I would have to look for more detailed surveys to get a detailed breakdown beyond those percentages, but anecdotally there were absolutely some young people in Germany who only worked part-time (and I don’t mean at 3 different jobs), because that was OK financially. No idea if it was good or bad for their careers, but that is a different question. They had time for hobbies, studies, learning new skills, though.
Back in the early '90s I went to our factory in the Netherlands, and I was struck by how the engineer we were visiting left exactly at 5, just like the workers. Engineers in our US factories never left at 5
In the US as I understand it lots of men don’t take the paternity leave they are entitled to since they are worried they’d be considered not as serious about their jobs as those who don’t. They get more also. My son-in-law took all of his, which amazed me. It won’t matter since he’s switched jobs anyway.
These days, not making use of all your benefits is leaving money on the table. If the company has absolutely no loyalty to you, there is no advantage to putting on a show of performative gung-ho willingness.
Maybe it pays off for a few lucky stiffs who might get a promotion or raise - and even then it probably comes with a ton of additional work - but not taking available leave is generally a mug’s game.
That’s the thing. If you create an environment where the expectation is for people to change jobs every couple of years, there’s not a lot of incentive to kill yourself climbing the ladder. A lot of companies don’t even have ladders anymore.
Someone that gung ho isn’t going to stay. They are going to leverage whatever promotion they get into a better job at a better company. Or if they were REALLY gung ho, they’d start their own company.
And everyone else will put in their time for a few years until they move on to something else.
It’s not like 30 years ago when people would join a company like Deloitte our of college and eat shit for 12 years hoping to “make partner”.
I guess that’s what I don’t really understand. Every now and then I see a positive LinkedIn post by someone whose been with the same company for 40 years. They moved up the ladder, maybe worked across various different divisions. I would think a company would want that. At least SOME people having broad and deep experience in HOW THEIR FUCKING COMPANY WORKS!! Of course it’s going to change over time, but not so much that you would throw away your entire staff every couple of years.
But companies don’t seem to work that way. A lot of companies seem to act as if they are personally offended that their employees even work for them! Like we have to pay this fucking guy or maybe promote him because he really knows how his department works?! Fuck that dude! Get me some kid right out of business school who doesn’t know shit besides making PowerPoint decks. Or even better, see if our CEO has an idiot nephew!
Yeah, I read a Reddit thread bemoaning the lack of “affordable housing” once, and it seemed to be a bunch of twenty-somethings bitching that they couldn’t afford to live within walking distance of a vibrant food and nightlife scene, without a roommate, near public transit, and within a close distance (~15 minute commute) to their jobs.
I tried to point out that all those things are exactly what makes apartments/houses desirable and expensive, and that if they were willing to bend or give up some of their requirements, they’d be able to find plenty of affordable housing, especially with respect to the roommate, walkability or commute time. But they chose to view this as a failure of the system, rather than them wanting their cake and to eat it too, and that somehow all this stuff was basic rights, not “nice-to-have” type amenities.
I have no doubt that this crowd is equally entitled when it comes to work. I would guess they have it in their heads that they’re somehow owed a job that’s meaningful, offers an advantageous work/life balance, doesn’t require them to dress a certain way, doesn’t require them to do scut work for a few years until they’re not entry level, pays upwards of 70k annually, has flexible hours, and so on. Again, those are all “nice-to-have” items, not requirements for an entry level position. They certainly shouldn’t be expectations.
I fully believe that most companies take advantage in the most negative sense, of employees with a high sense of professionalism and strong work ethics. They appeal to those in order to get their employees to work off the clock and in ways that are detrimental to their family lives, relationships and personal health. But the job’s got to get done, you know? 
And that’s what they rely on.
I think that there ought to be a balance- workers should want to get their jobs done out of a sense of professionalism, but employers should be mindful and protective of their employees, and not take advantage of that to get something for nothing.
I’m not sure it is gung ho - I think it is more fear. In usual times people worry about getting laid off, and they feel that not vanishing for paternity leave will not make them candidates for getting fired. And for good reason. I’ve been in a performance review meeting where a guy who left on time - not early - to be part of a carpool got screwed. That was exactly the moment when I decided I was leaving that company.
I expect the fear is much diminished now.
I don’t know where you live, but where I live 3 bedroom houses of around 1500 sq. feet have sold for way more than a million for years now. And we are nowhere near vibrant nightlife or walking distance from any jobs. People who make $100K are eligible for housing support around me.
Different issue. My point was that the people in question categorically refused to live further away, have a roommate, or otherwise budge on anything, and yet claimed there was no “affordable” housing. To which I thought “No shit. There wasn’t that kind of affordable housing 25 years ago either- most people had to live somewhere less than optimal, have a roommate, etc…”
Not being paid enough to actually afford what should be affordable is something else entirely.
I don’t know about that. 25 years ago is almost exactly when I got my first apartment. It wasn’t huge, but it was in an okay part of town, close to many jobs, and cost, without a roomate, around a week’s pay as a line cook making just a bit over MW.
Now, I look around, and any apartment costs over half a month’s wage at $15 an hour. And those are in kinda sketchy parts of town, and much further away from available jobs.
Gotta agree there.
I started out in a comparatively cheap city (Houston) not all that close to nightlife or walkable areas, with a roommate, etc. And afforded it just fine on my starting salary out of school (about 15-20% went to rent).
Now, that same apartment is in an area that has decidedly not improved and costs literally 3 times as much to rent while starting salary at the company I worked for then is about 10% higher with 1/3-1/2 going to rent. I don’t know how any of those kids out of school will ever afford a starter house that doesn’t also still need tens of thousands or more in repairs.
This is very much “kids these days” kind of griping.
