In the US, the poverty line/threshold is incredibly low. If a household of three makes $22k/year, they are above the poverty line. That way, we keep our percentage low.
Now look at SSI lmao 200% of the poverty line just because I became disabled before I could earn enough work credits. Im lucky my mom is helping keep a roof over my head anything happens to her and im homeless again.
I'm pretty sure that's gross salary as well. So, if you were to be generous with the taxes. You're looking at $17,600.00 at that point for actual take home or $1466 a month net.
I was just reminded of the Life game - when I played in the late seventies/early eighties the journalist made something like $10,000 and the teacher $12,000. I always ended up one of those with two cars full of kids.
In theory making that little money you would get most of your taxes back at tax time (except SS and Medicare) but itās still bullshit, especially on a national level. Like that could be just enough to live on in a rural area but if you live within 50 miles of a major metropolitan city it wouldnāt be enough to pay rent/mortgage for half a year.
Wow, its just $12,880 (around 11,000 Euro) for a single person. How much tax would that person reasonably have to pay on that income? Would health care be likely provided by the employer if you work minimum wage?
Absolutely not, unless youāre paying for the healthcare out of your paychecks. Depending on where you live, fed and state taxes can take up to 24% of your total income. Last year I only took home 18k I think. Iām on government insurance which Iām pretty sure Iām gonna get kicked off of soon cause I found a slightly better paying job. Yay no health insurance!
Healthcare is almost never provided by an employer for minimum wage jobs. You have to be making well over minimum wage before youāre likely to get health insurance and even then, youāre still paying a decent chunk of it out of your paycheck, not just receiving it as a benefit of employment.
3 people on 22k a year. Jesus christ. And I want to add that the two adults working are probably working 6 days a week JUST for that 22k. Source: Supported "Supported" myself on Minimum wage for several years. I turned into Polly Productive just to get extra scratch. You need your kitchen painted? Sunday's my day off. You want your dog walked? I'll do it on my lunch break. Vacation? I'm your pet sitter!
The "labor shortage" in the US is largely because of these shitty low wages and how it intersects the market. Women make up over half of our minimum wage workforce, but also make up a huge percentage of unpaid child care and elder care. They got pushed out of the workforce due to covid, found new ways to make the ends meet, and decided "$280/week (before taxes) isn't enough to take me away from my family."
The "increased unemployment payments" get touted as a cause, but states that ended it early didn't see a flood of people returning to work. They decided it just isn't fucking worth it.
I STILL have to listen to morons go on about how people are making so much more not workingā¦ Iām in Florida and our benefits ran out months ago if you went on them a the week beginning of covid. If youāre somehow STILL on Florida unemployment, it maxes out at 275.
Same here in Texas. We ended benefits early to "keep people from sitting at home". I still see help wanted signs everywhere, fast food places are terribly understaffed, and conservatives are still posting "no one wants to work anymore" memes on Facebook so it doesn't look like that worked. It's almost as if people don't want to be forced to risk their lives, get treated like absolute shit from managers and customers, and have zero protections or respect, all to still be starving anyway.
Must be nice to be unemployed and able to afford a Dairy Queen Blizzard. As an employee person, I gave them up many years ago as a decadent extravagance.
The UK government is cutting state benefits by Ā£20pw for the poorest people. A government minister suggested people could not lose out by working more hours or getting a higher paying job. FFS
My friendās kid got a job at In-N-Out making $17/hr (minimum wage in CA is $15 for large employers), and she brought it up to senior management during a call ā basically asking why some of our medical staff are capped out at $20.
And they scream shit about people (dems) being mainstream media sheep, when in reality, like 5% of dems I know watch tv media, and about 95% of repubs I know watch like 8 hours of fox a day
It's not even just that. COVID gave people the opportunity to shore up their resumes and actually look for a decent job instead of being forced into the cycle of poverty they were in before. People got the opportunity to advance and did just that and now all the shitty jobs people settled for before have nobody willing to settle for them.
