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Advocate for the 32 hour work week with no drop in pay. Join unions, create unions, call your representatives (and I know most of them are shit).
Convince your peers to advocate for 32 hours as well. There's no reason why most jobs couldn't do that. You'd be astounded at the amount of time wasting that goes on in the defense industry work I do.
Yes. This. 32 hours
I'm a union worker. This year at our union BBQ, the premiere of our province showed up to the Union BBQ. He's a conservative, staunchly anti union, anti worker and pro corporations. I was dismayed that not only was he allowed to attend, but at the amount of my fellow Union members shaking his hand and cheering him. The dude literally wants you to be a wage slave why are you cheering him??
Join unions, create unions
What if we're in one of the sad states that has 'right to work' laws?
For those unaware, 'right to work' laws at exactly the opposite of how they sound. They outlaw (or at least restrict) union presence in their state, you know, so employers don't have to deal with unions and can therefore do what they want with their labor force.
We can have 32 hour workweeks at my job… if we choose to give up pay on Fridays. True story. 😭
More like - EVERYONE is.
Everyone who isn't well-off that is.
Everyone who isn’t well-off that is.
Which is practically everyone.
I don't know about you but I'm in the top 49%. Just a couple more loot boxes and pay-to-win character enhancements and I'm probably gonna crack top 45%!
...and increasing, as regulatory capture (especially failure to enforce anti-trust law) allows big corporations to continue hollowing out the middle class.
And, the definition of well-off is a moving target. $150k a year now is the equivalent of $80k ish a year in 2000. That was a middle-class income then, but $100k+ now is seen as well-off by a lot of people.
It's more well-off than many, but it isn't what well-off used to mean. Outside of the super rich, everyone now gets fucked in their own way.
80k a year is like double what I make, how is that low?
$150k a year now is the equivalent of $80k ish a year in 2000.
The point is the change in buying power. $80k per year now is equivalent to $45k per year in 2000.
To make what would have been $80k per year in 2000, you would need to make $150k per year now.
But in 2000, it is also very likely you could have bought a house on that salary of $80k per year. The equivalent $150k per year now may not even do that, depending on your state. In some sense, to be "well-off" (which is poorly defined, but let's say: enough to comfortably afford a home) is likely more around $200k per year now. The baseline has changed, so even though $100k may sound like a lot, it isn't what "six figures" used to mean in the context of salary. It is the equivalent baseline of about $50k per year in 2000.
DON'T FORGET BUYING LESS FOR MORE MONEY!
The economy really is doing great and these monopolistic companies are enriching themselves on this fact. They supply us with everyday necessities and are choking us out simply because they fucking can. They own everything, it's all price collusion, just like the apartment and housing prices in this country (Canada too).
Squeezing the life out of the goddamn planet at the same time.
Barret?
Really got the vibe right.
It’s whether the fight is worth it. That’s what’s been getting me. Knowing that there will be battles. Bad days and bad years. Bad people you’ll have to manage or manoeuvre around. Just waiting and being on the scene or networking looking for the lucky break to drop. For what? Really? And what are the chances that it won’t go far and that you’ll know it’s not insignificantly attributable to that lucky break just not dropping for you. Which is fine, that’s the way of the world, as well as the difficulty of labour. But why the battles then and the tolerance of shitty people in positions of power and the sycophancy networking? What for?!
Existence is exhausting
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Living with parents isn’t ideal, but a part-time barista job in a cosy market town, with not a single work email boring into my soul every hour of the day and night, feels much more conducive to my wellbeing.
Millennials have been handed an untenable position, with adversaries citing avocado toast and a poor work ethic as symptoms of a failing generation.
Twice I have been hidden homeless while working at full capacity; and my last landlord was legally allowed to raise rents from £600 a head to £900, with no maintenance or material changes to the property.
Charles Bukowski wrote his novel Post Office in 1971, which detailed his morning job as a mail carrier that allowed him the freedom to write, drink and bet on the horses for the rest of the day.
For those of us who didn’t have all the advantages listed in this article, the option of leaving a hated job and going back to live in mum and dad’s beautiful home was not there.
What saddens me about this account of millennials is that it appeared to present a choice between working hard for money and power or opting out to please yourself – and not so much about finding what was truly meaningful and making a worthwhile contribution to the community.
The original article contains 1,154 words, the summary contains 217 words. Saved 81%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
Reading about rent increases boils my blood, the ultimate example of getting money because you had money to begin with. Not talent, or production, or anything like that, just had money, get money.
Rent seeking mindset I call it — too many people and companies seeking to press others to extract their money rather than providing tangible value to society, and it’s not generally millennials doing it. It’s the disgusting underbelly of the entrepreneurial mindset the many of the past used to frame capitalism.
Rent-seeking is essentially the core goal of capitalism.
I think there's clearly some societal benefits to distributing the work of maintaining housing in this way. Is there a cartel making the prices go up more than they should in a working market or what is the reason for it?
Greed is the reason, because they can. People need housing. Same way grocery stores are getting away with charging so much, people need food. The working market theoretically should fix this in time, but so far it isn't. New houses and competing grocery stores don't appear overnight. I fully agree with you, rentals have their place and there can be many benefits, but without proper oversight and rent control this was always going to be the outcome - squeeze as much cash out of people until you literally can't anymore. I don't think there is some secret collusion going on between landlords (at least in most cases), there's really no need. Just watch rental prices, then when the area average becomes higher than you charge for your unit, you raise yours slightly above that. By doing that you've now ever so slightly increased that area's average, now other landlords will raise their prices slighy higher, causing other landlords to raise their prices slightly higher, rinse and repeat. Note that I might be completely off the mark here but this lines up with my experiences at least.
I thought we were done with the "Millennials xyz" headlines after 20 years of it.
Reporter: And how do you feel about this?
Me, A Gen Xer: Ehh... whatever
'cause this is my United States of Whatever
Call overtime be calculated above 32 hours a week?