“Fight for Fifteen” is officially a Serious Topic. In the New Yorker, William Finnegan follows a minimum-wage NYC McDonald’s worker:
…. I asked Arisleyda Tapia who she thought could raise her pay. “Bruce,” she said immediately. “He’s rich.”
She meant Bruce Colley, the owner of the McDonald’s where she works. Colley owns twenty-nine McDonald’s franchises, including nineteen in Manhattan. He grew up in Westchester County, and graduated from the Trinity Pawling School and Cornell. When he joined the family business, in 1980, his father, Dean, owned more than a hundred McDonald’s franchises in the Northeast. Dean was master of foxhounds of the Golden’s Bridge (New York) Hounds. Bruce is a polo player. His net worth is not a matter of public record. Still, you can see where Tapia got her impression…
… There was a national conference of the fast-food workers’ movement coming up, in Chicago. The union was sending a couple of buses from New York. Maybe she could go….
Did she really believe that Bruce Colley could unilaterally raise the pay of all his employees to fifteen dollars an hour?
Tapia looked down. “He used to give us just one shirt,” she said, finally. “We tried to give a petition to La Dominga about people getting their hours reduced, but she wouldn’t accept it. Then Bruce came and had a meeting with us. He came because we have a strong union committee. He didn’t go to any of his other stores. He listened to us. Then they gave us each a box with four uniforms. That was a real strike victory.” She sighed. “But we know who our real opponent is. It’s the corporation. McDonald’s.”
The space between franchisees and a parent company is nowhere more opaque than at McDonald’s, where the price of admission is exceptionally high: applicants must show at least seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars of unborrowed money even to be considered for a franchise, and the investment costs go up from there. Very few franchisees fail to observe the code of omertà that governs their relationship with the corporation. One disgruntled franchisee in California recently broke the silence, telling the Washington Post that McDonald’s executives had advised her to “pay your employees less” if she wanted to take home more herself. Two former McDonald’s managers recently went public with confessions of systematic wage theft, claiming that pressure from both franchisees and the corporation forced them to alter time sheets and compel employees to work off the clock.
Having a union will put a stop to this type of injustice, Tapia believes. And she was not wrong, I thought, about the importance of tangible victories, however small. Building confidence was crucial, even in the fissured workplace—showing doubters that standing up for yourself need not always bring down the wrath of the bosses on your head and could actually achieve benefits. “Some people are too scared to say anything,” she said. “They’re scared to talk to you, for instance—the media.” I could confirm that. “It’s not that everybody working there supports the union. But they all want us to keep fighting. They’re afraid to fight themselves, but they know they’ll benefit when we win.”…
The conference did not disappoint. Buses pulled in from every direction—St. Louis, Detroit, Greenville, North Carolina. Delegates in red T-shirts practiced their chants in the late-afternoon sun. Inside the convention center, twelve hundred workers filled one end of a vast space. There were elaborate shout-outs from each delegation, a ritual that seemed to go on for hours. But the energy stayed high. There were videos, rappers, a driving beat. The proceedings were directed by an organizing committee of a dozen-plus people on a stage. They never seemed to call for order. They just drove the thing forward. The New York rep, Naquasia LeGrand, a twenty-two-year-old K.F.C. employee from Canarsie, said, “I got to be on my feet all day, and you don’t want me to go to the foot doctor? You want me to smile at customers, but you won’t give me a dental plan?” Mary Kay Henry gave a passionate speech, declaring, “I am proud to bring into this room two million workers who are in this with you to win it!” After Henry’s speech, Tapia was on her feet, along with the rest of the crowd, chanting, “We believe that we can win!” She was rocking, clapping, smiling excitedly.
Tapia said afterward that she was surprised to see that the movement was predominantly African-American. “That’s good,” she told me. “Because they’re not afraid. They have nothing to lose. We’re all afraid of getting deported. They’re not.”…
The history of the civil-rights struggle was constantly invoked. The N.A.A.C.P. had just formally endorsed the fast-food workers’ movement at its national convention (without mentioning the central demand for fifteen dollars an hour, possibly to spare the fast-food franchisees among its leadership the shock of that stark figure). The Reverend William Barber II, the head of the North Carolina N.A.A.C.P., gave a stand-up-and-shout sermon after lunch. Barber talked about President Franklin Roosevelt’s belief that a minimum wage should allow American workers to “live decently,” then offered his own gloss on that idea. “I want to be able to live,” Barber said. “I want to be able to pay my rent, feed my kids, put gas in my car, maybe buy a house—and every now and then fix my hair!” Representative Keith Ellison, co-chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, was on hand. “Income inequality is an existential threat to the American Dream,” he told me. “And these people are doing something about it.” In his conference speech, he said, “In the richest country in the world, you should not be working full time and still be on food stamps.”…
Schlemazel [was Schlemizel till NotMax taught me proper yiddish!]
