You CHOOSE to have a minimum wage job - what are you bitching about?
Moving to California some five years ago introduced a lot of changes to our lives. Unfortunately, they weren’t quite the changes I had been expecting. Looking back on this time I think it would have been easier to move to somewhere really exotic, like China. At least there I would have expected not to understand what’s going on – the language, the culture, everything is so strange that I would just have accepted a different mindset and attitudes as being natural.
But the problem with the US is that it actually is very similar to Europe. So I did somehow expect to understand them easily, feel at home quickly because, after all, people are people, no? I have since learned that this is utter BS. We're all human, and that's where the similarity ends between all and any countries. After a while you realize that the similarities are fooling you – in many a way Americans are any bit as weird, hard to understand and simply different as Chinese might be.
One of the most obvious discrepancies I noticed after moving here is how very differently the public opinion sees the role of industry in society. I found their attitude extremely strange (not to mention utterly unfair) but admittedly I feel I better get used to it – it does seem like the American way of running society is fast becoming the copied model in Europe as well.
In Germany still lurks (at least in the mind of the people that work for a living) the idea of a social market economy and most people up to the upper middle class believe that wealth carries with it responsibilities and duties (or at least it should. This attitude might admittedly not be so common among the wealthy). Anyone working for a living still believes that employers owe something to society (from the sound bites of German top managers of the last months I realize that this belief has died a death among the employers. They obviously believe it is the other way around). My last visit in Germany certainly showed me how strong emotions run about the impression everyone seems to have that social responsibility is shouldered only by a few groups of society, not of all members of society equitably (who exactly these groups might be strongly depends on whom you’re talking to, of course).
Of course there are many Americans that share these attitudes. Now I admit, I haven’t met any personally, but I read everyday in the “Letters to the Editor” section on the paper that this type of attitude is quite typical for those leftist, if not even communist and on all accounts un-American liberals. And no-one wants to admit membership to this dodgy group. But as I said, these people exist. The vast majority of people however seem to basically share the attitude Andrew Carnagie or William Vanderbilt – Carnagie was one of the robber barons of the 19. century who helped introduce the 72 hour work week for the whole family, with cutthroat wages and homicidal work conditions. Vanderbilt was another successful business man who managed to set his own passenger- and freight rates after he’d snagged the train monopoly (I want to make very clear here that this is of course in no way, shape or form intended to imply a similarity to modern day “captains of industry” like Bill Gates or Donald Trump. Far be it from me to make such assumptions). Those two guys were just rather typical representatives of unbridled capitalism. And unbridled capitalism is just the form of capitalism that in the mind of many Americans obviously is the optimal form of economy and society.
Just for illustration purposes some excerpts from a column of Daniel Weintraub in the „Sacramento Bee“ from August 12th : It discusses a recently published study of the University of Berkeley which scrutinizes the cost of the success of the giant retailer Wal-Mart to the state of California. According to the study the State pays employees of Wal-Mart about $86 million a year in health and welfare costs, necessary because of the low wages and lacking health benefits.
And what is Daniel Weintraub’s appraisal of the study?
“…It's […] meaningless. Why? Because the study's conclusions are built on the fallacy that people who create job - be they an individual, a small-business owner or the largest employer in the world - are responsible for the financial welfare of the people they employ. They are not. They're responsible for offering wages and benefits sufficient to attract employees who will offer their labor in exchange for that amount of compensation. Nothing more. Nothing less.…”
A very clear attitude – if employees accept a wage that is less than a living wage, completely voluntary of course, well, that’s obviously their problem. Nothing to do with the employer at all. This venerable argument has a long and ignominious history – 150 years ago it was quite en vogue to justify child labor in the mines, and ever since it has been used to explain why it is perfectly all right to pay women (or blacks/foreigners/fill in the blank:……) less money for the same work that men – I mean, we aren’t forcing anyone to work, now are we? The employer isn’t responsible for anything at all. How it is possible to ignore the sheer economic hopelessness of the applicants for those minimum wage jobs is quite beyond me. The demand for people working minimum wage jobs is quite a bit higher than the supply – there are constantly signs in any supermarket, restaurant and shop looking for people, but it seems that the law of demand and supply is somehow broken on the bottom end of society. There are more cheap jobs than people to do them, but this hasn’t led to a rising of wages. But of course those minimum wage workers still have costs – even such as them need food, shelter, medicine. A lot of them do without the last two of this list, despite working full time, but somehow it is their responsibility alone. Keep in mind, employers aren’t responsible for their financial welfare, even if their cheap labor is necessary for all those high share prices and the so very good return-on-investment.
I actually don’t want to pillory the columnist – he just states a common attitude here. This attitude seems the corollary to the all-American motto „every man is the architect of his own fortune“– or his misfortune as the case may be. Even people suffering from the downsides of unbridled capitalism, the ones on the bottom rungs of the success ladder seem ardent fans of the system. Obviously everyone dreams the American dream, once THEY THEMSELVES have made it, they’ll be able to do as they want. No-one will limit them in any way once they have made it.
