I’ve been watching a few American TV shows and it blows my mind that they put up with such atrocious working terms and conditions.
One show was about a removal company where any damage at all, even not the workers fault, is taken out of their tips. There’s no insurance from the multimillion dollar business. As they’re not paid a living wage the guy on the show had examples of when he and his family went weeks with barely any income and this was considered normal?!
Another example was a cooking show where the prize was tickets to an NFL game. The lady who won explained that she’d be waiting in the car so her sons could experience their first live game, because she couldn’t otherwise afford a ticket to go. They give tickets for football games away for free to people where I live for no reason at all…
Yet another example was where the workers got a $5k tip from their company and the reactions were as if this amount of money was even remotely life changing. It saddens me to think the average Americans life could be made so much better with such a relatively small amount of money and they don’t unionize and demand far better. The company in question was on track to make a billion bloody dollars while their workers are on the poverty line and don’t even have all their teeth?
It’s not actually this bad and the average American lives a pretty good life like we’re led to believe, right?
1 in 8 lives in poverty (<20k for a 2 person household).
1 in 4 has less than 1k in savings.
1 in 2 has less money saved than last year.
1 in 2 is living paycheck to paycheck
But thanks to massive income inequality, the average American makes 59k a year.
Fun fact: America is arguably better if you are rich or with a high income, Europe is better if you have a lower income / are poor
This. If you are fortunate to have great employment (100k+, dual income preferred (so breaking 200+), depending on location), with good healthcare, your options are great, and you’ll access a higher level of service than most of the world can get. Great schools, great doctors, great home/car/vacations.
If you don’t have that raw income, and therefore don’t have that support, america is a much much different place.
I’m fortunate enough to have gone from very low class to a much higher strata and I never get comfortable. I’m constantly surprised by shit that just happens…easily.
An example: by having good insurance, I have a very good dermatologist. I have psoriasis and use a biologic injectable to handle it completely. Once, my specialty pharmacy had some sort of shipping issue and I called my doc to check in. They said come by.
They handed me 6 doses FOR FREE, so 6 months of medication, like it was nothing. Each dose is thousands of dollars cash. I pay 25$ with my insurance. I assume a vendor rep dropped a ton off.
Point being, I know there are millions of folks on very expensive meds, who don’t have a high quality doctor relationship, who could never access that perk I did. Literally paywalled customer service.
I recently went back to college and I’m now in my first professional role with real professional benefits and the difference is night and day
I got sick and had to miss a couple of days of work. I literally just had to send a single teams message from my work phone and could ignore everything else for the rest of the day and still be paid. I’ve had previous jobs where I’d be required to get a doctor’s note by the end of the day just to not be disciplined for my absesnd, which meant going to urgent care which costs more because i couldn’t make a same day appointment with my primary care doctor. Y’know all for a common cold
I went to go to the office one day (my job is hybrid) and found a 4 inch screw in my tire. I had zero obligation to explain myself for why I didn’t come in when I was expected. I had another time I had a different issue with the car for which I didn’t get around to mentioning why I didn’t come in and I never heard about it. My last job I had a very catastrophic flat and literally had to miss 2 days of work while I waited for shop to get in tires to put on my car
Every holiday is paid. I’ve had previous jobs where I had to burn literally all of my vacation time to not take a 20% hit to my paycheck for a holiday that I don’t even get the choice of working if I wanted to. I’ve had other jobs where I just had to accept that I’d have to take a hit on a paycheck for a holiday because I didn’t get any vacation time
If I have an important personal phonecall, I can just answer the call. I don’t have to do some song and dance about burning a timed break or saying out loud to everyone in earshot who sees me getting a call “oh this is an important call, I need to take this” I can just answer the damn phone and get on with it
There’s usually some snacks somewhere in the building that i can grab for free. If I don’t pack enough food and find myself getting hangry I’m not forced to spend my own money at the vending machine or to go to the store at lunch, I can just go grab a snack and be done with it. I also don’t have to wait for a break, I can just get up and go grab my damn snack without having to explain myself
Notice how every one of these benefits is not having to spend time and/or money to appease my employer
While this may be true today, note that European countries (well, the rich ones anyways) might just be behind the curve here. We’re certainly on our way towards a U.S.-style disaster.
It’s very hard to generalise this though as cultures here are very heterogenous here. You’d never in 100 years expect the Dutch to fall for the car industry’s strategy of getting everyone dependant on cars to anywhere near the same degree as the U.S. has while you absolutely couldn’t say the same about Germany; we love sucking on those exhaust pipes (especially our politicians).
Americans absolutely need cars due to the size of the country. We like our space. We’re not being duped into buying cars for no good reason.
Cope.
It is absolutely possible to build infrastructure that is not car centric. Of course, they are always going to be people who need a car to get around but that doesn’t mean that we can’t design cities that don’t require cars.
The dumbest excuse for bad cities - Not Just Bikes
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This is a common misbelief.
There’s a small subset of U.S. citizens who do live in the middle of bumfuck nowhere and actually do need a personal vehicle to get around. The vast majority does not.
Not true. So much of the US, including many cities is uninhabitable or at least extremely inconvenient without a car due to a lack of planning that supports a car free lifestyle.
Also, while the majority of Americans live in urban areas, the rural population is not so small as to be insignificant.
The long term solution is to improve infrastructure and zoning laws to reduce the car centrism of the majority of the USA, this is already being done in many cities, but for the time being most Americans need a car.
That’s just false. There are vast rural areas and communities in every state. If you think it’s only in a select few states in the middle of the country, then I have a bridge to sell you.
My argument does not hinge on any arbitrary state borders. Read again.