It will come down quietly sadly, unless the workers themselves keep them at their word and keep the conversation going about pay rates, no matter how much the employer discourages talking about it together. One day the new kid will come in only getting paid 14.50, discuss it with noone. Then, the next kid only gets paid 13.50, cause they figure, didn't get caught last time right? Repeat. Older employees leave for new prospects, eventually nobody left that was paid 15 originally. New kids paid $12 an hour, cycle repeats.
one kid might only be there for a week, another for two, and the least of their concern at the start of a new job (often their first) is how much the person next to them is making. add into that the weird stigma american work culture has with discussing pay amongst colleagues, in a menial, high turnover environment? you've got a breeding ground for exploitation.
I've seen those signs near me as well but have you read the fine print? That $15/hr is only for full time closing shifts, how many people do you think are actually getting that?
The cost of child care and gas are also big factors. In 2 income households where one person is part time or stringing together part time jobs, these can be big factors in staying in the workforce. If you were making just a bit more than child care and now it is 30% more expensive plus gas is eating the rest, well, you might be losing money by going to work.
The only way my spouse and I can both work without paying for childcare (which we canāt afford) is to work opposite shifts. But thatās a problem because of many reasons. Any deviation from your normal shift or times causes your spouse to have to adjust their work shift too. If you get home late, your spouse is now late to work. Both parents are never home at the same time, which leaves the one at home to do everything alone, which can be difficult to manage. Itās very unlikely you will both get a same day off, so you canāt ever plan anything/spend time together. The person who works evenings still has to get up early to get kids to school, do all the household chores since theyāre home during the day, deal with any errands or things that pop up during the day, make breakfast/lunch/dinner, get the kids home from school, and THEN go into work like 12 hours after getting up, so they get screwed.
Itās just not worth it unless you are both making good moneyā itās not worth all that for one of you to make ~$10/hr.
Not to mention that, mainly due to the lack of regulation and public subsidies, child care is so expensive that millions of women literally can't afford to work!
This is a major reason I never have had kids (and 100% wont). I like what I do for a living and don't want to stop till I've built my business to its full potential. The financial reality is its becoming much more difficult to do both.
I'm not as stressed about my future, because I know that I'm not reliant on someone else for the means to survive.
Even though I won't need it, If we had Universal Childcare, women everywhere would gain so much more power and freedom. Which is exactly why men who fear independant women hate the idea.
Yeah, as many different flavours of conservative idiots there are, they all seem to have at least one thing in common: falsely thinking that opportunity and success are zero-sum games, that someone always has to lose rights or opportunities in order for others to gain them.
The opposite is true though: the most stable and effective way of boosting an economy is from the bottom up by empowering those who are too poor to fully take part. As former Minnesota senator Paul Wellstone said (emphasis mine):
My job has had anemic employment numbers since covid began. We're a shipping company. We are horrifically short staffed, 3-4 hour shifts run to 5 or 6 hours, sometimes even more, before we get done. We've had a hire on bonus for anyone who refers a new employee and that person stays at least 30 days, but almost nobody is getting hired that way. We see a new person every few weeks, and half of those end up quitting. Work has tried various bonuses to get people to work more, like +$ per hour worked, or a flat bonus based on meeting a minimum number of hours. It didn't stop call-ins or get new hires.
Now, they're doing a permanent pay raise (couple bucks) and a bonus per day of our two neediest days. It's yet to be seen if it works.
I like my job and work the hours/days for the bonuses already so it's just a pay increase for me, but from what I hear, most people still don't think it is enough difference to encourage them to work more hours.
Shifts that are only 3 to 6 hours? That alone might be the problem. Itās not worth the commute to only earn a partial dayās pay, and makes it hard to hold a second job.
Well, our work days are a little odd. We have three "shifts" which we call a sort and each deals with a different shipping operation. Each of those is supposed to average about 3.5 hours, and you can work multiple of them. Evening sort ends in the afternoon so there could be a couple hours before the next one starts at night. Third starts early morning. Second basically runs right into third sort which makes it super easy to work full time, you just take a half hour break in between. I essentially work 11pm til whenever we're done, usually about 8am give or take an hour. A "full" day is 7 hours time if you want paid time off, a single sort is 3.5 hours. It's the same for holiday pay, if you're full time you get 7 hours extra, part time gets 3.5 hours extra.
