A dude comes in my store every day to get gas and beer. On the weekends he pulls up in his giant RV. If I don’t see him for a week (pretty regular thing), when he does come back he’s been on vacation in that RV. His happy, healthy kids come in and get their drinks.
Recently he asked me if I knew anyone who could drive a medical taxi. He has a company which takes people to doctors visits. Insurance pays for it.
“I can’t find anyone to work. No one wants to work anymore. I have 10 vehicles parked right now.”
“What’s the pay? Do you do drug tests?”
MINIMUM FUCKING WAGE. DRUG TESTS.
I just told him, “dude, McDonald’s is paying $14.50 right now, starting wage. Paying people the bare damn minimum, you’ll either get them fresh out of prison or jacked up on meth. Like, holy shit man. Minimum wage? For a job that requires drug testing? You aren’t suffering. I see you taking your RV on vacation constantly. Fucking pay your employees bro. Those parked cars could be bringing in free money but rather than look at the problem, you think people don’t want to work. Pay 50 cents more than McDonalds and I’ll come work tomorrow.”
Nope. Stubborn, greedy bastard would rather have 10 cars parked.
Fuck that whole class of people.
If he owns vehicles, then he is entitled to exploit people to drive them.
The system has conditioned him to find a way to rationalize that he is victim.
He’s entitled to do whatever he wants with his vehicles. That doesn’t mean it’s a good business decision, he’s not entitled to succeed.
Well, among good business decisions is exploiting workers. In fact, historically, it is the very best kind.
Considering the person in OPs story can’t even find employees willing to work under the offered conditions, id argue it’s difficult to exploit a staff of zero.
as one CEO put it so nicely, “we need to increase unemployment, so the people learn their place”
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The observation that workers are exploited is one that is remarkably plain and simple for anyone to make.
Exploiting workers is entirely the purpose of private business.
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You are applying labels you obviously understand extremely poorly.
The observation that workers are exploited is one that is completely straightforward, and is broadly understood in any pro-worker space.
“What’s the pay? Do you do drug tests?”
MINIMUM FUCKING WAGE. DRUG TESTS.
In a lot of cases if you’re driving a vehicle for commercial purposes, DOT requires a pre-employment drug test. Taxi drivers are one of those, and I imagine that’s the regulation he’s under.
I mean, yeah he’s not paying nearly enough to attract people, but the drug tests aren’t entirely up to him.
Yeah, it’s the combination that OP was taking issue with. You can’t pay like shit for jobs that require drug testing.
This right here.
Shit fucking pay can’t possibly be combined with a drug test. Who the hell (who isn’t a felon or a junkie) would be willing to work for so little?
We’re in the middle of nowhere too. The driver would regularly have to leave the state or drive across the state.
I don’t understand the mindset of these people. He’s losing money for every patient that doesn’t get a ride through his company and he’d seriously rather let the vehicles sit. It makes no sense to me. If he paid good he’d be doing even better. Not as well as he imagines he could be doing robbing people, but still he’d be doing better.
Some joker out there will do it for shit wages and that convinces him there must be more people out there that are ok with being paid so little. He imagines how much money he could have if he’d juuuuust find 10 more suckers to rip off.
Every time I see him coming since that conversation something locks up in me.
We’re in the middle of nowhere too. The driver would regularly have to leave the state or drive across the state.
How big of an area does this guy serve? Or are you close enough to a state line that this sounds farther than it is?
The area he serves isn’t huge as far as population goes, but when people here have to see a specialist, there are two options. Depending on the need it’s 80 miles away or 175.
I am a driver in a large metropolis for a medical diagnostics unit. I do not get drug tested, nor have I ever been in finding this employment. That “DOT requirement” is false.
I don’t know about the class of driver you fall under, but bus drivers, taxi drivers, truck drivers, airline pilots and railroad employees are all required by DOT to take a drug test before employment. There are a few other cases where they are also required to have a drug test, such as after an accident.
This case sounds like a taxi, so I’d guess it falls under the rules for taxi drivers.
You’re referring to c class drivers.
I am a class d driver and had no such tests. Ever.
You can look this stuff up before you comment if you’d like.
There’s a reason I said “in a lot of cases”. I never said “in all cases” or similar.
Taxi drivers (and this case is a medical taxi) are one of the cases where it is required. Hence why I brought it up, and then you argued I was wrong because as a driver for a different sort of service it wasn’t required of you. And then I named several examples where it was, including one directly relevant to this discussion, and now you’re doubling down despite what kind of thing you drove having nothing to do with the point at any point.
