmac cost $2.24 now they cost $5.99. The real tell, tho, is that mcdonalds had $25 BILLION in profits in 2024. Money they made from consumers buying their products. Somehow it seems like they absolutely have the money to pay a living wage, but im no mathematician.
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individual is shit compared to collective
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individual is a lone gunman, collective is an army
