16 ms·

This is America.. where employers (small and large like Walmart) schedule workers for part time just so they don't have to provide health insurance. Where low w

This is America.. where employers (small and large like Walmart) schedule workers for part time just so they don't have to provide health insurance. Where low wage workers live paycheck to paycheck, get no time off, and if they get sick they would still be expected to show up for work. Economists cant seem wrap their head around the idea that being a front line worker being exposed directly to sick people during a pandemic seems to be worth more money than when there wasn't a pandemic. Incredible. It's like people--including low wage people--understand there's a pandemic going on. I wonder when economists will catch on.

anitil 5y ago
I have a question about the Walmart thing - is healthcare not pro-rated according to how much you work? Or is this casual work where you get a higher hourly loading to compensate? I'm trying to translate it into the Australian work context, but we don't tie healthcare to employment so I'm a bit confused.
- Baeocystin 5y ago
  It's an all-or-nothing cutoff wall, so that if an employer schedules someone for 29 hours/week instead of 30, (for example) they don't have to provide anything. And so of course 90%+ of the companies that can short on this, do. It's as awful as you think.
- pix64 5y ago
  If you're working at Walmart, you don't get healthcare. Not through your employer anyways.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - ianmcgowan 5y ago
    If you're full time you do, which is why Walmart and other big non-union companies strive as much as possible to have a part-time workforce. If you're part of corporate, or management, you're full time.. https://careers.walmart.com/us/jobs/WD597130-senior-software-engineer-full-stack https://careers.walmart.com/us/jobs/WD597130-senior-software... "Beyond competitive pay, you can receive incentive awards for your performance. Other great perks include 401(k) match, stock purchase plan, paid maternity and parental leave, PTO, multiple health plans, and much more."
- ianmcgowan 5y ago
  It varies by state, but typically part time employees get no employer funded healthcare at all, whereas there are required minimums for full time employees. Result: employers schedule everyone at 30 hours or less, in order to maximize shareholder value..
  - michaelmrose 5y ago
    Forcing many people that want to eat to figure out how to work two jobs but nobody wants to hire someone for 10 hours so people are more apt to work 2 25 hour jobs.
- rgbrenner 5y ago
  No. While most people (especially higher wage workers) get health insurance through their employer, it is not guaranteed that your employer will provide that benefit. Prior to Obama, low wage workers might be scheduled to work full time without health insurance. If they're poor enough, they might get Medicaid from the state; otherwise they get to ruin their credit and claim bankruptcy if they show up at the emergency room. Obama passed ACA, which required employers with full time workers to provide health insurance or pay a fine per worker. Full time is defined as 30 hours per week or more by ACA. So in low wage jobs, employers responded by scheduling people for 29 hours. So if you work multiple jobs or a job+doordash/uber/etc... you may work full time, and not have any health insurance because no one employer is going over 29 hours. ACA also expanded Medicaid, but some states decided to decline that expansion. So whether that covers a low wage worker depends on where they are, the size of their household, and their total household earnings. For many of these workers, it's not just the risk of unexpected medical bills that they can't pay... they rarely have savings, so if they miss a few days of work (say because they contracted COVID), that can spiral into a series of missed bills. And with the eviction moratorium coming to an end, that now includes losing their home.
  - hnick 5y ago
    Does anything happen if they keep you back for an hour and you "accidentally" go over the 30 hours? Or is it entirely based on the contract?
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - lolinder 5y ago
      The threshold is 30 hours on average in a given month [0]. So, presumably, if you work 31 hours one week they'd make you work 28 the next to avoid you being labeled full-time. [0] https://www.irs.gov/affordable-care-act/employers/identifying-full-time-employees https://www.irs.gov/affordable-care-act/employers/identifyin...
    - whoknew1122 5y ago
- b0tzzzzzzman 5y ago
  A prior place I worked had full time status as 32 hours a week averaged over an 8 week period.
- yourapostasy 5y ago