I was thinking about this the other day. St. Reagan and COmpany said we had to surrender to a “service economy” of course they pictured that as bankers and brokers and insurance and law but THIS is the reality. Service economy means McJob, waiting tables, stocking cloths racks. Those are job that used to be gateways work to teens or retirees not livelihoods. I don’t see how America ever recovers in this condition.
Right now there are ‘light’ manufacturing jobs and warehouse jobs that do not pay $15/hr. If a McJob pays that kind of money those jobs will be forced to raise wages to compete so there is a lot more money fighting against 15 than just some clown and his minions. It will be a long, ugly, fight and the outcome is anything but assured. We need to figure out how those of us not in this fight directly can lend a hand.
Botsplainer
Impressive piece, and precisely what is needed to pierce dismissiveness from dudebros, wannabe dudebros and their enablers.
c u n d gulag
To the sociopathic greed-heads – how much is too much?
Never mind.
Don’t answer that.
What they have is never enough.
They always want more, more, more.
They seem oblivious to the fact that the more money ordinary workers take home, the more they can buy the shit they’re selling.
Anoniminous
@Schlemazel [was Schlemizel till NotMax taught me proper yiddish!]:
And this is different from every other union struggle … how?
Anoniminous
Meanwhile …
The US?
(Give a cite but I’ve reached FYWP 3 link limit.)
Suzanne
I worked at McDonald’s when I was sixteen. The franchise owner I worked for was a flaming asshole. His second-in-command was even worse. I bailed before I started my senior year. Some of the people I worked with at that time, eighteen years ago, still work there. I cannot imagine how beat down I would feel if I worked for those fuckers for eighteen years.
Baud
@Suzanne:
Just reading your comment wore me down. Damn.
Schlemazel [was Schlemizel till NotMax taught me proper yiddish!]
@Anoniminous:
in that people today are not prepared for the violence that accompanied the earlier efforts. That the rich and powerful have better tools today to monitor, predict and control organizers and crush opposition. Lastly, because people today seem to believe that the rich are too good, that we as a society are too civilized, to engage in the rough stuff that took place at Ludlow.
OTOH, I never suggested the earlier fight was a walk in the park.
Geeno
My son is lost in college; he just can’t figure out what he’s really about and good at. He wants to sit out for a semester or two and work, but there aren’t any jobs for the young and unqualified anymore. Those jobs are being held by older people trying support their families. Bush the Lesser said “That’s great” when a woman said she was working three jobs, but no one noticed that there are two jobless people out there, because she needed those jobs.
One big issue lurking on the horizon is that eventually we’ll have more “workers” than we jobs for. Between automation and capital movement, there will be a certain number of people for whom there ARE NO JOBS. None, they’re not lazy, they don’t lack for industriousness, there’s just nothing they can legally do to make money. Which means not that they’ll starve, though some will, but that they will more and more turn to illegal means to make money, and, if those means are closed off, then they’ll do what every other mass group with discontent and nothing else to do with their time has done – they’ll burn that shit down.
I’m kind of hoping for something better for my son than that, but our political system seems unable to oblige.
Iowa Old Lady
@Geeno: I hope your son finds something that will allow him to support himself and make him happy. Most kids are lost in college at first. We act like they should know from day one what they want to do, but that’s the exception, not the norm. He needs to give himself a little time.
rikyrah
good read
Suzanne
@Baud: I remember an incident to this day that essentially summed up my McJob experience. Not the kids who were dropped off at the playland and left there the whole day, often without shoes, because their parents didn’t have care for them. Not the creepers masturbating in the playland. Not the dude who got mad at a new employee for messing up his order, so he threw all his food at me. Not the homeless people to whom I gave free food. Not the frequent customer who was so obese that the shocks in his car were blown out on the driver’s side—but always ordered a double-quarter-pounder, super sized, with a Diet Coke. I have many, many more.
