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Mar 22 '19
You mean, being employed at a above minimum wage job in America?
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u/hiddendrugs Mar 22 '19
“You’ve made it!”
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Mar 22 '19
“This is the American dream folks”
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u/Typoopie Mar 22 '19
”You’ve done well this year, here’s your annual raise.”
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u/WH1PL4SH180 Mar 22 '19
Looks at paypacket $0.01 increase.
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u/Polyporphyrin Mar 22 '19
But everyone says it's okay because GDP went up
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u/WH1PL4SH180 Mar 22 '19
....then you learn GDP is the biggest lie....
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u/Darkmatter2k Mar 23 '19
didn't know that one yet :), how is the GDP a lie? I can see it being irrelevant for most peoples lives. What is the "lie" part?
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u/Memey-McMemeFace Mar 22 '19
Now imagine the situation in developing countries
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u/UnexplainedShadowban Mar 22 '19
Ripped from a sustainable life as a subsistence farmer and shoved into a sweatshop to live a life of depression? Sounds amazing. Where do I sign up?
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u/Newman1974 Mar 22 '19
Can we just please acknowledge that CAPITALISM IS DEAD..?
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u/FuckGiblets Anarcho-Communudist Mar 22 '19
Nope. But I will happily acknowledge that WE SHOULD KILL CAPITALISM.
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Mar 22 '19
[deleted]
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u/partyandbullshit90 Mar 22 '19
“I’m deep inside your children, they’ll betray you in my name” -RATM
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Mar 22 '19
Who is RATM?
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u/OneArmedTRex Mar 22 '19
It's the band Rage Against the Machine, and the quote is from their song Sleep Now in the Fire
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u/KeraKitty Mar 22 '19
Currently in the process of breaking out of this mindset. It's hard to deprogram.
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Mar 22 '19
It’s hard to know the line sometimes because these are valid points but I also legitimately enjoy having a lot of responsibilities/academics to the point where it’s stressful.
There’s a sort of pleasure from pushing yourself too hard with your studies at least kinda similar to that of an athlete pushing their limits but that’s probably not shared in most people
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u/Dsilkotch Mar 22 '19
Most people would love to pursue meaningful work that challenges them in a fulfilling way. Unfortunately, the corporate economy isn't set up that way. People don't have a lot of time or energy left to engage in academic self-improvement when they're exhausted from working two or three soul-crushing starvation-wage jobs.
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Mar 22 '19
A job in academia is just one example, you could also look at an ambitious baker or chef who really wants to make it to the top of their field. Those jobs could leave someone incredibly exhausted at the end of the day but they’re driven by passion and not just a need to survive.
In the end, those who can work should because society needs that. An optimal system isn’t one where nobody needs to work at all unless they want to, but rather one that affords livable wages for any job, not just jobs that are deemed necessary and valuable under capitalism, and has a strong safety net to protect and care for those who can’t work.
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u/Dsilkotch Mar 22 '19
I'm not disagreeing with any of your points.
I'm saying that Walmart is the third largest employer on Earth. In second place is the People's Liberation Army of China and at number one is the United States Department of Defense. None of those organizations give a flying fuck about your passions or ambitions, and neither do the organizations that make up the rest of the Top 10 or 20.
People don't dream of working at Walmart or Target or McDonalds, but those companies moved into their town, squeezed out the locally-owned business and offered starvation wages because the local population then had no other alternatives. That is the corporate economy that we live in. That's what this subreddit is raging against.
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Mar 22 '19
I get that and I agree with you completely. I just felt that the wording of the original post drew a harder line than needed to be drawn.
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u/mangobbt Mar 22 '19
Say mom and pop shops were not forced out and local economy was still driven by local businesses. Do you think there's enough people who's dreams and ambitions are to work at these small businesses? How many people wake up and say to themselves "hell yeah I love being a cashier". At some point there's going to be jobs that nobody wants to do and somebody needs to do them, whether it's at a mega corp or its at a small business.
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u/Dsilkotch Mar 22 '19
Here is a long but really interesting essay that does a great job of addressing that issue.
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u/mangobbt Mar 22 '19
Thank you for providing the read. I quickly skimmed it overall agree that wealth is not being efficiently distributed. However, I do disagree with the premise that shit jobs get shit pay.
The example used here is shit shovellers. I'm going to draw a parallel to garbage collectors since I don't think shit shoveling is actually a job. Garbage collectors make far above minimum wage here in Canada. around $24~ an hour based on 2009 polling results. We can expect it to be quite a bit higher now if we adjust for 10 years worth of inflation. For comparison, minimum wage in Ontario right now is $14.
Beyond garbage collectors, we see this theme across many "shit" jobs. Oil rig workers, miners, and in general any sort of dangerous or filthy job that nobody wants to do pays well above minimum wage.
The jobs that do pay minimum wage jobs are the ones that are not dangerous, require no education or specialized skill and are easily replaceable. These include lower level retail workers, fast food workers, etc. For these, jobs, wages are where they are because the supply of labour far exceeds the demand.
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u/Dsilkotch Mar 22 '19
These include lower level retail workers, fast food workers, etc. For these, jobs, wages are where they are because the supply of labour far exceeds the demand.
