Again: Just because you survived your trauma, you are not a good person when you say others can go through it too. The proper response is “I want a society where I wasn’t faced with the choice ‘work or starve’.”, not “I survived it. You can too. It’ll toughen you up!”.
‘Work or starve’ is an old saying. No, you probably wouldn’t literally starve to death in Canada. However, you couldn’t just live on unemployment because:
- You could only get it for six months.
- You have to have worked for some time to be eligible.
- If you quit your job because it ‘sucks’, you cannot get UI, nor if you are fired for cause.
Once your UI runs out, you are out of luck and will be forced to apply for some kind of real hardship help like welfare or AISH. If you are a young able-bodied person without children or a disability, your chance of getting aid is just about zero.
I come from a background where a lot of people around me were on social assistance or were not eligible. Young men who didn’t work wound up sponging off of friends and family, getting involved in criminal activity like selling drugs, working odd jobs under the table to pay back enough people to maintain grifting off them, or became homeless.
My father spent the last decade of his life living in a room over the Elks’ club, in a hall filled with tiny rooms for indigent men. No one was getting UI. He may have gotten AISH or some other minor assistance because he was incapable of working, but not enough to afford rent.
That was something my wife and I concluded as well. Prior toi the pandemic, many if not most low wage workers had the tiger by the tail, so to speak. They had jobs, and were working hard, but didn’t really have the excess resources in time or cash to explore other alternatives. They basically worked like hell just to maintain the status quo.
Enter the pandemic and the lockdowns. They suddenly have BOTH money and time, and many probably did explore other alternatives that they wouldn’t have had the time or money to explore previously. And presumably a large enough number found something else to do that was more to their liking, that it’s causing worker shortages in low wage jobs.
Which is perfectly fine; I can’t say I blame them for that. I know I’ve been lucky enough to do exactly that on my own a couple of times without a pandemic, but I had the luxury of being single and well-paid with a pretty good safety net between my parents and friends.
I also don’t have a lot of sympathy for the companies; their whining is essentially “Wah. We can’t find suckers willing to work for our piddly pay.” I guarantee that if they paid $20/hr + benefits, they’d have people lined up around the block to flip burgers. But they’d rather whine about it, than take care of the problem by raising wages and/or benefits.
Yup. I have zero sympathy for any of the assholes who have helped normalize treating retail employees like shit and are now waah-waahing that retail employees aren’t being sufficiently subservient about being treated like shit anymore.
Whatever happened to the standard etiquette principle of “You must always be polite to people whose position forbids them to be rude to you”? The present-day equivalent seems to be “People whose position forbids them to be rude to you can be treated as convenient dump sites for all your ill-mannered negativity and general assholishness.”
I think that’s just people, and it isn’t going to change.
I worked retail for years. I have many stories of rude customers, scammers, thieves, etc. I think it’s endemic in any place where people feel free to behave poorly without consequence. For instance, on The Straight Dope. Or Twitter. Or a fast food place.
I am all for people quitting any job where they feel unrewarded, so long as they don’t demand that others use their own hard-earned income to support them, including taxpayers.
Once the benefits are gone, some attitudes will change. Some will not. Some industries may have to reorganize to cope with the new reality. More automation is possible. Fast Food may become more expensive and less available, especially to low income people. We all may continue to order in rather than go out.
Whether that’s overall a good thing for the working poor is another question.
Very likely; at least for many places.
If the consequence is getting thrown out of the store, however, attitudes are likely to change in a hurry.
Do you seriously think that routine harassment on the job ought to be something people should just have to put up with in order not to starve and to watch their dependents starve?
People who are working full time shouldn’t be poor.
Some will have more money than others: that’s fine. But it is not fine to assume that full time workers should be in poverty in a country as rich as this one.
?? ISTM there are quite a bit of consequences for various kinds of officially designated poor behavior on the Dope.
Hmmm, as a hard-working self-supporting taxpayer I think it’s better for society to provide safety nets so that the working poor don’t have to choose between abuse and destitution. Tolerating antisocial behavior in workplaces on the grounds that any worker theoretically can “quit any job where they feel unrewarded” is basically telling workers that they’re not entitled to decent treatment.
Given that the poverty guidelines float with family size and have no upper limit, it’s not just fine to assume but expected that some people will choose to have more kids than they’re capable of earning enough provide for, because there’s no way to prevent it, outside of governmental control of people’s bodies that I’m not so comfortable with.
It was 2.7% of “usually” (so including some unemployed or temporarily involuntarily part-time) full-time workers who had been in the labor force for >27 weeks in 2019. We’ll have to wait a year for the 2020 numbers.
OK.
