I'm a Frito-Lay Factory Worker. I Work 12-Hour Days, 7 Days a Week • Hacker News Board

Re: I'm a Frito-Lay Factory Worker. I Work 12-Hour Days, 7 Days a Week

#51

Post by XenophileJKO » Sat, Jul 17, 2021, 9:23 PM UTC

risedotmoe wrote: post #14

knuthsat wrote: post #2

Anyone knows why people decide to do this kind of time consuming work? Is the world getting hard enough that there is no alternative? Whenever I see people working really hard in other parts of the world, especially when the country is filled with other opportunities, I always wonder is it just everyone else that is raising the bar and now the standard is very time consuming work. For example, there's year long touri…

There is no job that won’t work you for as much as they can. They pay you low enough to where you’re dependent on them paycheck to paycheck. The turnover is high and if you don’t like the conditions they get rid of you. There are a ton of people in line for your job who will put up with worse working conditions so you either lick boots or you aren’t making ends meet this week. The culture at every job is that if you…

College or trade school is not the only way out. The core way out is skill attainment. College and trade school are one way to do this.

Re: I'm a Frito-Lay Factory Worker. I Work 12-Hour Days, 7 Days a Week

#52

Post by ryandrake » Sat, Jul 17, 2021, 9:24 PM UTC

hallway_monitor wrote: post #47

brianwawok wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Factories aren’t generally in cities. In a rural town, your job choices may be work at Walmart, one of two factories, or on a farm. The “hard” factory job may be the “best” bet among the choices. The bigger question is usually why don’t people move from a rural location? And the answer is usually “it’s complicated “. Old parents to take care of. It’s familiar. Friends. Maybe own your simple home. Maybe your church is…

The best thing about moving to remote work is that it will enable people to live in these smaller communities while having the increased income of the city. I hope this will bring more money back to local economies and revitalize rural areas.

If remote work really takes off, it won't be long until most employers adjust salaries down to each employee's local cost of labor. Why pay someone a Bay Area or NYC salary when they work in rural Montana, when they could pay a rural Montana salary to get someone who works in rural Montana?

Re: I'm a Frito-Lay Factory Worker. I Work 12-Hour Days, 7 Days a Week

#53

Post by bserge » Sat, Jul 17, 2021, 9:26 PM UTC

raffraffraff wrote: post #35

America needs an equivalent to the EU working time act.

People like that work the same hours in the EU.

Re: I'm a Frito-Lay Factory Worker. I Work 12-Hour Days, 7 Days a Week

#54

Post by jjcm » Sat, Jul 17, 2021, 9:28 PM UTC

"In its latest contract offer, Frito-Lay has said it would raise wages by four percent over the next two years"

Consumer price index has risen 4.5% since June of last year. With Biden planning similar amounts of printing, it's likely this trend will continue. What Frito-Lay is actually saying here is that they will cut employee's purchasing power by 5.2% over the next two years if that amount of inflation holds.

Re: I'm a Frito-Lay Factory Worker. I Work 12-Hour Days, 7 Days a Week

#55

Post by nawitus » Sat, Jul 17, 2021, 9:28 PM UTC

ryandrake wrote: post #52

hallway_monitor wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The best thing about moving to remote work is that it will enable people to live in these smaller communities while having the increased income of the city. I hope this will bring more money back to local economies and revitalize rural areas.

If remote work really takes off, it won't be long until most employers adjust salaries down to each employee's local cost of labor. Why pay someone a Bay Area or NYC salary when they work in rural Montana, when they could pay a rural Montana salary to get someone who works in rural Montana?

Remote salaries might end up being somewhere between rural Montana and Bay Area. There's no reason to assume there's a huge supply of software engineers in the US which would make all remote salaries to be in the low-end.