But this is what sums up McD’s for me: Flaming Asshole’s stores sold vanilla cones for 79 cents. Then they decided to sell a smaller sized cone for 29 cents. You could still buy the bigger one, but they heavily advertised the smaller one. So while Assistant Flaming Asshole was visiting the restaurant, a customer came up to my register and ordered a large cone. I took his money, gave him his change, and got him his cone. In full view of our customers, my managers, and my coworkers, Assistant Flaming Asshole came over to me and loudly berated me for making his ice cream cone too big. It was totally embarrassing. I told him, “He ordered a large cone, not a small one.” AFA didn’t believe me, so he interrupted my next customer, went to my register, and went through the transaction history only to find that, yes, that man had indeed ordered a large cone, rather than a small one. AFA just said, “Oh.” Not, “I’m sorry,” or, “Good job,” or, “My bad,” or ANYTHING that would indicate that I had indeed done my job correctly. And I couldn’t do anything. It was totally humiliating and demeaning, and there was nothing I could do about it, because my managers had told me that we had to kiss his ass and be super-deferential. They pulled that crap all the time, treating their employees like shit, with not even common courtesy. I have never been treated so badly as I was there, and I have never made less money for the privilege.
Anoniminous
@Schlemazel [was Schlemizel till NotMax taught me proper yiddish!]:
The bosses are always ready to bring out the thugs and guns and the general public ready to support the bosses, “Justifiable Homocide” & etc. People who are trying to unionize have to know US labor history. They have to know the lengths to which the bosses will go to prevent unionizing.
NotMax
@Iowa Old Lady
That, foremost. Plus, any college worth its salt will have some academic staff tasked to act as counselors and sounding boards for such students and their dilemmas. He may be reticent or unnecessarily feel ashamed to seek out such aid, but needs to get past that if that is the case. It also may be that he and the specific college he’s at are just not a good fit and a different school would be more efficacious.
Of course, have no way to know if this is the case, so just putting it out there: it could be he’s going through a bout of being homesick.
BillinGlendaleCA
@Iowa Old Lady: Or there are students, like I was, that know what they want to do; they’re just not all that good at it. I was fortunately able to survive my first year and change my major my second year.
Botsplainer
@Schlemazel [was Schlemizel till NotMax taught me proper yiddish!]:
Car bombs, poisoning, assassinations of the 1%, particularly targeting meritorious inheritors.
Baud
@Suzanne:
Some people are just sadists, which I didn’t appreciate until later in life.
BillinGlendaleCA
@Botsplainer: It won’t come to that, declining consumption will cause asset price collapse. Sort like 2008, except on steroids. The 1% don’t seem to get that.
Geeno
@Iowa Old Lady: I don’t mind him taking time off; I did between my sophomore and junior years, but those jobs that kids, like my son, depend on just aren’t there anymore. A friend of my son took a semester off to work and couldn’t find a job in that whole time. Those jobs are being gobbled up by desperate olders that I never had to compete against back when I was looking for that type of work.
Another Holocene Human
Anne Laurie,
Why would you frame this issue of dignity and living wages for service economy issues to fit your ongoing grudge with what remains of the print media? Is this fair to the topic to start off with snide, ironic distance to the notion that NYT took notice of the subject? To be fair to NYT, haven’t they written more abstract articles about the transition to service sector economy and the decoupling of productivity and wages since at least the 1990s?
Why instead of having a discussion of these brave workers, people who speak different languages from all over the world, men and women who have chosen to stand out in front and fight, like a reborn IWW, you frame it as NYT snark?
Aren’t the workers more important?
srv
Joe Sample, RIP. Only 75.
smintheus
@Another Holocene Human: The article is from the New Yorker. I don’t understand the rest of your comment, either.
Josie
@Another Holocene Human: As far as I can tell, you are the only one who is off of the topic of the excellent article Anne Laurie has pointed out for us.
Schlemazel [was Schlemizel till NotMax taught me proper yiddish!]
@Botsplainer:
I know I am the mot negative person here but that has been my assumption for 10-12 years now. My big fear is that we will balkanize the nation setting off intersectional conflicts with even more car bombs, poisonings and beheadings. Of course we might get lucky & just end up under the thumb of some modern day Hitler, one equiped with the largest nuclear arsenal in the world.
