Okay, then in that case, when I was doing that survey- there was exactly zero people who took the food aid that- could work , but just didnt want to. Except me, I guess, since the Priest at the church with the day old bread insisted I take some or it would go bad. But I was working.
Capable of working and having a job are not the same thing. Quite a few of our homeless people wanted to work, and were getting job training etc, but were not working.
No one was just mooching off the system. Even the tiny % of the homeless that preferred that lifestyle got day work whenever they could.
Now we have stay at home parents, retired people, and etc- who can work, but dont as they can afford not to,
In CA at least a child who stays & cares with their disabled parent or grandparent, etc can indeed get some pay from the state.
Right, there is nothing wrong with being a stay at home parent, supporting the working parent. Better for the kids, and saves on childcare.
Are you getting paid real money for it? Yes? Then it’s real work.
There are also some forms of real work that society has never treated as work - raising children being the prime example but there are others.
I know a couple adults who “aren’t working” but they are running households, and that is their job - maintaining a home, keeping a budget, spending time on planning shopping to maximize what they get for their dollar, minding children and/or elders, and so on. By doing that the people who are working outside the home aren’t overburdened when they get home, or having to take time off work. To my mind that’s just as valid as “real world” defined by the corporate world.
Many years ago, I worked with a woman whose daughter was divorced with 3 young kids (very young military couple; you can guess the rest) and at the time, the daughter was on welfare and attending college, in a 2-year certificate program. My co-worker lived with them and helped her with the kids. One day, she said her daughter was a burden on society, and I nearly burst into tears and said, “No, she isn’t! She’s dependent on society, but that’s not the same thing.” I then revised what I said, and told her, “Actually, she’s BENEFITING society by doing this. When they created these programs, she’s exactly the kind of person they had in mind - and she is working. She’s working to get her education, she’s working to raise her kids, and she just needs some help in the meantime.”
For me, if someone had told me at age 47 years 11 months that I would be retired before my next birthday, I’d have said they were nuts, but at 47y11m2w, I realized my job was literally killing me and that the profession I worked in was no longer the one I had trained for. Quitting that job without notice was, for me, more traumatic than my cancer diagnosis a few years later (and other people have told me that they thought so too). In the meantime, I worked briefly at Home Depot and tried to get on at the 2020 Census (see footnote) but that didn’t work out either. I started my book resale business, and even though that cratered in May when I was kicked off Amazon, I still maintain it.
Footnote: I had to watch a bunch of videos about various scenarios a census worker might encounter. The one I got stuck on was a video where a man answers the door with a baseball bat in his hand, and yells, “You so-and-sos, get off my property!” and at that point, I could not proceed further, even to give the proper multiple-choice answer. I took that as a sign that I was not supposed to do it.
Yeah, I worked the 2010 Census and while that particular scenario did not happen to me there were some tense moments. You need to be able to handle yourself in tense situations even if overall I actually did like the job.
Well, yeah, but there’s no strong correlation between time and effort invested vs revenue. It is work, but I hesitate to labour that point, because it doesn’t feel anything like the work I did when I was employed.
My point is that you are STILL just as employed at what you did before.
If it feels less like a grind and you get a better return for your effort that’s great, but you should NOT denigrate it as not being employed. You are. You just aren’t employed in a traditional 9-5 job working for someone else, which sort of jobs are becoming less common. Which probably terrifies those who depend on other people being that sort of drudge for their own livelihoods but tough. You do you and be happy.
It does depend on the company, but put simply, payroll is often the single largest cost for a company, especially white collar professional type companies. Something like 20-30% of gross revenue is considered safe from what I understand. That’s for a regular everyday company. Companies who provide services and/or non-tangible products like software are often much higher than that- Google spends 75% on salaries and benefits, for example.
So the ones that aren’t making as much money as they like tend to see things like COLA raises and large merit raises as something that directly impacts the bottom line, and don’t see the benefits, because happier workers, etc… doesn’t show up on the financial statements very directly.
And in the case of tech workers, I half feel like we’ve screwed ourselves, in that it’s become common practice for people to work somewhere for 2-5 years and bounce to somewhere for more pay. This leads the full-timers at companies to just accept a certain (high relative to other industries) level of turnover among their technical professionals. So they don’t really lean in to job perks that foster retention and long tenures- if everyone’s going to leave in the short term anyway, having that foosball table is going to be more effective, or at least less costly than a 3% COLA raise.
