Super insightful, I needed this today
Ok but how does this improve anyone’s situation?
Weirdly progressive for someone bougie
To say nothing of the massively increased productivity of modern workers (who now pay to get “trained” in college, instead of having business train employees on the company’s dime).
It’s also the death of the Third Places
I view college as training for dealing with deadlines and some logic practice (e.g. this essay isn’t coherent; math exam next Wednesday). I never see people come through the door ready to go… it takes a few weeks before even the most basic tasks can be delegated. Their writing still sucks 90% of the time, and their math is usually shaky (lucky we have automated many steps with computers.)
I agree that the pace at which all this goes is exhausting and more breaks are needed, but the third world is still full of people working overtime to overtake these “professional” jobs that colleges purport to prep workers for. Don’t go to an overpriced Ivy League school and take on debt and expect a 20h week… go to a govt sponsored school and be prepared to compete with the remote workers working for the company that is undercutting your employer. Welcome to globalization.
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Yeah then women entered the workforce and employers were like, “yayyy! Now we have doubled the labor pool. We can pay people half as much by not increasing real wages for 40 years.”
Women fought for their freedom, and the corporations just said fuck it, imprison them all :/
This is exactly why I liked Elizabeth Warren, she seemed to be the only politician talking about the major issue with tracking “family income” as opposed to individual incomes…
I’ve been single for the last decade, at this point I know it is permanent. I will never have a second income. I do not enjoy living in someone else’s garage as I near 40 years old… Whatever OPs image has to say, I still feel like a complete failure as societal expectations of an “adult” are pretty much everything I don’t have.
It is why I supported Warren, too. The concept is pro family, pro worker and pro business. It is terrible it is out of reach for so many families.
You could get a roommate.
Is this not a good-faith suggestion? If you’re going to disagree at least explain your downvote. I had roommates post-thirty and it improved my living situation drastically.
I expect they probably have the same ideology I have, that this statement is very simple minded and throws very big well “you could just marry someone rich” vibes
Like yes the comment is genuine but it isn’t reflecting on the fact that what the person is commenting on is the fact that societal expectations is that households required 2 income sources, which is polar opposite of what the society was built on where you used to be able to build a house and have a comfortable living with one income Source in the house, and now you can have two income sources in the house and still struggle to make ends meet. (hence the ideology of a minimum household wage instead of a min wage per individual)
Take my grandfather for example his house is currently equated at 300,000, he paid 14,000 when he bought it, this was with a stay-at-home wife and a household of four kids. My grandfather was a teacher, so on a teacher’s salary he was able to afford that house and support his kids and his wife all with him being the only one who worked in the house. I believe that’s the point that the commenter was trying to get at and it’s likely why other people down voted that response. “Just get a roommate” doesn’t address the actual issue at hand, it’s a temporary solution to a hard set problem.
But that is just how I see it,
300k on a 14k house? That’s chicken shit lol God I feel bad saying that but I feel worse saying my Nana got 1.5 mil on her 15k house. Somebody can do that math but I just ate dinner, I don’t have any room to eat shit too.
I appreciate your response, thanks!
the working class should have better living conditions, especially in modern times where worker productivity is multiple times higher than post-WW2 technology allowed even after accounting for the higher tech level required for modern society
why not simply lower your living conditions?
Ironic how the one arguing in bad faith is the one complaining about it.
I mean, there’s room to talk about addressing systemic change and immediate quality-of-life suggestions in mutual exclusion, right? It’s not like taking steps to improve your life now is capitulation, and as I said having roommates was a step up in living conditions and made me better prepared mentally and financially to exist. I don’t see the irony at all – apologies if I’m misunderstanding – but we have to accept some nuance here.
50 years now. The production/wage split was roughly 1973.
Preach it!
This is why working from home needs to be more normalized. The corporations have made the market impossible to bear unless you have more than one income. Without the ability to work from home (ideally flex hours), then basically your house goes to shit. You don’t have any free time if it doesn’t.
Your “choice” after putting in a full day of work for enough money to buy a portion of your groceries, is to come home and do everything that your stay at home partner (now, working a full time job), would have otherwise done (basically speed running burnout, any%), or actually relax and accept that your house will always be somewhat messy.
But the 40 hours work week is already a progressive measure to reduce the weekly amount of work?
