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Comment by doomtop | Hacker News Reader

Your privilege is showing. Not everyone who "chose" the job they have really has a choice. It's just not that simple.

BOH employee pay rates are generally not based on the assumption of tips the way they are for FOH employees.

And don't forget, BOH employees don't have to deal with the way some people treat service workers.

Yours is showing too, along with an unhealthy dose of smugness. GP literally chose to be homeless instead of licking the boots of the wealthy for table scraps, which is a degree of courage above and beyond what could have been expected of him, but it was still courage. Saying that his ability to do this is privileged, is like claiming a man who saves a baby from a burning house is showing his able privilege: true, technically, but grosly unfair and an underhanded way of attacking him.

Why do you eat at restaurants that don't pay staff enough? If "some people" treat service workers badly, and you know this because you've seen it, why don't you tell "some people" that they're acting like pigs?

After the Spanish civil war was underway, tipping was made illegal within the Republic, and George Orwell reports that one of his first experiences "was receiving a lecture from a hotel manager for trying to tip a lift-boy". They had it absolutely right. A business model where staff get paid whatever their customers feel like moves all the financial risk from the rich business owner to the poor worker, emphasises the class differences between the two, and is generally a practice which anyone left-wing enough to be using the word "privilege" should find abhorrent.

> Yours is showing too, along with an unhealthy dose of smugness. GP literally chose to be homeless instead of licking the boots of the wealthy for table scraps,

Personal attacks and ideological rants are two of the things least wanted on HN, so please stop posting them.

Sorry, dang. Posting this wasted a small but irretrievable part of our lives and was a bad decision all round.

Please remove this chain of comments, or the whole account, if you want.

I agree - having to rely on the kindness of someone with more disposable income - or worse, the shaming of another person - for your income while the business owner gets to keep more money as profit is abhorrent.

This is something I had no clue about and will make a note to look into later.

Thanks!

I had to resist the urge to break into uncontrollable laughter when you compared living in your car to saving a baby from a burning building. Since this is a throwaway I strongly suspect you are your own cheerleader. Let me see if I can take you down a peg.

A man who chooses to live in his own car instead of taking a servile job is presumably still in need of food to sustain him. You are basically glorifying living off other people instead of working for a living.

It's a ridiculous comparison, given in response to the ridiculous assertion that homelessness is a privilege.

At the end of the day, at some point someone says "these working conditions are too shitty and I'd rather go look for something else". That person sets a lower bound on working conditions for people who aren't able to leave so easily. Saying "how dare you not work for a pittance with all the other poor buggers trapped on a wage where saving is impossible" is blind; calling it privilege is wilful stupidity.

> I had to resist the urge to break into uncontrollable laughter

Please don't comment like this here, even when another comment seems outrageous. It just makes the thread even worse and breaks HN's civility rule.

Really that's kind of a matter of what "choice" is, but without getting too deep into that discussion, my observation has been that it's driven more by a toxic culture than anything else. I was a minimum wage and food service worker until quite recently, and having worked with many different people that's been my observation. A lot of people "stuck" in that position have been so indoctrined in their own victimhood that they get caught in a negative loop of ruining their own lives and blaming everyone and everything else around them for it. And some of them just plain don't give a shit. And there are some others who manage to get past it, and they're the ones who often manage to make things better for themselves and end up around lower-middle class. Certainly not great, but it's a huge difference. But in my opinion our coddling and infatalizing people isn't really helping the underlying cultural problem, it's making it worse by creating its own kind of privilege, which is basically a freedom from most forms of responsibility aside from having to obey the law.

It's very bizarre to me that the younger generations are learning to throw shame at people for not being in bad circumstances, particularly given the mixed-at-best results shaming produces.

It honestly blows my mind especially since I was describing a somewhat bad circumstance I was once in.

Granted my initial response was somewhat hostile. Nonetheless, I don't understand my own generation sometimes.

Based on the current political landscape, I think it's fair to say that the primary outcome of the shaming is rage

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