Starving your workers to death is not a good long term strategy.
Management is not nearly as smart as they want us to think.
It is when you have an unlimited supply of workers with zero protections. The breaking of the social contract makes all the old rules no longer apply. They will drive us to the absolute edge of torches and pitchforks and keep us there, forever. They will come up with newer and better ways of determining where that line is, and just how far they can push it. And we will sit here like obedient dogs and take it.
I had a grocery store clerk eyeballing my checkout yesterday with absolute amazement at the "luxury" of buying TWO boxes of name brand cream cheese. We live in two completely seperate worlds at this point, and I don't think you have any idea how bad things have gotten for the bottom 90% in this country earning <$100k.
Like, me and my wife have a very decent combined income of over 100k, but even then - 10 years ago I would have thought that with that kind of money we'd be living like kings, but in reality it just lets us save some money at the end of the month and not a whole lot else. If we actually wanted to move up from our 900sqf house or get a slightly newer car, it would eat up into all of that quickly. I think we've reached a point now where I literally don't understand who in this country is buying all these new cars and goes on holidays twice a year(forget expensive ones - I mean a few days in Spain with a budget agency). And I definitely don't understand how a teacher on £27k a year(or a nurse) is expected to make ends meet. It feels like an erosion of society from the very core, where unless you are in the top 1% you just aren't even playing the same game.
I feel like I am the only person in my friendship group who can afford things like a decent place to live and good quality groceries. This is all from me working hard to move into Software engineering from a languages and humanities degree. Honestly feel that the system is severely broken if the only way to afford a decent quality of life is to get into one of the most lucrative professions out there. Most of the people in my job have been screwed over by the market and have way more rent than me as well, so are probably not even able to do the things I can.
I feel a lot of pressure to get into FAANG or something in order to hope to ever get a house in my lifetime. Especially since my landlord threatened to put up my rent by like £400 the other day and my boss told me my raises will never keep up with inflation. But I'm a humanities person. I don't see myself becoming some sort of 10x engineer without it making me miserable. So, since the absolutely fucked announcements from my landlord and boss, I'm thinking of any way to leave this economic shithole of a country.
If you’re 25, you might as well spend your evenings trying to upskill. Make time for important things, but trim unnecessary leisure and invest in your skills/expertise/network. It’s much harder to do this when older.
Personally I continued to improve my technical skills, especially in getting into new areas like AI, while also building considerable domain knowledge, and taking on management responsibilities. You don’t really have to compete directly with yon 10x STEM rockstars - go for breadth, not proficiency. Someone who understands a lot of areas fairly well, and can communicate and document well, is incredibly useful to an organisation.
There might be some really tough maths on that course, but I’d argue it’s not exactly necessary. There’s undoubtedly a lot of people doing high paying “AI” related jobs whose main qualification is being able to identify a use case and coordinate a project staffed by engineers and data scientists.
Hyperbole is for good storytelling, not nuanced discussion or argument.
They will drive us to the absolute edge of torches and pitchforks and keep us there, forever.
Hardly an exaggeration to call this doomsaying.
You seem very petulant.
Or they would have to resort do massive immigration, destroying culturally their own country in the process, and laying the path to being replaced in the long run.
None of this path is good for them.
I live in a country where homes for the elderly (and the health system at large) have managed to remain profitable while overpaying doctors and severely underpaying just about anyone else. Now we're two months into a failing doctors' strike (because the doctors feel like they can extort an even higher wage from the state) and we're on the way to sign a memorandum for easier worker immigration from Phillipines because we need nursing and medical assistance staff and the (heavily subsidized and mostly state-ran) healthcare institutions can't by law pay native staff a fair wage.
What I can gather from that so far is that it sucks when you're being fucked over by a free market economy because some venture capitalist is being a miser, but it's 10 times worse when the miser is a legitimately legislated government. Immigration is not just a xenophobia issue, it's a genuine concern when an entity realizes it doesn't need to spend as much and starts mass importing cheap manpower from the other side of the globe.