  > is healthcare not pro-rated according to how much you work? No. > Or is this casual work where you get a higher hourly loading to compensate? No. It is precisely as horrific as you would imagine for those low-wage workers who want full-time jobs to obtain those healthcare benefits, but keep running into this issue in job after job. The official tax-oriented definition of "full-time" [1] is a bit more nuanced than what you will colloquially hear in discussions, but in broad terms, once you are put into the HR system for more than 30 hours in a week of work, the threshold to full-time is triggered. It is a binary switch, no spectrum, no gradient. This doesn't even begin to get into how capital-inefficient and service-poor so many of the healthcare plans are once you do get access to them as a low-wage worker. Nor how so many of these workers are so completely unequipped and unprepared to comprehend the fiscal realities of engaging these plans. [1] https://www.irs.gov/affordable-care-act/employers/identifying-full-time-employees https://www.irs.gov/affordable-care-act/employers/identifyin...
- austincheney 5y ago
  A too quick guide to American healthcare. * American healthcare is too expensive. The problem is long known and nobody wants to solve it. That problem is administrative inefficiency. Solving that problem means terminating the a large segment of a massive industry (destroying a massive number of jobs). Drugs are expensive too, but drug pricing problems impacts specific persons that when averaged across the entirety of the population become only a tiny part of the industry wide problem. Since medicine is expensive everybody is reliant upon insurance. The options are private insurance (expensive), employer offered insurance, and government insurance (designed for low income people and poor choices/service). The exceptions are Obama care and military. Military has a wonderful health insurance plan called Tricare. Tricare is great for the patient because they cover just about everything but they are really hard about releasing funds to medical providers so some medical providers refuse to take Tricare. Obama care is a new private insurance option from the government that provides an affordable insurance option partially subsidized by government funding. I have known people who are not insured and refused to get insurance then just never go to the doctor. Wonderful medical insurance is a primary reason I remained employed by the military for a number of years.
  - entropea 5y ago
    Medicaid also works great. https://www.cbpp.org/research/health/medicaid-works-millions-benefit-from-medicaids-effective-efficient-coverage https://www.cbpp.org/research/health/medicaid-works-millions...
  - gorbachev 5y ago
    Also relevant. Medical debt is the number one reason for personal bankruptcies in the US. It's absolutely shameful.
  - handrous 5y ago
    > * American healthcare is too expensive. The problem is long known and nobody wants to solve it. That problem is administrative inefficiency. Solving that problem means terminating the a large segment of a massive industry (destroying a massive number of jobs). Drugs are expensive too, but drug pricing problems impacts specific persons that when averaged across the entirety of the population become only a tiny part of the industry wide problem. My impression from looking at this for many years now is that the problem is everything. Every single individual and entity involved—and that's a whole bunch—is taking too much money. That's why it's so hard to point at any one problem and dig deeper and fine all the money. Every time, you find some of it, and usually a lot, but not all of it. Doctors and other people actually providing care? Too few of them, and (or, "therefore") they're making too much money. Hospitals? Consolidation of hospitals and smaller providers into "networks"? Yes and yes, but still, that's not all. Administration costs? Yep, but not all of it. Insurance overhead? Yes, but... well, you get the idea.
paulpauper 5y ago
sorta like employee Tetris but the goal is to prevent the blocks from adding up to 40
closeparen 5y ago
Six months ago. I’m not sure it’s fair to say “there’s a pandemic going on” anymore. The vaccine is readily available. There are cases where this might not be enough to end the pandemic from your perspective (immunocompromised family member, etc) but we wouldn’t expect very many.
- michaelmrose 5y ago
  Only 41.6% of the US population is fully vaccinated with many more either planning to get vaccinated or in the process of getting vaccinated. The mere existence of the vaccine doesn't mean the pandemic is over.
  - jayspell 5y ago
    Everyone who wants the vaccine can get the vaccine. If you get the vaccine, you have a minuscule, almost zero chance of having a bad response the virus. If you don't have the vaccine and you get the virus you have a small chance (if you're healthy) of having a terminal response to the virus, but if you do, it's on you, you chose to not get vaccinated. I believe it's safe to say we can back off the panic phase of the virus.
    - michaelmrose 5y ago
