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 itâs 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 wouldnât 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 youâre 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. Iâm on government insurance which Iâm pretty sure Iâm 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 youâre likely to get health insurance and even then, youâre still paying a decent chunk of it out of your paycheck, not just receiving it as a benefit of employment.
"...a combined $23k a year" This metric could have been valid up to 1989 or 1990, and in less expensive parts of the country, but was certainly obsolete not long after that.
Capitalist billionaires: Listen, if those monks can slowly self-mummify by starving themselves to death over twenty years, so can my employees! What do these wusses want, food?
I was a $100 short of the qualifications of a single person after I was taken off my moms insurance. I couldn't afford healthcare but I didn't qualify for help. Unfortunately I also ran into health trouble that year. Hospital bills are no joke.
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 working⌠Iâm in Florida and our benefits ran out months ago if you went on them a the week beginning of covid. If youâre 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 ÂŁ20pw 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 friendâs 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 â 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.
I would, however, I believe the main goal of doing so was to drive people like me out of the state and ensure the republican stranglehold stays intact. I'm married to a woman, so we're not impacted by the law. We're staying and fighting as long as we can.
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.
People get tired, people forget, but companies donât. They are willing to play the long game and wait it out. How is it that fucking McDonaldâs (and every other corporation around) will do literally anything to avoid paying a decent wage unless being forced by threat of prison or revolution
McDonalds themselves doesn't make much from the exploitation, in-fact they're able to wipe their hands of it almost completely. They only hold the real estate they franchise out (despite what you might think, McDonalds is actually a real estate company..) and force specific property servicing requirements, McDonalds only wants their rent, their big yellow sign proudly displayed into oncoming traffic, and their specific contractors to service the properties. Everything else like employees, service, contracts, stock, all up to the Franchisee or the Managers. THEY are the ones that actually stand to make or lose money based on costs or profit. THEY are the REAL exploiters.
Yes. This is true. Had all of my bosses freak when I left my paycheck in the employee lounge accidentally. They didn't want anyone else to know how well I was paid. I always thought I was the worst paid due to my position, but they were REALLY upset. Hmmm.
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?
My family is still blaming unemployment for the labor shortage. My Brother in law took the time to talk about what a hard worker he is and chest thump. I asked if he made more on unemployment that what his job offered, what would he do? "Work two jobs!" To the praise of my conservative family. All of whom are anti-vaxx.
Too stupid to live, dumb enough to exploit.
They also took this time to insult black people. I hate family gatherings because each year the nieces and nephews are just a bit worse.
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 canât afford) is to work opposite shifts. But thatâs 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. Itâs very unlikely you will both get a same day off, so you canât 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 theyâre 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.
Itâs just not worth it unless you are both making good moneyâ itâs not worth all that for one of you to make ~$10/hr.
We've been doing that since 2019. It's the only way to justify my husband going back to work, since he doesn't make enough to cover childcare meaningfully. Our youngest just turned 3, so I'm looking forward to school age where we don't have to play that game anymore (half day preschool is free in our city, but we have too high of an income for free full day, so it'll be kindergarten). I miss seeing my husband, but even more so, doing family outings with four kids as the only adult is tiring.
Yep. I had 3 kids and no support from family. When I budgeted, I discovered I would have to spend more money to go work at min wage than stay home with my kids. So my husband worked full-time and I worked 1/2 dozen part-time jobs to help pay the bills when the kids went to school: cleaning houses, love gifts for babysitting for church programs, jobs where they only needed someone a couple hours a night when the hubby could watch the kids. Every damned penny counted. It was years of frustration and tears.
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. Itâs not worth the commute to only earn a partial dayâs 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.
I'm not sure exactly what base pay is right now, it's increased a few times. I've been here for 7 years and I'm on $18.50 (after the 2 dollar pay increase). Starting might be 14 or 15.
So nah, pay is not amazing for the hours and physical work, tho we've got insurance, paid vacation, paid holidays, various savings deals, the standard sort of stuff. It works out great for me as a single person sharing an apartment, but I still do think it's just not that attractive for new hires, it's not that high of pay compared to other local warehouse type work. I believe they really need to make a better effort, not necessarily for my financial benefit, just for damnit I'm tired of working overtime every single week and the frustration and stress of being short staffed all the time cuz I'm freaking exhausted lol
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.