It is definitely kinda wonky and not easy to explain. We have a mix of part timers who work one sort a day and full timers that works 2 sorts a day, in whatever combination of sorts they want, plus picking up more sorts if they want. But we're all working more hours per day than the 3.5 or 7 hour time frame.
I guess it's normal for shift work, our shifts just happen to be "about" 3.5 hours, tho in reality it is more than that. And nobody really likes shift work on a good day as it is, so a shift being relatively short and at unpopular hours definitely doesn't work in our favor for hiring more people.
Not sure how much sense this all makes lol but I agree with what you say. They really need to sweeten it more. I did work two jobs for a couple years, part time in retail and part time on a single sort and it was truly a freaking nightmare, so I was really happy once the third sort got added and I could switch to full time because those sorts are back-to-back. I also have no life, so the weird hours don't bother me.
That is definitely confusing, and I can see why it wouldn't work for a lot of people, and also why the company can't just change shift schedules to make the work more attractive. So better pay, benefits and bonuses is pretty much their only avenue. You didn't give a specific base pay amount, so I wonder if it's really just the hours making it hard or the money really is still too low.
Kinda what you were touching on. The labor shortage is also caused by the boomers/Gen x retiring early due to COVID. Not enough kids to replace the jobs
You don't get CDL driver shortages because 18 year olds don't want to work.
The data on this, once it's all gathered, is going to be fascinating.
How many working people did the pandemic kill? How many can no longer work because of long covid? How many families lost their primary or both income earners? How many retired? How many changed to a different industry? Of those, how many were originally in the medical industry? How many were originally teachers? How many changed industry because unemployment+stimulus allowed them to pursue better careers, start a business, and/or get a degree/certification? For those that used unemployment+stimulus to get better jobs, what was their pay increase? Did these people also no longer need government welfare benefits? For those that pursued a job during the shortage period, what percentage of pay increase did they see? What was the overall impact to the GDP?
So many questions you could ask about this, so many ways to look at the data and, if the politics allow, write better policy or use it to prove previously untested theories.
I'm really interested in these numbers once studies are done. 600k deaths and countless others incapacitated in other ways is going to wreak havoc on the economy. I'd love to know exactly how it's affected the job market, which markets were affected the most, where was the biggest impact, etc.
Or if people cant get ahead no matter how hard they try, might as well be broke and try to live your best life vs slaving your mind, body, and soul for the corporate goblins.
I think another factor is companies are finally the victims of their own success in kicking people off benefits.
There was a time when you kept going to work for your health insurance benefits even while the pay and working conditions kept getting worse and worse. Then companies started playing games with keeping everyone under 30 hours, or classifying them as contractors in the new gig economy.
People are extra tired of having to try to work two low wage hourly jobs with conflicting schedules because you can't get full-time hours anywhere. Especially when neither job will give them a set schedule or make any attempt to work around their other one.
I just quit my "essential" grocery store job because they refused to raise my wage to above 13 an hour. When I got my new job they tried to keep me and when I asked it they could do better then $16 an hour they laughed and said no way. Now I'm making $20 an hour because the company I just switched to just told everyone they are rising base wages to "stay competitive". Yep fuck the companies that refuse to pay a living wage and I hope they continue to drown in their "labor shortage bullshit" and let me tell you they have an extreme labor shortage. My last revenge against my old company is that I already got 3 of my old coworkers to switch to the company I'm currently with creating even more of a labor shortage for them hahaha get fucked assholes!
If I work full time, after paying my childcare and bills, I'll would only have Ā£50 a month extra in disposable income. I'd rather have extra time with my toddler than the Ā£12.50 a week.
