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How's that supposed to work?
(lemmy.world)
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this post was submitted on 12 Mar 2024
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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.
Capabilities are a gigantic overlooked issue.
I am not capable of "good paying jobs." I'm not intelligent enough. The biggest problem in my entire life has been the fact that my interests are so disjointed from my actual capabilities. I may love going home and watching Anton Petrov discus new findings in particle physics, or astronomy, but there is no universe where I'm actually capable of doing that work.
To a more down to earth example, computer science jobs are some of the very few remaining "good paying jobs" I'm way too stupid to be able to do that work, I've tried to learn.
For all you highly empathetic people out there: yes, it sucks to suck, but that doesn't mean I should just starve and live in someone's basement, paying their mortgage in rent prices for the rest of my life...
And that was kinda my point. The issue isn't just that these jobs won't pay the bills (with a bit to spare) but rather that they won't pay the bills, there are less generally-available jobs that do, and those often have hefty requirements well beyond what they should.
People are being pushed down in the job market and the "McJobs" are insufficient for most people to get by. There user you be more positions that did at one point pay better than flipping burgers and they didn't require you have a Masters', five years experience, and 50 grand of student debt courses.
There were also more retail positions for those that wanted something a bit different than serving up food from a drive-through window. They didn't pay that much more but it was still something, and people became very knowledgeable in those positions. Want to know what tool does job X, what paint to use for job Y, or where to find the latest movie/single/book from some lesser-known artist: there was a staff member that knew that, and they knew the regular customers too! There was a guy whose main job was to put your groceries in a bag and maybe bring it out to the car.
Now we have adults taking up dual serving jobs and a side hustle in order to make ends meet. That's not "end at 4pm and chill" that's "collapse at home and get a minimal amount of sleep before going at it again and again and again".
Corporations cut staff, don't increase pay, and make record profits. I'm not sad that somebody might be working a McJob because they want to want to, I'm sad because they're probably working several part-time because they HAVE to and still struggling to get by, with little to no down-time and no opportunities for change.
And when a bunch of people finally say "fuck it" and employers can't find even enough people to staff their bare-minimum shift schedule, they cry to the government who brings in a million people from other countries to exploit instead of having the corps actually be pressured to make those jobs less shitty.
You make an excellent point that not everyone is capable to do everything in the world with just some gumption and training. We are all different in ways that makes some skills and knowledge unattainable for practical use.
A lot of us have interests and hobbies beyond our abilities. It's also awesome that you are smart enough to know what you don't know (many people who actually suck lack the self awareness)
Your enthusiasm may one day inspire someone else to do great things in that field. Maybe it's a child's future or maybe it's a question you ask that sets off a thought process in an expert. Maybe it inspires you to think about a problem of your own a different way.
Challenging experts to explain what they do so the rest of us can understand and discuss only helps. If you met a particle physicist or astronomer in real life, they'd absolutely love talking with you and corner you at the party and have a great time. Their coworkers would be jealous. :)
Anything we learn isn't wasted.
Not everything we learn has to earn money.
A living wage should not require extreme skillsets or extreme ambition.
A living wage should not require so much time and energy that all there is to life is work.
Living in your parent's basement or with multiple roommates as your only option is not a living wage.
These should be choices people make because they want to, not requirements if they want to afford food and medicine. Or temporary need to do's (like breakups, moving to a new area, theft, etc)
I agree you should be paid a real living wage for whatever it is you do. If the job is worth having it done, it is worth paying a living wage to have it done. Even if it doesn't take a particle physicist to do it. :) Even if it is a low stress job for the person doing it.
I also agree Corporations should not own and rent out single family homes at all. There do need to be rental options for people, but it should be feasible to buy a place too. But that is a different rant.
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.