Hillary says she will help struggling Americans. Why Should We Believe that she would?

[Benvolio]

Still, we don't have nearly enough poor, unemployed people.

 

[Hankerin1075]

I didn't "choose that". When I was hired, it was supposed to be a full time job. Otherwise, I would've hit the door. I gave that miserable puke 1 day shy of 1 year.

I was actually better off when I worked for minimum wage and got 40hrs a week. Yeah, I lived in a dump. But I had money in my pocket.

There's no way in hell that I could live on minimum wage today. Even though the state of Washington's is higher than federal.

That sucks! You got a raw deal there. I don't think I could cut it on minimum today either. Maybe 12 or 13 if I really tightened up. Good thing for me that I have enough experience and technical knowledge to find half decent jobs. If I were to lose my job tomorrow there are plenty of things I could do. Not the best pay, but thanks to this new interwebs deal I have plenty to choose from. I've lived in a few crapholes over the years as well.

 

[gsdx]

I started a part time job at McDonalds in 89. Those were the days. My buddies would come in on Saturday mornings and call out orders directly to me. It was not funny to the counter workers. Classic. Sounds like you had a part time job. They don't allow a lot of hours. I guess you know that now. I'm sure it was frustrating before you figured it out.

I come from a family of 9 - Mom and Dad and 7 children. I'm 5th of 5 boys and 6th over all. When I was 12 years old, my father came home one afternoon and said, "You have a job. Be there at noon on Monday."

I was there at noon on Monday. It was a local business grading (sizing) cucumbers for Bick's Pickles. The job entailed hoisting burlap sacks of cukes onto a conveyor where they would be sorted into different sizes and dumped into bushel hampers. Those hampers were hoisted onto a set of rollers and sent to scales for weighing, then down another set of rollers for dumping the hampers into huge crates, one on top of the other. Each crate could hold about 800 pounds of cucumbers. The bottom crate was easy. When it was full, to top crate was pulled forward and the cukes had to be hoisted over my head to be dumped.

These were my hours:

Monday - noon to midnight
Tuesday through Friday - 7AM to midnight
Saturday - 7AM until we were finished. (The latest was just after 4AM Sunday morning.)

I made $1.10 per hour.

When I got paid, my pay packet went to my mother and she gave me a $5 allowance for the week out of it.

There are people today who do similar hard labour because the must, not because they choose to. And many are living from paycheque to paycheque simply because they have no other choice, and a lot of employers prey on those people. Trump is one of them. He works very hard to pay as little taxes as possible, and he works just as hard to pay as little wages as possible, which is why people from south of the border are cleaning his toilets in a luxury hotel and golf club for $10 per hour.

 

[Hankerin1075]

How much money should a toilet scrubber make?

 

[rareboy]

How much money should a toilet scrubber make?

Enough to live on without public assistance or having to work 60 hours a week.

It is pretty simple math.

Some would argue it should be as much as a hedge fund manager.

 

[gsdx]

How much money should a toilet scrubber make?

In a multi-million dollar hotel owned and run by a multi-billionaire? More than $10 an hour. And they shouldn't be brought from outside the country to get paid it. Trump is a major league hypocrite. He preys on the people who don't have the same 'choice' that you do. They don't clean toilets because they choose to. They do it because they MUST.

That's what you refuse to see.

Go ahead and live your American dream. The "toilet scrubber" in Trump's hotel earning $10 an hour never will.

 

[Hankerin1075]

This thread has gone way off the deep end. Y'all are nuts. Cleaning toilets is a no skill menial job. It is not worth that much money. If the only marketable skill someone has is cleaning things, they will make minimal money. That's how life works. I don't know what upside down world you guys are living in.

And quit acting like I'm some sort of elite pompous asshole. As I've stated many times already, I have been in those type of jobs in the beginning of my working life. I still work nutty hours in a hot dirty environment. I'm not the enemy here folks.

 

[rareboy]

No.

You are a typically oblivious self-absorbed me-first reactionary.

