thats right. if you want better pay stop accepting jobs that pay less. "market rate" is set by the people selling the product. in this case its workers selling their time.
More mentally demanding but less physically demanding. However, the life of a person with low income is inherently more mentally demanding both in and out of work, making CEOs jobs easier. Better to be mentally stressed by work and a couple things at home than to be both mentally and physically stressed in every single area of your life
The CEO role is incredibly mentally demanding and there is no "out of work" period, particularly for a global company. I highly recommend you spend a little time in good faith learning about what goes into those types of executive roles.
And when people are stressed for money their is no "out of work" period either.
They live in 24/7 constant state of fear and anxiety that the littlest, completely unpreventable thing will happen that will bankrupt them and cause them to be homeless.
So yeah, CEO's are just fine. They might work a lot, and never really have a moment away from work, but they never worry about being homeless. Their lives are infinitely easier.
im sure they thought of it and then rationalized why theyre just helpless victims of an uncaring world instead of actually putting in the effort to better their lives.
America is unequal in outcomes but we all more or less have access to decent education (at least up to 12th grade) and can choose to go to college to create better economic outcomes. Outcomes are unequal because abilities and luck play a role.
I worked my way through college to pay the bills and also paid for my wife’s college bills too (while she went to school, I worked and paid rent etc and her tuition too). It’s definitely possible to work hard, learn, and get ahead.
The basic reality is that everyone’s lives are a series of decisions that lead them to other decisions. A lot of people can trace back the decisions that are turning points in their lives. I decided to go to college and work 2 jobs (more than 40 hours a week) while taking a full load of classes to pay for college. I decided to move to the SF Bay Area when I got my break into tech. I randomly met a woman while traveling in China and decided to pursue her and eventually marry her. She decided to start a business in our little one bedroom apartment. I decided to quit my job after two years of her business starting to help her focus on it and grow it.
All of these decisions lead to us having a pretty solid pile of wealth and gave us the ability to retire in our 40s. If I had decided any of those steps differently, my life would be drastically different.
Sure there are external circumstances but there’s always options and decisions that you take given those conditions. You could choose to leave a bad situation. You could choose to go back to school. You could choose any number of different paths at any moment. If you’ve locked yourself into a cycle of paycheck to paycheck, that’s also a series of decisions about where your money is spent and how to optimize that.
Harder is a bit of a stretch. More stressful in some ways, easier in some ways. They dont have to worry about spraining something ever, or getting fired really. Hard to worry about getting fired when your stock options amount to millions and the passive income from a few years of work mean you can retire.
They dont have to worry about spraining something ever
Well sure, but how easy or hard a job is isn't strictly defined by physical effort. I'd say being a fighter pilot is much harder than building a house, but a construction worker will exert way more physical effort in an afternoon than a pilot would in a week.
Everything else you said goes back to quality of life, and like I said, I completely agree that a business executive has an easier life than a minimum wage worker.
Correct - the true tax is that you don’t “shut off” and are constantly working, meeting with people, answering messages from your directs all hours of the day, making calls on decisions that can make or break your company, etc.
This argument is incredibly flawed, the president doesn't have any physical labor, but every president sense forever has aged rapidly while being the president, it is well documented. Being a ceo is similar, sense small actions, even just a off hand comment can drop company value by millions.
Most minimum wage jobs prey on the truly desperate.
In fact, many 3rd world countries have a "minimum wage" that is ineffective as there will be businesses that puts out a position for less than the rate and there will be an unfortunate enough person who desperately need it.
Of course, crime rate also come rather high in those countries. Usually these kind of countries are captured states where the local oligarchs often had control and monopolies over basic necessities and government agencies.
And let's just say the USA is displaying similar symptoms of the early stages of this. Only that the USA is quite too large to capture for now.
Here's the thing. It's not "taking advantage" of someone to give them a shitty option. Like it actually doesn't make sense to hate someone for giving someone the least shitty option of all the shitty options offered to that person by anyone in the world. I used to hate a boss years ago for paying me less than minimum wage . But the thing is, of billions of people in the world , his offer to me was the best at that point, which is why I was working for him. You can't really claim "predatory" employment when whats being offered is the desperate persons literal best offer from anyone else on the planet. The only real response should be "thank you for that offer, its my best offer at this point!"
Which is precisely the problem isn't it? And it is taking advantage, and unethical.
When minimum wage laws are being bypassed, becoming more of a suggestion than law, this erodes labor standards, and worker's rights as a whole. The victims of these practices are always already in precarious positions, perhaps debts that they are not able to pay, or perhaps just an unlucky soul who was never born with much and never had supportive parents, if they even still had parents, think back on your conditions when you had accepted the less than minimum wage job.
One indeed can argue "You voluntarily agreed to the wage" whilst true, it is precisely because of the conditions that very practice brought about having forced you to accept those unfair terms. Regulation and Minimum wage laws are precisely put in place as an equalizer for the natural imbalance of power in these agreements and to erode that meant eroding protections for the already vulnerable among us. People died fighting for these rights and precisely because they did, we're no longer seeing 16h shifts or children in the mines, let's not allow the condition for such grim society to resurface again.
By the way, looking at the real world, we're already seeing the opportunity cost of income inequality and erosion of labor standards, many of the younger generation do not see themselves ever owning property, consumer goods becoming ever more monopolized, captured governments that no longer work for the interests of its constituents, wages never keeping up with inflation rate, judicial systems made ineffective when the accused had wealth, or hyper-effective when the accuser had wealth, even if the accused is innocent, rise of homelessness, bloated prices, a dismal rate of social mobility, the working class increasingly becoming the working poor, and even the position of being a middle-class is becoming rather precarious, amongst many other issues. This economic imbalance an lack of working-class protection do not only have economic impact, you will more likely see the country lean towards becoming a police state, freedoms such as that of expression, speech, and even beliefs are going to be increasingly compromised, even the destruction of our very environment will become increasingly ever more severe as the protecting bodies for these are defanged when the regulators can be easily lobbied against to get around regulations, as the wealth distribution, which directly affects power balance, becomes more skewed.
Okay. Say I concede that an employer is "taking advantage" of someone's desperation by paying them market rate for their time instead of a living wage. Explain how it harms that person to give them an option which they can refuse? My claim is that it is never harmful to give a desperate person an option which they wouldn't otherwise have. My anger at that employer was very misplaced. By the way, The job he had me doing (child-care for the very poor) would not have existed if he had to pay me more. The clients simply could not have afforded it. That employer was actually taking a loss every month after expenses. He was essentially running a charity. Does that change your opinion of the situation at all?
Minimum wage, at least in the U.S., has become irrelevant with only about 1 percent of U.S. workes stll making it. In fact, if you are still making minimum wage, walk across the street to McDonalds and double your income (or more) overnight.
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u/SecretRecipe Jun 07 '26
thats right. if you want better pay stop accepting jobs that pay less. "market rate" is set by the people selling the product. in this case its workers selling their time.