I think this article starts to touch on a topic area I don't hear much about but am extremely frustrated by: how modern work for a lot of jobs has become de facto indentured servitude. In the "When They Know They've Got You" section, they mention the real challenges of not being able to obtain a lawyer if things truly aren't fair. The average worker can't afford anything without taking on debt. Insurance is a scam in a lot of cases but if a worker is sick it will only hurt the worker not the company a lot of the time. To make matters much worse, the corporations lobby the government and fund all candidates and have seemingly captured the government so no changes are being made. Healthcare, extremely high rent, and things like property tax where failure to pay sends you to prison are used as the means of coercion. If the United States continues on the current political course, nothing will ever change.
What does “shitty job” mean in the low-skill, low-pay world?
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Re: What does “shitty job” mean in the low-skill, low-pay world?
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
>It’s better to get paid $0 being in the right field for a bit than actually being paid in the wrong path. I am going to make the guess that you either have a lot of money right now or have an amazing support system to help you because such options aren't available to everyone who is making sure their food budget is correct down to the penny.
Your guess is wrong then. I’m more of a person that has been at the upside and downside of things. I know what it’s like to just need the paycheck. But I never looked at it like that, it was mostly a paycheck to create the opportunity via stability to evolve another path. In that case, holistically, that dead-end job had a purpose for creating financial groundwork (once upon a time for me it was literally to buy some…
Nah being broke isn't being able to afford a domain. It's eating fast food 3 days in a row because your paycheck isn't coming for another three days and the gas bill was $50 higher this month and your kid needed to see the dentist.
Re: What does “shitty job” mean in the low-skill, low-pay world?
#33I always have to think about this when people say "buy more at small businesses!" Most small businesse owners I met were just as shitty as the ones of big businesses, they just weren't as smart as them.
I don't doubt one bit that the average small business owner is roughly as shitty as a manager at a large chain. But I don't think that undermines the core motivation behind "buy local": all else being equal, buying local is still a way to improve the resilience and diversity of your local economy. We shouldn't let the fact that managment/ownership appears to be generally morally corrosive taunt us away from doing som…
That being said, some owners are so reprehensible that buying at a mega corp is the better choice. A local business to me was boycotted out of existence after they had a meltdown on Facebook when they were criticized for their support of the fascists that tried to overturn the election on Jan 6.
Re: What does “shitty job” mean in the low-skill, low-pay world?
#34Any job that doesn’t holistically build your skill set (antithetical to a career). As in, the money is irrelevant in the grand scheme of things. If you stock Shampoo on a shelf, and you can’t flip that into something useful, it’s a worthless job. It’s better to get paid $0 being in the right field for a bit than actually being paid in the wrong path. It’s negative money unless you are using it to pivot into the right…
Any job is better than no job as far as possibly leading to something better. At minimum, it shows you can show up for work. A surprising number of people cannot do that reliably.
Re: What does “shitty job” mean in the low-skill, low-pay world?
#35>> A meatgrinder job is a job that pays more not because there are fewer people who can do it, but because there are fewer people that will. They have insanely high turnover, because some aspect of the job is so bad that the vast majority of people who try it don’t stay. Maybe it’s long hours that never stop or maybe it’s constant on-call work. Maybe it’s an insane, stress-intensive workload you can’t begin to keep u…
Sat down at a bar once and the woman next to me was a pediatric oncologist, basically just crying into her beer about how she wanted to quit. It wasn't just sad-- it was an incredibly interesting conversation that I still remember about a decade later.
Re: What does “shitty job” mean in the low-skill, low-pay world?
#36Re: What does “shitty job” mean in the low-skill, low-pay world?
#37>> A meatgrinder job is a job that pays more not because there are fewer people who can do it, but because there are fewer people that will. They have insanely high turnover, because some aspect of the job is so bad that the vast majority of people who try it don’t stay. Maybe it’s long hours that never stop or maybe it’s constant on-call work. Maybe it’s an insane, stress-intensive workload you can’t begin to keep u…
Speaking of criminal prosecutors, I'm binging Law and Order (the OG). I completely understand it's a dramatization of real life but I never understood how complex the process is and how much they actually lose . You'd think the State/People have the upper hand at every turn and most of the time they do, but the amount of process, discovery and overcoming the reasonable doubt burden on their (relatively) limited budge…
Prosecutors do a lot of work, but the idea that they lose a lot is questionable. In the federal system, more than 90% of defendants plead guilty, and only around 1% of defendants take a case to trial and ultimately win. https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/06/11/only-2-of-f...
The numbers in state courts may vary, but in NY they are similar to the federal system. https://www.law.umich.edu/special/exoneration/Documents/New_...
Obviously a guilty plea still requires work, and maybe a lot of it. But in terms of outcomes, they rarely lose.
Re: What does “shitty job” mean in the low-skill, low-pay world?
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't doubt one bit that the average small business owner is roughly as shitty as a manager at a large chain. But I don't think that undermines the core motivation behind "buy local": all else being equal, buying local is still a way to improve the resilience and diversity of your local economy. We shouldn't let the fact that managment/ownership appears to be generally morally corrosive taunt us away from doing som…
That being said, some owners are so reprehensible that buying at a mega corp is the better choice. A local business to me was boycotted out of existence after they had a meltdown on Facebook when they were criticized for their support of the fascists that tried to overturn the election on Jan 6.
Certainly. “Buy local” is a decision weight, not a categorical principle.
Re: What does “shitty job” mean in the low-skill, low-pay world?
#39>> A meatgrinder job is a job that pays more not because there are fewer people who can do it, but because there are fewer people that will. They have insanely high turnover, because some aspect of the job is so bad that the vast majority of people who try it don’t stay. Maybe it’s long hours that never stop or maybe it’s constant on-call work. Maybe it’s an insane, stress-intensive workload you can’t begin to keep u…
Speaking of criminal prosecutors, I'm binging Law and Order (the OG). I completely understand it's a dramatization of real life but I never understood how complex the process is and how much they actually lose . You'd think the State/People have the upper hand at every turn and most of the time they do, but the amount of process, discovery and overcoming the reasonable doubt burden on their (relatively) limited budge…
Most defendant can’t even afford a couple hundreds (thousands?) dollar in term of extra resources (this includes non-monetary aspects like their own time) to defend themselves. So no matter how limited the budget of a department is, the State would still outbudget the defendant by several orders of magnitude, so don’t feel too bad for them.
(I don’t disagree with you, just adding a small point)
Re: What does “shitty job” mean in the low-skill, low-pay world?
#40I had a "shitty job" as a high schooler. I was a janitor at a public elementary school where I'd have to clean the unspeakable things that kids do in the bathrooms and classrooms.
While it was a literal "shitty" job, anyone could do it for the $10/hr. I saw that it was a dead-end though. I would be looking at my twenty-something year old boss and wanting much more for myself than the fun job he had. I saw that I could make a positive out of a negative.
I would work my ass off to give myself an extra hour each day after I locked up the school to then learn how to code online and did all of my lagging coursework on the computer we had in the janitor office/closet.
Looking back now after being part of a successful startup and working for big tech for the last 6 years, I believe this "shitty" job is one of the big reasons I made it. I think we underestimate the privilege that certain jobs can give us. I think it's especially important that you have enough time to work on your personal development in someway at any job. Sometimes you have to make that time for yourself somehow even if there are risks of being terminated.
Also it helps to have a job where nobody else is around and all people care about is the job gets done each day.