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from the work-like-a-dog-/-fingers-to-the-bone-/-nose-to-the-grindstone dept.
Mary’s story looks different to different people. Within the ghoulishly cheerful Lyft public-relations machinery, Mary is an exemplar of hard work and dedication—the latter being, perhaps, hard to come by in a company that refuses to classify its drivers as employees. Mary’s entrepreneurial spirit—taking ride requests while she was in labor!—is an “exciting” example of how seamless and flexible app-based employment can be. Look at that hustle! You can make a quick buck with Lyft anytime, even when your cervix is dilating.
[...] It does require a fairly dystopian strain of doublethink for a company to celebrate how hard and how constantly its employees must work to make a living, given that these companies are themselves setting the terms. And yet this type of faux-inspirational tale has been appearing more lately, both in corporate advertising and in the news. Fiverr, an online freelance marketplace that promotes itself as being for “the lean entrepreneur”—as its name suggests, services advertised on Fiverr can be purchased for as low as five dollars—recently attracted ire for an ad campaign called “In Doers We Trust.” One ad, prominently displayed on some New York City subway cars, features a woman staring at the camera with a look of blank determination. “You eat a coffee for lunch,” the ad proclaims. “You follow through on your follow through. Sleep deprivation is your drug of choice. You might be a doer.”
[...] At the root of this is the American obsession with self-reliance, which makes it more acceptable to applaud an individual for working himself to death than to argue that an individual working himself to death is evidence of a flawed economic system. The contrast between the gig economy’s rhetoric (everyone is always connecting, having fun, and killing it!) and the conditions that allow it to exist (a lack of dependable employment that pays a living wage) makes this kink in our thinking especially clear. Human-interest stories about the beauty of some person standing up to the punishments of late capitalism are regular features in the news, too. I’ve come to detest the local-news set piece about the man who walks ten or eleven or twelve miles to work—a story that’s been filed from Oxford, Alabama; from Detroit, Michigan; from Plano, Texas. The story is always written as a tearjerker, with praise for the person’s uncomplaining attitude; a car is usually donated to the subject in the end. Never mentioned or even implied is the shamefulness of a job that doesn’t permit a worker to afford his own commute.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Rosco P. Coltrane on Friday March 24 2017, @11:42AM (22 children)
When I was younger, I worked 50, 60, 70, 80 hrs/week. And I earned great money too back in the days - unlike the Uber slaves.
And you know what? My company tanked, I thought back on my workaholism, and I thought: what's the point? I'm not taking whatever I gained from working extra-hard to my grave. I only have one life, and one opportunity to have quality time with my family and those dear to me on this Earth.
I moved out of the US to Europe, found me a decent-paying old-style job in a heavily unionized company that frowns on overtime, and I *physically* feel a lot better. I know I'll live long and happy in my current line of work, even if I earn less.
That was before the "gig economy" came on the scene. Now with the gig economy, you do overtime but you earn peanuts. I said fuck overtime in a normal job market, so I say double-fuck to the gig economy. It's not entrepreunarial spirit, it's just the worst incarnation of wage slavery possible.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by The Mighty Buzzard on Friday March 24 2017, @12:33PM (20 children)
The thing is, working your ass off during your 20s is an outstanding idea. You should pull all the overtime you can so you can sock away all that extra money you're making for retirement. By your 30s though you should be working smart rather than hard. Which isn't to say you shouldn't put in a day's work, just that your value to the company should be more in your head than in your back by then.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by RedBear on Friday March 24 2017, @01:47PM (17 children)
This viewpoint ignores a very important fact of human biology. People can, and do, die from overworking. From lack of sleep. From eating improperly. From using stimulants to meet outrageously unrealistic work schedules. They get heart disease. They have strokes and brain aneurysms. They just up and die one day, much sooner than they should.
And yes, this can even happen to very young people.
It's a pleasing fantasy that all young humans gain "character" and the opportunity to "get ahead" by working themselves to the bone in their early years. But that's all it is for far too many people; a fantasy. In a weak economy or when you have zero rights as a worker, you can literally work yourself to death for years or decades and have absolutely nothing to show for it, no matter how "smart" you are. But somehow it's always the worker's fault when they fail to become a billionaire within their own lifetimes. It's always the worker's fault when the local property values and rent suddenly skyrocket and make it impossible for them to live in a certain area no matter how hard they work. Break your leg and can't work for six months? Too bad, sucker, it's a dog-eat-dog world.