      Last I checked 3% of deaths are among vaccinated people. That isn't what "almost zero" looks like. It's really good but it aint zero. Next up with 58% of the population not being fully vaccinated yet we have plenty of opportunity for problems if we don't take the ball all the way to the end zone especially with vaccinated people not being exactly evenly distributed. I give you the fine state of Mississippi where only 1/3 is vaccinated and they are only doing 15k vaccinations per week. If the population even wanted a vaccine at this rate it would achieve immunity some time in 2023. Its like a nice little virus lab where there are plenty of unvaccinated hanging around for existing strains but the first strain to successfully attack vaccinated will gain a huge advantage. https://msdh.ms.gov/msdhsite/_static/resources/12130.pdf https://msdh.ms.gov/msdhsite/_static/resources/12130.pdf
angmarsbane 5y ago
I have absolutely no data, but I wonder if a decline in public decency is also playing a role. It isn’t hard to find videos or articles of service workers getting harassed or physically attacked by customers.
- version_five 5y ago
  A lot of companies (e.g. uber, Amazon, etc) have made it much harder to get any kind of satisfaction from the management who is actually at fault for problems people have, and leave the front line folks to face the anger they incur. Easy example, I have had lots of problems with uber that are almost always app related, but I am asked to rate the driver every time. I try to always give a good rating or none at all, but I imagine the drivers (who are mostly just executing specified instructions) are bearing the brunt of any frustration with the company. This is true for most customer service roles now, companies have completely offloaded their accountability onto the front line who is usually the least responsible. So your idea makes sense.
- bostonsre 5y ago
  The front line workers absolutely have it rough and they get taken advantage of constantly but they've been getting the shit end of the stick throughout history. I think these mega companies have just been able to leverage technology in order to scale the distribution of a ridiculous amount of shitty sticks in quantities that haven't been seen before. That being said, I still agree that empathy in general seems to be trending downward and my assumption is that online life makes it a lot easier to dehumanize other people which makes it easier to treat people like shit.
- a3n 5y ago
  Shot and killed. https://duckduckgo.com/?t=lm&q=covid+mask+security+guard+shot+killed&ia=web https://duckduckgo.com/?t=lm&q=covid+mask+security+guard+sho...
  - itsmemattchung 5y ago
    what the actual...disgraceful. Over a mask dispute?
lettergram 5y ago
I wrote about the coming stagflation here: https://austingwalters.com/stagflation-is-here-monetary-inflation-economic-depression/ https://austingwalters.com/stagflation-is-here-monetary-infl... The reality is that they're being paid to stay home. A lot of people (myself included) would have loved the opportunity to take one of those $12/hr greeting jobs when I was 16. Instead, I managed to get $9/hr setting up a companies internal network. You're correct, this is America. You can work hard and build something. America is intentionally setup NOT to give you anything, but to make as many opportunities as possible open to you. That's why people brave deserts to come here. There aren't any static classes (although the education system is quickly becoming one), that's what makes america great. Honestly, health care isn't what most of the poor care most about (having been there, it is a concern, just not #1); medicaid and medicare cover you if you're poor enough, hospitals will drop 80-90% of your bill if you're over that, etc. etc.
- lotsofpulp 5y ago
  > America is intentionally setup NOT to give you anything, but to make as many opportunities as possible open to you. How did you come to this conclusion? Is it the lack of social safety net that opens opportunities? Does the lack of parental leave open up opportunities for mothers to breastfeed? Or having to work multiple jobs open up opportunities to spend time with one’s family and participate in the community?
  - insert_coin 5y ago
    It was the lack laws preventing you from charging whatever you wanted for your own labor, and the lack of laws that forced you to give away a significant portion of that wage.
    - smhost 5y ago
      love to live in a workers' paradise of not having legal protections against being in a race to the bottom
      - 5y ago
ocschwar 5y ago
Part of the issue is that some of the public facing high risk jobs, like line cook, are hard to fill because the people who filled them are fucking dead. Of Covid.
- jrmg 5y ago
  I’ve heard this in a couple of places now. It’s a neat, but horrifying, explanation. Are there reliable statistics that suggest it may be true?
  - dlp211 5y ago
