11 ms·

Newsflash: Life sucks anywhere when you're poor and uneducated. I worked as an independent Google contractor before for less than $11 an hour with very stringe

Newsflash: Life sucks anywhere when you're poor and uneducated. I worked as an independent Google contractor before for less than $11 an hour with very stringent rules, ever increasing performance requirements, no holidays, no sick pay, no nothing. If you're poor and uneducated you're disposable dirt anywhere these days, even though people would like you to think otherwise and it's obviously even worse in 3rd world countries, where people looking for relatively unskilled jobs far outnumber available positions.

Synaesthesia 10y ago
It's not something that's writ in stone though - we could hangs that, and change starts with education, articles like this.
- traveling 10y ago
  Call me overly cynical, but the future is looking even worse with ever increasing automation. There will most likely be a small elite of technocrats and wealthy while everybody else is living in shacks competing for whatever jobs are left. Most single millenial guys that aren't in tech or another high paying career are already living in shared housing indefinetely if they're in a big city. An excess of people having no purpose in society will result in such conditions unless there is a revolution and a technologically disadvantaged north korea where everybody has stuff to do suddenly doesn't look that bad anymore.
  - xapata 10y ago
    Shared housing isn't bad in principle. It was only some decades ago that most people didn't own a single-family freestanding home. I hope that when I'm old I can live with all my friends in a big shared home, rather than a nursing home.
    - fennecfoxen 10y ago
      Did you ever watch the cartoons growing up, like _Hey, Arnold_ on Nickelodeon? Remember how Arnold's family ran a boarding house, with shared common spaces and bunch of people renting rooms (for years at a time!) and a diversity of humanity to provide Humanity, different perspectives, and other such forms of Color for the show? Did you ever stop think about how weird that arrangement was? Do you know anyone who owns, operates, or lives in a boarding house? And yet it's not really all that weird by historical standards. It's only in fairly recent times that cities decided to get all Moralistic about how Home, Family and Neighborhoods Should Be Structured and started imposing zoning restrictions with super emphasis on homes, waging war against boarding houses and residential hotels and flophouses and other haunts of the poor and lower classes in the name of Progress and Class Warfare. Can't quite afford a place that meets the minimum square footage requirements independently? Well, don't worry, we can find a place for you in the crime-ridden public housing projects or on the streets. Kiss your remaining independence goodbye and welcome to the Bureaucracy, because you're never going to be able to get on the bus to a new town with $100 in your pocket and find a place to crash for a few nights until you get a new job. Who would rent you a place like that anymore? There's the YMCA... and that's about it, _period_. (Hell, a lot of the debates about AirBnB "abuse" end up rehashing these same problems.)
  - cobookman 10y ago
    Look up what the kibbutzim are like in Israel. Those types of communities could easily be ported to work in America. Shared housing isn't all that bad if done right
  - k__ 10y ago
    Not all jobs can be automated and there are a bunch of such in healthcare and social that are understaffed even now.
  - Synaesthesia 10y ago
    Only if we let it. Technology could equally be used to let everybody work less, have more spare time, instead of enriching the wealthy and leaving the rest as useless extraneous people
shkkmo 10y ago
Yet you make four times what the subject of the article makes (assuming you work 40hrs a week), receive additional pay for additional work, and are protected by US labor laws. I'm not saying your job isn't though, but I find it silly to use it to dismiss the point of the article which is that US companies should be held responsible under US laws.
- traveling 10y ago
  He made 2k a month with tips. I was not protected by any labor laws as I was a contractor and not an employee (their way to get around benefits and employee related regulations). I'm also living in a first world country where costs of living are fairly expensive and where I don't have free housing (and food I presume), so I was living hand to mouth without health insurance.
  - Daddy_cat 10y ago
    The employee worked over 75 hours a week, but routinely had his timesheets rewritten to show 40. When he complained, he had some of his works taken away. When he was seriously injured in his job, his injury was laughed off as a lie and he was sent back to work anyway. I think it's fair to say that this person has a unique set of extremely challenging circumstances different than what you described. I'm not sure what we have to gain by dismissing these henious labor violations. Even if it was just as bad for you (I doubt it), would that invalidate this person's experience, or mean we shouldn't investigate these crimes?
    - brianwawok 10y ago
      Except for the timesheet thinng, the rest is common in manual labor jobs in the US. An orange picker goes to his boss with a sore back? Fired.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
shasheene 10y ago
Wow, that's surprising. Was that position you're describing doing software development? Where were you based?
- traveling 10y ago
  An unskilled operational role. I worked for outsourcers before as well doing support type jobs. Bad pay, ever increasing performance pressure, no benefits (no sick pay or health insurance), so if you got sick you were shit out of luck and healthcare was prohibitively expensive. Private insurance was available of course but these were all angle shooting companies in the affordable range that are barely better than having no insurance at all. The gap to the 3rd world is quickly closing in a lot of places these days unfortunately. (and not in a good way) This was in western Europe.
