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?
The American economy is built in a very specific way to make certain things cheap and certain things very expensive. The cheap things are gas, toys, commodities, clothes, unhealthy food. The expensive things are education, good food, healthcare, and, in certain areas, housing. That means there are a ton of Americans who live extremely precarious lives, where losing their job would be the end, but they still have a higher level of material comfort than many people would in other countries.
The other thing about the American economy is that wealth is extremely biased towards older people. For a long time, the system was built around normal working class people buying a house, and building wealth through that. As long as housing prices went up at a controlled rate, everybody slowly got richer. Now, older people own most of the houses. Like I grew up in a small town that was sort of the ideal American dream neighborhood. There were a bunch of other kids on my street, including some good friends. We rode the bus together and spent the weekends hanging out in my friend's loft. Now, when I go back there, there's like one family with kids on the street, and everyone else is a retired couple in a huge house that they don't really need. They have no particular incentive to move out, because it would be expensive and they're comfortable.
So if you're a younger person without in-demand education you really are extremely poor. 5k could really improve your quality of life by letting you get some dental work or something. Although the unemployment rate is low right now, companies are able to collude to some degree to keep entry level jobs precarious.
I cannot understand the desire to be trapped in a job because without it your family gets no healthcare and will basically either die in a ditch or you'll get a bankrupting bill for it. Not having universal healthcare even as a safety net scares the crap out of me.
Do you truly think anyone desires that?
Some people are convinced that it's the price of freedom
Most people hate this. It's just impossible for the average person to do anything about it because very few politicians support changing the current system. In the 2020 election for instance there were like 2 dem candidates and 0 Republican candidates who wanted a public option for health insurance. Nationalizing the whole thing, NHS style, is completely off the table.
Policies like Medicare for All are popular with a majority of Americans, but aren't implemented because the parties in charge flatly refuse
Also the unemployment rate is low because they stopped counting those who have given up looking for work