goodness-gracious-great-balls-of:
Full time work should entitle someone to enough pay for rent, food, bills, and leisure activities. Full time work for a full life wage. You put in your 8 hours a day, 5 days a week? You should be able to afford the basic shit you need in life, no matter where you work.
pisses me off that this is considered a radical statement.
I do agree with this but from economic standpoint if you are working at a job like McDonalds as someone flipping burgers and making fries you are getting paid for the amount of skill needed for the job. But if its any other job that requires you to have an actual skill that you can make a career out of then yeah you should be getting paid enough to live a standard life.
If you work FULL TIME you should be able to afford to fucking live. No, it doesn’t matter if it’s flipping burgers, these people contribute to our fucking economy and they MATTER. They should be allowed to be alive.
Jesus fucking Christ do you people hear yourselves?
People like this are why we can’t move on to issues like reducing how many hours is full time, or working out UBI.
We’re going to need to do that. Most people just don’t know what’s coming down the pipeline, without a major change to the structure of the economy, we’re looking at large scale permanent unemployment, even in the “skilled” labor force.
Also? Making food is a fucking skill. Running a fast food kitchen is a fucking skill. Operating a drive-thru is a goddamn fucking skill.
I do not know how to do these things. I have a masters degree and I have no fucking clue how to operate a deep fryer or make coffee drinks. I’d probably not be very good at it, because that kind of hands-on, fast-paced work is very hard for me.
But thankfully, there are people who are good at it, so I can do my job, and they can do theirs, and we can benefit one another by putting our skills to use in different areas. People who work in fast food are not less deserving of comfort and security in their lives just because their skills aren’t valued like they should be. That is a myth developed to deprive people of rights.
My friend works as a medical assistant and I’ve worked at McDonald’s and Starbucks. You know there’s a lot of things you gotta learn in this typa job?
Like in addition to it being physically demanding (standing up for 4-6 hours straight, carrying heavy ice/coffee, constantly getting burned by boiling water and an oven, a lot of reaching and squatting (like a lot a lot I lost 40 FUCKING pounds in a year okay this job demands a lot from the body)), there are actual skills required. Also your skin splits from using so much antibacterial soap.
Do you know what temperature different foods have to be to prevent contamination? If it’s a “cold” or “hot” plate?? Do You know how long food can be out before bacterial contamination can happen?? Do you know the difference between say 1% and heavy whipping cream? Can you teach a chemistry class using milk????? That’s p much what you gotta learn to be able to do. My friend who works as a medic was surprised, because I do more in my day than they do, and THEY told me that. They were shocked how much I actually do; I am on my feet more, talking to more people, I have a working knowledge of food germs food born illnesses and chemistry, I gotta do the same shit with sterilizing my tools the same exact way a doctor sterilizes theirs. Etc etc.
There’s no such thing as an unskilled job. There are only undervalued skills.
“There’s no such thing as an unskilled job. There are only undervalued skills.”
The only thing I’ve learned from looking for a full-time job is that I’m only good at “useless” stuff.
Stuff like typing emails without templates for corporate correspondence, managing a team, standing for 8 hours straight with no break, smiling for 8 hours straight with no break, heavy lifting, organizing 100s of units of inventory BETWEEN all those other things, and doing more math in five minutes than most people can do in thirty, OH, and giving a genuine fuck about other peoples’ happiness. Customer care is a skill. People inherently know this because, as customers, we’ve ALL experienced the difference between a worker that has developed that skill and one that refuses to try.
All I’ve learned from trying to get OUT of retail, is that retail ‘didn’t prepare me’ to answer phones at a call center or move boxes from an conveyer belt to a truck. All I’ve learned is that I can spell out what retail work -actually- is during an interview and have H.R. reps & managers that used to work in retail tell me “Oh, I know. I used to have a retail job and all i did was stand around and talk. I know what you people do.”
All I know is that people who hated their high school summer job will take out frustrations from two decades ago on job applicants, today.
And the only reason I’m really looking to get -out- of retail is that my skills are so undervalued that I’d have a hard time breaking $1000 a month after taxes even if I was working full time!
The thing is that when you hire a human to do a job you are paying for two things – their skill and their time. A skill takes time to develop, so really you’re paying for their time twice over – the time they’re currently devoting to the job, and the time they spent in advance acquiring the skills necessary for the job.
When you think of it in that sense, I think it’s obvious that people deserve living wages for full time work regardless of what skill level the job requires.
Every hour an employee spends working for you is an hour closer to their death. You are CONSUMING A CHUNK OF SOMEONE’S LIFE THAT THEY WILL NEVER GET BACK.
PAY THE FUCK UP.
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Thoughtfulfangirling 