  - 77pt77 10y ago
    >This was in western Europe. Most western Europe has socialized medicine. Was health insurance as essential as in the USA?
    - traveling 10y ago
      I don't want to dox myself, but you can probably guess which western European country doesn't. Healthcare isn't US level expensive there where you'll go bankrupt with any minor issue but still prohibitively expensive if you don't make much and break your arm for example, so it's somewhat essential. A colleague of mine got diagnosed with a serious heart condition, was away for a month or so without sick pay, got fired as a result and went bankrupt from medical bills.
      - pimlottc 10y ago
        > I don't want to dox myself, but you can probably guess which western European country doesn't. Maybe this is supposed to be an easy question, but as an American, I have no idea which western European country doesn't have socialized medicine, and Wikipedia is not helping me out. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_with_universal_health_care https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_with_univers...
GFK_of_xmaspast 10y ago
Sounds like someone needs a whole lot of collective labor action.
- nojvek 10y ago
  America is built upon the idea of cheap labor and fat profits. Everyone for themselves. Unions won't do much. Automation will only make things worse for poor and uneducated. Humans are selfish by nature driven by financial rewards.
kafkaesq 10y ago
Newsflash: Life sucks anywhere when you're poor and uneducated. And abundant evidence indicates that (most) corporations will do everything within their power to take advantage of this fact, unless very strongly regulated.
- TheSageMage 10y ago
  Not trying to start a capitalism war, but would an Earned Income Tax Credit be a more viable alternative to higher minimum wages? I've not done the leg work, but the IRS has a lot more info to help determine who's making how much that could help make the EITC even out unequal pay.
  - kafkaesq 10y ago
    I'm not really on top of the various policy debates, actually. What's important is not to be distracted by this idea that "life sucks, and you can't really do anything about it -- so just keep your head down and look after yourself." Being as this is not only exactly how the powers-that-be want you to see things; it's entirely integral to their strategy of keeping things the way they are. In fact, they even have a name for this strategy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just-world_hypothesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just-world_hypothesis
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
    - FabHK 10y ago
      Very good point - it's a bit disheartening to see many people eschew political action in favour of self improvement. Self improvement is fine and necessary and honorable and all, but ultimately living together in society is necessarily political. Note also that a lot of what is taught in undergrad/MBA economics 101 distracts from that, and (even while aspiring to be value neutral) implicitly promotes a trust in markets and corporations that is naive and misguided. James Kwak's book "Economism" is a nice antidote to that: https://www.amazon.com/Economism-Bad-Economics-Rise-Inequality/dp/1101871199/ https://www.amazon.com/Economism-Bad-Economics-Rise-Inequali...
edblarney 10y ago
What Google was doing to you is immoral, and should be illegal. Yes, 'it stinks' to have low wages because one might not have much of an education - but there's absolutely no reason on earth not to have 'basic worker protections'. I generally don't like Unions, especially those that are entrenched - but we wouldn't need them if people were not so greedy. Google does this a lot, and I find it despicable that they take the 'moral high ground' on so many issues, but then treat people as commodities. Google is massively rich, there's no reason they can't offer 'decent pay' with 'regular paid holidays' and 'sick days' and to ensure that their contractors are doing the same. High tech has this weird duplicity: they want to 'save the world' and 'end disease' - when they fail to realize that the world would be a pretty good place to begin with if all of the actors - people and companies - just behaved conscientiously - and that they have a role to play in this. Steve Jobs for example - with one single sentence, in one single email, could have ensured basic worker protections for every worker in his entire supply chain. And I'm not talking about 'gold plated retirement packages' and 'can't get fired no matter what' - I just mean '2 weeks vacay, basic healthcare, 40 hours a week max' and 'actual bathroom breaks'. We talk about intellectual things like UBI, heyzeus, we could make big inroads with just some basic things.
- alashley 10y ago
  > High tech has this weird duplicity: they want to 'save the world' and 'end disease' - when they fail to realize that the world would be a pretty good place to begin with if all of the actors - people and companies - just behaved conscientiously - and that they have a role to play in this. Agreed. They fail to realize this and saving the world and ending disease is far more glamorous than actually treating your employees well. Its much the same with organizations that focus on helping people in other countries while ignoring the fact that there are starving, homeless people in their own backyard.
- LoonyBalloony 10y ago
  Didn't google recently remove the "do no harm" line from their mission statement or something?
merpnderp 10y ago
"these days"? When was there a time that the unskilled and uneducated masses were treated better?
- FabHK 10y ago
  Well, there was a bit of a golden age for lower/middle classes in the West in the decades following WW II (though tainted by racism). Pikkety's seminal "Capital in the Twenty-First Century" is the famous, but somewhat dry exposition on that. Branko Milanovic's "Global Inequality: A New Approach for the Age of Globalization" is a relatively slender volume that gives a great overview (on this question in chapter 2). TL;DR: In "the West", 1950-1980

