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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: 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