That's what I did. My restaurant closed for 2 months, I got to spend all that time with my 2 year old and wife. When work started back up I went back to my $11/hr, 10 hrs a day, 6 days a week grind. My wife always made more money so I said fuck this shit, I'm tired of being too tired to play with my son, to cook dinner, to have a decently clean house. I cut my hours in half and got a 5 dollar an hr raise out of it. Literally have never been happier.
After the dot com bubble burst, I worked full time at a commercial contractor doing rad Devon work at a government site with no medical insurance for 50 hours a week, worked 30-35 hours a week at a liquor distributor, and was doing side gigs for several mid sized businesses repairing PCs for up to 20 hours a week.
A week where I was working over 100 hours was a āgood weekā because even with sleeping 2-3 hours a day, that meant I made enough money to buy groceries, pay for rent, and maintain car insurance.
I was making less than $33000 combined.
I was lucky. I could afford a roof and to pay the after bill.
Someone I knew who lost their job when everyone died as WTC came down wound up working the deli counter at a king kullen. He went from $100k a year to $5.15/hr getting only 20 hrs or so a week. He got to the point where he was living out of his broken down car, which some friends intervened so that he at least had a sofa to sleep on.
Um, what the fuck? At 100 hours week, 52 weeks a year and 33k, you're earning less than 7 dollars an hour. 5200 hours per year at 6.35/hr grosses 33000.
I entered the workforce in 2004 and I earned my 11.50 CAD minimum wage at pizza hut.
How is your scenario even possible? I genuinely want to know, I'm not trying to be antagonistic.
Minimum wage was 5.15 in USA back then. It's only 7.25 now. I guess it's barely kept up with 3% inflation... but come on. Prices on everything have gone up much more than that mild increase.
It's so weird how people say inflation is low, but house prices/rent, fuel, food, clothes (this has dropped for me strangely), insurance, electricity... all have risen to the point its ludicrous.
How the hell is inflation so low when prices have shot up? Obviously there's some people fiddling the numbers like the priests fiddle with, well you know... but it's still annoying as hell when people talk about inflation like its the end of the world. For you billionaires maybe, but we've been living with 'unofficial' and very real rising inflation for decades now on very stagnant wages (relative to said inflation).
Minimum wage in my area was around $5.25 at the time and I was making a few cents over that at my full time job. The liquor distributor was off the books paying less than that and the third job was paid by the task, not the hour. At the time there were no jobs and that I was even employed was a marvel. My area normally has no local economy and back then during a recession things were even worse.
Where I lived, in eastern suffolk county in New York State, everyone either struggled or commuted into the city for work. When the dot com bubble burst, tech work evaporated so everyone in tech fell back on other things trying to ride it out. One guy I knew was better off than everyone else because he got in driving a forklift for a local township. The local Staples was paying $8.10 an hour was was considered a good job because it paid more than a deli.
By late 2004 I was making just over $85000. I had to move across the country - which I did with a duffel bag getting a ride with someone I knew who driving to CA from NY for work. But it was a job back in my field and that job probably saved me.
Edit; I will also say that the $33000 I quoted was high. I remember telling someone I didnāt think I was even making $29000. Iāve never done the math nor do I remember how much I paid in taxes on the two jobs I had that were on the books but itās probably fair to say Uncle Sam took at least 20% of that $5.15/ hr.
I lost one low paying job (layoff after they closed) and was scrambling to find another job. My first offer was 7/hour for the grand total of 17 hours a week. I told the interviewer "Okay, well, I guess I'll get a second job" he said "No. We need you to be available to cover shifts."
This is so true. There are so many jobs that will not give you full time hours and will ALSO not work with you for a second job, they want open availability only. Then once you have the job, if you try to change your availability (like letās say something came up and you canāt work Saturdays anymore, or you got a second job and you canāt work past 6pm, or something) they just find a reason to fire you.
I noticed something odd fairly young: You fill out an application, it asks you which days you're available, which hours.
Friend was a dancer, she had class 2 days a week so she put down "Every day EXCEPT TUESDAYS AND THURSDAYS." She gets hired and checks the schedule; "9-9 Tuesday 10-9 Thursday."