Otherwise, I suspect it just comes down to the bean counters and executives seeing 30% of gross revenue becoming 33% and clutching their chests and deciding that it’s more important that the 3% stay in revenue (and by extension into profits) than into payroll. Cheapskates in other words.
One, the COVID stimulus checks allowed a lot of people some freedom to actually quit their hated jobs and find better ones without the risk of not having income for a period. I suspect this hits hardest at the lower pay/skill level jobs- i.e. people who don’t want to flip burgers or clean hotel rooms.
Two, I think there’s a profound difference in the way that degreed/salaried professionals look at having a career versus the way that hourly workers look at having a job. We’re looking at it as a sort of giant competition where the end result is getting more pay/resposibility/job title for playing this career game, and we recognize that being fired, or otherwise doing “unprofessional” stuff is a detriment to succeeding at that game. Hourly types aren’t really in that same game- the worst that happens to them is they get fired, and AFAIK being fired doesn’t really impact their career the same way it might a professional person.
Three - some people are just… dramatic. Most of the people I’ve known who demanded accommodations and were loud about letting everyone know, weren’t the ones who truly needed them. Those people would quietly ask HR, get their needed accommodations, and go about their jobs. It wasn’t something they’d share with everyone who could hear them, although it wasn’t something many of them were embarrassed about either. But the other crowd were demanding various accommodations because it seemed to me like they wanted to be the center of attention. They’d claim a constellation of weird ailments and unimpeachable, but minor accommodations (ergonomic desks, chairs, etc…) and then make a lot of noise about their issues while the guys were assembling their new stuff in front of everyone. Or they’d perpetually be taking afternoons/days for mental health/stomach aches/migraines, and from where I sat, it seemed like they’d do this on the days when they’d be most missed in meetings, etc… so that their absence would be noted, along with the reasons. They always have felt to me like they were desperately craving attention and/or some measure of control over their environment, and by demanding public accommodations and time off, etc… they could accomplish both.
Some of this is due to the lack of loyalty on both sides I mentioned before. But a lot is due to salary policies. New people get paid based on market conditions - you need to give an offer with some chance of being accepted. Current employees get paid based on what the execs think they can get away with. I did salary administration even back in the '90s and new people would have salaries close to or higher than those who had been working a decade. If you truly have 5% of your workforce deserving good raises then this is fine, but if you have done a good job hiring and managing valuable people are going to get screwed and they are going to move - especially if you are in a place like Silicon Valley where moving is easy, and especially where a show of interest on LinkedIn can get you lots of interest.
The cost of turnover doesn’t seem easy to determine, and usually is slighted relative to the cost of salaries. And some companies, especially in tech, see turnover as a good thing since they can hire those with training on new technology and not spend money on internal training.
It’s basically a statement that you commit yourself to the priniples of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion. Sometimes it might be a formal statement you sign, and in other places they may want a biographical statement of how you have acted on these principles in the past. Sometimes it includes a demand that you will actively work for those goals, and not just agree with them.
It’s basically a polutical oath that no one should have to sign as a condition of employment in a country with freedom of conscience. I don’t know how widespread the practice is. I think it’s common in academia these days, but not as common outside of it.
I was annoyed by all the moving jobs I had to do during my husband’s grad school, but one of the upshots is that my salary rose pretty damned fast, as each place offered me more than the last. When I was offered a promotion at my current job where I’d been working for eight years, HR tried to low-ball me. My husband talked me into pushing back, so I did, and I really had them over a barrel because they could not afford to lose anyone else with tenure. So I asked for more than I thought they’d accept (the equivalent of a 30% raise.) To my surprise, they did accept my counter-offer. Now I’m making what I consider good money. It’s rare that an opportunity like that comes along, though, without actually picking up and leaving your job. And for people who love their jobs, that kind of sucks.
I don’t really know that many people who just up and decided not to work.
One of my college friends is semi-retired at 52 from a 30 year career in investment banking. He also manages a bunch of rental properties in Brooklyn. I think he’s doing some teaching on the side at one of the business schools.
