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Comment by pc86 | Hacker News Reader

Imagine being in a position where you have to choose between putting up with this hostile bullshit or going hungry/evicted.

Most of us here could tell our bosses to f off and either have enough savings for months (or even years), or at the very least get another job within weeks or days. Even having grown up lower-middle class with zero, often negative, extra money, going years without vacation, etc., it's hard to wrap my head around being forced to deal with abusive supervisors and coworkers because the alternative might be homelessness within weeks.

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> Imagine being in a position where you have to choose between putting up with this hostile bullshit or going hungry/evicted.

Yes, this is exactly why we got the idea of unions in the first place. Without unions we would still be forced to work at least 6 days a week, and many more drawbacks. The list is huge of what unions have given us (in Europe at least).

How does someone get into that position? Are public schools so bad that people come out with no marketable unique skills that would give them natural job security?

What jobs have natural job security? Either you’re protected by a union, a professional association, or having a rare and valuable skill set. The unions have been busted, professional associations are exclusive by their nature and most people definitionally do not have rare and marketable skills. As a result, an increasingly large fraction of jobs are gig work, part-time, or on contract. That includes work in law and software engineering. Precarity is the natural state of an unregulated, de-unionized job market and it is not a bug but a feature. It has little to do with our public schools.

Massive deindustrialization is a huge part of it in the US. There aren't many decent blue collar jobs anymore.

Unique skills are rare by definition.

Each individual skill may be rare, but given how many thousands of different skills there are, the trait of having some rare skill should be common.

But that doesn't mean that it's going to be valued by the market. If it's not valued by the market, the fact that it's rare doesn't help you.

For a high market price, you need the intersection of a scarce skill (low-supply in labor market) that provides value to other people (high-demand in the labor market). Being a good software engineer is an example - low-supply and high-demand, therefore high wage/salary.

> Are public schools so bad that people come out with no marketable unique skills that would give them natural job security?

Yes, but that's not the only issue. Some people are incapable of managing their own affairs. Showing up to work on time, not drunk is not in their personal capacity. It's not really their fault; we are not the authors of our neurobiology.

There are plenty of alcoholics who can show up to work and wait until afterwards to get drunk. There is a certain level of choice to being so egregious about it that you reek of whisky at a meeting, even if that choice is just saying "f it."

Choice is an illusion, a story our brain tells itself to feel better about the reality our consciousness is largely just a witness too.

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