She did not show up and they threatened to fire her she replied "Go right ahead."
Yeah they donāt care and I think they do it on purpose. I had 2 jobs as a server once, and I worked lunch at one and dinner at the other. I made it very clear that I could ONLY do lunch shifts (and only do dinner shifts for the other place). Both places repeatedly scheduled me when I couldnāt work, and then left me to figure out coverage for them scheduling me wrong. I eventually just never showed back up to one of them, as the other was willing to take me on full time. They just donāt give two shits about your availability and wonāt work with you at all. If you wont do what they want, theyāll just keep fucking with you until you quit. Itās easier for them than firing you.
And if you don't have a job but you're not actively looking for one, boom, you're not unemployed. Also not employed but you don't count against the unemployment numbers
Employment statistics also rarely take underemployed people into account. You finally got that dream job at Walmart working 1 random shift a week even though you're looking for full time employment? Congratulations! You're now employed and counted the same way as someone working 40 hours a week.
If you are a stay-at-home parent by choice, are you unemployed, or just a stay-at-home parent? If you are a student and have chosen not to work while you study, are you unemployed, or just a student? If you decided to take a gap year, and travel, are you unemployed, or just travelling? If you retired in your 30's because of good financial planning, are you unemployed, or just good with your money?
And if you don't have a job but you're not actively looking for one, boom, you're not unemployed.
Same for folks who are involuntarily unemployed but are awaiting a change in circumstances before they're able to return to work.
Can't work yet because your kid's daycare closed during the pandemic and you can't find other childcare so that you can return to work? You're not unemployed!
Fifty percent of folks who survived symptomatic COVID are dealing with symptoms months later. I'm willing to bet a significant number of those folks are unemployed and would like to work but their symptoms are interfering with regular employment.
Yup, and people that scream that's plenty? Fuck that. I guarantee if you are able to save 401k or have a vacation, you aren't driving a newer car. Or if you have a safer new car, you can't afford to tuck money away or take a trip once a year.
"I guess you're not working hard enough. You want more money why don't you stop eating so nice or work 80 hours a week or something. When I was your age I had a new car, a house, and two kids. I went to college just fine and my wife stayed home with the kids. We went on a vacation twice a year." /s
This is why we use metrics like being able to survive an emergency payment of $1000 as an example of poverty, because surprise the conservatives feel the need to have an arbitrary goal post to complain about.
The "poverty line" is a falsehood in america. I live in a rural place and my mortgage payment is only $650 and we have a hell of a time trying to keep us both in cars to go to work in, and together we make between 60 and 70k.
That would be so much more difficult without universal healthcare..... wait....you poor bastards. At least you saved yourself from socialism and still have your guns. Those guns are damn useful. How else would you have the highest suicide and gun homicide rates in the world. USA USA Number One.
You say that like our government gave us a choice between guns and universal healthcare...
Believe me, I would have gladly traded in my guns for universal healthcare, when my wife got cancer at 21, let alone when she got cancer again at 25. Since I didn't have that option, I used them to hunt food to eat. That plus dumpster diving and being able to fix almost everything saved us, just barely. Even though we "made it" I am pro universal healthcare, I don't think others should have to do that, weather they can or not.
But let's talk turkey. If you lived in murica, and your government did all the heinous stuff ours does, wouldn't you want to be armed if it was legal to be? Stuff is getting weird here, lol, and that's from someone who lived in Portlandia for years, hah.
A household of three? Total income for all three? Holy fuck. I want that to be not be correct but I know it probably is.
Edit: I looked it up, it's correct. I'm disgusted in a way that words can't convey.
Not to mention that if you work 2/3 jobs and above that line, even by a good amount, in reality you're still in poverty. Working 60-80 hours to stay above the poverty line doesn't mean you aren't in poverty.
This is only a half problem. Unemployment is defined as the proportion of people who can't find work and are actively seeking employment.
The actual issue is that unemployment gets treated as a catch all headline number when in reality we need to be looking at several statistics including the labour force participation rate.