Let’s say a floor where a single person working full time has a living wage, that is, can afford housing, food, utilities, and other basics.
Then for families with children we can have an additional program that scales with the family. Because I can’t condone punishing people for having children in a country where the things can limit reproduction - reliable birth control and abortions - are becoming increasingly harder to obtain.
Ya, that’s just not true. Here is a pizza place by my house. They were advertising with banners outside and every 4th add on their TV was for their positions. They were paying $16/hour for dishwashers and $20/hr for cooks. They wouldn’t be advertising that much if people were lined up around the block. That includes paid vacation and 51% paid health insurance.
The cook position seems like it may have been filled since I don’t see it on their website.
So, taking out the hyperbole about lines around the block, it is true, then. They offered $20/hr and benefits and filled the position. Right?
“Punished” isn’t the word I’d use, but if you want to raise my taxes to buy prophylactics and cover basic needs, I’ll join you on that limb.
Speaking of kids, does anyone know what the current availability of childcare is compared to normal times? I know it’s a barrier to return to work but I haven’t seen anything quantitative. But also haven’t seen specifically looking.
Exactly. It seems they found the minimum they could pay, along with some semi-shitty benefits to get someone to do the job. 51% paid healthcare and one week vacation? 
BTW, it appears other job openings they have advertised don’t have those same “perks”. At least they don’t list them…
Are you in for hormonal birth control, diaphragms, IUD’s, Norplants, and all the other options, too? Right now even people with insurance are starting to have trouble accessing them what with employers like Hobby Lobby saying “oh, it’s against our religion so we’ll impose our religious views on our employees.” and the courts going along with that.
A bunch of daycares went out of business. A lot of former daycare employees aren’t coming back (moved on to other things, at home caring for their own families, etc.) So, like everything else, disrupted.
Actually free birth control would probably lower our taxes. Less welfare, women could get better educated and find it easier to join the workforce without having to worry so much about childcare.
Hobby Lobby isn’t against birth control for economic reasons.
I don’t see why I wouldn’t be. Well, I’m sure some pharmaceutical company could come up with a new platinum-plated option that might make me rethink this, but while I use none of the above myself, I know this isn’t a one-size-fits-all situation.
And it’s not just HL and their ilk. I know someone who was denied a hormonal BC prescription by a (male) physician because she wasn’t married. Never mind this was for PMS symptoms that later turned out to be caused by a fibroid.
This was in the last decade!
Ahem:
Summary of a study:
https://www.bu.edu/sph/news/articles/2021/lack-of-child-care-associated-with-higher-unemployment-among-women-compared-to-men/
in states that shut down childcare services, the likelihood of a woman being employed decreased by 2.6 percentage points—equating to an estimated 611,000 positions among 23.5 million working mothers with young children.
Although tying that back to the OP is a bit tricky. Most state-level closures were lifted a while back, but schools have been a mixed bag.
Another study summary:
In our national panel survey of 2,500 working parents we found that nearly 20% of working parents had to leave work or reduce their work hours solely due to a lack of childcare. Only 30% of all working parents had any form of back-up childcare, and there were significant disparities between low and high-income households.
Again, I still can’t immediately take the ~7M currently missing and say what percentage is due to childcare.
The 20 Republican-led states that reduced unemployment benefits in June did not see an immediate spike in overall hiring, but early evidence suggests something did change: The teen hiring boom slowed in those states, and workers 25 and older returned to work more quickly.
A new analysis by payroll processor Gusto, provided to The Washington Post, found that small restaurants and hospitality businesses in states such as Missouri, which ended the extra unemployment benefits early, saw a jump in hiring of workers over age 25. The uptick in hiring of older workers was roughly offset by the slower hiring of teens in these states. In contrast, restaurants and hospitality businesses in states such as Kansas, where the full benefits remain, have been hiring a lot more teenagers who are less experienced and less likely to qualify for unemployment aid.
The findings suggest hiring is likely to remain difficult for some time, especially in the lower-paying hospitality sector.
Right it took them over two months to fill a job making pizza in a college town paying $20/month plus benefits. I just went there last night and their printed help wanted sign still asked for a cook so its possible they need a web developer too.
Without the hyperbole they did everything you asked and still can’t find all the employees they need and the little few positions they can possibly hire for take months.
You should actually read the link. It very clearly goes to a dishwasher position with 1 week of vacation and paid benefits.
I actually read the other jobs liisted (that’s why I said “other job openings”), like the full-time host/hostess position. https://woodysgolden.betterteam.com/host-2
Here are the perks:
Perks:
- Good pay with room to grow.
- Free shift meal.
- Discounts on food and drink.
- Free parking!
- Fun work environment!
- Room to grow.