The fundamental problem we have as a species is that we need to decide if humans are just nothing but animals, or if we are capable of being something that behaves differently. We've already invented a great many concepts such as "human rights" which would be totally unexplainable to any other animal in existence. Yet much of humanity still seems dead set on behaving no differently than the so-called "lower" forms of life. Oh, you didn't make enough money flipping burgers to feed your children today? Boo-hoo, then I guess your children should starve to death.
I find this point of view bizarre, illogical, inhuman and abhorrent, and I can't understand how the human race can make any progress in the future if we're going to continue to insist on being nothing but "clever animals" fighting each other over scraps of food in the street, when we are fully capable of rising above such struggles with even the slightest amount of cooperation and humanity.
But hey, if you work 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, you too can quickly rise through the ranks of your company and become the new CEO. In your dreams.
¯\_ʕ◔.◔ʔ_/¯ LOL. I dunno. I'm just a bear.
... Peace out. Got bear stuff to do. 彡ʕ⌐■.■ʔ
(Score: 2) by PiMuNu on Friday March 24 2017, @02:06PM
Note that there is pretty good evidence that working night shifts shortens telomeres (I'm not a biologist, I probably read about it here somewhere).
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 24 2017, @02:11PM
"working your ass off during your 20s"
Working your ass off is a damned good prescription for half of America. Obesity is out of hand.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 24 2017, @02:13PM
Those children who you worry about starving to death? Yeah.... why do they exist in the first place?
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Friday March 24 2017, @03:39PM (9 children)
People also cry like little girls over hard work. Nobody said to kill yourself but if you're not willing to bust your ass for a decent life, you're damned well not going to have one. If you do only what is required of you right now, then you have nothing for later when you eventually will need it. Fucking ignorant shitheads. Learn to life.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 24 2017, @04:02PM (7 children)
Speaking of an ignorant shithead... You need to get out of your bubble, plenty of people work hard and can barely get by. Your solution is work harder? Lose the few years they have while their kids are still kids? Or shall we expect more crappy logic and victim blaming? There simply aren't enough good jobs to go around, and there isn't some infinite magic market for people to sell to... Buzzard really is your spirit animal, scavenger pucking the meat off the dying bones of the US.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Friday March 24 2017, @04:07PM (6 children)
Jobs are a business relationship. Give value if you want to receive value in return. Give the bare minimum of usefulness and effort and you should absolutely be paid like it.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 24 2017, @04:52PM
You assume that there's negotiation going on. There's enough people needing jobs and a small enough number of employers that the employers set the pay. For better jobs there note negotiation, but there's even more people that want those jobs.
There's a reason why civilized countries require sick and vacation leave to be provided by the employer. Being an at will employee means you've got virtually no negotiation power in many jobs.
Ultimately, the employers have the money to pay, they're just too cheap.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by AthanasiusKircher on Friday March 24 2017, @05:25PM (3 children)
Mr. Buzzard, just stop it.
I rarely say anything like this, but I don't get why you're trolling this story's comments so much. Unless you sincerely believe what you're saying, in which case you've proven yourself to be much less intelligent than I thought.
I came from family of blue-collar workers who worked hard all their lives, and yes, they managed to save money over time and have a reasonably okay life. But I also personally know people who worked just as hard, and life crapped all over them. Or their skills suddenly became less useful in a changing market. Or whatever.
And, frankly, lots of people are stupid. No, not mentally deficient, but significantly less intelligent than you are. They can't just learn new marketable skills overnight, or even if they study hard for a couple years. And that group of disadvantaged people grows larger as they age, because older people really do start to slow down cognitively and physically, and acquiring new skills when your old ones suddenly become obsolete in the market becomes less feasible. (Not to mention age-related discrimination, which is easy to have in an era with an excess of people looking for jobs.)
Anyhow, for many of these people, who spend years working two jobs or double-shifts or whatever and making barely enough to squeeze by, suddenly some life crisis emerges they can't deal with, or their minimal skills (perhaps about as good as they will do with their intelligence level) are made obsolete by some robot. And then what?
Not all people are just able to "work harder" and succeed. Sometimes the deck they are dealt is simply a lot less full of options than yours, no matter how hard they work. And yes, there are PLENTY of people out there who are lazy bastards too and could do better if they just tried harder. I'm not at all saying you can't feel self-righteous as you criticize them -- go ahead. But for each one of them, there's also likely somebody who is working 60+ hours/week cobbled together from various part-time jobs doing their very best to get by. Maybe some of them made poor choices -- maybe they need guidance and help to make better ones. But it doesn't necessarily mean that if they just "work harder" all will be okay, because many of them are working DAMN hard.