Synaesthesia 10y ago

It's not something that's writ in stone though - we could hangs that, and change starts with education, articles like this.

traveling 10y ago
Call me overly cynical, but the future is looking even worse with ever increasing automation. There will most likely be a small elite of technocrats and wealthy while everybody else is living in shacks competing for whatever jobs are left. Most single millenial guys that aren't in tech or another high paying career are already living in shared housing indefinetely if they're in a big city. An excess of people having no purpose in society will result in such conditions unless there is a revolution and a technologically disadvantaged north korea where everybody has stuff to do suddenly doesn't look that bad anymore.
- xapata 10y ago
  Shared housing isn't bad in principle. It was only some decades ago that most people didn't own a single-family freestanding home. I hope that when I'm old I can live with all my friends in a big shared home, rather than a nursing home.
  - fennecfoxen 10y ago
    Did you ever watch the cartoons growing up, like _Hey, Arnold_ on Nickelodeon? Remember how Arnold's family ran a boarding house, with shared common spaces and bunch of people renting rooms (for years at a time!) and a diversity of humanity to provide Humanity, different perspectives, and other such forms of Color for the show? Did you ever stop think about how weird that arrangement was? Do you know anyone who owns, operates, or lives in a boarding house? And yet it's not really all that weird by historical standards. It's only in fairly recent times that cities decided to get all Moralistic about how Home, Family and Neighborhoods Should Be Structured and started imposing zoning restrictions with super emphasis on homes, waging war against boarding houses and residential hotels and flophouses and other haunts of the poor and lower classes in the name of Progress and Class Warfare. Can't quite afford a place that meets the minimum square footage requirements independently? Well, don't worry, we can find a place for you in the crime-ridden public housing projects or on the streets. Kiss your remaining independence goodbye and welcome to the Bureaucracy, because you're never going to be able to get on the bus to a new town with $100 in your pocket and find a place to crash for a few nights until you get a new job. Who would rent you a place like that anymore? There's the YMCA... and that's about it, _period_. (Hell, a lot of the debates about AirBnB "abuse" end up rehashing these same problems.)
- cobookman 10y ago
  Look up what the kibbutzim are like in Israel. Those types of communities could easily be ported to work in America. Shared housing isn't all that bad if done right
- k__ 10y ago
  Not all jobs can be automated and there are a bunch of such in healthcare and social that are understaffed even now.
- Synaesthesia 10y ago
  Only if we let it. Technology could equally be used to let everybody work less, have more spare time, instead of enriching the wealthy and leaving the rest as useless extraneous people

shkkmo 10y ago

Yet you make four times what the subject of the article makes (assuming you work 40hrs a week), receive additional pay for additional work, and are protected by US labor laws. I'm not saying your job isn't though, but I find it silly to use it to dismiss the point of the article which is that US companies should be held responsible under US laws.

traveling 10y ago
He made 2k a month with tips. I was not protected by any labor laws as I was a contractor and not an employee (their way to get around benefits and employee related regulations). I'm also living in a first world country where costs of living are fairly expensive and where I don't have free housing (and food I presume), so I was living hand to mouth without health insurance.
- Daddy_cat 10y ago
  The employee worked over 75 hours a week, but routinely had his timesheets rewritten to show 40. When he complained, he had some of his works taken away. When he was seriously injured in his job, his injury was laughed off as a lie and he was sent back to work anyway. I think it's fair to say that this person has a unique set of extremely challenging circumstances different than what you described. I'm not sure what we have to gain by dismissing these henious labor violations. Even if it was just as bad for you (I doubt it), would that invalidate this person's experience, or mean we shouldn't investigate these crimes?
  - brianwawok 10y ago
    Except for the timesheet thinng, the rest is common in manual labor jobs in the US. An orange picker goes to his boss with a sore back? Fired.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]

shasheene 10y ago

Wow, that's surprising. Was that position you're describing doing software development? Where were you based?