He probably started his business when there was cheap labour thanks to the recession, inability to change is the defining trait of these morons.
They are the exact ones sucking musk dick and think he’s the god of capitalism crying that “no one understands the owner of a company is supposed to be rich and everyone is supposed to be homeless but grateful to work for them bloblooobloo .”. Wondering why no one has any empathy for them.
I can understand the pay point, but not the drug one. Why would anyone hire a testable drugs user to drive? Which employers are fine with hiring drug users in general?
Ironically meth heads can pass drug tests if they haven’t partaken recently but marijuana lingers in your fat cells for a month or more. Don’t you wish you could weed (pun intended) out people who smoked a joint last weekend while hiring more drunks and crack monkeys?
maybe OP is alluding to marijuana when they mention drug testing.
Bingo. It’s legal here.
Drug users are everyone, alcohol, tobacco, coffee, some are legal, some are still detectable months after use, would you care that your cab driver got drunk last months ? I wouldn’t care.
Most any restaurant.
Depends on the drug tests but a lot of them are very bad at catching actual drug users or popping false positives, to being so lax on the actual sample collection that people are smuggling in clean samples rather than providing their own.
So the people following the rules are being penalized and often put under scrutiny they didn’t deserve, and those that are breaking the rules in an obvious way aren’t being penalized for it.
And there are some scheduled drugs that in no way inhibit your ability to drive or work, especially when they aren’t being abused and taken infrequently. And those are the ones most likely to get you caught despite being the least likely to cause an actual problem.
Drug tests don’t work like you think. They don’t test for the drug itself, they test for the metabolites.
A lot of the big scary drugs your D.A.R.E. officer told you about like cocaine or LSD or meth won’t even show up on a drug test a day or two later. So I can dive into the Bolivian Marching Powder on friday after work, and pass a drug test monday.
This falls apart when you get to marijuana, and marijuana causes a lot of issues because it will show up on a drug test weeks later, and these tests cannot determine if a person is high right then, they can only test if a person has used marijuana in the last month or so. This means if I get stoned with my wife on friday I could lose my job monday.
Marijuana is popular in the US. If someone can get a job working for conpany Y for $8 per hour, or a job working for company Z for $8 per hour, but company Y does drug tests, guess who isn’t going to get employees? If you want to drug test, you have to pay for workers who will pass it.
Well you can’t be eating those everything bagels.
Did you actually go on a rant like that or was that just in your head?
Oh no I definitely went on that rant.
Probably the latter
you are fantasizing
Not sure if this is a seethe or cope?
it’s just an annoying mess
I run warehouse/fulfillment ops for an ecomm business and frequently hire temps (task rabbit, instawork, etc)
People literally won’t show up for less than $20/hr even for basic shit like kitting, we have to start at $25 just to get people in the door. My boss sees the bill and asks why we don’t find some younger workers for $15 but they just don’t exist in our area. People want to work, just not for shit wages.
The younger worker thing fucking shits me. I worked as OPs manager for 11+ years and my GM was always on me about getting younger staff for the cheaper rate. Little did he know I entered everybody under 18 as 18 in our payroll… He expected the same workload from these guys so I was ensuring they got paid the same.
So… Child labor?
Teenagers are allowed to work part time jobs
So… legal child labour?
Pay all my bills and give me fun money and savings money or no work.
It’s that fucking simple.
Preach. I work for a small manufacturing and production company. The pay rate is $16/hr, they don’t offer health insurance, they have paid holidays, they offer 1 week paid vacation after 1 year and 2 weeks after 3 years. They’re having trouble hiring people. They’ve resorted to reaching out to former employees and asking current workers if they could reach out to friends or family.
Edit: The location is South Florida, so $16/hr isn’t much here. I live with my parents so it’s good enough for me.
zero vacation days for the first year??? wtf is going on in America
There is no law requiring vacation or sick days, so employers offer a few as a little treat. Wait until you hear about how much maternity leave you are guaranteed
No one wants to have children anymore.
What?! You can have up to 12 whole weeks of maternity leave! Your kid should be good by then, right?
Oh? You wanted money to live on while you recover from creating a whole other human? See you next week, then.
@Theharpyeagle @Uncle_Bagel Yeah, our ability to make ends meet shouldn’t depend on businesses being able to profit from our labour…
Five neoliberal presidents, two red scares, four centuries of structural racism, and the cult of individualism as a de facto state religion.
