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?
Are these lower classes voting to change this or are they completely brainwashed into voting against their own interests?
It almost kinda sounds like there's an unspoken caste system going on in the way you described it.
A lot of it is decades of misinformation and propaganda paired with limited to no education and what some journalists call "braindrain" where those who do come from these areas and do get educated end up leaving.
Lots of us poors just don't vote at all.
We're working all the time, so its difficult to find the time and energy to try to be up to date on the local politicians and ballot measures in any real way and even find time away from work to physically go vote (because who the fuck even knows if the mail in ballots even get counted assuming you can get one and figure out how to mail it back in).
Also, there isn't anybody to vote for. Your options are Dem, Repub, Libertarian, Independent. And none of the politicians running under those banners are actually offering any drastic material change to a shitty system. During the last mid terms where I live, I took a few hours to find who was going to be on the local ballot and skim their websites. The farthest "left" candidates were the Dems and the choices where "Religious Person", "Religious Person", "Milquetoast Boilerplate Dem", and "Cryptobro." None of them run off voting year outreach programs where they help people in need navigate the few social support programs in the deep red state where I live. None of them advocate for vacant houses, apartments, empty hotel/motel rooms to be appropriated by the city government to house those without homes. None of these candidates even really exist outside of the 12 months between filing their intent to run, securing their spot on the ballots before they're printed, and the final vote counts are certified.
Oh yes, these states are red because the Republican party has convinced them all to vote against their own interests.
Many may not understand this, but the single most important voting point to most in my area is abortion. The churches have convinced the masses that it is basically the ultimate sin. They will choose any candidate with an R (Republican party) next to their name on the ballot.
They've also convinced them that social programs are for lazy layabouts, and they should be cut. Even if the abortion issue were somehow solved, it would not change much.
Where I live we're fortunate enough to have universal healthcare but it's constantly under attack from the same side of politics that ultimately want to abolish it.
I have a friend who was going on about cutting taxes and especially not having to pay for others healthcare. Meanwhile, this idiot had just had a baby with his wife with the entire tab picked up by taxpayers, was now receiving family benefits and payments for starting a family and would soon need to rely on taxpayer-subsidied child care when she went back to work and school going forward. It somehow didn't dawn on him that he himself was reliant on all of this assistance and was getting far more out of it than he was putting in.
At least he wasn't so cooked that he was scared of others having abortions but I've at least had a taste of this bazaar mentality here.
Poor people don't vote because they've completely checked out. They don't believe either party represents their interests. They're correct.
There is no way to vote poverty away here because the entire apparatus is already owned by the people who want widespread poverty to exist