Why Aren't People Working? (Personal anecdotes only)

In My Humble Opinion
101

Doing work to help the family is still work, and clearly was not the point being made.

The point being made is that people have to work. You can work for an employer, or for yourself. You can work for lots of money, or little money, or no money at all. You can work for a profit-seeking enterprise or a not for profit enterprise. Or you can choose not to work. But SOMEONE has to work. One way or another, everything we have comes from us working. You have food to eat because people work. You have electricity because people work. You have clothes, a house, the computer you’re using, internet, pet food, furniture, eyeglasses, running water, protection from criminals and a service that tells you how likely it is to rain tomorrow because of people working. So someone’s gotta work. If you want to make some contribution to the human condition that requires you do some form of work. So if someone feels they shouldn’t work, well, why are they so special? What, are they royalty? A priest?

I mean, I don’t get the point @Spice_Weasel is trying to make when he says it “sounds pretty transactional” to work to afford food. Of course food is transactional. Someone had to grow it. Someone had to pick it. Someone had to transport it. Someone has to work for the government agency that tried to keep it clean and unadulterated. Energy and materials were used to make the food. It’s already been through a lot of transactions before you can acquire it as a consumer. Of course it’s transactional. A truly immense amount of WORK went into making food. So what’s the issue with the last step being another transaction?

Now, whether there’s a problem with people not working these days is a different matter. I don’t know anyone who doesn’t work and if there’s a swathe of people refusing to work around here, they seem very invisible.

102

I don’t know if you’ve been following the whole conversation but we were arguing about whether work should be viewed as an intrinsic good, or transactional. I said I think my generation and younger are increasingly viewing it as transactional whereas older generations are viewing it as an intrinsic good. @Sam_Stone argued that it was an intrinsic good in language that I pointed out was pretty transactional.

My whole point is that working for an employer isn’t nearly as rewarding as it used to be for a large subset of the population. If work can no longer cover the cost of childcare, it doesn’t provide a pension or health care, what is the point? People are increasingly doing things besides traditional models of work, to make their lives work. Employers who have increasingly profited from workers labor without raising their wages should not be surprised that people don’t want to work for them.

103

You totally misread my point. I said that people who can work but can’t support themselves should work in part because it’s not fair to take welfare resources from others who can’t work. The response I got was that ‘cash welfare’ hasn’t been a thing for a long time, so I pointed out that soup kitchens and shelters are also resources, and if they are taken up by people who can work but don’t, it takes those resources away from people that have no choice.

In other words, I made the opposite point you are accusing me of. It’s precisely because shelters and soup kitchens are needed for the truly needy that it’s important not to lean on them if you are capable of working. I have no idea how you got to the opposite conclusion.

104

It’s both.

105

One of the failures of capitalism as practiced in the US is the absolute failure to value unpaid work. I stayed home with my kids for eighteen years. During that time, I did a ton of volunteer work, managed the household, and made it possible for my spouse to work at a career that required a lot of travel. I went back to work solely because he started to work as a contractor and individual health insurance was just too expensive.

When everyone with the physical ability to do so is expected to work at whatever job they can find for whatever pay an employer is willing to give them just in order to survive, does that really benefit society? I’d say that people who are free from fear of hunger and homelessness are more likely to be happy, healthy, and creative, and most people will be more likely to want to work if they aren’t forced into crappy jobs that provide no satisfaction and barely enable subsistence.

106

Gotcha. Sorry for misunderstanding. Well, I agree with that. I’m not a fan of freeloaders, but I think whether or not someone is freeloading depends on more than whether they are making a wage. I don’t see a large amount of people going to soup kitchens who don’t actually need them.

107

This thread is interesting to me.

I NEVER intend to retire. I’m going to die in situ and they’re going to have to drag my rotting corpse out of my lab.

I love my job (University Professor/scientist). It pays well, it’s interesting, it’s constantly new, I set the goals and the directions we investigate. I teach but not very much (and I like teaching). I am certain if I retired I’d be dead in a couple years.

If I need a recharge I can just travel, go visit colleagues wherever I want. Can pay out of pocket but if I’m smart about it I can get the Uni or the grants to pay for it (by visiting colleague with whom we have active scientific collaborations - spending a week in the lab or giving lectures etc). Easy enough that i’ve never had a formal sabbatical (even though I’ve been eligible to take 3 over the years). Why bother with the paper work since I don’t teach much anyway?

Is it perfect? No. Admin paperwork and bureaucracy has gotten much worse over the years. But even still, I have the best job in the world and yes, I am aware how rare that is and how lucky I am.

The saying is true. Find a job you love and you’ll never work a day in your life. I am truly blessed.

108

Clearly the amount of work we do and need to do changes. When I started working, a ‘standard’ work week was 44 hours. Now it’s 37.5 or 35, depending. The norm for working people was once 2 weeks of vacation per year. For people higher up the ladder they might get three. Now it’s common for white collar workers to get 4,5, or 6 weeks of vacation per year, plus personal days, plus sick days.

My grandparents worked until their 70’s. So did my mother. I didn’t have to, and neither does my wife, because we as a society are productive enough that we can get by with less hours worked.

We will continue to evolve this way as work evolves. Maybe we’ll all be working 3 day work weeks at some point. But we’ll still have to work, unless you think the robots are going to take over. And if we have to work, even it it’s only 3 days per wek, that doesn’t give some people license to declare they aren’t going to work and demand to be supported.