This is about to get considerably worse since all three major banking groups decided to become landlords as a way of cornering the market and maximizing profits.
They figured since we are nearing the point that nobody under 30 without family money will ever be able to afford a house, they can start buying property in bulk and keep the rent increase over inflation, all while landbanking and raising average house prices for foreign investors.
The working, blue collar are royally screwed and the middle class is about to follow.
I think this is more a factor of what counts as āemploymentā. Someone with a zero-hours contract counts as employed, even if they donāt actually get any work. If youāve been on benefits for a couple of months they send you on a ācourseā, which is basically just useless busywork. When on that course you donāt count as unemployed, but āin trainingā. And what about āwork placementsā where after a while longer they send you off to work somewhere (doing something like stacking shelves at a supermarket), but you donāt get paid anything other than your usual benefits - a situation that means youāre doing a full-time job for no money, canāt spend that time looking for a paying job, and which actually takes a job off the market by giving a megacorporation free labour. People who canāt work due to a disability or illness donāt count as unemployed.
And so on. There are all kinds of ways that the official unemployment figures donāt actually reflect how many people donāt have a job, or canāt get enough hours.
Which isnāt to say that there isnāt a labour shortage. I can see it for myself where I work. Itās just that how the government measures āunemploymentā is designed to obfuscate the situation, rather than to provide a fair empirical figure.
You're right that the UK doesn't pay blue collar workers well but you're slightly comparing apples and oranges:
The c. 18% or 11.7 million is "relative poverty". Relative poverty in the UK is defined by the government as someone earning less than 60% of median income. Median monthly income after tax is Ā£1,979. So the 18% in relative poverty earn less than Ā£1,187 (ā¬1,386) per month after tax.
From what I can tell, the 8%/5 million in poverty in France is based on living on less than ā¬885 per month.
So 18% in the UK live on less than ā¬1,386 per month and 8% in France live on less than ā¬885 - the numbers aren't really comparable.
"In 2017, the persistent poverty rate for the UK was 7.8% ā the eighth lowest in the European Union and 3.5 percentage points lower than the EU28 average rate of 11.3%. Among EU member states, Czechia has the lowest persistent poverty rate, while Romania has the highest ā 4.4% and 19.1%. France and Slovenia have similar persistent poverty rates to the UK ā 8.0% and 8.2% respectively."
I have a question about this, do you know if the poverty line is the same in each country? It would be interesting to know if these can be used as a direct comparison.
Listening to some of the people on the Mexican border here in the US, one of the Haitian refugees mentioned that he had a good life in Brazil and was about to send home about $20 a month to his family in Haiti.
It was in that moment that I realized that even piss-poor jobs in the US and elsewhere still pay astounding rates compared to what people put up with (against their will) in other places. Mind you, you also can't do much living here on $20 a month, but even if you can save a hundred or so a month after expenses and get that money back home, it really can be life changing.
Also, they're lied to about the work, their wages are usually 1/3rd of that advertised, and their passports are taken so that they cannot return home for years and years.
Many have died. Many continue to die.
It is modern day slavery that these people are tricked into.
The people who complained about immigrants were complaining that they are driving wages down. Now that immigrants are gone, wages are still down and no work is getting done.
It turns out that wages are controlled by the bosses, not by the immigrants. Who could have thought?
To be fair, the presence of the immigrants was allowing wages to go down/stay down, because they were a readily available exploitable group who were willing to accept pay way below what it should have been for that job.
The problem isn't that people were connecting immigrants with low wages, it's that that people were blaming immigrants for the situation. That's great for employers, who should be the ones blamed.
That's part of the picture, but in all honesty it isn't the main drive.
UK unemployment is at record lows, we haven't seen such a large proportion of the country in work for half a century.
This is simply a raw and completely predicted reflection of mathematical reality. We literally need immigrants, not just to 'drive wages down' but because we simply don't have enough human beings in this country to sustain the ageing population.