    Line cook was the deadliest job w.r.t. Covid. https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.cnbc.com/amp/2021/02/02/jobs-where-workers-have-the-highest-risk-of-dying-from-covid-study.html https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.cnbc.com/amp/2021/02/02/job...
  - cm2012 5y ago
    Simple math says it's wrong. 500k people died of covid in the USA, most over retirement age. Drop in the bucket of employment.
alfiedotwtf 5y ago
It was coined "the dismal science" for a reason.
solveit 5y ago
> Economists cant seem wrap their head around the idea that being a front line worker being exposed directly to sick people during a pandemic seems to be worth more money than when there wasn't a pandemic. The article says this...? It analyzes three possible causes: overgenerous benefits (the covid stimulus), fear of COVID, and inefficiencies in job-seeking. It goes on to suggest that overgenerous benefits are probably not the reason and that the latter two causes are probably more important. Furthermore, I expect approximately zero economists to not "wrap their head around the idea that being a front line worker being exposed directly to sick people during a pandemic seems to be worth more money than when there wasn't a pandemic." Why are you going on a vaguely related rant about economists when the article (presumably written by an economist in the wider sense) agrees with you? And why is your low-quality comment at the top of the comments section? What is with the quality of discussion these days?
- jmcgough 5y ago
  Sadly many people will comment on the headline before they read the article.
  - gordon_freeman 5y ago
    I have seen a lot of quality discussion on HN comment section even if the comment does not align with the article completely. Usually the comments are related to the topic of the article and not completely to the article written itself. Which is how it should be otherwise we would just have pretty narrowed down comment section.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
  - Sol- 5y ago
    Well, the article is behind a paywall. Since HN tolerates such articles (and has no culture of expecting OP to provide a way around the paywall apparently), I feel like it's somewhat the fault of HN here. Nothing encourages discussion about headlines only as paywalled articles.
anovikov 5y ago
But all these people are vaccinated now and since quite a while. If not, it's only their own fault.
pw 5y ago
I guess I count as a “low wage worker” these days and your claims in the first paragraph simply aren’t true for myself or most of the other low wage workers I know. I deliver for DoorDash and make around $100 dollars a day from about five hours of work. My girlfriend (who’s disabled) rides along with me, so it’s sorta like I’m just getting paid to drive around and hang out. I drive a 2005 Honda Civic, so I spend less than $15/day on gas and the car is old enough the depreciation is minuscule. I buy my health insurance on the exchange. It’s excellent and with the premium subsidy I only pay $22/month. I have several chronic health conditions, so good health insurance (and particularly drug coverage) is really important to me. I’ve been able to get my insurance to cover all of the many medications I’m on (many of still under patent and not generic) and my copay is only $45/month. Visits to my primary care doctor are free and I’ve got a $500 deductible for everything else. I can work as much or as little as I want on pretty much whatever schedule I choose. I tend to stick to about five hours a day because it doesn’t feel like a ton of work, but it’s enough to cover my expenses and then some. Rent is my only other major expense and I pay just $550 for my one bedroom apartment. I rarely cook at home, but even after spending way too much eating out, I regularly have $500-$1,000 leftover at the end of the month, so I’m certainly not living paycheck to paycheck. Since I save some of that extra money, I can take time off whenever I want (although I rarely do, since I enjoy getting out of the house and working). Sure, if I get sick and don’t work, I don’t make any money, but that’s why I keep a bit of money in savings. It might be Uber or Lyft or Instacart instead of DoorDash, but I know several people in a similar position to me. And honestly it’s a pretty sweet life. I’ve got all my needs met and then some. I enjoy my work. And I’ve got lots of free time to purpose my intellectual interests like coding.
- oblio 5y ago
  What happens if your car gets totaled?
  - samatman 5y ago
    Kelly Blue Book for a 2005 Honda Civic in good condition is $2-3000. So two to six month's savings. Painful but not career-ending.
missedthecue 5y ago
Why wasn't there a problem of this severity in 2019, but there is now?
andromeduck 5y ago
Healthcare costs would be in a better place were it not tired to employment. The problem right now is institutional/cultural momentum, bad leglistlation and how most of the high value customers are already locked down & better milked by the status quo.

