points by weakfish 12 hours ago | 0 comments
> Its not a labor shortage, its a shortage of people for whom doing the job can pay the bills they need paid.
I think this fact is often missed by middle/upper-middle-class tech folks (like a majority of this forum). From up here, it's eas to view labor as being an equitable exchange between two parties, but as you said, that is simply not the case when the pay doesn't even come close to covering expenses.
The refrain I often hear is that those people should then just work harder and get a better job - but then the question is, who delivers the food? To which I have yet to hear a satisfying answer (besides incentivizing better wages for those workers)
[–] taurath 11 hours ago
[–] resters 7 hours ago
I drove Uber Eats for one day a few years ago (as an experiment) and it was way harder than I had imagined. Seemingly no buildings have numbers on them, and it took tremendous effort to find which door to knock on in most apartment complexes, and the tips were lousy and the pay was horrible.
These are folks who've never had to work a low wage job where bathroom breaks are tightly controlled, except maybe for fun money. I started working at 14, and as a software dev today I've never had to work nearly as hard, or be as utterly exhausted as working these sorts of jobs, which if you are having to do them to pay rent, its difficult or impossible to do extracurriculars like education or networking to move forward.
Imagine your entire workday is on a strict, short term set of timers and if you don't complete a task for any reason an automated rating goes down, and if it happens more than 3 times you are let go. People don't understand the level of stress that carries.