Comment on Anon gets an ultimatum
FireRetardant@lemmy.world 5 months ago
I wish one of my close buddies would get this. He is nearly 30 and has never held down a job. He feels like life is pointless, has no money, cannot afford anything. He kinda wants a job, but all he can imagine are super unique positions like being a jeweler, a historic weapons restoration or other obscure jobs. I hate to burst his bubble but his jobs are often unrealistic for his experience and education level but he refuses to do some basic position.
For example, he has never owned or fired a gun and doesn’t have a gun lisence but expects a museum will hire him to work on historic firearms. He refuses to attenpt to get any other positon. He is just waiting for his mom to get enough money to move to a different city so he can go to another college program to try to get this job. He won’t even do the first step in my opinion which is getting a gun lisence and getting actual experience with real firearms.
Num10ck@lemmy.world 5 months ago
these people are enabled by loved ones. he’ll start trying as soon as he has to.
UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 5 months ago
In my experience, entry level retail work is absolutely soul-crushing and the pay is barely worth showing up for.
People imagine getting a job and moving out of their parents’ homes, living Melrose Place style in an apartment full of hotties, having a social life, hooking up, and building adult relationships. But OP’s experience seems more like the exception than the rule. A lot of these places have incredibly high churn, no upward mobility, and are a huge physical/emotional suck that leaves you feeling exhausted the moment you’re home.
Good for getting a leg up literally anywhere else, as they prove you can “be normie”. But horrendous for any kind of actual professional career advancement outside of a casual recommendation going into your next job. And the pay is so bad that it often doesn’t even cover the basic cost of living (car, food, utilities, etc). You’re still going to be living with your parents. You’re not going to have any kind of fuck-around money. There’s no promotion path that gets you out of this hole. Its not where you want to spend one more minute of your life than you absolutely have to.
Num10ck@lemmy.world 5 months ago
what you say is true, but it beats NEET for mental health. Got to start somewhere. Also theres no reason to only apply to retail jobs. Reach out to every company you can find that fits your criteria (geography/industry/company size, etc .) a librarian can help with this.
UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 5 months ago
In my experience, it causes NEET-tier mental health. These rise-and-grind employment situations burn through people rather than developing them into more skilled and useful workers.
By all means, absolutely do that. But I see a ton of dysfunction on the corporate side of the coin that rarely gets acknowledged when we talk about “NEETs” as a social phenomenon. As though hundreds of thousands of young people just woke up one morning and all decided to be lazy at once. From my experience, people are being thrown into an economic wood chipper. Some of them escape. Some miraculously pass through. But a bunch are torn to shreds - physically, psychologically, emotionally - and then told to take responsibility for their mangled state.
I’ve seen this arc before, aimed specifically at minority youth groups (African Americans, in particular). From my experience, what comes next is a ton of brutal policing and human immiseration for anyone who can’t climb through successfully. And then you get another Ferguson.
FireRetardant@lemmy.world 5 months ago
My parents own a swimming pool company. They were willing to pick him up and drop him off at home while he worked for them and he refused to do it. I used to work there too and I will admit it can be labour intensive, but it was a good job, working outside in small teams. Its also a good enterance into plumbing or gas fitting trades and a lot of the labour experience could be used as experience for any trade/job.
The guy defintely has mental health issues as well, he barely does any chores or anything for himself. He wouldn’t have even needed an interview for this job, he could have just been ready to work one morning and started.
BearOfaTime@lemm.ee 5 months ago
Yep, imagine that, work that anyone can do sucks balls.
Now let’s go back about 80 years or so, when simply growing enough food for your family was a real concern for a large portion of the “First World” nations.
My parents and grandparents were always hungry. Always. It’s why my grandparents emigrated to the US, and my parents moved from where they grew up to somewhere with opportunity, hundreds or thousands of miles away from family.
So yea, my soul-sucking jobs (usually 2 at a time until my 30’s, sometimes 3 at a time) sucked. But they were still better than what my parents went through, by a long shot.
I had heat, hot water, food, and a car. Multiple changes of clothes and shoes, not just one or two (or none). I didn’t have to sleep in the barn with the animals like my grandfather. Or in a cold house with nothing but a wood stove in the kitchen.
UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 5 months ago
Given the turnover rate, its not just anyone. The miserable nature of the work and the awful pay tends to make these jobs difficult to fill.
Subsistence farming hasn’t been the primary means of employment in the US in over a century.
The inflation adjusted minimum wage of 1950 was $2 more than it is today. By the 1970s, the min wage was an inflation-adjusted $12.60. And that was with housing at less than a quarter of the going inflation-adjusted rate and utilities practically being free. Americans saw an explosion in quality of life between the 1940s and 1980s, peaking in the 90s at the dawn of the information age.
My home town of Houston is in its second city-wide blackout in barely more than a month. If our grid degrades any further, or a big enough storm tears up enough excess infrastructure, we could conceivably be back to wood stoves and out-houses by the end of the year. And we’re hardly alone. From Flint, Michigan to Miami, Florida, core components of municipal infrastructure are failing in large part thanks to over-investment in consumer facing sales and under-investment in public works.
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 5 months ago
Well yeah, and that’s not the point of those jobs. The point of those jobs is to encourage you to skill up so you no longer have to do those jobs. Ideally, those jobs should mostly be staffed by teenagers, so they can learn that lesson before deciding to give up on school or whatever.
That’s a huge part of why I oppose raising the minimum wage. Minimum wage aren’t supposed to be where you go to make a living, they’re where you’re supposed to be where you get perspective so you realize you need to do something, anything different. Getting paid $20/hr for a crappy job doesn’t make it a career, and it just enables people to not try to improve themselves.
If you want a cool job, do the work to qualify for that cool job. If you want lots of money, do your research to see what pays well and put in the work to qualify. Etc.
UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 5 months ago
The point of these jobs is to generate surplus profit for your employer. Nobody works the check out counter at Target as an educational experience and there is no path to promotion in a seasonal position.
If you cannot afford to live, how the hell are you supposed to work? Have you tried showing up to a job on an empty stomach or without any sleep? Your productivity dips straight into the trash. Min wage rates exist to mitigate the negotiating power of unemployed people, absent a large labor movement. And while I agree they’re more of a band-aid than a structural benefit, and we might even be better off with them gone if it means a more united and militant labor movement, the idea that we shouldn’t raise them because entry level workers just deserve to be malnourished and homeless isn’t ethical or logical.
Ah, yes. Working for the experience. Or, “We pretend to work and they pretend to pay us”. The American employment model that never ends badly.