anitil 5y ago

I have a question about the Walmart thing - is healthcare not pro-rated according to how much you work? Or is this casual work where you get a higher hourly loading to compensate? I'm trying to translate it into the Australian work context, but we don't tie healthcare to employment so I'm a bit confused.

Baeocystin 5y ago
It's an all-or-nothing cutoff wall, so that if an employer schedules someone for 29 hours/week instead of 30, (for example) they don't have to provide anything. And so of course 90%+ of the companies that can short on this, do. It's as awful as you think.
pix64 5y ago
If you're working at Walmart, you don't get healthcare. Not through your employer anyways.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- ianmcgowan 5y ago
  If you're full time you do, which is why Walmart and other big non-union companies strive as much as possible to have a part-time workforce. If you're part of corporate, or management, you're full time.. https://careers.walmart.com/us/jobs/WD597130-senior-software-engineer-full-stack https://careers.walmart.com/us/jobs/WD597130-senior-software... "Beyond competitive pay, you can receive incentive awards for your performance. Other great perks include 401(k) match, stock purchase plan, paid maternity and parental leave, PTO, multiple health plans, and much more."
ianmcgowan 5y ago
It varies by state, but typically part time employees get no employer funded healthcare at all, whereas there are required minimums for full time employees. Result: employers schedule everyone at 30 hours or less, in order to maximize shareholder value..
- michaelmrose 5y ago
  Forcing many people that want to eat to figure out how to work two jobs but nobody wants to hire someone for 10 hours so people are more apt to work 2 25 hour jobs.
rgbrenner 5y ago
No. While most people (especially higher wage workers) get health insurance through their employer, it is not guaranteed that your employer will provide that benefit. Prior to Obama, low wage workers might be scheduled to work full time without health insurance. If they're poor enough, they might get Medicaid from the state; otherwise they get to ruin their credit and claim bankruptcy if they show up at the emergency room. Obama passed ACA, which required employers with full time workers to provide health insurance or pay a fine per worker. Full time is defined as 30 hours per week or more by ACA. So in low wage jobs, employers responded by scheduling people for 29 hours. So if you work multiple jobs or a job+doordash/uber/etc... you may work full time, and not have any health insurance because no one employer is going over 29 hours. ACA also expanded Medicaid, but some states decided to decline that expansion. So whether that covers a low wage worker depends on where they are, the size of their household, and their total household earnings. For many of these workers, it's not just the risk of unexpected medical bills that they can't pay... they rarely have savings, so if they miss a few days of work (say because they contracted COVID), that can spiral into a series of missed bills. And with the eviction moratorium coming to an end, that now includes losing their home.
- hnick 5y ago
  Does anything happen if they keep you back for an hour and you "accidentally" go over the 30 hours? Or is it entirely based on the contract?
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - lolinder 5y ago
    The threshold is 30 hours on average in a given month [0]. So, presumably, if you work 31 hours one week they'd make you work 28 the next to avoid you being labeled full-time. [0] https://www.irs.gov/affordable-care-act/employers/identifying-full-time-employees https://www.irs.gov/affordable-care-act/employers/identifyin...
  - whoknew1122 5y ago
b0tzzzzzzman 5y ago
A prior place I worked had full time status as 32 hours a week averaged over an 8 week period.
yourapostasy 5y ago
> is healthcare not pro-rated according to how much you work? No. > Or is this casual work where you get a higher hourly loading to compensate? No. It is precisely as horrific as you would imagine for those low-wage workers who want full-time jobs to obtain those healthcare benefits, but keep running into this issue in job after job. The official tax-oriented definition of "full-time" [1] is a bit more nuanced than what you will colloquially hear in discussions, but in broad terms, once you are put into the HR system for more than 30 hours in a week of work, the threshold to full-time is triggered. It is a binary switch, no spectrum, no gradient. This doesn't even begin to get into how capital-inefficient and service-poor so many of the healthcare plans are once you do get access to them as a low-wage worker. Nor how so many of these workers are so completely unequipped and unprepared to comprehend the fiscal realities of engaging these plans. [1] https://www.irs.gov/affordable-care-act/employers/identifying-full-time-employees https://www.irs.gov/affordable-care-act/employers/identifyin...
austincheney 5y ago
A too quick guide to American healthcare. * American healthcare is too expensive. The problem is long known and nobody wants to solve it. That problem is administrative inefficiency. Solving that problem means terminating the a large segment of a massive industry (destroying a massive number of jobs). Drugs are expensive too, but drug pricing problems impacts specific persons that when averaged across the entirety of the population become only a tiny part of the industry wide problem. Since medicine is expensive everybody is reliant upon insurance. The options are private insurance (expensive), employer offered insurance, and government insurance (designed for low income people and poor choices/service). The exceptions are Obama care and military. Military has a wonderful health insurance plan called Tricare. Tricare is great for the patient because they cover just about everything but they are really hard about releasing funds to medical providers so some medical providers refuse to take Tricare. Obama care is a new private insurance option from the government that provides an affordable insurance option partially subsidized by government funding. I have known people who are not insured and refused to get insurance then just never go to the doctor. Wonderful medical insurance is a primary reason I remained employed by the military for a number of years.
- entropea 5y ago
  Medicaid also works great. https://www.cbpp.org/research/health/medicaid-works-millions-benefit-from-medicaids-effective-efficient-coverage https://www.cbpp.org/research/health/medicaid-works-millions...
- gorbachev 5y ago
  Also relevant. Medical debt is the number one reason for personal bankruptcies in the US. It's absolutely shameful.
- handrous 5y ago
  > * American healthcare is too expensive. The problem is long known and nobody wants to solve it. That problem is administrative inefficiency. Solving that problem means terminating the a large segment of a massive industry (destroying a massive number of jobs). Drugs are expensive too, but drug pricing problems impacts specific persons that when averaged across the entirety of the population become only a tiny part of the industry wide problem. My impression from looking at this for many years now is that the problem is everything. Every single individual and entity involved—and that's a whole bunch—is taking too much money. That's why it's so hard to point at any one problem and dig deeper and fine all the money. Every time, you find some of it, and usually a lot, but not all of it. Doctors and other people actually providing care? Too few of them, and (or, "therefore") they're making too much money. Hospitals? Consolidation of hospitals and smaller providers into "networks"? Yes and yes, but still, that's not all. Administration costs? Yep, but not all of it. Insurance overhead? Yes, but... well, you get the idea.

