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?
It really depends on the location within the US. Each state really operates like their own country, connected through the federal government, so standards of living, and what constitutes poverty can widely vary. However, the broad trend is: minimal to no labor protections, employer or self-funded health insurance are the only way to begin to afford medical care (dental insurance is a rarer offer), and there are a lot of trade-offs in determining how to survive. There is very much a different reality for people with money compared to how a lot of others are forced to live. The reasons are historic and systemic, and there’s too much to fully unpack in a response to a post. However, it can be simplified to: rampant, virtually unchecked capitalism is used to extract all of the labor and wealth from the general populous. The “American Dream” is propaganda shoved down everyone’s throat to make people think that they, too, can work hard to become wealthy enough to not have to scrape together enough money to survive. Except that it’s all a lie built on generational wealth, servitude, and violence.
Tipped wages originated from business owners refusing to pay freed slaves a fair wage after the US Civil War. The US still openly practices economic slavery. The 13th Amendment to the US Constitution allows slavery as punishment for a crime, which is why prison populations in the US are enormous. Private companies operate prisons here. This country was built and is maintained by slaves. The wealthy segregate themselves so they don’t have to see or think about it, but that doesn’t make it any less true.
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
Each dose is thousands of dollars cash.
LOL, it’s because it’s not, simple as that.
It is, to the consumer. Obviously I’m not referring to the true manufacturing cost, that would be idiotic. What part of my comment lead you to believe I was referring to anyone who was able to subvert the customer model? Why would you even imply that given the very specific situation, and players I mentioned?
What part of my comment lead you to believe I was referring to anyone who was able to subvert the customer model?
A plane ticket out of the scam country and back is a pathetic fraction of the “thousands dollars cash per dose” you invoked.
Are you questioning the price of drugs like humera or taltz? What are you taking about scam… It’s still thousands in Mexico, last I read. Here’s an article from a few years ago
The point is that quality insurance is a serious privilege, especially in the frame of reference of folks living in America.
You’re off topic and moving goalposts
Your above comment was wrong and you should edit it. It’s misinformation
Off-topic? Goalposts? Misinformation?
Now that you’ve named specific drugs, it’s awfully easy to show how US is just a scam: https://www.statista.com/statistics/312014/average-price-of-humira-by-country
The difference between US and the runner-up is worth not just two plane tickets, but a lavish vacation. Just accept it, you’re being had and it never crossed your mind to do the reasonable thing.
I’m an American and I had a pretty decent job out of college and the idea of moving out of my parents house without roommates was impossible. In fact I don’t know a single person who did it.
$5000 might not be life changing for me, but it would take me a really long time to save that much.
Americans have high salaries compared to the rest of the world, but everything is really expensive so things kind of balance out.
One thing to consider is that the higher salaries make it easier to get things like an iPhone or MacBook. But all the things that are needs like housing, food, and a car are almost too expensive to afford.
Most people have a car loan, most people don’t even dream of owning a home any longer. When you see that you will never earn enough for a home, then you don’t really save for it.
When the amount you earn that. An be saved is too little then you don’t really bother with it.
Most Americans do not live nearly as well as it is portrayed on TV or in movies.
update
I’ll add on to this that most Americans have debt for some reason or another besides having a car and house. A lot of people have student debts that are oppressive some people have medical debt as well.
Gas prices are reasonably low, but everything is so far that you end up using a decent amount of gas to get around.
I’m an American and I had a pretty decent job out of college and the idea of moving out of my parents house without roommates was impossible. In fact I don’t know a single person who did it.
Not to pick on you specifically, but I’ve never understood the modern generations’ seeming aversion to housemates.
I had housemates from after college until 7 years later when I had a wife, starting in the mid-90s. My mom had housemates in the 60s after college (my dad had the GI bill, which afforded flexibility, but had other drawbacks).
It seems weird to me that people these days seem to think that’s unacceptable. That’s how people do it when they are just getting started. Either that, or they live somewhere less desirable, far from cities, small, old, crappy. Personally I did both… housemates in a rural area in a shitty place. :)
The aversion to housemates represents a breakdown in social trust in general, plus people are just more precarious. You’ve got to hope your housemates can pay rent when all of you hold tenuous employment. One person losing their job is a disaster for everyone else. One person moving out can also be a crisis.
I lived with housemates around 2010 to 2016 and it was a constant struggle to keep bills paid, plus we’d have to share vehicles and that was difficult since sometimes one of us would work nights, some of us days. Also revolving door of girlfriends/boyfriends who’d come in and eat our food or borrow cars.
Not great experiences. Honestly some fun times looking back on it all. Was nice to be around friends or do movie nights. But otherwise it was a struggle to keep together.
This may be unpopular to hear… but most of the justifications for not having roommates are like the ones in this thread. People say they can’t have roommates because they have social anxiety or other people are just jerks.
To an older person it sounds like “My generation can’t have roommates because we don’t get along with other people, and they don’t get along with us.” That’s not an economic problem.
It’s actually far far more worrying than that. What happens to a generation that has no ability to coexist with other people? What happens to the world when they are in charge of it?
I do see it as an economic problem. Precarity is going to induce loneliness and tension. People are working more hours and there’s simply less ability to connect. There are fewer “third spaces” (places outside of work or home) these days, so people have reduced capacity to develop bonds with one another. All of that is going to generate mistrust and lack of friendship among people.
Political tensions are high too, for instance, I would refuse to live with someone who expresses casual transphobic because I wouldn’t trust them to be around me.
Furthermore this is a niche internet forum with a lot of nerds who have general social anxiety. Probably not a good cross section of a population.
There’s just a lot of inequality in the US that is both socially and politically unacceptable in the rest of the developed world. Extremes are more accepted here.
There are more extremely rich people than you would see in other Western countries and and many, many more extremely poor people than in other Western countries. Alleviating that would mean implementing policies to redistribute wealth that many Americans are not willing to implement, especially conservatives.
The US basically sacrifices the good of the many for the great of the few.
Every American is a rich man who is temporarily down on his luck and making big societal changes would screw them over when they finally get their money.
And they manage to get poor people on board by tying their policies to Jesus and Family Values. And it works like a charm and it’s so weird.
Which seems even stranger. In many other countries, Christians vote left of center to promote economic equality, reduce poverty, get green policies to protect God’s green earth, make sure that everyone has universal access to healthcare and education, etc.
In the US, they vote oppotite of that.