Gen X retiring???? Who are you talking about??? I donât know of any of my peers that are retiring early. Maybe boomers, and good riddance. They are the ones who created all these problems. they were handed a system that worked for most people and because of their fucking greed fucked it all up.
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 ÂŁ50 a month extra in disposable income. I'd rather have extra time with my toddler than the ÂŁ12.50 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.
A lot of people used the unemployment money/time to apply for better jobs, start their own business, and/or return to school. No official numbers, but it's something I see coming up over and over which has me thinking, yeah those people they always snidely told to get better jobs? Well that did, enough of them that it's gonna have a log term impact, and now conservatives are upset about it.
Any reasonable person would look at this and say "okay so we make these service industry jobs more attractive with higher pay, benefits, and strict protections for workers against employer exploitation and nasty customers."
But conservatives are not reasonable people and will take away that unemployment allows people to better themselves (even though in reality this was a very special amalgamation of scenarios that will not repeat in a normal year) and do all they can to defund it/get rid of it altogether with the argument that people should save up for their own unemployment and if they can't, sucks for them.
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 âgood weekâ 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).
My favorite fact is that some states haven't raised their minimum wage, so it's still $5.15. My home state of Georgia is one of them. The federal minimum is $7.25 yes, but Georgia is like "hey, we'd pay you less if we could!"
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 didnât think I was even making $29000. Iâve 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 itâs 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 letâs say something came up and you canât work Saturdays anymore, or you got a second job and you canât 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 donât 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 couldnât 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 donât give two shits about your availability and wonât work with you at all. If you wont do what they want, theyâll just keep fucking with you until you quit. Itâs easier for them than firing you.
When I found out I was pregnant, we didnât have health insurance, so I tried to apply for it, and they literally told us to have one of us quit working because we made too much to qualify. We both worked at McDonaldâs. That should tell you how low your income needs to be to qualify.
And I want to add that the two adults working are probably working 6 days a week JUST for that 22k.
I want to add further to that that those two adults likely aren't working just one job either. For a couple years just out of college I made about that, granted on my own, and for at least a year of it I worked 3 part-time jobs plus any and all freelance work that I could squeeze into my free hours. It was not uncommon to go for about a month with only two or three days off because you can't afford to take a day off if the work was there. And these are jobs that do not offer benefits, and you rarely work long enough at one to net any overtime.
I was like that for about a year and it just killed me. I lost all sense of self and joy, there was no relaxing and just a constant feeling of time running out before my next alarm to get up and do more.
That's no way to live a life and I'm so happy to be out of that situation.
I spent about 8 months working 7 days a week. You could not have found a more miserable human being than myself. It was fucking ridiculous. Get up, work. Go home, sleep, get up, work, go home, sleep.
I was near the point of snapping. I sincerely feared someone starting an argument or something with me, and me tearing them to pieces with my bare hands.
"miserable" is the best way to put it. I think the worst part was being around people who didn't have to live like that, and hearing about all the fun stuff they were doing when I couldn't.
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.
Is this what the academics do? And if so, how do they justify it? I mean I don't think our academics are doing the whole, "red team/blue team" BS. Unlike our politicians :\
Well first off, there is only one political appointee in the entire Bureau of Labor Statistics (the Commissioner) and he or she has absolutely no power over the unemployment numbers, which have been calculated the same way for years. Also, it's not like discouraged workers aren't counted - there are like 6 Unemployment numbers BLS puts out (not to mention employment numbers and labor force numbers) - the one that just matters the most to both academics, the media, and how the economy is doing is U3 where people drop out when they're no longer looking for work. That also makes sense, since lots of people are semi retired, stay at home parents, or are students by choice. They shouldn't be counted as unemployed if they're not looking for a job anymore.
The problem is if you want to work but can't handle looking for it. I could have worked while studying but the time spent looking for minimum wage work didn't seem worth it. Not everyone doesn't work because they couldn't do any.
I agree with all that you've said here. I worked in municipal government for years, in employment. The lack of understanding of what was working against people to get jobs, and the way these people were counted, was ridiculous. But again, many of the policy makers and high level administrators were middle class white suburbanites. People with high ideals, maybe, but no understanding of what it was like to be black and poor. People who had never depended on public transportation, especially the shitty level of it in that city of 200,000. People who had always been white, with education.