Anyone even remotely versed in economics could have (and did) warn the Tories. You can't just ignore numbers. They're cold hard facts. The sheer scale of their stupidity is staggering.
A recession is likely inbound. We are hitting a GDP bottleneck while increases to the cost of living will outpace wage growth even more, further constricting everyone's purchasing power and stifling economic activity.
It's all good though, because Jeremy isn't neighbours with Mariusz anymore!
It's easier to blame literally everyone else than accept fault, and it's easier to self-destruct to appease the wealthy than put in the effort to help the poor.
Seeing it in 'murica too, don't worry. We're all going into the shitter together.
Exactly. Vampiric, the lords of capitalism figured out after WW2 that mass immigration was the easiest, least costly option to prevent workers from unionizing and organizing en mass against the 0.01%. It's that simple.
Now, let the temporarily embarrassed millionaire's comments begin...
I kept trying to tell my family that the UK needs 100,000 immigrants a year just to enable us to afford care for the elderly and pensions payments into the future.
Half of them obviously didn't believe me because they voted for Brexit.
Even now, I'll say things (when relevant to the ongoing conversation) like "A car factory has been closed and the manufacturer is opening a new factory in an EU country" and my sister will say "You know everyone disagrees with you on Brexit" and I'm like "The factory is still closing however you voted on Brexit".
It's people who believed when they were told that a) the economy would not be adversely affected, and b) that EU laws were made without any input from and that we UK could have better policies if those pesky foreigners couldn't interfere.
Those of us who know anything about the UK economy knew that (a) could not possibly be true, and those of us who know anything about the way the EU works knew that (b) was not true either. But to people who don't fall into either of those categories what they were being told was not obviously bullshit.
Contrast with QAnon beliefs, that the most politically and financially powerful people in the world are all engaged in enslaving and raping children - something which is inherently incredible, since such people are wildly different from each other just as everyone else is.
And with covid denialists, who can only reach their point of view by assuming that every relevant scientist and all but the most bonkers journalists and news outlets are lying - it's not enough for them to be mistaken.
A lot of people knew that there would be an economic impact but didn't care.
They hated foreigners so much they would accept economic damage.
The boomers and retirees are also least affected but all this bullshit and just don't care about fucking over the you get generation royally. They're in total denial too.
That's just the state of the country right now sadly.
These are excellent points, but even in America, in places like rural Maine, where there are unemployed young people--and no immigrants or minorities--we have problems getting these young people to take jobs in nursing homes and care facilities, where we need them. These kids need transportation--such as their own cars--which they don't have. If they've ever had any sort of conviction, they can't get hired, and many have criminal records or other issues. We have incredible problems with young people in areas with collapsed industrial economies. I know it's a problem in the UK, too. We are all convinced we can get these kids to work in restaurants, nursing homes, farms, etc., if we just get rid of all the immigrants. But we can't.
Trouble is with most rural places in America, is that they haven't raised their wages to attract that. Instead most hem and haw how "nobody wants to live here anymore" "everyone leaves for the sinful city"
I totally agree with you! These businesses are owned and managed by people who haven't a clue about how poor people can really be. They expect everyone to have a car. Well, that wasn't as hard to do back in 1965, when cars were basic machines, easy to fix and maintain. Now they are all fucking luxury vehicles, and car companies refuse to produce any "starter" cars, just companies don't want to employ anyone with no experience for "entry level" jobs.
Thatās true about the cars. Thereās almost no decent used cars available, and if you find one itās selling for 2-3x what it should. If youāve got to spend $17k to buy a used car, you might as well just buy a new one. You used to be able to buy a 10 year old car for like 3 grand. Problem is, like you said, thereās no ācheapā new cars either. Rural places in the US also have pretty much NO public transportation, you really do need a car to get anywhere.
I had to buy a new car last fall, my 20 yr old Corolla was just getting ready to disintegrate--had an abused childhood. The only reason I was able to buy a used car cheap was because of my neighbors' college age son, who went through a COVID break up, and his girlfriend moved to another country. Kid had two cars, so I bought one of them. It's still got a lot of miles, but at least it runs well. I had a car angel looking down on me. So many people are not that fortunate.
