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Below Deck: Filipinos make up nearly a third of all cruise ship workers

story.californiasunday.com

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Re: Below Deck: Filipinos make up nearly a third of all cruise ship workers

#201

Post by jpalomaki »

kafkaesq wrote: post #111
traveling wrote: post #19

Newsflash: Life sucks anywhere when you're poor and uneducated. I worked as an independent Google contractor before for less than $11 an hour with very stringent rules, ever increasing performance requirements, no holidays, no sick pay, no nothing. If you're poor and uneducated you're disposable dirt anywhere these days, even though people would like you to think otherwise and it's obviously even worse in 3rd world c…

Newsflash: Life sucks anywhere when you're poor and uneducated. And abundant evidence indicates that (most) corporations will do everything within their power to take advantage of this fact, unless very strongly regulated.

As consumers we could do better. Instead of just focusing on the price and features we could be also interested in how the product was produced.

I think the pressure from consumers can be even stronger force than regulation. It can act faster and it is not so susceptible to lobbying and loopholes.

Re: Below Deck: Filipinos make up nearly a third of all cruise ship workers

#202

Post by Baeocystin »

manigandham wrote: post #200
Baeocystin wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a different perspective. Education is resource-constrained, and learners do not exist in a vacuum. In my opinion, it is the height of ego to refuse to make use knowledge that so many others have spent time and effort to teach.

The education is paid for, so the "others" who are teaching are earning money, it's not wasted effort. Knowledge itself doesn't contain any inherent value, it's free if you want to learn it all yourself without depriving anyone else of it. What you're paying for is the academic environment, resources and tutoring of a person. That's a business exchange like any other and everyone is free to spend their money on that,…

All knowledge learned represents an opportunity cost paid, both in real capital and time consumed in acquisition, both for the students and the educational system as a whole. If nothing is done with it other than acquisition, we as a society lose.

I am not against the viewpoint you present for anything other than what I see as pragmatic reasons. If we lived in a post-scarcity economy, I would agree with you.

But we don't, and we aren't going to be there anytime soon, either. The system we have now loads crippling debt on to students, and one of the reasons it can do so is because of the constraints of supply and demand. Thus, in my opinion, to not do anything with an advanced degree is deeply selfish.

Re: Below Deck: Filipinos make up nearly a third of all cruise ship workers

#203

Post by Baeocystin »

abiox wrote: post #198
Baeocystin wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That very attitude (that higher degrees=better at everything) is what I have the problem with. Not only is it demonstrably not true, but it comes with real consequences. An entire generation is being saddled with crippling amounts of debt because of attitudes like this, and we all lose because of it. Our society becomes lopsided, with not enough jobs for college grads to enable most to pay off their student debt, and…

there was a candidate that wanted to address the "crippling amounts of debt" issue, but that movement was cut off at the knees.

No argument there.

Re: Below Deck: Filipinos make up nearly a third of all cruise ship workers

#204

Post by readhn »

jasode wrote: post #29
readhn wrote: post #13

This is why I am never ever going on a cruise ship (or any resort in Mexico, Dominican etc). Knowing that the guy serving you is basically a slave working for pennies while you are supposed to enjoy your vacation and relax- I couldn't, no thank you. What surprises me to this day is how little it costs to buy American congress. 1,000,000$ lobbying costs? That's less than a lot of houses in SF or NYC. Shouldn't it cost…

>This is why I am never ever going on a cruise ship [...] Knowing that the guy serving you is basically a slave I'm not doubting your sincerity and principles but I'd like to go beyond this particular injustice of cruise workers and understand how consumers reconcile all the "slave" inputs for the other products they buy. In the USA, many fruits and veggies are collected by cheap labor from Mexico.[1] In UK, the anal…

I know that this is not limited to the cruise ship industry and I do "vote with my dollar". Just as with avoiding cruise ships and resorts of this type I avoid cheap manufactured products coming from countries with questionable labor laws. It is hard to completely avoid this in our everyday life but I do as much as I can. I'm being mindful about it unlike some people who completely ignore these issues.

Food, clothes, energy ... The human slavery did not stop with the abolition almost 200 years ago.

Re: Below Deck: Filipinos make up nearly a third of all cruise ship workers

#205

Post by wyclif »

jacquesm wrote: post #190
wyclif wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anything that doesn't end up destroying his health and life. I reject the notion that cruise ship work is the only job available to him.

Unless you're planning to employ him I don't think that's your call to make.

You're trying hard to be annoying, I suppose. You don't know this, but I've never worked for a startup. If you're looking for that attitude of "oh, he should have learned React and moved to SF", then you're looking in the completely wrong direction. Now, I know there are people on this board naive enough to believe things like that, but I'm definitely not one of them. And as far as "it's not my call to make", I'm not making this guy's call. The implication is that unless I have a job to provide this unfortunate fellow, in your view I shouldn't be commenting and suggesting that destroying his health by signing an employment contract that waives his right to collect damages is a bad idea.

I think that's an absurd attitude to maintain.

Re: Below Deck: Filipinos make up nearly a third of all cruise ship workers

#206

Post by SamReidHughes »

chillwaves wrote: post #154
SamReidHughes wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're clearly people who had choices in life.

That categorization encompasses what.. 98% of everyone? Your bar for sympathy may be a bit high.

Well it's certainly not going to include people that have $13/hr jobs in America.

Re: Below Deck: Filipinos make up nearly a third of all cruise ship workers

#207

Post by Synaesthesia »

traveling wrote: post #53
Synaesthesia wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not something that's writ in stone though - we could hangs that, and change starts with education, articles like this.

Call me overly cynical, but the future is looking even worse with ever increasing automation. There will most likely be a small elite of technocrats and wealthy while everybody else is living in shacks competing for whatever jobs are left. Most single millenial guys that aren't in tech or another high paying career are already living in shared housing indefinetely if they're in a big city. An excess of people having…

Only if we let it. Technology could equally be used to let everybody work less, have more spare time, instead of enriching the wealthy and leaving the rest as useless extraneous people

Re: Below Deck: Filipinos make up nearly a third of all cruise ship workers

#208

Post by jacquesm »

wyclif wrote: post #205
jacquesm wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless you're planning to employ him I don't think that's your call to make.

You're trying hard to be annoying, I suppose. You don't know this, but I've never worked for a startup. If you're looking for that attitude of "oh, he should have learned React and moved to SF", then you're looking in the completely wrong direction. Now, I know there are people on this board naive enough to believe things like that, but I'm definitely not one of them. And as far as "it's not my call to make", I'm not…

> You're trying hard to be annoying, I suppose.

No, I'm not. That's called 'disagreement' and it can happen.

The only thing I note is that you don't know what options this man has available to him since you are not in his shoes and you can simply assume that he's trying his level best to do the best he can - just like everybody else. So unless you wish to increase the number of options available to him I don't think you should be telling him what to do, just as he wouldn't have any standing to tell you what to do.

None of your other assumptions are relevant to this and besides I wasn't making them.

Filipino employees are exploited because they have very little in terms options to resist signing such contracts. It's akin to victim blaming.

Re: Below Deck: Filipinos make up nearly a third of all cruise ship workers

#209

Post by flukus »

vacri wrote: post #160
aianus wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You see exploitation, I see a market signal to high schoolers and undergraduates telling them we have enough graduate-level geographers, encouraging them to pursue something else and eventually making us all more prosperous in the future.

Because as we know, high-schoolers are really good at labour-market analysis.

Maybe there should be a specialist who's role is to counsel students through these decisions and provide guidance?
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