A dude comes in my store every day to get gas and beer. On the weekends he pulls up in his giant RV. If I don’t see him for a week (pretty regular thing), when he does come back he’s been on vacation in that RV. His happy, healthy kids come in and get their drinks.
Recently he asked me if I knew anyone who could drive a medical taxi. He has a company which takes people to doctors visits. Insurance pays for it.
“I can’t find anyone to work. No one wants to work anymore. I have 10 vehicles parked right now.”
“What’s the pay? Do you do drug tests?”
MINIMUM FUCKING WAGE. DRUG TESTS.
I just told him, “dude, McDonald’s is paying $14.50 right now, starting wage. Paying people the bare damn minimum, you’ll either get them fresh out of prison or jacked up on meth. Like, holy shit man. Minimum wage? For a job that requires drug testing? You aren’t suffering. I see you taking your RV on vacation constantly. Fucking pay your employees bro. Those parked cars could be bringing in free money but rather than look at the problem, you think people don’t want to work. Pay 50 cents more than McDonalds and I’ll come work tomorrow.”
Nope. Stubborn, greedy bastard would rather have 10 cars parked.
Fuck that whole class of people.
If he owns vehicles, then he is entitled to exploit people to drive them.
The system has conditioned him to find a way to rationalize that he is victim.
He’s entitled to do whatever he wants with his vehicles. That doesn’t mean it’s a good business decision, he’s not entitled to succeed.
Well, among good business decisions is exploiting workers. In fact, historically, it is the very best kind.
They are the exact ones sucking musk dick and think he’s the god of capitalism crying that “no one understands the owner of a company is supposed to be rich and everyone is supposed to be homeless but grateful to work for them bloblooobloo .”. Wondering why no one has any empathy for them.
“What’s the pay? Do you do drug tests?”
MINIMUM FUCKING WAGE. DRUG TESTS.
In a lot of cases if you’re driving a vehicle for commercial purposes, DOT requires a pre-employment drug test. Taxi drivers are one of those, and I imagine that’s the regulation he’s under.
I mean, yeah he’s not paying nearly enough to attract people, but the drug tests aren’t entirely up to him.
Yeah, it’s the combination that OP was taking issue with. You can’t pay like shit for jobs that require drug testing.
This right here.
Shit fucking pay can’t possibly be combined with a drug test. Who the hell (who isn’t a felon or a junkie) would be willing to work for so little?
We’re in the middle of nowhere too. The driver would regularly have to leave the state or drive across the state.
I don’t understand the mindset of these people. He’s losing money for every patient that doesn’t get a ride through his company and he’d seriously rather let the vehicles sit. It makes no sense to me. If he paid good he’d be doing even better. Not as well as he imagines he could be doing robbing people, but still he’d be doing better.
Some joker out there will do it for shit wages and that convinces him there must be more people out there that are ok with being paid so little. He imagines how much money he could have if he’d juuuuust find 10 more suckers to rip off.
Every time I see him coming since that conversation something locks up in me.
I am a driver in a large metropolis for a medical diagnostics unit. I do not get drug tested, nor have I ever been in finding this employment. That “DOT requirement” is false.
I don’t know about the class of driver you fall under, but bus drivers, taxi drivers, truck drivers, airline pilots and railroad employees are all required by DOT to take a drug test before employment. There are a few other cases where they are also required to have a drug test, such as after an accident.
This case sounds like a taxi, so I’d guess it falls under the rules for taxi drivers.
I can understand the pay point, but not the drug one. Why would anyone hire a testable drugs user to drive? Which employers are fine with hiring drug users in general?
Depends on the drug tests but a lot of them are very bad at catching actual drug users or popping false positives, to being so lax on the actual sample collection that people are smuggling in clean samples rather than providing their own.
So the people following the rules are being penalized and often put under scrutiny they didn’t deserve, and those that are breaking the rules in an obvious way aren’t being penalized for it.
And there are some scheduled drugs that in no way inhibit your ability to drive or work, especially when they aren’t being abused and taken infrequently. And those are the ones most likely to get you caught despite being the least likely to cause an actual problem.
Drug tests don’t work like you think. They don’t test for the drug itself, they test for the metabolites.
A lot of the big scary drugs your D.A.R.E. officer told you about like cocaine or LSD or meth won’t even show up on a drug test a day or two later. So I can dive into the Bolivian Marching Powder on friday after work, and pass a drug test monday.
This falls apart when you get to marijuana, and marijuana causes a lot of issues because it will show up on a drug test weeks later, and these tests cannot determine if a person is high right then, they can only test if a person has used marijuana in the last month or so. This means if I get stoned with my wife on friday I could lose my job monday.
Marijuana is popular in the US. If someone can get a job working for conpany Y for $8 per hour, or a job working for company Z for $8 per hour, but company Y does drug tests, guess who isn’t going to get employees? If you want to drug test, you have to pay for workers who will pass it.
I run warehouse/fulfillment ops for an ecomm business and frequently hire temps (task rabbit, instawork, etc)
People literally won’t show up for less than $20/hr even for basic shit like kitting, we have to start at $25 just to get people in the door. My boss sees the bill and asks why we don’t find some younger workers for $15 but they just don’t exist in our area. People want to work, just not for shit wages.
The younger worker thing fucking shits me. I worked as OPs manager for 11+ years and my GM was always on me about getting younger staff for the cheaper rate. Little did he know I entered everybody under 18 as 18 in our payroll… He expected the same workload from these guys so I was ensuring they got paid the same.
Preach. I work for a small manufacturing and production company. The pay rate is $16/hr, they don’t offer health insurance, they have paid holidays, they offer 1 week paid vacation after 1 year and 2 weeks after 3 years. They’re having trouble hiring people. They’ve resorted to reaching out to former employees and asking current workers if they could reach out to friends or family.