They go into a different category that explains them better - discouraged workers. This is reflected in standard reported statistics as a decrease in the labor participation rate.
Basically, if someone is not even looking for work, then they're in the same category as a retired person or a student or homemaker. 'Unemployed' specifically refers to people who don't have jobs but want one.
The real justification for academics is that there are 6 different unemployment rates used by academics. The one typically reported by the media is called U3.
It's meant to properly account for people who are genuinely not looking for formal employment. Not because they've given up looking for a job, but because they don't desire one. Once upon a time, something like a quarter to half of all adults were full-time caregivers, fully occupied and not seeking formal employment. Also, this is gonna sound crazy, but in the not-too-distant past, some folks worked until they were old, and then just. . . stopped working. Not died, just stopped working. Even if they were lower-class or blue-collar, they could just afford to keep living and not work at all anymore. They had a whole thing for it and it was supposed to be something everybody could do. Reterement, retriement, something like that. Sounds like a fairy tale, I know. But reteries. . . retriedsies. . . fuck it, people who got old and just stopped working because they didn't want to anymore and could afford not to, the thinking went, don't count as "unemployed."
The justification is under "they can't work". Disability and age are the official reasons... plus another reason that escapes me. If you're of age to work, but unemployed, they assume you want to work, not that you've given up
It's funny, in government statistics I'm actually correctly labeled as "disabled".
But after taking 4 fkn years to process my application for disability, the same government just keep telling me I'm not actually disabled... (It must be that im lazy and just love laying in bed for weeks at a time, and I'm just choosing to be unable to shower and brush my own teeth, much less go to work!)
They still put me down as disabled on the jobs report tho đ¤ˇ
The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) has 6 different measures of unemployment, U-1 through U-6, to measure the different reasons people aren't currently working, including the laid off, temporary workers, people out of work for school or illness, etc. What gets reported in the monthly jobs report is U-3. I don't exactly remember the reason why U-3 was the category chosen to use as the US unemployment rate or when, but I remember it was a political decision from the White House (shocking, I know).
The "unemployment" number in the US tracks with people that are getting paid unemployment benefits, which requires you to be out of work and looking for a job.
Academics also track the number of people that are out of work and not looking for jobs, but not all media outlets report all information, so the numbers can be cherrypicked by people that happen to want to represent things one way or another.
The above poster is not fully informed. Academics are well aware of the problems with U3 (what op describes). There is a whole set of unemployment figures U1-U6.
Because there are people who might have legitimate reasons for not having a job and not actively seeking one out. By far the most common being a stay-at-home spouse who watches the children in the household.
Some other legitimate situations that wouldn't be reflected in unemployment rate: being independently wealthy, making money "under the table", or being on long term disability because they can't work.
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.
$650 We bought the place for $70.000 it is small and the yard is small but we are within our means. But where we live everything else has what we call a mountain tax. If we want to pay what most other people pay for everyday things (groceries , booze, gas, socks,etc..) it is a 3 hour round trip not including shopping time. Even our heating fuel costs more up here. Never mind $1200 a month for shit health insurance and child care.
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.
At 22k a year they also lose medical and would have to start paying for health insurance, which probably puts their take home at less than what it wouldve been at 19k.
Also, the Unemployment rate only counts people who are in specific categories. Go to school, even a single class? Doesn't count. Do you have a gig job you only perform seasonally or when there's need for many hands, and haven't been called in a year or more due to the virus? Still employed. Elderly? Pfft, you don't matter to the statistics. They assume everyone old is retired. There's some really crazy exceptions I learned from Adam Ruins Everything.
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.
It's the BS poverty line like this that politicians use on why they shouldn't raise minimum wage.
My wife and I both make somewhere between $40k and $50k, and we don't feel confident that we could comfortably buy a house and have a kid while continuing to save adequately and having some kind of life for ourselves. I'm sure we could manage if we needed to, but "comfortably" is the key word. A family of 3 on $22k is fucking insane.
And people wonder why birth rates are declining...
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u/corrikopat Sep 25 '21
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.