miwadake: wildmansters:hyperbemily:commiewithablog:missmaialibre:iammyfather:heavenearthan
miwadake: wildmansters: hyperbemily: commiewithablog: missmaialibre: iammyfather: heavenearthandhoratio: stfueverything: bltpastasalads: Freaking THIS Yes, that’s right, it’s obviously the worker’s fault, not the systemic and pervasive problem of crony capitalism. Duh. Let me tell you some fun stories, OP. My best friend has a degree in early childhood education AND teaching home economics (there is an actual name for this degree, I just can’t remember it right now, she would kill me). Yes, she has an ~actual degree from a university~. I know it’s hard to believe, because we so adore thinking that everyone making minimum wage are barely high school graduates (as if there’s anything wrong with that). Here’s the thing though, she can’t get a job with her home-ec degree because all of the things she could be teaching (culinary arts for example) are being cut from school’s budgets. So they’re downsizing those teachers, not hiring more. So she uses her early childhood education degree, and she works at a preschool. Bear with me. I know it’s more fun to pretend that the only low-wage jobs in our country are in retail and fast food. Because it’s easier to look down on the people busting their asses to make sure you can shop and eat. She teaches her students their letters and numbers, how to write their names, counting and sharing and art. She gives her students a solid foundation to be able to enter elementary school. She makes $8 an hour. In the city she lives in, depending on what preschool she works at she could make anywhere from $8-10 and hour. It’s not a matter of skill, it’s not a matter of ‘rising above’. There is no above in a preschool, unless it’s the director. And someone making $16,000-$20,000 a year and working 40+ hours a week doesn’t really make enough to go back to school for their master’s degree just for the hopes of making $15. Before I got into my current field I worked at a different non-profit. Oooh, that’s right. A Non-profit organization. With my degree. I actually did ‘rise up’. I rose up as high as I could withing that organization. As high as ANYONE could, actually, without being either the Executive Director or Assistant Director. I went from making 7.25 to making 8.25. That’s right. I rose as HIGH AS I COULD GO and was still only making a dollar more than minimum wage. That wasn’t because of my skill, or my drive. I rose from the most entry level position to the position directly under the assistant director in THREE YEARS. But it didn’t matter because greed is everywhere, even in non-profits, and the AD and ED were making six figures a year while the rest of us were starving. The AD and ED were also the only people in the org allowed to work full time. This wasn’t because there wasn’t enough work, this was because they didn’t have to give us any insurance if we didn’t work full time hours. Greed is everywhere. THAT’s why people don’t have living wages. Corporations are making billions of dollars a year, their employees are getting their food from food banks. Look at caregiver pay. These people are taking care of Nana and can’t afford to live. remember that next time you complain about staff “Ignoring” her. Understaffed, overworked, and minimal wages, and they have licenses and certifications. The entire state university system in my state is preparing to strike for a 5% wage raise because the average faculty salary is $45,000 - which works out to about $22/hr, taking winter and summer breaks into consideration - for 50-70 hrs/week of work. These are people with Masters and PhDs, people who worked their asses off to get to where they’re at, people who work their asses off on and off the clock to provide an education. These are tenured professors who have worked ~10 years without a raise. Don’t even get me started on K-12 educators. And no matter what, people need to work those minimum wage jobs. People who need to work in food service. Those jobs will not be going away because they are used by EVERYONE. Telling the people that serve you every day that they should work harder to stop doing that job will not only destroy those things you now consider essential, it tells those people you don’t value them enough to live while they struggle to serve your petty ass. I, too, have a college degree. I went to grad school for a year before dropping out due to cost and the realization that I didn’t want to do what I was studying. I graduated in 2013. I’ve had ONE job since then. Making $10/hr working retail. Which is a whopping 20¢ more than I made working retail in the same mall as a freshman in college. It’s not that people aren’t working for it. It’s that there’s nowhere to go. I normally don’t post opinions on here but I have a lot of feelings about this topic. I have a college degree, and a ~fancy~ full-time office job that requires a college degree. Spoilers: I barely make more than I did when I was a student and folding the tissue paper that goes in Victoria Secret thong boxes for 8 hours a day. I have a coworker who makes more money at her second job as a waitress at a truck stop than she does at her job that she went to college for. But that’s not the important part. About a year ago my company decided to downsize and do you know who lost their jobs? Not me, who was new and made no money. No, they fired my senior coworkers (not “senior” as in their age, just that they had flippin’ 15+ years of experience while I had less than 2) Let me tell you how fun it is to watch coworkers, good workers, who had been working at the company for 15+ years get fired out of nowhere just because they had the audacity to have worked hard and gotten raises over the years. Let me reiterate, the only reason that I didn’t get fired is because I was the lowest paid person in the department. So don’t talk to me about the effort to ~rise above~ because let me tell you where rising above in some companies gets you: into unemployment. That doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t work hard or anything, but it’s crazy to think that the magic of hard work is the simple solution to getting paid a reasonable wage. There are people who have a lot of downtime at work and browse the internet for $50,000 a year, and there are people who work on their feet for 60 hours a week for $20,000 a year. How hard you work is not necessarily a direct reflection of how much money you make. I wish there was a way to ‘like’ this in a way that made it clear I was doing so over the reblogs proving the OP wrong. SO. MANY. of my friends with college degrees work minimum wage jobs because that is ALL THEY CAN FIND. Not to mention the presumption of working minimum wage jobs is equal to inherent laziness is something VERY ablelist since, as a disabled person, I know how many disabled people work these jobs too. All the ‘clap back’ did was highlight her privilege. -- source link