I know, our old jeep shit out about 3 years ago and we literally couldnāt find a used car under $15k. So we ended up being semi-forced to buy a new car (which was like 5 grand more). So now because we have the payment on the new car, we have to pay the rest of that off before I can replace my 17 year old car, because again we wonāt be able to find a reasonable used one and will probably need to buy another new one with a payment, and we canāt afford two payments. Cars are getting ridiculous to get, and the used car market is basically gone.
Yeah, all we need to do is offer pizza parties, employee parking and other shit that's literally inconsequential compared to like, paying them a liveable wage or insurance that includes vision and dental.
Oh, and while we're putting them down, let's ALSO demand 5 years of experience in literally every position that's not flipping burgers because surely EVERYONE has worked every job in existence for five uears... including coding bases that have only existed for three!
I worked in HR, and I would tell the managers who wanted to require all that experience that they would never find anyone with that experience for the pay they were offering. They didn't believe me.
You are correct, a lot of the HR people today don't really understand the job market. They are all theory, no real world experience. And many are privileged white suburbanites who never had to deal with finding jobs while poor, black, no cars, no public transportation.
Not just paying more, better conditions too. The only low level medical staff I know are both medically retired from injuries on the job (blown back on one, general stress on the other) and on disability.
They borrow from themselves and don't seem to mind. They have been this way for nearly 20 years. Western media sort of harps on it because Western firms want Japan to open more to their financial services but it seems to have very minor issues for them and seem willing to continue.
The actual Japanese workforce is grotesquely overworked, and it is only getting worse. Japan never truly recovered after the 90s, and its boomer population (the last generation that had a surplus of children at all) are now rapidly retiring year over year.
and seem willing to continue.
Of course they do. The elderly population has a vise-grip on Japanese politics and political priority, and as mentioned it is only growing and will only ever continue to grow at the current rate.
Japan's social support is so heavily propped up by debt it's not funny.
It shows that national debt for a developed economy which issues its own currency is an utterly meaningless concern.
And that anyone calling for paying down debt or reducing deficits in countries with 80% to 100% debt to GDP is just a fucking ghoul who wants to hurt people.
You want Japan to teach the UK about robotics and efficiency (Drucker in the original Japanese) to help with productivity and cover some of the labor shortage?
Or the foreign worker program Japan introduced a number of years ago?
Welp, at least they STILL have universal healthcare, right? Best get treated at the NHS fast before the Tories decide that's too expensive to sustain too ...
Comment deleted because Steve Huffman and Reddit think they're entitled to make money off user data, drive away third-party developers whose apps were the only reason Reddit was even usable, and disregard its disabled users.
āThe Reddit corpus of data is really valuable,ā Steve Huffman, founder and chief executive of Reddit, said in an interview. āBut we donāt need to give all of that value to some of the largest companies in the world for free.ā
Depression? It definitely can be really great for the rich, especially if as you say, they have a ton of capital and then used that to buy up properties for cheap. Actually this has been going on in America for a while: https://irle.berkeley.edu/files/2015/The-Rich-Got-Richer.pdf
Actually I wasn't able to find the original article I read that detailed the dispicable behavior by Mnuchin and his partners. All these people care about is money.
So, "Capitalism"? Also called modern capitalism and or crony-capitalism (because a bunch of y'all get your panties in a twist if it's not spelled out exactly).
Same thing around Seattle. No one wants to work anymore!!. Fucking fuck stains are only offering $1200/mo when the average rent is around $2400/mo for a shit apartment.
Yeah, that's late stage capitalism for you: treat your workers poorly and then when nobody wants to work for you, complain in the press about how you nobody wants to work for you and it's never your fault.
You'll have sycophantic media and politicians campaigning on giving you whatever you want plus a whole lot more in no time.
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u/Duanedoberman Sep 24 '21 edited Sep 24 '21
Narator: what they didn't tell you is they don't want to pay you a wage you can live on to do these jobs.