Individualism is so dumb. If humans were lone wolfs, we wouldn’t have microchips, steam engines, the written word, or even language.
Plenty of animals are stronger, quicker, have better sight, better memory, etc. We’re definitely the most dominant large animal, but only because of cooperation. You might be able to survive alone in the woods, but we need others to thrive.
No doubt. All that happens to us is related to the systems that surround us, and our accidental position within them. Individuals always carry some accountability for choices, but most choice with the strongest effects is social. Punishing individuals for structural problems is a collective sickness.
SlaveryCapitalismIt’s the same where I work. Small family-owned business, benefits only kick in after you’ve been full-time for a year. I’ve been there 20 months with no benefits because I was only part-time the first year.
They gave me a raise after one year but because my pay started so low, even with my raise I was still making less than what this other girl started at. We had been hired at the same time. In our first year there, I learned more and took on more responsibilities, stuff the other girls were afraid to do, did everything she did plus more, but even with my raise I made less than her starting pay. I was not happy and I let them know it. They caved and gave me the same rate she was at after her raise.
WTF? This is worse than fucking Russia. And Russia itself has very low labour standards. 5-day 8-hour per day work week with 4 weeks of paid vacation(paid as in wage is still coming, not paid as in paying for travel and stuff) per year with minimum 14 days continiously. How can you get worse than that?
Many places in America give absolutely zero paid vacation at all. Ever. It is extremely common. No paid sick days either.
The average American gets barely more than a week and a half of paid vacation per year, total. And many can’t even afford to use their unpaid leave.
An ingrained assumption persists of a particular class of people who willfully identify with providing certain labor for paltry compensation. It is simply because workers want to live well that they are not accepting low wages “even for basic shit like kitting”.
They never held any original plan to accept poverty wages in exchange for being relegated to particular kinds of work.
I’m curious, what category are you hiring people in on taskrabbit? Off the top of my head can’t think of any that match warehousing.
I was tasking for a while at 30/hr and I’d have to raise my rates to make it worth it. Every customer estimates their task at 30 minutes to an hour but it could be anywhere from 1-4 realistically making it really difficult to schedule consistent work, and that’s before you factor in all the overhead/missing benefits compensation.
For moving heavy stuff I do moving/loading/unloading and for kitting/assembly I think we use… Office organization? Since that is a sit down job typically.
For real warehouse stuff (forklift, container unload, pick/pack) I use instawork because in theory those people should have some warehouse experience.
I’m guessing people that book for 30 mins are probably just regular people? I generally book multiple people for 4+ hours, if it’s less me or one of the warehouse folks will just take care of it.
I work in food service and the amount of people that mindlessly repeat “no one wants to work anymore” makes me literally tremble with rage.
Though a lot of the times all I have to say is “no one ever wanted to work. That’s why you fucking pay us to be here.” and it’ll shut them up
Used to live not far away from a Mom & Pops pizza joint. Best pizza ever had in my life. 10 years ago, they sold the place. New owner cheapened a lot of the recipes and expanded their menu to compete with a lot of other local businesses, which up till this point had been respecting each others specialities and promoting their own customers to try other places when they asked for something not on their menu.
So they pissed a lot of people off, but the food was still pretty good, for a while at least. Definitely dips in quality, and apparently didn’t do much to keep their prices competitive so most of their good cooks and servers would work about 6 months for them then get hired up somewhere else to make more money for less bullshit.
During the pandemic, every other place boosted their wages by a couple of bucks just to keep people on staff since a LOT of people were doing curbside pick ups, so their overall business went up even if their dining areas were vacant. So every other business in town is thriving despite the difficulties of the lockdown and social distances. Except for the pizza place, who despite having a loyal customer base, didn’t have enough staff to stay open through the week and by the end of 2020 was down to three days a week.
And then these assholes put up their ‘NO ONE WANTS TO WORK ANYMORE’ sign next to their pick up window asking people to be patient with their staff because they don’t have enough bodies. Curious, and knowing the owner wasn’t there at the time, I asked the server what the deal was, and she (un)happily informed me what her wage was, and how she was slated to start working across the street next week for more money. And the kicker being she said she wish the pizza place would just pay more since they’d get more workers and people actually like the joint because it had a lot of history in town.