The husband of one of my HS classmates retired from the police force (I think he’s in his mid-50s). I think she also retired from her nursing job and they seem to be touring around the country in an RV (no kids AFAIK).
I have a cousin in his 50s who I don’t really know what he does for a living, if anything. I think his wealthy dad just sort of subsidized his lifestyle of being a Brooklyn hipster and aspiring writer / film director or whatever it was he pretended to do.
Maybe some college-aged kids of some of my friends are still working out starting their career.
But in general, no, I don’t really know of a lot of able-bodied adults who just up and quit the workforce.
Except that it kind of sucks.
I don’t mind it for short bursts and I’ve been fortunate that I can integrate pickup and dropoffs with my work from home schedule. And generally speaking, I like being able to work from home.
But what I don’t really like is endless days of not working, not interacting with other adults (other than some perfunctory greetings to other parents to and from school), being a slave to my children’s schedule.
All of this. Plus I’m not really convinced it’s “better for the kids.” It’s actually really economically inefficient, too. I understand some people love this lifestyle, and I don’t dispute that it’s good for some people and their families, but for some of us, it’s just unpaid labor.
I have a cousin who works and has a daughter and every time I see her she talks about what a tragedy it is when women have to work instead of stay at home. She really thinks we all secretly feel that way. I don’t feel that way at all. I love my kid like crazy but I’m grateful for an engaging, intellectually stimulating job to balance my family life. And to be honest I need the socialization, too.
I expected to get cabin fever after staying home with my first child for a while. I originally thought I’d do it for a year, but at the end of that year, I was still enjoying myself, and Mr. Legend wasn’t feeling overly stressed by being the only wage-earner, so I just kept it going. What I loved about it was that I didn’t have to answer to anyone but myself. I did interact with other adults, especially once the kids were in school.
It made a big difference that the job I left was a low-paying clerical position with very little room for advancement. Had I taken a break from a fulfilling career, I’d have gone back to it.
I feel that children benefit the most from being in a safe, enriched environment supervised by people who care about them. Those people don’t have to be only their parents. I also think that having happy parents with occupations that they enjoy benefits children. While I was the kids’ principal caretaker, I also had my own pursuits and I didn’t spend all my time catering to them. Different families thrive in different conditions.
Maybe, maybe not. Practically speaking, that is obviously impossible in many jobs as it stands. You cannot have a functioning hospital around here if everyone worked half the time they do now; there aren’t enough doctors and nurses as it is. I am a strong proponent of Parkinson’s Law in terms of working hours - if you do NOT limit them, you’re just wasting time - but I can effortlessly think of a dozen industries or more where the labor simply does not exist to fulfill existing demand if everyone worked half the time.
Work in the sense I mean is human effort to make a process happen, and in work terms a “process” is the transformation of inputs into outputs of greater utility. By definition, you have to be doing it “For someone else” because utility is defined by the demand curves of a person or people.
I do not think most people work too much. However, I think that there is excellent reason to believe that we are severely underusing and misallocating people’s talents; I do not believe, at all, that our economic system is anywhere near effective at meritocracy and at maximizing people’s skills. 35-40 hours a week may in fact be the right amount, but I don’t think even half of people are doing the kind of work that best suits them.
I should clarify. I would set 15-20 hours as a minimum, for people who can’t or don’t work at a standard full time job. I wasn’t saying I think everybody should work only 15-20 hours a week. But when I look at the people in my life who are unemployed, I think they would be happier if they were doing some kind of work at least 15-20 hours a week. When I was employed part time, that was the minimum I needed to maintain my sanity.
Not everybody can work full-time, but most people can work some of the time, for my broad definition of work. I think there is a deep-seated human psychological need to contribute to something bigger than yourself. Unfortunately, disability law makes it difficult for people to work part-time without losing benefits.
I definitely agree with that. And as long as that mismatch persists you are going to have a lot of people who do not find work fulfilling.
That’s not a great example. One of the reasons people choose not to go into medicine is the crazy hours. If the norm in the industry was fewer hours, we’d need more people, but perhaps that would happen. It’s true that the training is expensive per person, though.
(The reason I’m not in medicine is the crazy hours, by the way. I probably should have been a doctor, but didn’t want the hours.)