Edit: The location is South Florida, so $16/hr isn’t much here. I live with my parents so it’s good enough for me.
There is no law requiring vacation or sick days, so employers offer a few as a little treat. Wait until you hear about how much maternity leave you are guaranteed
Five neoliberal presidents, two red scares, four centuries of structural racism, and the cult of individualism as a de facto state religion.
It’s the same where I work. Small family-owned business, benefits only kick in after you’ve been full-time for a year. I’ve been there 20 months with no benefits because I was only part-time the first year.
They gave me a raise after one year but because my pay started so low, even with my raise I was still making less than what this other girl started at. We had been hired at the same time. In our first year there, I learned more and took on more responsibilities, stuff the other girls were afraid to do, did everything she did plus more, but even with my raise I made less than her starting pay. I was not happy and I let them know it. They caved and gave me the same rate she was at after her raise.
WTF? This is worse than fucking Russia. And Russia itself has very low labour standards. 5-day 8-hour per day work week with 4 weeks of paid vacation(paid as in wage is still coming, not paid as in paying for travel and stuff) per year with minimum 14 days continiously. How can you get worse than that?
An ingrained assumption persists of a particular class of people who willfully identify with providing certain labor for paltry compensation. It is simply because workers want to live well that they are not accepting low wages “even for basic shit like kitting”.
They never held any original plan to accept poverty wages in exchange for being relegated to particular kinds of work.
I’m curious, what category are you hiring people in on taskrabbit? Off the top of my head can’t think of any that match warehousing.
I was tasking for a while at 30/hr and I’d have to raise my rates to make it worth it. Every customer estimates their task at 30 minutes to an hour but it could be anywhere from 1-4 realistically making it really difficult to schedule consistent work, and that’s before you factor in all the overhead/missing benefits compensation.
For moving heavy stuff I do moving/loading/unloading and for kitting/assembly I think we use… Office organization? Since that is a sit down job typically.
For real warehouse stuff (forklift, container unload, pick/pack) I use instawork because in theory those people should have some warehouse experience.
I’m guessing people that book for 30 mins are probably just regular people? I generally book multiple people for 4+ hours, if it’s less me or one of the warehouse folks will just take care of it.
I work in food service and the amount of people that mindlessly repeat “no one wants to work anymore” makes me literally tremble with rage.
Though a lot of the times all I have to say is “no one ever wanted to work. That’s why you fucking pay us to be here.” and it’ll shut them up
Used to live not far away from a Mom & Pops pizza joint. Best pizza ever had in my life. 10 years ago, they sold the place. New owner cheapened a lot of the recipes and expanded their menu to compete with a lot of other local businesses, which up till this point had been respecting each others specialities and promoting their own customers to try other places when they asked for something not on their menu.
So they pissed a lot of people off, but the food was still pretty good, for a while at least. Definitely dips in quality, and apparently didn’t do much to keep their prices competitive so most of their good cooks and servers would work about 6 months for them then get hired up somewhere else to make more money for less bullshit.
During the pandemic, every other place boosted their wages by a couple of bucks just to keep people on staff since a LOT of people were doing curbside pick ups, so their overall business went up even if their dining areas were vacant. So every other business in town is thriving despite the difficulties of the lockdown and social distances. Except for the pizza place, who despite having a loyal customer base, didn’t have enough staff to stay open through the week and by the end of 2020 was down to three days a week.
And then these assholes put up their ‘NO ONE WANTS TO WORK ANYMORE’ sign next to their pick up window asking people to be patient with their staff because they don’t have enough bodies. Curious, and knowing the owner wasn’t there at the time, I asked the server what the deal was, and she (un)happily informed me what her wage was, and how she was slated to start working across the street next week for more money. And the kicker being she said she wish the pizza place would just pay more since they’d get more workers and people actually like the joint because it had a lot of history in town.
But nope, these bastards wouldn’t increase pay. They refused to budge from their $9 dollar mark, insisting it was good pay because it wasn’t minimum wage for no prior experience. My sister worked there in the early 2000s for $9 an hour. Everywhere else in town started at 12. The gas station was hiring 16 year olds for 12 dollars an hour to empty trash and sweep floors. The grocery store was paying 13 dollars for people to bag groceries 20 hours a week. But this otherwise successful pizza place with several generations of customers couldn’t keep their doors open because they wouldn’t go above 10 dollars for people to cook food, wait tables and sometimes do deliveries. Someone who had helped them with their finances even quitel informed me they probably could have afforded to pay 8 staff $16 per hour and still make a profit thanks to the regular business they had and they were practically losing money as it stood because they couldn’t keep their doors open consistently and people were getting fed up with going to eat out and finding a closed sign on the front door.
But hey, nobody wants to work anymore. That clearly is the problem.
It’s shit, but definitely not an example of enshittification.
Surplus value to users > surplus value to business partners > surplus value to shareholders.
Workers aren’t supposed to use the law of supply and demand. Only the employers can do that.
Many workers have seemed to feel just fine identifying with the beliefs and values of their oppressors.
This fucking kills me. The race to the bottom mentality to work more for less with less days off is way way too common and I will never understand it.
They seem to equate enduring exploitation with strong character I often see it as the opposite.
@franklin @unfreeradical I understand it. That’s exactly what they are doing. They want to exploit us as much as they can as our exploitation is their profits. Some of us have internalised their will, which is just another stride forward in the race to the bottom.
Minor fix: “kids are lazy, nobody wants to work anymore.”
They already caused two worlds wars, a depression between them, the climate crisis, and settler-colonial genocide.
