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Comment by totalthrowaway | Hacker News Reader

If you have to take a bus for an hour to get to your four-hour shift at a stressful minimum wage job, where your manager is abusive and the workplace is unsafe, your mental health may suffer.

Meaningful work, or contributing to the wellbeing of those around you -- that would be a worthwhile goal. Suffering just so your family isn't hungry is a harder sell.

Inevitably, someone will say they should just learn skills from the internet to improve their lot, and perhaps some will. I think most people on HN (especially me) are so insulated from the reality of working poverty that we just look for technical solutions. I wish there were some.

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> to take a bus for an hour to get to your four-hour shift at a stressful minimum wage job, where your manager is abusive and the workplace is unsafe, your mental health may suffer

Your statement sounds like what would be typically written in an attention grabbing first paragraph of a news article in order to draw people in w/o providing any context as far as how common all or even most of those items you listed even exist. It is not realistic in any way at scale common sense says that. You are highlighting almost certainly an outlier not what is typical to make your point.

Let's take a look in particular into 'suffering just so your family isn't hungry'.

- Riding a bus for an hour in itself isn't suffering. - Four hour shift isn't suffering - Stressful minimum wage job? Any job can be stressful having a job pay more does not make it less stressful. - Manager is abusive. Abusive? This sounds like some characterization for impact to make a point. How realistic is it that the vast majority of jobs have people who are 'abusive' managers (as opposed to a percentage of them let's call it 10% arbitrarily).

- Workplace is unsafe? Where? In the US? You think 'all' or 'most' workplaces are unsafe? Or there are perhaps a percentage that are unsafe?

- Your mental health may suffer. Sure ok that one is fine. But maybe you are in the position that you are in the first place because of your mental health.

Nobody should be taking a bus for an hour to a minimum wage job. One of the reasons a job is MW is that they are everywhere.

You don’t commute that far for minimum wage.

Anecdotally, this is not true.

Due to how many North American cities are designed with urban sprawl and separation of living areas (suburbs) and productive areas (industrial/office zoning laws) it should actually be the norm to have a lengthy commute to work.

Hell, I live in a suburb with quite good public transport and it would take me almost 30 minutes to go to the grocery store by bus.

When I was a teenager and had no car, it took me about an hour to get to my minimum wage job by bus due to transfers. Once I could afford a car (because I lived with mum and dad and could save) that commute got cut to 20 minutes.

If you don't have a car, and the bus runs infrequently, I bet many people spend an hour getting somewhere.

Anecdote, not data, but

https://www.seattletimes.com/business/economy/low-pay-long-p...

You could argue the person in the story should get jobs closer to home, but it is probably more common than you think.

You're right, we probably should have said longer, maybe an hour and a half. I definitely know people that commute a long time for low wages. Or did. They're in better places, now.

One of them used to stay really late at night at a Denny's because the buses didn't run when he needed to get to work, so he would spend the night (basically) at a Denny's so he was at work on time.

If you work in one of the US tech hubs, ask your janitorial staff how long their commute is.

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