Comment on Anon gets an ultimatum
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 3 months agoWell 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 3 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.
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 3 months ago
No, the point is to teach kids that working retail sucks, and they should do everything they can to never have to do that again. There’s only excess profit if you’re sticking around more than a year or two.
Retail is to get experience with working. You show up on-time, interact with people, learn to organize stuff, etc. You get a taste of the most unpleasant parts of almost everything society has to offer, so you get an idea of which parts to actively avoid the most. If you don’t mind dealing with stupid customers, go into sales. If you don’t mind organizing stuff, try accounting. If you don’t mind managing shifts, get an MBA. And so on.
Exactly! If we try to solve that problem by increasing the minimum wage, we’re just enabling more people to stick to crappy jobs and live unfulfilling lives. If a minimum wage job isn’t enough to live on, people will be forced to look elsewhere and get decent jobs that pay better and have better working conditions.
Retail and fast food should be the domain of teenagers and college students learning valuable life lessons about never being stuck in retail or fast food.
They’re worse than a bandaid, they’re a full-body cast. They bind you so you can’t get out. It’s similar to the welfare system, where the time you spend getting benefits or whatever should be spent looking for a better job.
We don’t need a labor movement, we need something like UBI. My preference is NIT (Negative Income Tax), which is basically UBI but limited to people below a certain income.
If everyone could afford to survive (basic needs like shelter and food) without having to work a crappy job, they’d be more selective about the work they take on. Here’s my proposal:
Here are my expected results:
Addressing the symptoms is just going to exacerbate the issue. I believe this proposal cuts at the root of the problems we have, which is that people don’t like working in jobs that don’t go anywhere, but they feel they have to in order to afford to live. Let’s socialize the cost of undesirable jobs so we can encourage people to create more desirable jobs instead and automate the stuff nobody wants to do.
UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 3 months ago
The retail industry does not exist to teach kids retail jobs suck.
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 3 months ago
The industry, no, but the jobs do.
Compare working at Target to working at Costco. Target is a “working retail sucks” job, whereas Costco is a “retail can be a career” job. At Costco, you do a wider range of jobs, like driving forklifts, selling memberships, etc. At Target, you just restock shelves and occasionally help customers find stuff. Target wants disposable employees, so its onboarding process is streamlined to narrow roles (i.e. perfect for students looking for a part-time job).
So while those jobs may not have been created with that in mind, that’s how they’ve been optimized. Most retail jobs are intended to be disposable, which means they’re targeting the low-end of the market.