Their employer may not "owe" them anything, and perhaps minimum wage guidelines or whatever aren't the best way to deal with this problem. (In the long run, I don't think minimum wage will be able to solve the problem, because eventually automation coupled with AI advances is going to make it so even many reasonably intelligent people can't develop consistently useful skills to carry them through a decade, let alone a lifetime.) But I do think that civilized society arguably owes them something if they are willing to put in some effort to contribute (as the kind of people I'm talking about have) -- I'd suggest reading about the "original position" in John Rawls's Theory of Justice and how to design an equitable society when you don't know whether you'd actually have innate skills enough to success within it.
Your perspective is not only ignorant toward such people who are less able than you, but borderline offensive. And I normally wouldn't call you out on it, except for your pervasive trolling here.
Have a nice day.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by mechanicjay on Friday March 24 2017, @06:57PM (1 child)
And, frankly, lots of people are stupid. No, not mentally deficient, but significantly less intelligent than you are. They can't just learn new marketable skills overnight, or even if they study hard for a couple years.
Seriously, this was an epiphany for me a number of years ago. Like, we all know people are dumb, but I finally really understood how that impacts people over a life-time. At that point, I accepted that a large part of my success in my career is due to the fact that I'm just a bit above average in intelligence (I'm not saying this to be full of myself) . The next realization was that to meet with success, you need to have some trait that's above average, be that intelligence, determination, passion, etc. Next is that lots of people have no outstanding traits, and may be below average in some areas. So, then the question comes to me, as a society what do we do with these folks? These are people who perhaps are good for little more than unskilled labor jobs. In previous decades, unskilled labor could make a decent wage and make a living for themselves. That is just not the case now. There is a severe downward pressure on unskilled wages due to too many people and not enough jobs in this segment.
Ok, so what are some solutions? We talk about job retraining, but as was mentioned above, that's just not practical for a lot of people. I'm going to divide these people into two basic groups. Either retraining/schooling costs money they don't have and they're too busy trying to put food on table, or they're just not capable (for whatever reason) which is why they're unskilled labor in the first place. You may be able to address a lot of the first group by putting a lot dollars into Adult Education/Training programs, make it free along with Cost of Living grant to keep people afloat while training -- this is something I'd be happy to see my tax dollars go towards.
That still leaves the second group of average/below average people. As a society are we willing to tell them they need to live on the ragged edge? Will they get to a point where they're willing to work for so little, that they essentially become an indentured servant -- because that might just be cheaper than a fleet of shiny new robots. I'm not okay with that, but it's that seems the likely outcome if current trends continue. What about a something like a Universal Basic Income, or a Universal Base Standard -- take care of the necessities for all people (You have a roof over your head, enough to eat, and get all the medical care you need), so even the least among us can have some kind of dignity to their lives. I realize it's a radical idea, but that in no way would impede people from achieving for themselves, it would just inject some humanity into the system.
My VMS box beat up your Windows box.
(Score: 2) by Zz9zZ on Friday March 24 2017, @07:49PM
Providing for those in need is not a radical or new idea. It is actually a huge founding principle for the Christian bible.
The biggest problem plaguing our planet right now is irresponsible distribution of resources. I'm not talking about private jets and yachts even, but the focus on monetary profit is so single minded that we have developed an incredibly wasteful society. Disposable containers, products designed to fail, infrastructure unnecessarily held back, power and transportation advances limited by those with financial interests in maintaining the old systems, etc. etc.
I think the capitalist system works quite well, but only when paired with heavy government regulation to make sure that the overall society is not taken advantage of to further corporate agendas. If the US gov never created the EPA or cracked down on monopolies then we would have had a revolution decades ago. Now the system is finally reaching the breaking point with greed undermining every safety measure.
~Tilting at windmills~
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 25 2017, @12:25AM
I can't seem to find them right now but the statistics are that most of us will not make it to full retirement age. Besides being layed off because of changing markets, a significant number of these people also end up getting bumped out of the market because they or a family member comes down with a health problem that needs a lot of time and attention. I guess they just should have taken better care of themselves, eh Buzzard?
