61–70 of 73 posts
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They would have a significantly lower cost of living. So they should be able to save much more.
You haven't spent much time on the west coast if you think the cost of living anywhere out there is low. If you want low cost of living, you need to move to the midwest or south, or throughout the NE in upstate or western NY.
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They would have a significantly lower cost of living. So they should be able to save much more.
Also, their likelihood of dying young is among the highest in the developed world, so they may not need to save at all! What a deal.
When even a left-wing outlet like The Guardian is willing to uncritically echo capital's BS about "labor shortages" when the real cause is a lack of willingness to pay real wages, you know we're in trouble. Seriously, $18/hr. for the most dangerous job in the country? I'd tell those people to get fucked.
Business and economic journalism aren't critical enough of people who complain about a "skills shortage" and accept their argument at face value. This is where capitalism should excel: you can't attract necessary talent at price point $X, then you pay >$X.
Partisan ideologies can cut in multiple directions. For example, if you have an ideology where you view capitalism as inherently evil you may be ignorant of where it could be of benefit. If you view workers are excessively self-entitled, you won't call out companies and managers for not paying enough.
I'm totally for job automation, and think we should find better solutions to the problems it causes than "be less efficient". But I also think we should own up to those negative effects instead of playing a game where we pretend not to understand how markets work.
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Also, their likelihood of dying young is among the highest in the developed world, so they may not need to save at all! What a deal.
I never said it was a good deal. Just that cost of living is lower. No need to snark.
I'm old enough to remember a time when shit jobs paid really well because, well, they were shit jobs. Let's take the bottom of the barrel: bailing hay in the August heat of the Midwest. Dead simple job: take heavy bail of hay, put it on truck. Alternatively, take bail from truck, put in barn. Anyone with two working synapses could do it. And it paid the equivalent to $16/hour in 2017 dollars. Great job for a high sch…
Hang on. The longshoreman part is a bit more complicated than that. Longshoreman was actually not a shit job. The workers had a great deal of flexibility and good pay for the hours worked. The labor unions protected them too. What caused that job to decline and disappear was the container box. The container box moved the packing and unpacking part from the source and destination instead of the ports. During the Vietn…
In the past 20 or so years a literary genre has emerged that uses esoteric subjects as a narrative device for exploring broader social topics. The Box doesn't fit neatly into that genre because, AFAIU, the historical material is novel, rather than recapitulating a standard theory or, on the other hand, reframing beliefs with a contradictory or counter-intuitive narrative. The book remains earnestly focused on the history of container shipping, albeit at a more macro scale. The broader relevance just naturally follows from the keen, objective description of that history.
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Do you think part of the reason the longshore industry managed to keep a really strong union was just the geographic concentration? When you only have a few major container ports, it's gotta be pretty easy to keep union solidarity...
Yes! Actually, a lot of the older port cities were eventually bypassed because of this. For example, SF and NYC are no longer ports for shipping because rather than deal with the unions and their power, new ports such as Oakland and Newark (think that's the city in NJ) with facilities for containers were simply built close by.
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I don't blame people for not flocking to an extremely dangerous and grueling job only to be underpaid. There's plenty of other options. I get tired of older generations somehow trying to guilt trip us into continuing in their line of work when in reality those jobs weren't very good to begin with. Work smarter not harder. Maybe they never heard of that.
It's not an "older generation" thing. It is a "shitty employers try to have their cake and eat it" thing.
I wonder how we recovered from this after The Great Depression...
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$18 dollars an hour for arguably the most dangerous job in the country. That doesn't seem like a great deal to you?
How about: underwater welder, fisherman, skydiving instructor, firefighter, electrician, policeman, astronaut, or sanitation engineer?
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It's not an "older generation" thing. It is a "shitty employers try to have their cake and eat it" thing.
They got greedy during the downturn and don't want to give up the sweet milking of the labor supply. I wonder how we recovered from this after The Great Depression...