But nope, these bastards wouldn’t increase pay. They refused to budge from their $9 dollar mark, insisting it was good pay because it wasn’t minimum wage for no prior experience. My sister worked there in the early 2000s for $9 an hour. Everywhere else in town started at 12. The gas station was hiring 16 year olds for 12 dollars an hour to empty trash and sweep floors. The grocery store was paying 13 dollars for people to bag groceries 20 hours a week. But this otherwise successful pizza place with several generations of customers couldn’t keep their doors open because they wouldn’t go above 10 dollars for people to cook food, wait tables and sometimes do deliveries. Someone who had helped them with their finances even quitel informed me they probably could have afforded to pay 8 staff $16 per hour and still make a profit thanks to the regular business they had and they were practically losing money as it stood because they couldn’t keep their doors open consistently and people were getting fed up with going to eat out and finding a closed sign on the front door.
But hey, nobody wants to work anymore. That clearly is the problem.
Just textbook example of enshittification
It’s shit, but definitely not an example of enshittification.
Surplus value to users > surplus value to business partners > surplus value to shareholders.
It went from stage 1(to customers) and 2(to workers) to stage 3(to owner)
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Let’s assume the pizza business is a web platform, because why not.
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Let’s assume the previous business counts (because… reasons), and call that one for the customers.
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Again, let’s assume the workers are a proxy for business customers (a reach), and pretend that them not ever benefiting was the point of the story.
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I’ll give you the ineffective attempt to capture the surplus value for the business against qualified advice… but let’s assume that wasn’t their priority from the moment they bought the business.
With all that in mind, sure - textbook.
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Workers aren’t supposed to use the law of supply and demand. Only the employers can do that.
Many workers have seemed to feel just fine identifying with the beliefs and values of their oppressors.
This fucking kills me. The race to the bottom mentality to work more for less with less days off is way way too common and I will never understand it.
They seem to equate enduring exploitation with strong character I often see it as the opposite.
@franklin @unfreeradical I understand it. That’s exactly what they are doing. They want to exploit us as much as they can as our exploitation is their profits. Some of us have internalised their will, which is just another stride forward in the race to the bottom.
The master takes away the slaves’ identity, so that the only one they have remaining is the master’s, and the only cause they have left to pursue is to please the master.
Minor fix: “kids are lazy, nobody wants to work anymore.”
“Millennials are killing the job market.”
They already caused two worlds wars, a depression between them, the climate crisis, and settler-colonial genocide.
When will they stop?!
As someone job hunting right now, it’s so true. I’ll see the same posting up for weeks and weeks.
I don’t really care what work I do, as long as I can find some interest in it, so I’ve had a variety of jobs. There are definitely postings I look at that sound good, but the pay is lower than I had at easier jobs sometimes a decade or 2 ago. They immediately go off my list of things to apply to.
Even if 2 jobs are equal, who would want the one for less money? Sorry to say boss, sometimes it’s not the people that aren’t viable, it’s the business.
Perpetual job postings is a strong indicator that you should avoid that company. Unfortunately most young people have to learn that for themselves first hand. It’s terrible but, hey, an object lesson in how to identify terrible employers is at least one useful take away.
So true. If you can’t find someone to fill a job in a month, it’s probably them that’s the problem. Either a bad work environment, unfair pay or expectations, unrealistic standards, something. I see my old company on there right now. There’s only like 20 people in that office and years later they’re still looking for at least 5 people right now. Tells me not much had changed there. The job itself was perfectly fine, but they sure made it crappy to be in that building with them.
Late stage capitalism. Relentless pursuit of higher quarterly profits and earnings that fuel CEO bonuses and shareholder dividends. All at the expense of the people people who actually create the value. Also. That first line ain’t paying for college loans.
Of course it is necessary to exploit workers while some of us are still alive. If a systemic collapse leads to massive destabilization, then elites will regret any missed opportunities for having extracted greater profits.
More like End Stage Capitalism, right now. CEOs and Shareholders have seen the approaching cliff and know that we all are about to fall right off of it. Rather than change course, they have decided that they should get to a point where falling off the cliff will deal them no damage. This means exploiting workers to the hilt to the point where they will be able to escape the consequences of their actions.
I’m not sure if it second or third stage of enshittification.