Yep. These days if you are over 50 and out of work for more than a few months, you are essentially unemployable. Several years back I was a few years away from that reality smacking me hard as I was in the middle of retraining myself for a new career path. Luckily, I was able to find myself a good job that paid better than the career path I was on at the time. But I am fully aware that it could have turned out much different if my luck had continued to work against me. Yes, I know that luck played as much a role as innate skill in getting me out of that jam.
If I recall correctly, minimum wage would now be around $22/hr if it had kept up with inflation since the 1970s. And that minimum wage suppression actually does affect almost everyone else's wages, too. Yours. Mine. Everyone's. Regardless of whether you are working for a minimum wage or not. On the other hand, compensation at the very top of the management ladder has sky rocketed over that same time frame. Gee, I wonder why that might be? You don't suppose that it might be because of predatory practices at the very highest levels of management, do you? Naw, couldn't be!
It looks to me like there is nothing at all borderline about this. Not at all. In fact, I'm pretty well convinced it is actually by design.
(Score: 2) by Sulla on Friday March 24 2017, @06:31PM
I work for a city government and we just switched from a assured step to a merit event. Its amazing. No more 10 year government workers collecting that maxed out paycheck who can't be fired regardless of poor performance, at least now they can be refused raises if they are not performing giving a little power back to the taxpayers. I will continue to advance at the same rate as I would with the steps (if not more) because I go out of my way to make improvements on my own position through updating poor business practices and bringing value to the organization.
This is no longer the world of company loyalty. I would be thrown away just as quick as I will throw them away if our assessment of worth is not matching up.
Ceterum censeo Sinae esse delendam
(Score: 2) by cmdrklarg on Friday March 24 2017, @06:14PM
Nobody said to kill yourself but if you're not willing to bust your ass for a decent life, you're damned well not going to have one.
False.
There are *plenty* of wannabe slavemasters out there whose goal in life seems to be inflicting pain on their slaves, er workers. If you're not willing to give your life, body, and soul to the company you aren't doing enough.
This whole business about people busting their ass and getting shit in return is bullshit.
The world is full of kings and queens who blind your eyes and steal your dreams.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Scruffy Beard 2 on Friday March 24 2017, @05:42PM (3 children)
In Europe, animals apparently have more rights than humans do in the USA:
- U.S. Lags Far Behind Europe in Protections for Farmed Animals [aldf.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 24 2017, @05:56PM (2 children)
And if you wonder why the US fails humanity compared to the EU care of animals then look no further than TMBs extensive posts this morning. The culture that led up to his existence is pervasive and they use some type of Darwinian social selection that turns humans into predators / prey. It is a reversion back to our animal heritage, and often one done out of greed
"I put this company together I deserve all the goodies!"
"What about the many employees that actually did the work you put togther?"
"I paid them what I think is fair and they accepted the job, they weren't the grandmaster who designed this awesome company!!!"
"Selfish prick"
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 24 2017, @06:45PM (1 child)
If you hate him so much and his culture, but it is the prevailing culture where he is, why the fuck do you want to change the whole place rather than going to another place that is already to your liking?
TLDR: If you don't like it, leave.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 24 2017, @08:04PM
I have thought about it, but family / friends and the fact that the culture is changing. I would rather fight to make my own country better rather than move somewhere else and let them burn it all down. The US culture also gets spread around, so it is in the world's interest for us to change.
To Godwin this thread: Why fight the Nazis? Why not just let them do their thing? Oh right, cause they're power craving lunatics who will try and destroy anything they disagree with. Fascists are trying to rise up in the US, they've been trying for a long while, and bullshit inhumane work ethics are the start. "I work hard so why should any of my money go to someone else?" It is deeply flawed narrow minded bullshit that dehumanizes people and make sit increasingly easy for the population to detach enough that they commit genocide.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 24 2017, @04:27PM
I think the lack of "extra money" is the point.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by urza9814 on Friday March 24 2017, @07:09PM
...assuming you're lucky enough to get a job that pays for overtime instead of just mandating 24/7 on-call support without compensation.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Friday March 24 2017, @02:20PM
When I was younger I worked in a small company probably 60 hours a week. I was single. So was the other software developer I worked with. We had a lot of fun. I rarely took vacations. I grew older. The company grew. By my 30s I only worked 40 hours a week. Eventually the company was acquired by a large Canadian company. Now I have five paid weeks vacation and they STRONGLY encourage us to use it. Furthermore, this company eats a large chunk of the cost for us to have excellent health insurance. What is it with these non-US companies?
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.