Schlemazel [was Schlemizel till NotMax taught me proper yiddish!]
@BillinGlendaleCA:
The point I hammer home every time someone wants to talk about the American economy: 75% of GDP is consumer spending. What happens to GDP when consumers have nothing left to spend? Are the billion CHinese that you so lust after going to spend $180 on tennis shoes when you are only paying them .35/hour?
Cermet
@Schlemazel [was Schlemizel till NotMax taught me proper yiddish!]: Didn’t think of that! Excellent point and that explains so f’ing much!
srv
@Schlemazel [was Schlemizel till NotMax taught me proper yiddish!]: Well, we can start making shoes for them. Or something.
Rick Bookstaber is a guy who thinks about the future consumption:
http://rick.bookstaber.com/2014/05/piketty-myopia.html
He thinks tomorrow’s consumers aren’t like yesterdays, because their consumption is much more virtual. Even if a kid could move out from mom & dad, get a white collar job, would they want their own 2500 sqft McMansion, 30 year mortgage, 2 cars and 2.5 children?
Hal
@Suzanne:
I worked at burger king senior year of high school. 22 years ago. I remember people who worked there ranged in age from teens to 60s and several had been there for years. I remember praying to the sky gods not to let that happen to me. Seeing grown adults struggle to make enough money to pay rent or buy a little food while working in a 90+ degree kitchen that smelled like old grease is hugely depressing.
Cermet
@Geeno: Sorry to hear that! Maybe they could take more general course to keep working towards the degree but not be in danger of too many credits with no major;a few PE’s, various English and history, art/drama as well as some intro/low level math courses (if not a STEM major) can be used to fill out a semester or two. A non-credit chem (to get ready for a real chem) might be worth doing once in case a STEM is of interest.
BruceFromOhio
Imagine what would happen to an employee that went public with confessions of systematic “order of fries and shake to go” theft.
This is why workers fare better by unionizing.
srv
By their internets, you shall know them:
Iowa Old Lady
OT, Mr IOL called. He’s at least gotten as far as Chicago on his trek home from Spain. We’ll see whether he gets the next flight which is to Cedar Rapids. An earlier Cedar Rapids flight was cancelled because the airlines didn’t have a plane available.
Another Holocene Human
@Anoniminous: Liberia is an American colony. An African-American colony. Why would the US gov treat Liberians any better than they treat their cousins back home?
If we had a Democratic majority in both houses, maybe. Studs Terkel in Hard Times recorded the story of a segregated hospital built by the FDR admin during the Great Depression. After the feds left, the local potentates seized the facility, kicked the Negroes out, and made it the white hospital thenceforth.
White supremacy is the prevailing wind of American politics. If, like Woodrow Wilson, you wish to advance it, by, say, redlining neighborhoods and invading Haiti for being uppity, the wind is at your back. If, however, you wish to be an LBJ or an Eric Holder and try to use the power of the government to ensure that all citizens have access to the ballot box, you do so fighting against gale-force winds. LBJ was lucky to have the Warren court because Holder doesn’t even have that.
Another Holocene Human
Maybe the situation with Liberia will change when African Americans get a long-term, senior senator, a Lieberman or a Kennedy, to influence a change in the US’s priorities. Kennedy was the architect of a major change in immigration policy towards Irish nationals (who have been coming to the US illegally for decades–hell, I know someone who came in illegally AFTER Kennedy got the law changed because he didn’t feel like waiting for the red tape to untangle itself). That’s the kind of stuff that makes a real difference.
White supremacists masturbate to the sounds of the four horsemen of the apocalypse thundering through West Africa.
Mnemosyne
Ahem. Speaking of long reads, I finally have my piece up about Night Nurse (1931). I’m hoping to get Trouble in Paradise up tomorrow or Monday, but it turns out it takes me longer to write these than I thought, even if I’ve seen the film before. Hopefully you’ll think it’s worth the wait!
Another Holocene Human
@Iowa Old Lady: If he got through US Customs and Immigration the rest is gravy.
Coming home is always the worst part of an overseas trip for me. That’s why I settled for vacationing in shitty Lake Placid (to be honest, I thought it would be more fun than it was, although it has its high points, you know literally the high points, I climbed some rocks if you know what I mean) instead of Niagara Falls this year because border crossing. FUCK IT.