I don’t see us evolving to a place where a few people have to work hard so the rest can play games all day. Not unless we do it at gunpoint. But we might all be doing less physical work in the future, due to automation.

109

You can see how little this kind of work is valued by how little childcare workers are paid. What I can’t figure out is how the childcare system once worked as well as it did. The only thing I can figure is that women have to work outside the home now more than ever before so there is extra demand. I just know I was shocked when my kid started school how unfriendly it is to working parents. It seems designed to force one person to stay at home, but that is increasingly not viable.

There’s also elder care. Many people have kids and parents to take care of at once.

110

Which frankly will do many of us no favors. Desk jobs are already killing us.

It will be better for manufacturing employees, though. I guess everything has trade-offs.

111

We could always take another page from Scrooge and bring back the treadmill…

112

I definitely agree - if 10% of people need to work, that also basically means that everyone could work 10% as much and we’d be good.

That said, I think one thing we’re already learning to some degree and will continue to learn to a much greater degree is that the work that gets automated will in no way be limited to ‘physical’ work. Indeed, non-physical work seems likely to be automated sooner in many cases; it can be automated by software, and won’t require specialized advanced hardware like robot bodies, etc.

And as to the topic of the thread, I think part of why there’s this attitude isn’t just poor pay, but also that the time savings that technology is allowing aren’t really coming as strong as they should. We’ve seen increases in efficiency and productivity of multiple times the baseline, but work hasn’t decreased even by 50%. People to some degree seem to be starting to realize that’s kinda bullshit. I know for certain it factors into any decisions I make about employment.

113

I can tell you how it went wrong here: I was a director of a day care, and chaired it for a couple of years. Most of our workers were women whose own children had left the nest and they wanted to stay busy and loved kids and had lots of experience with them. Probably 80% of our workers were like that. They got paid close to minimum wage, but pay wasn’t the point. Some were retired, others were housewives with working husbands who had nothingt to do once the kids left. A couple were young mothers who got an income supplement in the form of free daycare for their own kid plus their salary.

It worked out great. The low cost meant low fees to the community. We only charged $450/mo, so lots of people could afford it. We could do that because we were co-located in a school, and because we didn’t have to pay the workers that much. The gov’t subsidized day care for people earning under $40,000. All was well.

Then came the activists and the union people. We were paying too little, our workers weren’t credentialed, won’t someone think of the kids. They lobbied the city to pass a law requiring that all day care workers had to have at least 2 years towards an education degree. They wanted to capture day cares under the teacher’s union umbrella.

So, we fired all the workers the kids loved, and were forced to hire young education students or new education grads that did not have a school job yet. The new workers had no experience with young children, nothing in their education prepared them for looking after 2 year olds, and it was a mess. And we had to pay them more, which drove up our day care fee from $450/mo to $700/mo. The city then had to raise the subsidy to people making up to $75,000.

Those new workers wanted to be teachers, not babysitters. THey got paid less than teachers, and resented it. The second they’d get a real teaching job they were gone. So we had constant turnover of staff, parent complaints about bad staff behavior, and a lot of sad kids who missed their old grandma workers.

So, due to ‘progress’ we got worse employees, paid them more, charged more to parents, and the government had to pick up millions per year in extra subsidies.

That was my last year with the daycare. I don’t know what happened to it since.

114

In my opinion, the opposite is true. Finding happiness and fulfillment at work is impossible for the vast majority of jobs, and the attitude that work should make you happy is a huge part of the general discontent in the workplace and some of the more annoying antics of corporate America (the only “morale boost” I ever needed was decent pay). I have never had a job I loved and ironically every job I’ve had people have told me “You love it here, don’t you?” It seemed that way because I had that Zen-like not-seeking thing going on, and for the most part my life outside of work was great.

115

I totally agree with that. Mechanization reduced the need for physical labor, automation made physical labor more productive. But this new information revolution is coming for white collar workers. IMO, that’s why there’s more of a panic over AI than there was over say, the automatic threshing machine. AI is coming for the chattering classes, and they do a lot of chattering.

I suspect the same pattern will hold there as in automation and mechanization. It’s not that whole job categories will be eliminated, it’s that they will evolve into supervisors operating machines. Instead of an accounting department of 50 people, it’ll be an accounting department of 5 leveraging a lot of AI.

116

oh nvm.

117

Just like all the Millennials are ruining the economy buying avocado toast instead of houses. Nobody’s immune.

118

LOL. Have you ever eaten avocado toast?

I have, btw. It’s tasty!

119

My coworker who is in Executive Leadership once called me into an office meeting with her IT team because they had just told her about ChatGPT and she was amazed and thought it could help save me time writing grants. I have no doubt AI can write grants, but I enjoy the process too much to let a machine do it for me (that’s what copy and paste is for, anyhow.)

Yeah. Nobody freaked out about self-checkout lanes, but you come for the white collar jobs and now it’s the apocalypse.

I’m a writer and I’ve been thoroughly unimpressed with the ability of AI to write a compelling story, so I figure I’m safe for another five years at least. But I will note that artists are going after AI companies hard. We see the writing on the wall.

It’s freaking delicious. I’m so proud of having invented it.

120

I’ve thought about this and I agree with you if we expand work to mean “doing something for someone else.” I think to a certain extent humans are hardwired to be productive and cooperative and things go wrong inside us when we don’t have that. Whether that means serving on a board or raising kids or making a wage or creating art, contributing to something larger than yourself is an intrinsic good. I don’t think we necessarily have to do that forty hours a week, but it seems like maybe 15-20 hours would be good for most people.