Cleaning toilets is not just a mindless, menial, worthless job. It is honourable work and the people who do it are entitled to have their work paid at even a minimum wage that allows them to live with some dignity without having to work twice as hard and long as someone else to scrape by paying for rent and food...often while having to receive public assistance.

What you and others of your limited understanding of social economics don't get is that it isn't the working poor that you are subsidizing with taxes...it is the corporations and the 1% who, it has been proven again and again, do not 'trickle' their wealth down.
They only aggregate more and more wealth and remove more and more wealth from an economy.

A rising tide lifts all boats.

Any person who provides a service for other people...including cleaning up their shit after them, is worth a living wage. So if it costs a family of four 40,000 dollars per year to live and we want to keep it equal and expect that there have to be two wage earners, then they have to net at least $10 per hour after taxes for a 2000 hour year. If the cost of living is 50K, then the two family wage earners have to net $12.50 per hour.

And this is excluding any ability to likely set aside enough for retirement savings.

And frankly, I don't care what your own job is or how dirty the environment is. I'm sure that there are many who would look down on your work and be trying to figure out how to pay you less in order to increase their own profits.

A healthy democracy is not built on the backs of impoverished workers or an economic caste system with a narrow middle class.

In a way, you are the enemy here. You are part of the great Republican hoi polloi who are mean and resentful about others...who feel that everyone else but you, below your own social position is a freeloader who doesn't deserve what they are paid and grumble about them not having to pay the same amount of taxes that you do. You really do believe that those who are born to wealth and power are better than the rest of all of us and probably believe that you can work your way up from sweeper on the factory floor to president of the company.

 

[Benvolio]

In a multi-million dollar hotel owned and run by a multi-billionaire? More than $10 an hour. And they shouldn't be brought from outside the country to get paid it. Trump is a major league hypocrite. He preys on the people who don't have the same 'choice' that you do. They don't clean toilets because they choose to. They do it because they MUST.

That's what you refuse to see.

Go ahead and live your American dream. The "toilet scrubber" in Trump's hotel earning $10 an hour never will.

That is not true. They choose to come to this country, knowing from others who have come and written back, they they will scrub for low wages. But they choose it because it is better than the country their own culture has created. As this thread shows, with the surplus of labor many cannot find as much work as they want, and the democrats have limited the number of hours which can be worked.
You can screech about employers, but when was the last time you voluntarily paid someone for goods or services more than you needed to.
As this thread illustrates, a lot of people cannot find full time work, because the combination of surplus labor and the wage and hour laws makes it better for employers to hire more part time workers than few full time workers.

 

[gsdx]

This thread has gone way off the deep end. Y'all are nuts. Cleaning toilets is a no skill menial job. It is not worth that much money.

And you've never been a housekeeper if you think that's all they do.

 

[gsdx]

There's been a lot of talk about American jobs going across the borders, but now American companies want to take jobs out of Canada and send them elsewhere.

Oshawa is a ground zero of sorts for the ongoing contract negotiations, which kicked off last month, between the Detroit Three automakers and its unionized workers.

The plant, whose future is on the line, represents the struggle between the union's desire to keep investment in Canada and efforts by the Detroit Three to move production to jurisdictions such as Mexico and the southern U.S., where labour and power costs are lower.

https://ca.finance.yahoo.com/news/gm-workers-oshawa-ont-brace-140004922.html

Most Americans really have no idea of the impact that they have on the rest of the world, even on their closest neighbours.

 

[Benvolio]

There's been a lot of talk about American jobs going across the borders, but now American companies want to take jobs out of Canada and send them elsewhere.



https://ca.finance.yahoo.com/news/gm-workers-oshawa-ont-brace-140004922.html

Most Americans really have no idea of the impact that they have on the rest of the world, even on their closest neighbours.

The big three opened plants in Canads because labor was cheaper than US big union labor. What goes around.....

 

[jbrown329]

The big three opened plants in Canads because labor was cheaper than US big union labor. What goes around.....

Fuck it. Move them all to Vietnam. Where the workers can make $1 a day. Hope you like driving substandard shit.