However, I had to check my privilege last month because my good friend’s wife is an Ecuadorean national and she got stopped by French immigration on the way to their Parisian honeymoon, detained, and eventually sent back to Miami because of some issue with her visa. I know she didn’t fuck up her paperwork because she is a scarily efficient overachiever who planned her own wedding and designed and made all the decorations (it was some super romantic kill-yourself-now kind of affair, so not kidding) and who is a PhD candidate in a super competitive major while running a non-profit advocacy group that got their political agenda passed starting from zero two years ago. FUCK BORDER CROSSINGS.
Another Holocene Human
@Josie: I’m just telling you how I feel, I start scanning something about fight for fifteen and it starts with snark and derision.
Going out there in public is tough, it takes courage, it takes faith, it takes a lot of time and dedication and resources by organizers. And part of what organizers try to do is get attention in the form of media response. So frankly I just feel insulted. Why is this about how much the media sucks right off the bat and not about these brave workers and SEIU?
Maybe you can see past that and maybe I’m too sensitive. I just spent THREE AND A HALF YEARS getting to the point where I can get rank and file in the streets and labor issues in the press locally SO FORGIVE ME FOR BEING A LITTLE PISSY ABOUT THAT. Do NOT denigrate what it took for those labor organizers and those workers organizing their own workplaces to be able to do interviews with major media. Do NOT spit on their hard work.
The Thin Black Duke
@Mnemosyne: You’re a good film critic. And speaking as a crazed, unrepentant, doomed-beyond-all-hope-of-redemption movie junkie, you have just been bookmarked. Thank you.
Iowa Old Lady
@Another Holocene Human: Do I gather you don’t enjoy border crossings?
Mnemosyne
@The Thin Black Duke:
Thank you! It’s funny what Bill said above about college majors, because 20+ years ago I went to USC intending to be a cinema critical studies major and stuck with it. It was probably a foolish decision, but I don’t regret it one bit!
The Thin Black Duke
@Mnemosyne: Too many movie reviewers simply type out a dull synopsis overloaded with the who, what, when, and where. A great film critic tells their readers why.
p.a.
“We’re desperate. Get used to it.”-X
The Reptilicans and their DLC fellow travelers have achieved 2 generations of dominance at the cost of pushing working people and the unemployed to the brink. Dialectical Materialism anyone? If the poor fuckers had just VOTED. Now there are stirrings, and we have to deal with voter suppression. Why didn’t we get election day made a national PAID holiday when we controlled all 3 branches…
Josie
@Another Holocene Human: I understand your feelings about snark and derision used against something you feel strongly about. I just didn’t get snark and derision from Anne Laurie’s intro to the article. I got that she was interested enough in the subject to bring it to our attention and highlight the strongest part of the article. Different strokes for different folks, I guess.
PIGL
@BillinGlendaleCA: They are certain that their assets and privelege are guaranteed by state power, and will be preserved by all means necessary, no matter how many bodies end up the streets without eyeballs, tongues or fingernails. Skin colour won’t matter except maybe at the very beginning. What the Freikorps does to black kids, they’ll just as easily do to white adults, and anyone in between.
MoeLarryAndJesus
Guillotines.
Ruckus
Let me put it this way. I make more than $15/hr. But I’m a master craftsman in my line of work. I have over 50 yrs experience.
Now the kicker, my boss is good. He pays well in his line of work (precision machining). But I make $1/hr more than my foreman did, doing the same type of work 30 yrs ago. And I paid on the upper end for this type of work in LA and I know because I belonged to a trade group that tracked wages throughout the country. Wages have been going nowhere for 30 yrs. It’s not just the fast food workers, it’s almost all blue collar workers.
Kay
This is a new study on wage theft.
Yesterday I talked to a 20 year old here who went to what he called a “working interview”. I asked him what that means and he told me his “interview” was 4 hours washing dishes at a local restaurant. He was hired, but he doesn’t know if he’ll get paid for the 4 hours. I hope he pursues the lost wages if they don’t pay him for what was his first shift, but I don’t know if he will because he needs the job and he’s shy.