traveling 10y ago
An unskilled operational role. I worked for outsourcers before as well doing support type jobs. Bad pay, ever increasing performance pressure, no benefits (no sick pay or health insurance), so if you got sick you were shit out of luck and healthcare was prohibitively expensive. Private insurance was available of course but these were all angle shooting companies in the affordable range that are barely better than having no insurance at all. The gap to the 3rd world is quickly closing in a lot of places these days unfortunately. (and not in a good way) This was in western Europe.
- 77pt77 10y ago
  >This was in western Europe. Most western Europe has socialized medicine. Was health insurance as essential as in the USA?
  - traveling 10y ago
    I don't want to dox myself, but you can probably guess which western European country doesn't. Healthcare isn't US level expensive there where you'll go bankrupt with any minor issue but still prohibitively expensive if you don't make much and break your arm for example, so it's somewhat essential. A colleague of mine got diagnosed with a serious heart condition, was away for a month or so without sick pay, got fired as a result and went bankrupt from medical bills.
    - pimlottc 10y ago
      > I don't want to dox myself, but you can probably guess which western European country doesn't. Maybe this is supposed to be an easy question, but as an American, I have no idea which western European country doesn't have socialized medicine, and Wikipedia is not helping me out. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_with_universal_health_care https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_with_univers...

GFK_of_xmaspast 10y ago

Sounds like someone needs a whole lot of collective labor action.

nojvek 10y ago
America is built upon the idea of cheap labor and fat profits. Everyone for themselves. Unions won't do much. Automation will only make things worse for poor and uneducated. Humans are selfish by nature driven by financial rewards.

kafkaesq 10y ago

Newsflash: Life sucks anywhere when you're poor and uneducated. And abundant evidence indicates that (most) corporations will do everything within their power to take advantage of this fact, unless very strongly regulated.

TheSageMage 10y ago
Not trying to start a capitalism war, but would an Earned Income Tax Credit be a more viable alternative to higher minimum wages? I've not done the leg work, but the IRS has a lot more info to help determine who's making how much that could help make the EITC even out unequal pay.
- kafkaesq 10y ago
  I'm not really on top of the various policy debates, actually. What's important is not to be distracted by this idea that "life sucks, and you can't really do anything about it -- so just keep your head down and look after yourself." Being as this is not only exactly how the powers-that-be want you to see things; it's entirely integral to their strategy of keeping things the way they are. In fact, they even have a name for this strategy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just-world_hypothesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just-world_hypothesis
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - FabHK 10y ago
    Very good point - it's a bit disheartening to see many people eschew political action in favour of self improvement. Self improvement is fine and necessary and honorable and all, but ultimately living together in society is necessarily political. Note also that a lot of what is taught in undergrad/MBA economics 101 distracts from that, and (even while aspiring to be value neutral) implicitly promotes a trust in markets and corporations that is naive and misguided. James Kwak's book "Economism" is a nice antidote to that: https://www.amazon.com/Economism-Bad-Economics-Rise-Inequality/dp/1101871199/ https://www.amazon.com/Economism-Bad-Economics-Rise-Inequali...

edblarney 10y ago

What Google was doing to you is immoral, and should be illegal. Yes, 'it stinks' to have low wages because one might not have much of an education - but there's absolutely no reason on earth not to have 'basic worker protections'. I generally don't like Unions, especially those that are entrenched - but we wouldn't need them if people were not so greedy. Google does this a lot, and I find it despicable that they take the 'moral high ground' on so many issues, but then treat people as commodities. Google is massively rich, there's no reason they can't offer 'decent pay' with 'regular paid holidays' and 'sick days' and to ensure that their contractors are doing the same. High tech has this weird duplicity: they want to 'save the world' and 'end disease' - when they fail to realize that the world would be a pretty good place to begin with if all of the actors - people and companies - just behaved conscientiously - and that they have a role to play in this. Steve Jobs for example - with one single sentence, in one single email, could have ensured basic worker protections for every worker in his entire supply chain. And I'm not talking about 'gold plated retirement packages' and 'can't get fired no matter what' - I just mean '2 weeks vacay, basic healthcare, 40 hours a week max' and 'actual bathroom breaks'. We talk about intellectual things like UBI, heyzeus, we could make big inroads with just some basic things.

alashley 10y ago
> High tech has this weird duplicity: they want to 'save the world' and 'end disease' - when they fail to realize that the world would be a pretty good place to begin with if all of the actors - people and companies - just behaved conscientiously - and that they have a role to play in this. Agreed. They fail to realize this and saving the world and ending disease is far more glamorous than actually treating your employees well. Its much the same with organizations that focus on helping people in other countries while ignoring the fact that there are starving, homeless people in their own backyard.
LoonyBalloony 10y ago
Didn't google recently remove the "do no harm" line from their mission statement or something?

merpnderp 10y ago

"these days"? When was there a time that the unskilled and uneducated masses were treated better?

FabHK 10y ago
Well, there was a bit of a golden age for lower/middle classes in the West in the decades following WW II (though tainted by racism). Pikkety's seminal "Capital in the Twenty-First Century" is the famous, but somewhat dry exposition on that. Branko Milanovic's "Global Inequality: A New Approach for the Age of Globalization" is a relatively slender volume that gives a great overview (on this question in chapter 2). TL;DR: In "the West", 1950-1980