My anecdotal experience: The best jobs in my career were the medium-pay, medium-expectations jobs.
Most (but not all) of the very high paying jobs I've had also came with very high expectations. They were paying a lot of money and they knew that people didn't have many other options to get paychecks that large. Managers were compensated on performance of their teams, so they had to extract as much work as possible to get the maximum pay. They knew that they could post a job ad tomorrow with the high salary listed and it would attract hordes of qualified applicants who wanted that paycheck.
I never got to experience the golden era of certain FAANG companies where many people were making bank and few people were ever fired.
Likewise, the lowest paying jobs I've had were also terrible. They had no concept of anything other than extracting work from people for minimum pay. They kept everyone tired, demoralized, and afraid of being fired. People don't search for other jobs as much when they're constantly burned out and overwhelmed.
The sweet spot, for me, has been right in the middle. Good pay (great, relative to all professions), but not top of market pay, and reasonable expectations. Surrounded by a mix of people from different ages but with a lot of parents who have families at home. If I interview somewhere and it's nothing but mid 20s people who don't have families, I stay away because they have much worse concept of work-life balance in my experience.
That's a very good point.
I remember the first time I was in a cycle of trying to meet impossible expectations. We kept putting in a lot of effort and doing some very impressive things, but every time we got close to delivering something the goalposts would move.
After far longer than I'd like to admit, I realized that those lofty expectations weren't designed to be met. They were designed to keep us perpetually insecure. Always feeling like we needed to try a little harder. And it was working on us, at least for a couple years.
The illusion was briefly shattered when a manager gave us a goal that numerically meant that one of our vendors would have to serve us at a loss. He wanted us to negotiate a contract where they paid us to be their customer, when you added up all the factors. When we showed him, he did a pretend-angry routine and lectured us on how we should be thinking bigger all the time. We "failed" to meet that impossible expectation, to the surprise of absolutely nobody on the team. After that, it was like the team had been freed from the shackles of impossible expectations. We did our best and shrugged off the disappointed manager routine when it didn't meet the arbitrary expectations. It was interesting to watch as the manager realized his power over us had been broken, which quickly gave way to a slow-motion process of sidelining us for younger replacements who were more receptive to the disappointed manager routine.
I miss many of those coworkers, but I do not miss that job.
If no one in management has kids, run the other way.
Who am I? Who are any of us to complain and/or fix things? The answer is: we're the only people who can. Change has to start somewhere. The best thing for people who have it worse isn't to silently suffer, it's to help ourselves by dismantling the systems under which we both suffer. We have to take every opportunity to do that, and that means even the unglamorous ones.
> If I'm not for myself, who will be? If I am only for myself, who am I? If not now, when? — Hillel
Import taxes aren't going to help without serious, long-term government subsidization of those jobs.
Apply that to all companies who ship parts to Mexico for assembly/manufacture, and it will make a difference, assuming the tariffs are high enough to make a difference in the showroom.
Here's the Gore/Perot debate pre-NAFTA. Perot seems pretty spot on in his assessment.
More expensive cars means cars are going to be less in demand. Means less cars manufactured, means less jobs for people who make cars.
Also, reworking the auto manufacturing pipeline is going to take decades not days.
Maybe ask yourself if the reason nobody else in the past 30 years has enacted the recent measures of the American government is because they were stupid/lazy/greedy or if it's because they clearly don't work.
Shipping parts to Mexico to have them assembled then shipping it to the US is much less efficient than shipping the parts to the US, manufacturing in the US, then selling in the US.
>More expensive cars means cars are going to be less in demand. Means less cars manufactured, means less jobs for people who make cars.
Less jobs for Mexican labor making cars, more jobs for American labor making cars, that's the objective. It also strengthens unions by increasing headcount and making the threat of moving labor to another country much more expensive. Remember, the discussion is about the plight of the average American worker and how they've been systematically squeezed for 30+ years now due to globalization.
>Also, reworking the auto manufacturing pipeline is going to take decades not days.
Yes, more like years not decades, but ya, not sure why anyone would think it would take days. I suspect a lot of companies will try political maneuvers like waiting out Trump's term, hoping the next guy would be more sensible to their profit needs.
>Maybe ask yourself if the reason nobody else in the past 30 years has enacted the recent measures of the American government is because they were stupid/lazy/greedy or if it's because they clearly don't work.
Companies have a much higher profit margin by using Mexican labor, at the expense of US labor. Those companies also donate a lot of money to campaigns. It's pretty off brand for the Democrats under Clinton/Gore to champion moving thousands of jobs to Mexico under NAFTA. I wonder what motivated them to do that.
It may or may not work, but don't let perfect be the enemy of good. Despair of the average American has a lot of negative, long term social consequences we're currently dealing with, and it's just going to get worse.
Did you know foreign car manufacturers make cars in the US for the US market to avoid tariffs and improve efficiency? They might be on to something.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_automobiles_manufactur...
Let's suppose that we institute an income cap and a wealth cap. For the sake of argument, we'll call that 10 million dollars a year, and 100 million dollars. All the existing taxes apply. Nothing gets treated specially: your income for the year will always be capped at 10MM, and your total wealth will be capped at 100MM. It's a 100% tax and knowingly evading it is a crime. If you hit the income limit in two different years, the mayor of your city will award you a plaque, with an optional ceremony, and if you hit the wealth limit, the governor of your state will award you a plaque.
How much pain does that inflict?
None at all.
But nearly everyone harbors some secret hope of becoming a billionaire right now, and the thought of not winning that lottery is enough to make it politically impossible to enact this tiny reform.
And if you can't make reforms, the whole thing may need to be dismantled.
I'm not repudiating (in this thread) capitalism, per se. Only whatever system it is that's abusing OP's protagonist. If you think capitalism inevitably punches someone in the stomach, well, then yeah; you've got your work cut out for you.
The question you should be asking first is, is it sustainable? If you give someone a bank account with a million in it, they can bring a lot of good to themselves by spending it profligately... but then one day it runs out.
That can be a legitimate use, but one should remember that it's but a temporary thing to solve a particular problem, there should be an end date, and a way out. In particular, you should not start depending on the thicker stream of money such a job pays.
It's rare that such a job leaves the physical damage described in the story. More often it can damage you mentally: burned out, depressed, crushed by internally felt shame and guilt. This should not be discounted too easily; it can cost you a lot of plain money to get treated, to say nothing of the suffering, both yours and that of those who care about you.
It may be a terrible job in the absolute sense, but also a good job in the relative sense because it pays well and most involve gut punches.
None of that applies to this allegory. Dodging the punch got the protagonist put on a three-punch PIP. Who knows what punching back would have led to.
For me it's the uselessness of it that would bother me, the actual act of getting punched is neither here nor there. I mean I pay to take boxing classes and I enjoy them.
>Who are you to feel bad about your situation?
I am a human being with one life that is far to brief to spend it being miserable.
Our safety nets have been ripped away from us. Leaving us with this awful choice of working with shitty employers. In some cases, they might even hold a monopsony on labor and thus have _no choice_.
The time I have wasted at shit tier employers is lost forever. All so the rapacious capitalists could pump the stock and deliver share holder value