Ruckus
@Suzanne:
I had a boss once that pulled that shit in public. The first time I let it go but people around me told me I should have told the boss to fuck off. The second time I didn’t say a word but took him in a closed room and let him have it. The last thing I told him was if he ever did it to me again I would not give him the courtesy of a closed door, but would make him look like the little asshole he was acting like to everyone in earshot. At that point I cared less about keeping my job than my dignity.
Ruckus
@Kay:
A working interview? WTF?
That is a new low in bullshit hiring practices. A probationary period, sure. But an interview to wash dishes? That is…. I’m speechless. Pissed off and speechless.
Kay
@Ruckus:
I know. It bothers me that it has a name. He didn’t come up with “working interview”. Someone told him that. I’ll ask him next time I see him.
I wonder too if it’s harder for them to figure out if they’re getting all their pay because a lot of them don’t get paychecks anymore. They get “payroll cards”.
Mnemosyne
@Ruckus:
It was years ago, but I once had a working interview … through a temp agency, and I was paid for the day at the normal rate. Nowadays, they would probably call me an “intern” and not bother to pay at all.
WaterGirl
@Kay: That’s 15%. Bastards! I want to see people start going to jail for this stuff.
Mnemosyne
@Kay:
I can see why it would appeal to a business to do that even without the wage theft thing — all of my longest-lasting jobs came from temp-to-permanent positions where they could try me out for a few weeks and see if I was a good fit for the office. But they paid me to do it. They didn’t expect me to come in and work for the day for free to see if they really liked me.
doomsayer (a lurker)
what bothers me the most is that these are the mainstream jobs today. I was lucky but if I tried to get my job now they wouldn’t even look at me. I hang on by my fingernails. I can’t even fathom what the kids are dealing with today. It’s horrifying. $15 an hour is a living wage. How do we make it happen?
Aardvark Cheeselog
@Ruckus:
I’m in my mid-50s. I’m a software engineer, which is the same line of work that my father did (though he started back when you programmed a computer by physically flipping switches). He sent four kids to college and went on a 2-week vacation every year, on one income. My family can’t do on two professional incomes what he did on one. I’m just glad I don’t have four kids, and that the one currently at college has merit scholarships, a good work ethic, and good luck finding jobs.
Ruckus
@Mnemosyne:
Centuries ago when I owned a business and had employees, I always told the new hires that they were on probation for 90 days, that they would be paid x for that time, and at the end they would be given a raise commemorate with their skill level. I frequently would shorten the period and give them the raise if they showed good skills and work ethics. But I always knew if they didn’t have the goods much sooner. My record was less than 1 hr. before deciding that no way in hell was this person staying for the entire period. But I also paid a person a full days pay if they showed up for work and I fired them. That guy that got in just under an hour got a check for 8. Not a huge thing but it was a craft business and many people lied about their skill levels. Some lied about having any skill at all or even having ever been in a machine shop even once. That was the 1 hr guy.
On the flip side I had many people who told me they had never worked at one place so long because they always got pissed about the money or the hours or the asshole boss. I didn’t use to understand this, why would a boss be an asshole to the people making him/her money? I’ve since learned that some people are just assholes. I think I may have been young and innocent at one time. Now I’m old and cynical. Go figure.
Ruckus
@Aardvark Cheeselog:
I stand properly corrected.
I used to know someone whose parents came from China over 60 yrs ago. They spoke no english their entire lives and worked in low end manual labor, he in a laundry and she a seamstress in a sweatshop. But they owned an apartment building so their rent was paid for and they put their 4 kids through college and they are all professional people, one formulates prescriptions, one a CPA, one in IT, and I can not remember what the other did.
Could they do this today?
No. Not even close.
Kay
@WaterGirl:
They have suggestions at the bottom, “hire 300 regulators” is one of them, but I think we need more than fines, more than state regulatory action.
I think they need a non-state advocate or organization that is a “local” – close to their workplace and accessible to them. I read the Department of Labor enforcement site and, well, it’s a big country. It’s 18 million here, at one chain in California and them 7 million dollars recovered there, at another in San Antonio. You’d need an army of regulators.
Kay
@doomsayer (a lurker):
They’re doing great. They keep shaking it up because they won’t get coverage if they do the same things over and over. Last week was “civil disobedience” and they added home health care workers .