What if we applied an enshittification quotient (EQ). Something like this:
The EQ represents the degree or intensity of enshittification at a particular point in the process. Efficiency Erosion (EQ1): This stage’s quotient reflects the initial decline in efficiency, measuring the deviation from an optimal state of wealth distribution and economic functionality. Inconvenience Amplification (EQ2): The second quotient gauges the increased inconveniences experienced by the workforce, highlighting the growing disparity between effort exerted and rewards received. Complexity Cascade (EQ3): The complexity quotient measures the intricate mechanisms contributing to wealth concentration, signaling the level of convolution in the economic system. Frustration Escalation (EQ4): This quotient represents the heightened frustration among workers, reflecting the emotional and psychological toll of perceived economic injustice. Longing for Simplicity (EQ5): The final quotient captures the collective yearning for a simpler and fairer economic system, indicating the depth of societal desire for a more equitable and user-friendly economic structure.
That huge CEO bonuses make my blood boil. They do not fucking deserve it.
Or you could work at a restaurant and get a guaranteed $2.13/hr :D
I don’t know if I’ve ever met wait staff that agreed they’d get paid more if they got a normal hourly wage. Say what you will about the math out financial skills of an adult in this occupation, but I know I’d prefer steady and predictable income over occasional highs and lows.
I liken it to people that enjoy casino gambling. I’m sure if you spend enough time doing it that you feel the times you get a big payout make up for the losses, but research seems to show otherwise. I’ve never had to work for tips though, so I couldn’t say for sure.
Worked for a payroll firm that had a couple dozen restaurant clients.
- Tips vary wildly between employees, not payrolls. Some rock out every check, I have no idea why some of the others keep trying to wait tables.
- You can’t be paid less than state minimum wage if your tips don’t get you there. The payroll software almost never made use of that option because no one ever falls below. We were a couple of months into the new software when we figured out that hadn’t been set, some edge case where the employee worked but didn’t get enough tips.
- Service jobs are highly seasonal here in NW FL. You better be in the top 10% to make it year-round.
It would be interesting to evaluate the preferences of workers whose employers have been moved out of the tipping system and into one of regular wages.
Thank you for this very unique perspective! Very informative!
I don’t like the heat, so I go to the Jersey shore in the off season, and I always wonder about the wait staff that can make a living during the winter. It’s generally a ghost town when I’m there. It’s gotta be tough in the off season in a place so dependant on seasonal guests.
A steady wage might either be greater than or less than an amount someone is currently receiving in tips, depending on the amount. Under poor conditions, the common tendency is defensive, of acting on an assumption that any change only would degrade conditions further.
The inclination to defend the status quo is natural even if also irrational.
Makes me think of the King if the Hill where Hank finds out the exclusive deal of paying MSRP for all his trucks over the years was really someone he respected as a fellow professional taking advantage of him.
It’s hard to admit you’ve let yourself get played, and we shouldn’t ever get upset at the employees for being fooled. They put trust in someone that gave them an opportunity is all. But the boss knows what he’s doing.
But the boss knows what he’s doing.
He sure does. That’s why he’s boss.
It’s shit, when I worked as a waiter I commonly earned less than minimum wage in my state (like $7.50/hr)
I believe it, some places you drive by and the parking lot is near empty and you know those people aren’t getting paid squat.
I think the place is required to make sure you make the equivalent of minimum wage for the hours you work, but I’ve read many stories about shady owners screwing with people’s post regardless of what the law says.
Plus you shouldn’t get paid based off if you get polite or shit customers anyway, that just seems like a rigged system. Only in America! *Insert eye roll
Then you were to paid minimum wage. You got fucked. Contact your labor board.
Report them. That’s not legal.
I get paid a $15 minimum wage plus tips (WA laws are great), and it very much is reliable as income, at least on a weekly basis. In 3 months I’ve never gotten less than $3/HR in a day, or $8/hr in a week. There’s no way that I’d be getting paid more if I had a higher wage and zero tips.
Bro, tips are good. Your lows are still solid if you gig drive effectively.
What those waiters don’t understand is that you still get tips on top of your normal wage.
It just isn’t guaranteed. Meaning you don’t have to be angry every time they don’t tip.
What’s exactly like this except that everybody is in their own little box which they can’t see out of, and never choose to go around the side to look out of. And then low-washer boss says “nobody wants to work anymore” and “we need to make the poors suffer so our profits go up.”
Here I am being a wage slave at $12.20/h
School will help. Just with a AA went up to $33/hr
Thanks to personal issues with faculty I have not finished my degree because of the bureaucracy involved.
And that guy’s only hiring a few of them, so the rest are forced into the lower and lower offers until another high one appears
laughs in Pennsylvania
