Like, you want janitors and McDonald fast food workers and cleaners.
You just don’t want them to make a liveable wage and have healthcare and be treated like proper human beings.
People who work in an air conditioned office all day sincerely do believe that those jobs are both less important and not as exhausting.
a job being ‘exhausting’ doesn’t make it important, janitors and fast food workers are paid less bc their job doesn’t take any real skill – like basically anyone can do it
not everyone can be a lawyer or a doctor or run a successful business, those people worked hard and learned new skills and gained useful knowledge so their end job would pay more and not be physically exhausting
stop shitting on people who earned a good life because you aren’t being given one for free
ugh
I work in a hospital. It’s also the worst flu season in recent years in my hospital. You know whose job is one of the most crucial for EVERYONE, doctors and medical staff included? Janitors. Go ahead and try to have a safe working environment, ESPECIALLY in the medical field, without them.
Tell me, do you know how to best create a medically safe work environment? Because I sure as fuck don’t, but the janitors do, and they know this while being on their feet and performing manually exhausting tasks for 8+ hours straight surrounded by caustic chemicals.
Same goes for fast food workers. Do you have any idea how much knowledge and physical work goes into working in a kitchen? Wanna tell me you put out grease fires, what temperatures different foods are stored in, and how to keep a safe working environment for both customers and workers in a job surrounded by hot oil, ovens and chemicals? Not to mention, again, being on your feet for 8+ hours in a hot kitchen being yelled at by customers constantly.
I promise you that these people do a more difficult and oftentimes more important job than a large portion of office jobs I’ve been in.
Fun fact: In my neck of the woods, hospital janitorial staff union wanted a pay raise. Their workers were struggling. The hospitals laughed at them, so they went on full strike.
The hospitals were in crisis mode within an HOUR.
Surgical rooms were not being cleaned, toilets and patient rooms were not cleaned, garbage was not picked up, instruments that get reused were not being cleaned (i.e. scalpels, patient beds), laundry wasn’t done, floors were not clean, biohazard waste wasn’t collected.
The hospitals folded the next day and the union got EVERYTHING they asked for.
Now, you may not work in a hospital @purest-rain but wherever you do work, just imagine what might happen if… suddenly no one cleaned. No one picks up the trash in that fancy office. No one vacuums or sweeps, or cleans anything. Nothing. Not the toilets, not the offices. It might take a little longer, but pretty soon, those fancy law-offices look pretty gross, don’t they? Especially the bathrooms. I’ve cleaned bathrooms, I know exactly how disgusting people are when they use a toilet they don’t have to clean.
Stop shitting on low-wage workers just because you don’t understand how important their job actually is. You cannot simultaneously demand a service, while dehumanizing the person who provides you with it, and demanding they not be compensated fairly.
What we’re discovering with jobs done primarily by immigrants – farm work, slaughterhouse work, adult care work, as well as janitorial work – is that while these jobs are not “skilled” labor, so in theory anyone can do them, not everyone will do them. There are some jobs that are highly paid relative to the skill level/ expense of training they require because they are dangerous: police work, firefighting, coal mining. But considering that some “unskilled” and (theoretically) non-dangerous jobs remain empty following crackdowns on illegal immigration, they are underpaid purely from a market standpoint. While we’ve figured out that there needs to be a wage premium for dangerous jobs, the market has been slow to acknowledge that there should be a similar premium for unpleasant jobs.
Why, if markets are so smart? I’m no sociologist, but my educated guess is that it’s precisely because we as a society look down on the people who do unpleasant jobs. There’s an age-old association between the jobs that no one wants to do and the lower classes: people who do unpleasant work because they have no choice, whether because of poverty or because they are not permitted to do anything else (as in hereditary caste systems). The fact that immigrants from poor countries are willing to do these jobs when poor unemployed American citizens won’t is partly an economic artifact (the low pay for unpleasant work goes a lot farther in the immigrants’ countries of origin, where at least part of the pay gets sent), but partly an artifact of what is effectively a social caste system based on race and nationality. Americans consider such work beneath them; it is not only physically taxing, it is often dirty and disgusting, which people tend to regard as an offense to their dignity.
No one denies that dirty work is necessary; so when the question arises as to why it’s not paid accordingly, Americans who are convinced that we’re beyond such petty things as not-purely-economic caste distinctions start going on about skill level. Bullshit. It’s about the perceived lack of dignity in the work. A pure market system would compensate people for the disgustingness the way it compensates for danger. Markets are not free of atavistic prejudice.
Loki is the Philosopher King 