 

[gsdx]

The big three opened plants in Canads because labor was cheaper than US big union labor. What goes around.....

Oh, and the US also controls the value of our dollar.

 

[luckynumbah7]

And you've never been a housekeeper if you think that's all they do.

I doubt he could handle being a housekeeper, what with the general and specific disdain he'd get from his currently considered-colleagues and superiors. Or the work.

There's a minimum 16 rooms per day per person, which is 16 bedrooms and bathrooms. And some of those bathrooms are 'special' - it's a tiring pain in the ass to wipe down a hot tub/shower combo (instead of just the typical bath/shower) to go along with the tiled walls (as splatters are unacceptable), toilet, sink/faucets, mirrors, towels, sweeping, toilet paper (down to the fucking particular way of folding the top sheet and direction) and sweeping/mopping in ten minutes, I can tell you that much. Then there's the actual bedroom, which only gets twenty minutes tops - usually a bit less since during the shift there's generally one hellhole of a room that needs more work, and hence more time, than the others. That's not even all of it, there's very specific ways to do everything, like folding said towels before they get centered on said rack. There's a reason it doesn't generally look like the average schlub's bathroom. And it doesn't take a half hour cuz the job's easy, of all things.

Oh, and the hot tub special comes with a mini kitchen area off in the corner, think Best Western style. And the bastards rarely tipped.

 

[rareboy]

The big three opened plants in Canads because labor was cheaper than US big union labor. What goes around.....

No. The Big Three opened plants (or kept plants) because of the Auto Pact.

And Oshawa was home of of the founder of Sam McLaughlin and GM.

http://www.cbc.ca/archives/entry/canadas-car-industry-before-the-auto-pact

 

[Benvolio]

Oh, and the US also controls the value of our dollar.

I think Canadians blame the US for a great deal that is beyond our control as well. The relative value of currencies is more a matter of international professional speculation than anything else. In the balance i think you benefit from the historic stability of the US dollar. Alas, you, and all, will suffer from its coming collapse.

 

[gsdx]

I think Canadians blame the US for a great deal that is beyond our control as well. The relative value of currencies is more a matter of international professional speculation than anything else. In the balance i think you benefit from the historic stability of the US dollar. Alas, you, and all, will suffer from its coming collapse.

You can't be serious. Where's the blame? You must know the effect American money has on world currency. It's fact, not speculation. But the world stops at your borders, so you don't have a clue what goes on outside them.

 

[Benvolio]

You can't be serious. Where's the blame? You must know the effect American money has on world currency. It's fact, not speculation. But the world stops at your borders, so you don't have a clue what goes on outside them.

Speculation has two meanings, at least. When I spoke of speculation in currencies i meant the buying, selling, short selling, gambling and trading of currencies. It is that speculation which changes the RELATIVE value of currencies on a daily basis. The value of the US dollar is relatively stable; other currencies vary in relation to the dollar on a Day to day basis. This is because the US dollar is the medium in which international business is often done. If Canadians buy from a company in Pakistan, for instance, it does not want to pay in Pakistani money, and they do not want Canadian dollars. One way or another their national banks reduce the transaction to US dollars. Yeah, yeah not every transaction is exactly like that.

 

[Kabluey]

This thread has gone way off the deep end. Y'all are nuts. Cleaning toilets is a no skill menial job. It is not worth that much money. If the only marketable skill someone has is cleaning things, they will make minimal money. That's how life works. I don't know what upside down world you guys are living in.

And quit acting like I'm some sort of elite pompous asshole. As I've stated many times already, I have been in those type of jobs in the beginning of my working life. I still work nutty hours in a hot dirty environment. I'm not the enemy here folks.

If you want your toilets cleaned, and you can't do it yourself, you pay someone to do it.
If you don't pay the full cost of employing that person, you're being subsidised by them and the tax payer.

You revealed that relative to the minimum wage, your pay has decreased with time. That means that your employers are valuing your work less and less, yet somehow that doesn't concern you. Interesting.