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Comment by ElevenLathe | Hacker News Reader

I have the same experience, but would like to clarify that almost everything on this list is mostly only true of middle class employment. You absolutely can "fail" if you are on the bottom rung of the political-economic ladder -- this looks like a life in and out of prison, homelessness, despair, and an early death. You don't get endless chances from your landlord or your parole officer. If your area of weakness is "money" (earning enough of it, knowing how much to spend and how much to save, etc.), then you are still fucked. To someone with a poor education, filling out a job or EBT or WIC application is indeed a high-stakes test with disastrous consequences for failing. Your boss in the restaurant kitchen does not want you to question their methods of dishwashing -- he will fire you instead for being lippy if you try to negotiate around it.

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That's a fair point. My first job was retail, and I was accidentally late for a shift _once_ and I got put on probation for weeks and wasn't even allowed to take sick leave during the probationary period. The better the job the less you're treated like trash. People float all sorts of explanations for why this would be, but I think fundamentally people just don't know how to move away from class hierarchy. I think it's built into us.

I believe it's because if you are easily replaceable, then screwing up means you're not worth the trouble. If you aren't easily replaceable (whether it's because you have demonstrated you're a good employee or you're working a high-demand role), you are worth the trouble and you'll get more chances. There are other reasons too, such as jurisdictions where suing after being laid off is more common, which makes more chances, PIP and severance packages more likely.

>I believe it's because if you are easily replaceable, then screwing up means you're not worth the trouble.

These ideas work great when you have a large/growing labor population, we're seeing it start to fall apart in a tight/shrinking labor population. "nobody wants to work" is the drum beat of the employers that used to burn employes.

Well, then they're not easily replaceable. Which implies those workers have other options. And thus employers that treat workers worse than other employers will see workers leave and/or find it harder or more expensive to hire. So it all works out.

It all works out, unless everyone is doing it, and then entire swaths of the economy just burn down.

In lower level jobs like retail and food service, nobody can retain workers.

You would think then "oh, labor market, the cost of labor goes up"

But no. Everyone is greedy, stubborn, and stupid.

Instead, you just run your business with half the labor. Does it work? Not really.

So then you think, "oh, well free market dynamics. These companies will go out of business because their product or service sucks"

But no! Because everyone is doing it! And now everything just sucks!

I promise I’m not that whiggish when it comes to automation, but there was a time when a good portion of human labour was washing clothing, and now that’s become much less of a thing for much of the world.

Perhaps food service and in-person retail will start to go that way too. It’s my hope we can navigate that and still make a place where it won’t be so bad.

Most of the automating in retail isn't even automation, it's just corporate laziness. They're passing their job off to their own customers.

Why am I bagging groceries? Am I on your payroll?

Great, you put in a machine and replaced half your workers. Expect you replace them with me, your customers. The machine is just for kicks.

Sometimes we do our own laundry, sometimes we pump our own gas, and sometimes we prepare our own meals. Not having a servant to do those things for us doesn’t make us destitute; it makes us human.

It's not a "servant", it's a service.

Why don't I cut my own hair? Because I'm shit at it.

If you went to a barber, and you sat down for a haircut, and they handed you a pair of clippers, would you go back? Fuck no!

The problem with having customers do their own checkout isn't that the fat and lazy customers have to get off their fat asses. No. It's that customers are unbelievably shit at that.

Have you noticed that, despite there being, like 10x as many self checkout lanes than before, the lines are longer than ever? Go ahead and do the math on that. Not only are people doing more work, they're paying more for it too, and it's a much worse service. Lose, lose, lose. Unless you're the corporate overlords.

Well, maybe fast-food restaurants were a low-interest-rate phenomenon or whatever the equivalent term is (a high-labour-supply phenomenon?). If that kind of business can't afford good enough working conditions to get a decent supply of labour while selling its products at a decent price, then yeah, the whole industry will burn. But if there's a demand for it then sooner or later someone will start offering it. I think that probably looks like a decoupling between middle-class-oriented (e.g. Costco or Chipotle) and working-class-oriented.

During COVID a new kind of food business sprung up called a virtual restaurant (or a ghost kitchen), where instead of having to rent a restaurant space and hire wait staff, they just had a kitchen and delivery drivers. Lower expenses, fewer staff.

Eventually, those delivery drivers will be replaced by delivery drones.

Often I hear "I wouldn't take a higher paying job. It's not worth the stress". But I find the opposite to be true. The better paid the job, the less that's expected of you.

This is what you say when you don't want to tell your boss that moving into management means becoming a class traitor.

Most of the examples you gave seem focused on life outside of work aside from the last one, so I’m curious which of them you’d say don’t also apply to lower-income jobs. There are lots of ways for middle-class people to “fail” too outside of work.

Personally, I worked in food service for a decade (mostly as a line cook of some sort) and most of these rules still applied, maybe to a slightly lesser degree.

Even with dishwashing, if you have some way of dishwashing that halves utility costs, someone would listen to you.

The answer might also be “who cares, get back to work” but that’s also true of a lot of middle-class employment. Your manager won’t give a shit if you think the expense reporting system sucks. Amazon’s famous for “disagree and commit” which is just a corporate way of saying the same thing.

That's fair, but I don't totally agree that there is a "work sphere" that is different from the "life sphere" in this regard. That distinction between politics and economics is a synthetic big-L Liberal one that only goes back to approximately Napoleon. The fact that some people have worse jobs, worse working conditions, and worse pay is fundamentally related to the fact that they rent, struggle with money, and have a poor education. Our society has bucketed them into this life, which is a package deal, just like the middle class package is.

Anyway, in this context I was mostly addressing the idea that these "lessons" from high school don't hold in the "real world". To me, the "real world" includes your landlord, the cop on your street, etc., just as much as it does your job.

Sure, but these are all true of middle-class employees as well:

1) Many middle-class families rent and their landlords aren’t necessarily any more understanding.

2) Not to be too political, but many middle-class employees don’t enjoy a friendly relationship with police either and similarly can easily “fail”.

If your argument is that being wealthy affords you a lot of leeway to fail in life, I mostly agree (though again, there are plenty of minority groups who would disagree that wealth always affords that privilege), but “middle class” encompasses a very wide swath of people which this doesn’t apply to. Many middle-class employees in the US are a paycheck or two away from being pretty destitute.

Maybe you meant “professional” or “upper class” instead?

We can quibble about where to draw the markers, but my point is that these "lessons" that people in these comments are decrying as mostly not true about the "real world", are in fact true for some people, likely even some of the people that you went to school with. You and I heard our asshole math teacher say "It's not gonna be this easy in the real world, cats and kittens!" and probably now regard that as the opposite of true. Many others wish life was as easy as high school. Thanks for the engagement but I don't see any point in "arguing" this point -- that we appear to both agree on -- any further.

I don’t think we do agree, but fair enough. I’ll “disagree and commit”.

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