What does “shitty job” mean in the low-skill, low-pay world?

Note also that $30k USD (not “42k AUD”) is pre-tax, and take home is more like $25k somewhere like Ohio. And that Amazon warehouse is going to exist near a population center, where CoL is a bit higher, like rent.

But I really need to reject what you’re saying about the “bottom wage.” $15/hr is not the lowest, it’s actually on the very high end of the lowest income salaries:

> Of those individuals with income who were older than 15 years of age, approximately 50% had incomes below $30,000

This isn’t 50% of low income jobs. 50% of all workers make less than what you say is a “normal” low skill wage.

Minimum wage in the US is $7.25/hr. Anecdotally, when I was starting out a few years ago, I was paid minimum wage at a college IT job. Most restaurants (outside of HCOL cities) are going to start around minimum wage or slightly higher.

Let’s also look at one of the biggest employers in country, Walmart. It’s not going to start you anywhere close to $15/hr. Say you get lucky and get a whopping $12/hr. That’s $24k/yr, or $21k net. Monthly rent in the cheapest CoL places in the US is going to be like $500. That’s $6k/yr. So your total income after paying rent, at an extremely common low skill job, is $15k/yr, or $1200/mo.

You can cover these types of essential expenses with $1200/mo?

- Food

- Car and gas (there is not public transit to take you to Walmart in Ohio.)

- Utilities, such as electric, water, trash, and internet.

- A basic phone plan.

- Health care. (think about what percent of $1200 a premium could be.)

- Any kind of savings, including retirement?

It is certainly possible to live extremely frugally, assuming no children, no existing debt (such as college), no vacations or travel, no big expenses, etc. It is certainly not possible to cover emergencies (like a medical one or your cheap car breaking down). I also question if you’ll ever save anything towards changing your future, like a retirement plan or better education.

The bigger question is why the fuck, in one of the richest and most successful economies in the world, do a huge number of the participants in that economy — again, 50% make under $15/hr — have to make a wage which doesn’t enable them to be at least a little bit comfortable?

And they don’t get any kind of meaningful protection against bad situations, like medical problems. Walmart isn’t going to pay you to be on an extended leave. It’s not going to be common to have any kind of retirement plan other than social security. It’s rare to have good health care plans at this salary.

It is going to be challenging, in this forum, to gain empathy, because most of us are likely in the top 10% of earners. But I don’t see a way to look at this situation and think it’s good for our society.

Can someone explain to me and maybe to great industrialist Shahbaz Sharif how Pak is supposed to compete with those two countries with a 20% lower literacy rate in comparison?

To call out the woefully common hyperbolic rhetoric of calling having to compare the default natural state of being, having to work to survive as slavery. Take any given natural environment no matter how idylic and stick bands of naked humans in it.

Plus the whole "demand something with zero regard as to the hows of the process and what it would take to maintain it".

I don't agree with this writer on any of these points, it seems like he's trying to come up with some efficient market hypothesis describing how low-level workers are "different" than those of us in tech, when no such thing exists, in fact it's incredibly narcissistic.

My first job was making $7 an hour at Best Buy, then Staples, then a local company for a few years. Now in the mid 6-figures in tech. The thing about all my former co-workers was the vast majority of them were normal and intelligent people. In fact they were a lot less 'oddball' types than half the people I've worked with who want to tell me about a Soylent diet or how they were enlightened by taking recreational drugs in Peru for the 15th time.

The reason people are high earners a combination of Luck + Supply and Demand + Right place at the right time. Grit plays a part too, but not in the sense of pulling all-nighters or working yourself to death. Grit means being in more "right places" at more "right times", working hard on skills that have ROI, and increasing the chances you get lucky.

Unloading frozen blocks of fish off factory fishing trawlers.

In short, these trawlers catch the fish (by trawling the ocean floor), produce the fish onboard (fish fillets), pack the product (in 25 and 50 kg blocks), and store them in large freezing rooms. Then when the capacity is full, they dock, and the product is unloaded. Usually some company offers this loading/unloading service. The product was the either placed in freezing warehouse, or loaded directly onto trucks.

The trawlers we unloaded, would usually carry 300 - 500 metric tons of fish. When I worked, we'd get around $0.03 pr kg fish unloaded, so a 300 metric tonne assignment would result in $9000 split on 10-15 people. Some days we'd unload 500-700 metric ton. That would be very long days - but the work had to be done, as the there were ships standing in queue.

The main problem with automation is that all the ships look a bit different, and there are so many edge cases there. Sometimes the blocks are frozen together, and you'll have to use a crowbar to get them loose. Sometimes the blocks have shifted due to rough seas. It can be a fucking mess, other times it's nice and straightforward.

The largest boats do have conveyer belt, so the longshoremen are just throwing blocks on the belt, and the other crew is on land putting said blocks onto pallets. But 9 out of 10 times, there's a crew in the freezer loading blocks onto pallets, and then the pallets are brought up from the ship, and sorted on land. People work surprisingly fast.

As for the vessels, it's just a cost of doing business.