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UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

The point of those jobs is to encourage you to skill up

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.

Minimum wage aren’t supposed to be where you go to make a living

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.

If you want a cool job, do the work to qualify for that cool job.

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.

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sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
The point of these jobs is to generate surplus profit for your employer

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.

If you cannot afford to live, how the hell are you supposed to work?

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.

And while I agree they’re more of a band-aid than a structural benefit

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:

completely end the minimum wage - don’t just lower it, eliminate it entirely

institute NIT where you’re guaranteed to be at the poverty line at a minimum, even without working (poverty line is ~$15k for a single person, depending on area)

transform Social Security to fund this NIT, so it’s an actual safety net instead of a retirement program, and remove the income cap

Here are my expected results:

wages for retail and fast food would plummet, and most workers would be replaced by high school and college kids; prices for fast food would also fall

unemployment would go up, as would the number of people not looking for employment

enrollment in trades would go up, since people now have the time to try something new

unemployment would trend downward again after an initial shock, and average incomes would go up

automation of jobs would be slowed in certain jobs, and increased in others, depending on desirability of those jobs

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.
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- UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  
  No, the point is to teach kids that working retail sucks
  
  The retail industry does not exist to teach kids retail jobs suck.
  
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  - 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.
    
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    Laurentide@pawb.social ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    None of this changes the fact that a job’s purpose is to create profit for the employer and that any educational benefit to the worker is entirely coincidental. Target doesn’t care how many teenagers need to learn that “working retail sucks”. That’s not what the job is for. Target only cares how many people are required to keep their stores running well enough to make money for them.
    
    If you think there should be some kind of work-study program specifically for teenagers so they can gain a bit of job experience as part of their education, fine. That’s something that can be discussed. But don’t lie to us that Walmart is this program.
    
    “[job type] is intended for teenagers” is nothing but corporate propaganda to justify poverty wages. If it were actually true then why the hell is McDonald’s open during school hours? Which teenagers are supposed to be working those jobs?
    
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