paulpauper 5y ago

sorta like employee Tetris but the goal is to prevent the blocks from adding up to 40

closeparen 5y ago

Six months ago. I’m not sure it’s fair to say “there’s a pandemic going on” anymore. The vaccine is readily available. There are cases where this might not be enough to end the pandemic from your perspective (immunocompromised family member, etc) but we wouldn’t expect very many.

michaelmrose 5y ago
Only 41.6% of the US population is fully vaccinated with many more either planning to get vaccinated or in the process of getting vaccinated. The mere existence of the vaccine doesn't mean the pandemic is over.
- jayspell 5y ago
  Everyone who wants the vaccine can get the vaccine. If you get the vaccine, you have a minuscule, almost zero chance of having a bad response the virus. If you don't have the vaccine and you get the virus you have a small chance (if you're healthy) of having a terminal response to the virus, but if you do, it's on you, you chose to not get vaccinated. I believe it's safe to say we can back off the panic phase of the virus.
  - michaelmrose 5y ago
    Last I checked 3% of deaths are among vaccinated people. That isn't what "almost zero" looks like. It's really good but it aint zero. Next up with 58% of the population not being fully vaccinated yet we have plenty of opportunity for problems if we don't take the ball all the way to the end zone especially with vaccinated people not being exactly evenly distributed. I give you the fine state of Mississippi where only 1/3 is vaccinated and they are only doing 15k vaccinations per week. If the population even wanted a vaccine at this rate it would achieve immunity some time in 2023. Its like a nice little virus lab where there are plenty of unvaccinated hanging around for existing strains but the first strain to successfully attack vaccinated will gain a huge advantage. https://msdh.ms.gov/msdhsite/_static/resources/12130.pdf https://msdh.ms.gov/msdhsite/_static/resources/12130.pdf