Re: I'm a Frito-Lay Factory Worker. I Work 12-Hour Days, 7 Days a Week

#56

Post by jbay808 » Sat, Jul 17, 2021, 9:28 PM UTC

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #41

jbay808 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How did things get the way they became? Is it due to iron wrought natural laws, or historical decisions we could freely agree to change? Reminds me of Scott Alexander's Meditations on Moloch , which also ponders this question. I can't do it justice with just one excerpt, but here's one passage that always stays with me: The reason our current system isn’t a utopia is that it wasn’t designed by humans . Just as you…

Sorry, but this is BS. The course of a river is a direct result of several close-to-deterministic forces and influences. Caesar's Palace, along with "neurobiology, economics, and regulatory regimes" are manifestations of many different forces, a large number of which are subject to individual and social choice-making. The pretense that "neurobiology is destiny", "economics is as immutable as physics" and "regulatory…

Are you arguing against me, the essay, or the excerpt? I don't think your rebuttal really hits at the main body of the essay, which is about how competitive pressure can trap groups into miserable situations that no individual wants, but which are stable enough to be hard to break out of. It's not that you can really predict the form of societal institutions, but just that they perhaps aren't shaped by free choice as much as they seem, because of how much the incentive landscape restricts our choices.

I don't think the point is that the exact detailed form of Las Vegas was inevitable, but rather that it exemplifies the collective madness that these forces can produce.

Although perhaps more relevant to this thread would be how a society might, under pressure, lose its traditional siesta and never get it back. He mentions examples like this too.

Re: I'm a Frito-Lay Factory Worker. I Work 12-Hour Days, 7 Days a Week

#57

Post by JackFr » Sat, Jul 17, 2021, 9:33 PM UTC

Where is the union?

That has got to be the single most ineffective union I’ve ever seen. If that’s what a union shop looks like I can understand why people might not want to pay union dues.

Re: I'm a Frito-Lay Factory Worker. I Work 12-Hour Days, 7 Days a Week

#58

Post by xyzzy21 » Sat, Jul 17, 2021, 9:37 PM UTC

knuthsat wrote: post #2

Anyone knows why people decide to do this kind of time consuming work? Is the world getting hard enough that there is no alternative? Whenever I see people working really hard in other parts of the world, especially when the country is filled with other opportunities, I always wonder is it just everyone else that is raising the bar and now the standard is very time consuming work. For example, there's year long touri…

No choices. This is in the Midwest in the middle of no-where.

No you can't realistically move - every other location is far more expensive and would require significant relocation expense, and you'd have to leave your community, likely where you were born and raise(d) your family.

Re: I'm a Frito-Lay Factory Worker. I Work 12-Hour Days, 7 Days a Week

#59

Post by xyzzy21 » Sat, Jul 17, 2021, 9:39 PM UTC

TaylorAlexander wrote: post #20

knuthsat wrote: post #2

Anyone knows why people decide to do this kind of time consuming work? Is the world getting hard enough that there is no alternative? Whenever I see people working really hard in other parts of the world, especially when the country is filled with other opportunities, I always wonder is it just everyone else that is raising the bar and now the standard is very time consuming work. For example, there's year long touri…

Its a very good question. I think in general it is important to realize that a significant amount of "design" work goes in to creating economies. Local, state, and national decisions will lead to certain conditions. How were those decisions made, and under what conditions? For any given place the answer will be different. How does one place compare to another? It is my view that it is perfectly feasible to design eco…

These are NOT "design" jobs. They aren't "knowledge/service" jobs either.

And fun fact: retraining absolutely does not work. Less than 10% can be retrained and usually they are the segment that could have retrained themselves without specific retraining.

Re: I'm a Frito-Lay Factory Worker. I Work 12-Hour Days, 7 Days a Week

#60

Post by bpodgursky » Sat, Jul 17, 2021, 9:39 PM UTC

My brother-in-law works at the Target distribution center in Topeka, and is very confused why these workers don't just quit and work at either the Target or WalMart centers that are practically next-door and begging for workers.

Definitely sounds like a rough gig here, but everyone is begging for entry-level labor, most at higher wages than this. The workers need to just protest with their feet and quit.