I work with people like this. The next sentence is always some variant of “if they don’t want to be poor they should get a better job. “
Yeah dumbass, there’s 100 million 6-figure jobs available for everyone to not be poor. And education that doesn’t put you 6 figures in debt. They should work harder than the 2 jobs they’re already working and Ubering on the side, you say? They’re already doing 4x as much as your privileged fat ass sitting behind a desk who knocks off early on a Friday.
Fuck I hate people sometimes.
You have a great point.
100 million 6-figure jobs available for everyone to not be poor
While “100 million” was likely made up, there are 8.3 billion people on earth. Those 100 million jobs are enough for 1/83 of the population.
The secret ingredient is crime
Unironicaly, I believe people do this to get ahead, and that is the only way people make it out.
Not really. While, yes, the job usually is necessary, telling someone to get a better job does not imply that their current one is necessary.
No person working a full time job should be poor. And a 20hr per week job should be able to comfortably split the median rent of a 2 bedroom apartment with another working adult and offer at least a basic lifestyle.
I don’t give a fuck about judging if a job is necessary or not. If a buisness needs a job filled then they have to pay enough for people to live
Every shitty job is necessary to somebody to some degree or no one would pay for it.
It comes down to this. If you want something to be done by someone, but you also dont think people that do that thing that you want should be paid enough to live a decent life, then you are evil. Period.
If it is necessary, why are people working that job poor?
The ruling class intentionally creates extra work to keep people off of the streets. David graeber wrote a good book about it.
https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/david-graeber-bullshit-jobs
I think that’s the right source material to answer the comment’s question, but the wrong answer.
The central idea of that book is that the most necessary labor is devalued under hierarchy in order to inflate the importance of unnecessary roles. Not that unnecessary labor is created to keep people occupied. It is, but the unnecessary labor inventoried in that book by Graeber are mostly decently-paid white collar jobs.
This makes the fundamental assumption that the job has to be done by a human.
In this day and age, a whole lot of “poor people jobs” can be automated (at least to some degree). That happens whenever the supply of people available to do the job cheaper than the capital cost of the machine dries up.
Everybody raising their qualifications to work “better jobs” is one way to do that.
This would be a better argument if eliminating jobs didn’t mean the people who used to work that job die in poverty if they can’t adapt to a new job.
It isn’t an argument at all, merely fact. The dynamic applies regardless of whether we like it or not. Jobs will be eliminated, some humans will be made redundant and be unable to adapt into higher-value labour.
At that point, the only real choice in the matter is whether society pays these people to sit around and do nothing (welfare), requires them to work a meaningless job or lets them die of poverty.
When there is less work to do, god forbid we get creative. Like having all the people doing less work overall. No, let’s gamble on the lives of some people. These people!
Or we could have free higher education to help people learn those skills rather than say fuck em if they dont have the money to pay for it
Even with free higher education, there are people who either don’t want to or can’t participate. Here in Sweden for instance we’ve had huge troubles integrating the MENA migrant wave of the 2010s into the job market, despite education being not just free but compensated by the gov:t.
A decade after the fact and this group is still hugely overrepresented in unemployment unfortunately (>5x). Many fuckups in that puzzle, but availability of education isn’t one of them.
The position criticized in the tweet is that people don’t care about workers in poverty now because they imagine a future in which that worker has a better job, and they forget about the person then put in poverty working the first position. The point is that the imagined future does nothing to help the real person suffering now nor reduce overall suffering even if it were realized.
Your imagined future of automated post scarcity has the reduced overall suffering part but it does nothing for people still waiting for their shitty jobs to be automated. You also don’t suggest any way of enforcing an equitable distribution of this automatic production rather than allowing it to be owned by the same people who own everything now, who have chosen to structure the current economy to keep so many in poverty.
When I was in the US the last time (must be around 20 years ago) there was a man in booth in a parking garage. It was something I had naver really seen in germany before. All our garages were already automated back then.
Later I thought about that and got to the conclusion that this person’s work must be cheaper than just putting up an automated system.
The US seems to have a few other jobs that I had never seen in germany. Greeter, bagger, sign spinner.
I don’t know what it looks like today but for me that looks like jobs just to make people work.
Some jobs absolutely should be done by humans. I don’t want kids being taught by machines. They need human interaction to do many things, from learning how to appropriately take turns with others, to having someone guide how they hold a pencil.
It’s unfortunate that so many of us who dedicate ourselves to educating the next generation still can’t afford a living.
