Low unemployment isn’t worth much if the jobs barely pay

(eg, they include college age students when they are usually left out because things like increase college enrollment would skew the numbers).

All their distributional data and numbers for what counts as low wage workers comes from a 2012-2016 Census Bureau survey. They then claim without much justification "we think it is unlikely our finding would change significantly if we considered more recent wage data" for the 2017-2019 period.

edits:

strangely enough they exclude graduate and professional student, but still include 18-24 year olds in high school or college. And they exclude self-employed for reasons similar to why you would want to exclude 18-24 year olds. And that 18-24 year old group accounts for only 4% of mid and high wage work, but 24.3% of low wage work, so it is clearly skewing the results.

And the largest category of low-wage workers (a plurality) is classified as "low-wage workers in a family with mid- to high- wage workers". I'm not really sure we care about that as much.

Reading more, they have some very strange inclusion/excisions, such as they exclude professional and grade students because they are seen as having a career path, they include "springboard jobs" because some might not transition out of them. That's just sloppy and lazy.

Sounds like some serious data hacking going on.

> On average, the unemployed experience lower life satisfaction than the employed by about 0.3 standard deviations in Canada and the United States, by 0.32 standard deviations in the United Kingdom and by 0.47 standard deviations in Germany.[1]

Your claims relies on the assumption that unemployment in Canada is more tolerable than unemployment in the US. Yet large-scale surveys do not reflect that for the average jobseeker.

Therefore we can conclude that higher unemployment in Canada vis-a-vis the US is almost certainly driven by a lower supply of jobs, rather than as you posit a lower demand for employment. The same also holds true for the major Western European economies surveyed.

[1] https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/11f0019m/11f0019m2018408...

I am of the opinion that low wage jobs are a form of UBI. In this manner, individuals are paid a basic income in exchange for their productivity. However, these jobs are not meant to create wealth. They're meant to provide subsistance. This is much the same goal of UBI.

For those that say that benefits (health, retirement, sick pay, family leave, vacation) are necessary in addition to low wage income which often does not supply many or any of these benefits, I would say that is the case for UBI as well.

For UBI to work, there must be a base of benefits to support the UBI. As such, I see UBI and low wage as fairly synonymous except that UBI is seen as providing income without any productivity required of the individual, and low wage being UBI with required productivity.

In many ways UBI and low wage work come at odds. The more that UBI is offered, the less that individuals would want to do low wage work. Rather than pushing up wages for low wage work, dis-incentivization of low wage will push employers towards automation. As such, low wage is a support of employment generally. The more that employers move towards automation, the more that low wage jobs are eliminated, the more that UBI becomes the only alternative to low wage. As such, low wage jobs do provide a necessary function in the economic system.

This is just food for thought.

This got repetitive quickly, and the managers got really upset whenever you slacked off in the lulls. Groups of more than three people chatting while we had "downtime" were more or less immediately disbanded. Checking your phone, even to text your family, was a big no-no on company time. There was no such thing as a "smoke break" (I don't smoke, but man a five-minute break occasionally would've been really nice.)

I hated that job. I dealt with a bout of depression because of that job. The turnover there- among people who were talented- was exceptionally high (I lasted about two months before I found a better job) because the job was so menial- and the managers so demeaning- that all joy in working was lost fairly regularly.

It would've been better than staying at home and playing games all day long, but I'm sure that I could've done something more productive, without pay than I did with pay.