Me too… I might have wanted to live in Uptown (although it wasn’t called that just yet), or somewhere else that was cool, but instead, I ended up living further out on Westheimer, and just driving where I wanted to be. IIRC I paid something like $500/month for a roughly 800 sq ft apartment. Which was about 1/3 of my take-home pay, and didn’t include electricity or phone service.
Looking at my old apartment complex, the lower end prices are just about where you’d expect them to be with inflation (~$850-900). Not sure about the upper end price. (I had an A2/A3 floor plan).
That’s the thing though- pay hasn’t kept pace. I made 30k out of school in 1997, and $500/month was affordable on that salary, just like paying $900/month would be affordable on 52k today. Problem is, few people are making 52k straight out of school. That’s why I’m saying it’s a different problem- housing (at least at my old apartment), had kept pace with inflation, but pay hadn’t.
I’d say that housing is a big driver of inflation, and pay hasn’t kept up with either.
And you are talking about getting a job out of college, the wages there haven’t fallen behind nearly as much as those of us without college degrees.
If I were in the position I was in 25 years ago, I’d probably be taking a serious look at van life.
The definition of “close to things” has also changed in the last 25 years. When I was a kid there was “close to downtown” and then there was “commuting from the suburbs,” but the suburbs were all inside the highway loop. Now “the suburbs” means everything outside the loop and anything inside is considered “close to downtown.” Now, I think a lot of people prioritize square footage and a big yard over lower commute times, but natural growth has driven up prices for any house reasonably close to the city center and any apartments being built within a similar distance are “luxury apartments” by default.
All that said, I think there’s a difference between people complaining that “the rent is too damn high” and people complaining that city planning is rarely focused on making affordable housing desirable. There’s nothing wrong with wanting an affordable place to live that’s near public transportation and walkable to various things. Everyone should want that. But nobody is focused on building those kinds of communities. Instead we get development that’s just “plow over this farm and build 130 units of cookie cutter apartments and then build a massive road infrastructure to get people in and out that will inevitably become overwhelmed with traffic in 10 years.”
“Move to a Rust Belt city.” Sure, solid plan. I’d have to give up on seeing any of my friends, any of my extended family, start a whole new career, and likely sacrifice some of my civil rights, but that’s the sort of thing people have to expect if they want to be able to afford a place to live, right? At least I’d have a house, which is good, because I’d be spending a lot of time there, given that I don’t have anyone to go visit, and there’s nothing to go and do.
No wonder people blow up at you. That’s spectacularly useless “advice.”
FWIW around here (Corpus Christi, TX) a house like that will go for around 350 K in the upper middle class areas of town and around 150 K in the working class areas. Back when we bought (which was admittedly in the middle of the Great Recession when the housing market had crashed) we payed 180K for a house like that, in an affluent suburban area.
What I said was a simple observation that, contra a lot of hand-waving by the owner class, wages in a capital enterprise are a zero-sum game. All of their moralizing about the importance of work has exactly one purpose, which is to convert more of our time into their profits. You’re the only one making this about Marx, which I gather is some sort of hobby-horse of yours.
I didn’t argue that, and your accusation of sloganeering is shallow and lame. You’re the one trying to reduce the conversation to “yuk yuk people like free stuff.”
Wages are not a zero-sum game, and the reference to Marx, who thought that way, was critical of his notion. Labor and capital are not the only sides in the game: reduction is simplification.
I’m saying exactly the same things as @bump. No time in history has allowed the average person to have everything. Compromises were always necessary. People who lived on the literal other side of the tracks had tiny houses on tiny lots, or lived in half of a double, or narrow brownstones. Rentals were typically in poorer areas and the awfulness of cheap apartments was legendary.
Americans have always moved to places that offered opportunities and cheap land and housing. Historically, the flow was away from the northeast, but historians tell us that a good percentage moved back when the reality didn’t live up to the extravagant propaganda used by hucksters to lure people.
This period may be extreme, although I’m not sure how to quantity that, but it’s nothing new. To the contrary, it’s exactly what should have been expected. My only quarrel is with those who ignore history and expect that this time they can have it all.
Hey, here’s a slogan you might agree applies: faster, better, cheaper - choose two.
And judging from San Francisco, those sketchy neighborhoods will be gentrified by the people moving into them for affordability, and will no longer be affordable (especially by the people who have lived there for years) in a few years.
But the nightlife will improve.
Maybe. One of my friends always answers the door with a gun in his hand, even if he knows I am coming over.
I’m probably considered to be anti-gun on this board, but I think he’s probably right to do so, given his neighborhood.
Don’t know how well gentrification takes root in some of the more “affordable” parts of town.
“nearly as much” - that’s the fundamental issue all around. Wages/salaries haven’t kept pace with inflation and prices in general, giving nearly everyone a de-facto pay cut over time, even though they may actually make more money than they used to. Put another way, unless people are making 2-3% annual increases consistently, they’re ending up with an effective pay cut. And I seriously doubt that most companies manage to consistently pay their average employees 3-5% pay raises every year without fail.
Wages are indisputably a zero-sum game. It’s hard to think of a game that’s more zero-sum, to be frank. The whole isn’t more than the sum of the parts. A dollar cut from my wages is a dollar that I can’t spend, ever. Now, if you want to argue that not all of that money goes to profit, fine. But that makes it a negative-sum game, which isn’t exactly an argument-winner either.
I hear lots of management apologists insist that it’s not a zero-sum game. We’re just all supposed to agree that shaving wages to boost profits will somehow eventually trickle down to the workers. But they, like you, will not show their work on this assertion, because it’s not offered as a fact, it’s simply a thought-terminating cliche. Trust management, your raise is the fact that you haven’t been fired.
Strawman.
This isn’t relevant to any part of the conversation and I’m starting to get the feeling that you have a dilapidated triplex in Akron that you need to unload.