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It’s hypocritical of European cultures to tout their great social benefits and stable employment while having an entire underclass of unpaid and abused employee

by j7ake 4y ago

It’s hypocritical of European cultures to tout their great social benefits and stable employment while having an entire underclass of unpaid and abused employees that don’t get fair treatment from everybody else in society.

barry-cotter 4y ago
Europeans aren’t morally posturing over this though. This is an American site, run by Americans, where most of the readers and commenters are American. American leftists love to talk about how great Europe is, sure. If people want to spend years of their life doing unpaid labor so they can get high status badly paid work those are their own choices. Seems like a poor choice to me but adults are free to make stupid choices in many areas.
- j7ake 4y ago
  As a young person in some countries in Europe, some have no choice but to go through a period of unpaid internships before they get a full time job. It’s a consequence of high labour costs, high minimum wage, and government regulations on employment terms. What happens then is that wages between 0 and minimum wage are floored to zero.
  - barry-cotter 4y ago
    > As a young person in some countries in Europe, some have no choice but to go through a period of unpaid internships before they get a full time job. Yes, I understand that people who refuse to do the kinds of jobs working class people do don’t do working class jobs, even part time, or over the summer to earn money. Given that and the factors you mentioned Italians, French and Spanish particularly either do internships as part of their studies as a gatekeeping exercise to show they can afford to work without pay and are of the right class, or they go actual where entry level pay is bad but existent before going home. When one of my college friends went to Paris to do the internship he was doing as part of his degree that was unpaid. The difference between him and the French students doing their stage was that he was working at McDonalds as well to support himself.

by j7ake 4y ago

barry-cotter 4y ago

Europeans aren’t morally posturing over this though. This is an American site, run by Americans, where most of the readers and commenters are American. American leftists love to talk about how great Europe is, sure. If people want to spend years of their life doing unpaid labor so they can get high status badly paid work those are their own choices. Seems like a poor choice to me but adults are free to make stupid choices in many areas.

j7ake 4y ago
As a young person in some countries in Europe, some have no choice but to go through a period of unpaid internships before they get a full time job. It’s a consequence of high labour costs, high minimum wage, and government regulations on employment terms. What happens then is that wages between 0 and minimum wage are floored to zero.
- barry-cotter 4y ago
  > As a young person in some countries in Europe, some have no choice but to go through a period of unpaid internships before they get a full time job. Yes, I understand that people who refuse to do the kinds of jobs working class people do don’t do working class jobs, even part time, or over the summer to earn money. Given that and the factors you mentioned Italians, French and Spanish particularly either do internships as part of their studies as a gatekeeping exercise to show they can afford to work without pay and are of the right class, or they go actual where entry level pay is bad but existent before going home. When one of my college friends went to Paris to do the internship he was doing as part of his degree that was unpaid. The difference between him and the French students doing their stage was that he was working at McDonalds as well to support himself.