angmarsbane 5y ago

I have absolutely no data, but I wonder if a decline in public decency is also playing a role. It isn’t hard to find videos or articles of service workers getting harassed or physically attacked by customers.

version_five 5y ago
A lot of companies (e.g. uber, Amazon, etc) have made it much harder to get any kind of satisfaction from the management who is actually at fault for problems people have, and leave the front line folks to face the anger they incur. Easy example, I have had lots of problems with uber that are almost always app related, but I am asked to rate the driver every time. I try to always give a good rating or none at all, but I imagine the drivers (who are mostly just executing specified instructions) are bearing the brunt of any frustration with the company. This is true for most customer service roles now, companies have completely offloaded their accountability onto the front line who is usually the least responsible. So your idea makes sense.
bostonsre 5y ago
The front line workers absolutely have it rough and they get taken advantage of constantly but they've been getting the shit end of the stick throughout history. I think these mega companies have just been able to leverage technology in order to scale the distribution of a ridiculous amount of shitty sticks in quantities that haven't been seen before. That being said, I still agree that empathy in general seems to be trending downward and my assumption is that online life makes it a lot easier to dehumanize other people which makes it easier to treat people like shit.
a3n 5y ago
Shot and killed. https://duckduckgo.com/?t=lm&q=covid+mask+security+guard+shot+killed&ia=web https://duckduckgo.com/?t=lm&q=covid+mask+security+guard+sho...
- itsmemattchung 5y ago
  what the actual...disgraceful. Over a mask dispute?

lettergram 5y ago

I wrote about the coming stagflation here: https://austingwalters.com/stagflation-is-here-monetary-inflation-economic-depression/ https://austingwalters.com/stagflation-is-here-monetary-infl... The reality is that they're being paid to stay home. A lot of people (myself included) would have loved the opportunity to take one of those $12/hr greeting jobs when I was 16. Instead, I managed to get $9/hr setting up a companies internal network. You're correct, this is America. You can work hard and build something. America is intentionally setup NOT to give you anything, but to make as many opportunities as possible open to you. That's why people brave deserts to come here. There aren't any static classes (although the education system is quickly becoming one), that's what makes america great. Honestly, health care isn't what most of the poor care most about (having been there, it is a concern, just not #1); medicaid and medicare cover you if you're poor enough, hospitals will drop 80-90% of your bill if you're over that, etc. etc.

lotsofpulp 5y ago
> America is intentionally setup NOT to give you anything, but to make as many opportunities as possible open to you. How did you come to this conclusion? Is it the lack of social safety net that opens opportunities? Does the lack of parental leave open up opportunities for mothers to breastfeed? Or having to work multiple jobs open up opportunities to spend time with one’s family and participate in the community?
- insert_coin 5y ago
  It was the lack laws preventing you from charging whatever you wanted for your own labor, and the lack of laws that forced you to give away a significant portion of that wage.
  - smhost 5y ago
    love to live in a workers' paradise of not having legal protections against being in a race to the bottom
    - 5y ago

ocschwar 5y ago

Part of the issue is that some of the public facing high risk jobs, like line cook, are hard to fill because the people who filled them are fucking dead. Of Covid.

jrmg 5y ago
I’ve heard this in a couple of places now. It’s a neat, but horrifying, explanation. Are there reliable statistics that suggest it may be true?
- dlp211 5y ago
  Line cook was the deadliest job w.r.t. Covid. https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.cnbc.com/amp/2021/02/02/jobs-where-workers-have-the-highest-risk-of-dying-from-covid-study.html https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.cnbc.com/amp/2021/02/02/job...
- cm2012 5y ago
  Simple math says it's wrong. 500k people died of covid in the USA, most over retirement age. Drop in the bucket of employment.

