Full time work should entitle someone to enough pay for rent, food, bills, and leisure activities. Full time work for a full life wage. You put in your 8 hours a day, 5 days a week? You should be able to afford the basic shit you need in life, no matter where you work.
pisses me off that this is considered a radical statement.
I do agree with this but from economic standpoint if you are working at a job like McDonalds as someone flipping burgers and making fries you are getting paid for the amount of skill needed for the job. But if its any other job that requires you to have an actual skill that you can make a career out of then yeah you should be getting paid enough to live a standard life.
If you work FULL TIME you should be able to afford to fucking live. No, it doesn’t matter if it’s flipping burgers, these people contribute to our fucking economy and they MATTER. They should be allowed to be alive.
Jesus fucking Christ do you people hear yourselves?
People like this are why we can’t move on to issues like reducing how many hours is full time, or working out UBI. We’re going to need to do that. Most people just don’t know what’s coming down the pipeline, without a major change to the structure of the economy, we’re looking at large scale permanent unemployment, even in the “skilled” labor force.
Also? Making food is a fucking skill. Running a fast food kitchen is a fucking skill. Operating a drive-thru is a goddamn fucking skill.
I do not know how to do these things. I have a masters degree and I have no fucking clue how to operate a deep fryer or make coffee drinks. I’d probably not be very good at it, because that kind of hands-on, fast-paced work is very hard for me.
But thankfully, there are people who are good at it, so I can do my job, and they can do theirs, and we can benefit one another by putting our skills to use in different areas. People who work in fast food are not less deserving of comfort and security in their lives just because their skills aren’t valued like they should be. That is a myth developed to deprive people of rights.
My friend works as a medical assistant and I’ve worked at McDonald’s and Starbucks. You know there’s a lot of things you gotta learn in this typa job?
Like in addition to it being physically demanding (standing up for 4-6 hours straight, carrying heavy ice/coffee, constantly getting burned by boiling water and an oven, a lot of reaching and squatting (like a lot a lot I lost 40 FUCKING pounds in a year okay this job demands a lot from the body)), there are actual skills required. Also your skin splits from using so much antibacterial soap.
Do you know what temperature different foods have to be to prevent contamination? If it’s a “cold” or “hot” plate?? Do You know how long food can be out before bacterial contamination can happen?? Do you know the difference between say 1% and heavy whipping cream? Can you teach a chemistry class using milk????? That’s p much what you gotta learn to be able to do. My friend who works as a medic was surprised, because I do more in my day than they do, and THEY told me that. They were shocked how much I actually do; I am on my feet more, talking to more people, I have a working knowledge of food germs food born illnesses and chemistry, I gotta do the same shit with sterilizing my tools the same exact way a doctor sterilizes theirs. Etc etc.
There’s no such thing as an unskilled job. There are only undervalued skills.
“There’s no such thing as an unskilled job. There are only undervalued skills.”
The most physically demanding job I have ever had was McDonald’s. I am fortunate now to have a different job and advanced degrees and while I do work hard now, I never come home with the same level of physical exhaustion that I had at the end of a McDonald’s shift. Plus I had to go home to the stress of not enough money, which is its own kind of hell. And anyone who wants to go on about how I made good decisions and got degrees and left the McDonald’s can just shut the fuck up.Yeah, I worked hard in college and grad school, but I also got lucky. Everyone who succeeds in this nightmare hellscape got lucky to some extent. Not everyone does. And I am not arrogant enough to think that my PhD means that I’ll never end up in fast food again. The universe/fate/whatever can be a fickle asshole. Plus the people I see attacking fast food workers who just want to be able to work and pay their damn bills (what a novel fucking concept) also seem to want to be able to buy their fast food for cheap and not get food poisoning. “Wahwah… Bust your ass to feed us safely but don’t expect compensation.” So stop giving people shit for wanting to be able to fucking exist.
What people mean when they say it’s an “unskilled job” is that it’s an industry that considers its workforce disposable (quickly replaceable) and can therefore coercively drop wages until they find the minimum tier of desperate people. The more companies do this, the more desperate people there are.
People cannot bargain effectively for wages when “need to be alive” is on the table.
Not to mention that LITERALLY EVERY PART OF SOCIETY benefits from everyone having a living wage. EVERY PART.