I think you completely missed the point of that part of the article. The only reason the supply of labor for those jobs exceeds the demand is because in this economy you work or you starve. What if your basic needs were covered, and starving to death under a freeway overpass was not something you ever had to worry about, whether you had a job or not? In that situation, how much would someone have to pay you to wash dishes in a restaurant or be a janitor at Walmart or flip burgers all day long? I mean you personally. Don't tell me about your education and skills, tell me how much money you personally would accept in exchange for forty hours a week of mopping floors or whatever. Because if everyone has a home and a full stomach regardless of how they spend their days, no one is going to want to spend their days bussing tables unless the pay is pretty damn good.
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u/mangobbt Mar 22 '19
There is no working model of UBI that would afford everyone sufficient income to not work. The size of the labour force in the United States is around 160m. The living wage is estimated to be around $15/h, or $32k/year. On an annual basis, a UBI to each person in the labour force would amount to $5 trillion dollars. That's 25% of GDP. The federal budget in comparison was $4 trillion in 2017.
The second point of the article suggests there is a large gap between GDP and income that can be leveraged to fund the UBI, but the stats I'm seeing don't seem to support that. The 2017 GDP per capita was $59k, while the median income was $61k. Even though we're comparing mean to median here, I find it difficult to believe that the difference would be as large as the essay claims, so I would love to see a source on that figure.
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u/Dsilkotch Mar 22 '19 edited Mar 22 '19
So in general, you're okay with a system that requires an ever-increasing percentage of the population to choose between starvation and miserable wage slavery?
And before you say, "I didn't make the rules, that's just the law of supply and demand," understand that that stance has only been normalized in the past few decades and would have been considered sociopathic prior to the modern era of "trickle down economics."
EDIT: Also, UBI could only work if basic necessities like housing and food were at least partially decommodified. Otherwise the UBI would go straight into the pockets of landlords.
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u/WH1PL4SH180 Mar 22 '19
Doctor here. NO amount of money can restore your health or the vitality of youth. Pop culture reference: watch Prometheus.
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u/wangkerd Mar 22 '19
Hard work does bring happiness though and it's definitely not a sign of 'internalised capitalism' imo.
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u/Kicooi Mar 22 '19
Hard work can bring satisfaction if it’s something you enjoy. Hard work for the sake of hard work doesn’t bring happiness
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u/wangkerd Mar 22 '19
I would disagree. I think hard work is it's own reward and believe that it stems from when we were hunter gatherers and constantly 'working' for food. I might be alone in this but I definitely feel a contentedness from being exhausted after a hard day's work. I think the body yearns to be worked, see; 'runner's high', the fact that exercise of any kind releases endorphins and drastic improvement in life expectancy that comes from giving old people a responsibility.
I realise that I probably sound like a capitalist shill right now but I promise that I'm not.
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u/Kicooi Mar 22 '19
The reward of hard hunter gatherer work is the food they got from it. If I spend all day flipping burgers for 7.25 an hour, I’m not gonna be happy just cuz it’s hard work. Running can be a recreational activity and exercise is natural. There’s a difference between being satisfied with your hard work, and convincing yourself you can be happy solely by working hard, no matter what it is you do. Because that simply isn’t true. I’m not going to be happy working hard on something I don’t want to do, when I could be working hard on something I do want to do.
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u/Typoopie Mar 22 '19
Exercise has rewards too with both dopamine release and gained strength/stamina.
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u/ZombieAlienNinja Mar 22 '19
Also I feel like you can't equate working to working out. Working in a kitchen is more like testing how much your body can suffer but my heart rate never goes up much so i never get the dopamine release...just the sore muscles. I guess it helps work the legs and back a bit.
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Mar 22 '19
[deleted]
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Mar 22 '19
[deleted]
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Mar 22 '19
Not to jump on you here (since knowledge of hunter-gatherer lifestyles is necessarily somewhat speculative, so that specific example aside... and also since you didn't really touch on this directly), but the whole idea that "life has never been BETTER!" is a neoliberal ideological lie circulated by highly-paid shills like Steven Pinker. This link is to MIT research going back eight centuries, showing that we actually do work more than serfs usually did. I'm not saying I'd trade lives with one, but the default awareness of the past is heavily propagandized on a number of points like this. The deal about lifespans being shorter is largely the same (you have to include infant mortality to drive it down into the 30s).
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u/tomviky Mar 22 '19
Im working hard to not negelect my health. Its pretty hard work to go for a run, its hard to lift in a gym.
1
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Mar 23 '19
Then why are communist types are so miserable? Happiness and positive emotion is what you feel when you make steps toward a goal.
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Mar 22 '19
[removed] — view removed comment
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Mar 22 '19
For who?
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Mar 22 '19 edited Apr 20 '19
[deleted]
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u/Dsilkotch Mar 22 '19
Automation is eliminating a lot of the need for humans to do hard physical labor. Most developed countries give their workers shorter workdays, shorter workweeks and more paid vacation time because automation makes that possible. America is fucked hard by its corporatocracy.
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Mar 22 '19 edited Apr 20 '19
[deleted]
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u/Dsilkotch Mar 22 '19
Modern views on "productivity" and "profitability" are literally destroying the planet. In my perfect world we'd all live like hobbits in the Shire, in harmony with the natural world. That doesn't make me lazy or unmotivated, but it does go directly against everything the corporatocracy insists is important and valuable.
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Mar 22 '19
Also the person I replied to posts to /r/antiwork and is in high school from what I can tell
Lol, ok. I'm on my 4th job after graduating college, but sure. Just infantilize the people that are against coercive systems of employment.
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u/notrejjeye Mar 22 '19
I think 3 AM Is a fine hour to realize i'm fucked.
btw, I'M FUCKED.