alfiedotwtf 5y ago

It was coined "the dismal science" for a reason.

solveit 5y ago

> Economists cant seem wrap their head around the idea that being a front line worker being exposed directly to sick people during a pandemic seems to be worth more money than when there wasn't a pandemic. The article says this...? It analyzes three possible causes: overgenerous benefits (the covid stimulus), fear of COVID, and inefficiencies in job-seeking. It goes on to suggest that overgenerous benefits are probably not the reason and that the latter two causes are probably more important. Furthermore, I expect approximately zero economists to not "wrap their head around the idea that being a front line worker being exposed directly to sick people during a pandemic seems to be worth more money than when there wasn't a pandemic." Why are you going on a vaguely related rant about economists when the article (presumably written by an economist in the wider sense) agrees with you? And why is your low-quality comment at the top of the comments section? What is with the quality of discussion these days?

jmcgough 5y ago
Sadly many people will comment on the headline before they read the article.
- gordon_freeman 5y ago
  I have seen a lot of quality discussion on HN comment section even if the comment does not align with the article completely. Usually the comments are related to the topic of the article and not completely to the article written itself. Which is how it should be otherwise we would just have pretty narrowed down comment section.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- Sol- 5y ago
  Well, the article is behind a paywall. Since HN tolerates such articles (and has no culture of expecting OP to provide a way around the paywall apparently), I feel like it's somewhat the fault of HN here. Nothing encourages discussion about headlines only as paywalled articles.

anovikov 5y ago

But all these people are vaccinated now and since quite a while. If not, it's only their own fault.

pw 5y ago

I guess I count as a “low wage worker” these days and your claims in the first paragraph simply aren’t true for myself or most of the other low wage workers I know. I deliver for DoorDash and make around $100 dollars a day from about five hours of work. My girlfriend (who’s disabled) rides along with me, so it’s sorta like I’m just getting paid to drive around and hang out. I drive a 2005 Honda Civic, so I spend less than $15/day on gas and the car is old enough the depreciation is minuscule. I buy my health insurance on the exchange. It’s excellent and with the premium subsidy I only pay $22/month. I have several chronic health conditions, so good health insurance (and particularly drug coverage) is really important to me. I’ve been able to get my insurance to cover all of the many medications I’m on (many of still under patent and not generic) and my copay is only $45/month. Visits to my primary care doctor are free and I’ve got a $500 deductible for everything else. I can work as much or as little as I want on pretty much whatever schedule I choose. I tend to stick to about five hours a day because it doesn’t feel like a ton of work, but it’s enough to cover my expenses and then some. Rent is my only other major expense and I pay just $550 for my one bedroom apartment. I rarely cook at home, but even after spending way too much eating out, I regularly have $500-$1,000 leftover at the end of the month, so I’m certainly not living paycheck to paycheck. Since I save some of that extra money, I can take time off whenever I want (although I rarely do, since I enjoy getting out of the house and working). Sure, if I get sick and don’t work, I don’t make any money, but that’s why I keep a bit of money in savings. It might be Uber or Lyft or Instacart instead of DoorDash, but I know several people in a similar position to me. And honestly it’s a pretty sweet life. I’ve got all my needs met and then some. I enjoy my work. And I’ve got lots of free time to purpose my intellectual interests like coding.

oblio 5y ago
What happens if your car gets totaled?
- samatman 5y ago
  Kelly Blue Book for a 2005 Honda Civic in good condition is $2-3000. So two to six month's savings. Painful but not career-ending.

missedthecue 5y ago

Why wasn't there a problem of this severity in 2019, but there is now?

andromeduck 5y ago

Healthcare costs would be in a better place were it not tired to employment. The problem right now is institutional/cultural momentum, bad leglistlation and how most of the high value customers are already locked down & better milked by the status quo.