If anything, it’s the consistent nature of 40 hours for almost the entire year that’s the problem. We need actual vacations and periods of rest and time off for other responsibilities.
But at least I can watch YouTube at work.
At this point you should be watching YouTube at work. Reclaim the time lost at work by any means necessary!
Our company forced us to take 8 hours off every week for the past couple of months. It has been fantastic 😊. Why not make it permanent? C’mon!
I always wondered what would happen if we had a family wage, instead of a minimum wage. The social and economic implications are an interesting thought experiment.
I’ve had thoughts along those lines. Like how everything I buy is just something my employer technically spent money on with the indirect expectation I am making purchases to keep myself relatively fit for work. But atomization is capitalism’s greatest strength, this economy runs on scapegoats and finger wagging.
We have to be in the office 5 days a week. My boss who is a boomer/late gen X gets annoyed when people aren’t “butts in their seats 9-5”. I’m a Xellenial and really don’t care when my guys are in as long as they get things done. I keep telling him the more rigid he is with time, the more likely we are to lose good people. We’re already on thin ice with 5 days in office and have been losing people. It’s a constant fight that I have to shield them as much as possible from.
In a team meeting I had a while back my lead was talking about making sure we don’t get burnout. I asked if our department could trial run a 4 day work week. Their answer was “company won’t allow that but if you get all your work done by Friday I won’t ask questions if you’re not online”. Productivity and morale immediately went up. Good leads shield their team from the bullshit thank you
My current mid-manager has the same attitude that gets them our respect back, but as long as it’s not codified, it’s one single useful piece of corruption that’d be taken away if that gets noticed or they’d get replaced. Better to have legit short hours than cuts entirely dependent on someone’s will, but we are frustratingly happy eating what occasionly falls from the table. It causes a lot of mixed feelings to say the least.
As a software deceloper I struggle to understand that phrase “if you get all work done”. That will never be the case for me, because (1) there is always more work and (2) we usually plan in more into a sprint than one can muster. That means we are always moving work from one into the next sprint. You are never done early enough to quit even a quarter of a day early.
we usually plan in more into a sprint than one can muster.
That means you have a project manager who doesn’t understand how sprints are supposed to work, and he’s hurting the entire team because of it. You guys will get burnt out, productivity will be shit, and the good people will leave. I’d encourage you to talk to them, or their boss if they don’t listen.
I mean, that’s true, but the point still stands - every first Friday of a sprint there is ALWAYS going to be work to be done.
And what if they’re doing Kanban?
The point is, Fridays off shouldn’t ever be dependent on “all work being done”.
You should be able to tell by the first Friday if you’re on-track to finish your sprint without working Fridays. You can’t tell now because you’re overloaded.
Xellenial - I like that. I’m also an in-betweener - Boomer and X. It’s also called Generation Jones.
Do you feel part of either, part of both, or completely not fitting in with either?
Part of both. My work ethic is closer to that of X, but I very much understand the millennial approach to things. They way I’ve heard that sub-generation defined is “analog childhood, digital adulthood”
Are you me? This fits almost 100% my curent “setup”… Insane.
And even that was a compromise from just working until you drop. People organized and died for the 40-hour workweek.
Literally got on trains, headed into West Virginia, shot at each other, stormed machine gun pillboxes, and got bombed. If it weren’t for those people we’d still be in labor camps
Pinkertons murdering workers at Carnegie Steel
The same Pinkertons that were sent after some guy who grabbed a few Magic the Gathering cards?
Pretty sure Nintendo has made use of the Pinkertons as well.
He didn’t even grab them, he was sent the wrong box by the warehouse by mistake.
Friendly reminder you work more now than your ancestors did before all the innovations we have now, and you get a much smaller slice of the pie for it.
They also expected a lot less. One of the hardest parts of being a nurse in the modern day is having to be mentally “on” for 2x6h for 2-3 days straight (or just 12h straight if I don’t make it to lunch). I’m constantly having to evaluate and reevaluate every action I take and decide whether multiple different types of clinical alarms are actionable or not moment-to-moment. I actually LOVE getting a nursing assistant assignment for the night because it means I get to just clean things and people all night and not have to think (as much) about every possible medication and health condition and how all of them will interact. I would 100% just make beds and wipe butts all shift and give meds 1-2x if they’d let me. That honestly sounds so mentally zen to me.