This is one of their Twitter feeds. They’re extremely active on Twitter :)
If you want to see what they’re doing during one of their “actions” it’s the best place to watch because they post tons of photos and video from all over. I think the civil disobedience was a big success, as far as media coverage. They get on local news that way.
https://twitter.com/fightfor15
Mike McNeil
@Ruckus:
Started using computers at age 30 when the publishing company I was doing paste-up and layout for put a Mac on my desk in 1987. As a failed art major (good enough but like music, dance and athletics, there tends to be a gift that some folks have… which I didn’t), newlywed and a techophile, I read every fking manual there was and six weeks later I was a Technical Coordinator.
After various stints at professional service gigs – copywriting and editing and marketing – I took a job selling Macs, about the only product I could stand behind after 15 years of professional use. Six weeks later (again) our repair tech quit and I became a Mac repair guy at age 45. Thanks to some latent Scots techno DNA which I did NOT know I possessed, I ran this branch of a regional company for the next decade and… at age 55 got hired as the Mac repair tech at the large state university… where the benefits are over a third of my paltry salary, but have already paid for my wife’s uterine cancer (stage 1 and she’s fine now) and eldest son’s ACL either of which might have bankrupted us if I was still in the private sector.
Moral? There is none, other than luck and timing play a not insignificant role in jobs and careers. I was a typical Boomer teen and young adult and thanks to guessing right about Macs in the 1980s, got lucky when Jobs resurrected Apple and have ridden the Apple wave into a decent tech job at a state university that will see me through to my FRA (Full Retirement Age).
I’m wary of what the future holds for our six kids (second marriage, three of each on either side) as the margin of error for anyone not in the upper ten percentile of income – white privilege and all – appears to have vanished. They’re bright, articulate and ambitious, but so are their peers all over the world.
Maybe the Universal Dole combined with some kind of compulsory public service – think more WPA/CCC than military – is due, before the robots take over completely. Yo no se – I just don’t envy anyone younger than 35 or so who’s not in a technical or professional field already. “They” don’t want to hire you, or pay you if they do, or give you any benefits if they do bother to hire and pay you. WTF? This breaking of the social contract always bites everyone on the @ss – the big and rich who end up twirling from a lamp post, the poors who die like dogs before some of them extract their revenge. Is this what we want for the US and the rest of the planet? Time to GOTV while there’s still a vote to get out, and see if we can steer back to common sense and decency before we forget what those are.
chris9059
@Botsplainer:
unfortunately this may indeed be necessary
BruceFromOhio
@Ruckus:
Welcome to Balloon Juice. Make yourself comfortable!
Ruckus
@Mike McNeil:
Yeah, I’m a early boomer, on SS and still working. Too many days are ibuprofen days any more, the body is beat up from working too many 10+ hr days/6+ day weeks standing on concrete, moving metal. In some ways I’m fortunate that I don’t have kids/grandkids that I have to watch struggle along in a system that is so different that what I went through. The GI bill paid for college, rent was cheap, jobs were not as hard to find and get and paid, if not reasonable, at least not unreasonable wages. Now? Retirement? Can’t until I have to stop working because I just can not go on any longer. That isn’t the story I was sold to get me to work all those hours and days.
@BruceFromOhio:
I think that’s why I fit in here. And why I keep coming back.
Lurking Canadian
@srv: sure. Why wouldn’t they? Has some sort of speciation event occurred to make kids fundamentally different from their parents?
All things being equal, there will be some who reject their parents lifestyle. There will also be others who reject it in favour of a brownstone in Park Slope, no kids, no car and no yard.
However, things are not equal. Most of them are “choosing” not to live in big houses in the suburbs because they graduate saddled with massive debt and can’t find any job that doesn’t need a hairnet.
People have been “choosing” less and less financial security for the entirety of my working life. I remember articles in the early 90s about how Gen Xers were “choosing” to change jobs every five years. Apparently, unlike their stodgy old dads who worked one job for thirty-five years with regular raises and a defined benefit pension, my peers were all “choosing” a life with no job security and no retirement security. Because freedom. Or creativity. Or some shit.
Pretty soon, the articles will be about how today’s youth are “choosing” to roast sparrows under the bridge, rather than eat the bourgeois farm raised food they grew up with.
Lurking Canadian
@Lurking Canadian: oh rats. The first “reject” should be more like “aspire to”, but I can’t edit with my phone.