As I mentioned earlier, this dream is becoming socially accepted in Europe as well (never mind that it’s more of a nightmare for the have-nots). Industry is all in favor of the American Dream – just what the share prices (and the incomes of top management) need. It’s high time we got rid of 125 years of communist ideas about fairness for the masses.
You can do it!!
But the problem with the US is that it actually is very similar to Europe. So I did somehow expect to understand them easily, feel at home quickly because, after all, people are people, no? I have since learned that this is utter BS. We're all human, and that's where the similarity ends between all and any countries. After a while you realize that the similarities are fooling you – in many a way Americans are any bit as weird, hard to understand and simply different as Chinese might be.
One of the most obvious discrepancies I noticed after moving here is how very differently the public opinion sees the role of industry in society. I found their attitude extremely strange (not to mention utterly unfair) but admittedly I feel I better get used to it – it does seem like the American way of running society is fast becoming the copied model in Europe as well.
In Germany still lurks (at least in the mind of the people that work for a living) the idea of a social market economy and most people up to the upper middle class believe that wealth carries with it responsibilities and duties (or at least it should. This attitude might admittedly not be so common among the wealthy). Anyone working for a living still believes that employers owe something to society (from the sound bites of German top managers of the last months I realize that this belief has died a death among the employers. They obviously believe it is the other way around). My last visit in Germany certainly showed me how strong emotions run about the impression everyone seems to have that social responsibility is shouldered only by a few groups of society, not of all members of society equitably (who exactly these groups might be strongly depends on whom you’re talking to, of course).
Of course there are many Americans that share these attitudes. Now I admit, I haven’t met any personally, but I read everyday in the “Letters to the Editor” section on the paper that this type of attitude is quite typical for those leftist, if not even communist and on all accounts un-American liberals. And no-one wants to admit membership to this dodgy group. But as I said, these people exist. The vast majority of people however seem to basically share the attitude Andrew Carnagie or William Vanderbilt – Carnagie was one of the robber barons of the 19. century who helped introduce the 72 hour work week for the whole family, with cutthroat wages and homicidal work conditions. Vanderbilt was another successful business man who managed to set his own passenger- and freight rates after he’d snagged the train monopoly (I want to make very clear here that this is of course in no way, shape or form intended to imply a similarity to modern day “captains of industry” like Bill Gates or Donald Trump. Far be it from me to make such assumptions). Those two guys were just rather typical representatives of unbridled capitalism. And unbridled capitalism is just the form of capitalism that in the mind of many Americans obviously is the optimal form of economy and society.
Just for illustration purposes some excerpts from a column of Daniel Weintraub in the „Sacramento Bee“ from August 12th : It discusses a recently published study of the University of Berkeley which scrutinizes the cost of the success of the giant retailer Wal-Mart to the state of California. According to the study the State pays employees of Wal-Mart about $86 million a year in health and welfare costs, necessary because of the low wages and lacking health benefits.
And what is Daniel Weintraub’s appraisal of the study?
“…It's […] meaningless. Why? Because the study's conclusions are built on the fallacy that people who create job - be they an individual, a small-business owner or the largest employer in the world - are responsible for the financial welfare of the people they employ. They are not. They're responsible for offering wages and benefits sufficient to attract employees who will offer their labor in exchange for that amount of compensation. Nothing more. Nothing less.…”
A very clear attitude – if employees accept a wage that is less than a living wage, completely voluntary of course, well, that’s obviously their problem. Nothing to do with the employer at all. This venerable argument has a long and ignominious history – 150 years ago it was quite en vogue to justify child labor in the mines, and ever since it has been used to explain why it is perfectly all right to pay women (or blacks/foreigners/fill in the blank:……) less money for the same work that men – I mean, we aren’t forcing anyone to work, now are we? The employer isn’t responsible for anything at all. How it is possible to ignore the sheer economic hopelessness of the applicants for those minimum wage jobs is quite beyond me. The demand for people working minimum wage jobs is quite a bit higher than the supply – there are constantly signs in any supermarket, restaurant and shop looking for people, but it seems that the law of demand and supply is somehow broken on the bottom end of society. There are more cheap jobs than people to do them, but this hasn’t led to a rising of wages. But of course those minimum wage workers still have costs – even such as them need food, shelter, medicine. A lot of them do without the last two of this list, despite working full time, but somehow it is their responsibility alone. Keep in mind, employers aren’t responsible for their financial welfare, even if their cheap labor is necessary for all those high share prices and the so very good return-on-investment.
I actually don’t want to pillory the columnist – he just states a common attitude here. This attitude seems the corollary to the all-American motto „every man is the architect of his own fortune“– or his misfortune as the case may be. Even people suffering from the downsides of unbridled capitalism, the ones on the bottom rungs of the success ladder seem ardent fans of the system. Obviously everyone dreams the American dream, once THEY THEMSELVES have made it, they’ll be able to do as they want. No-one will limit them in any way once they have made it.
As I mentioned earlier, this dream is becoming socially accepted in Europe as well (never mind that it’s more of a nightmare for the have-nots). Industry is all in favor of the American Dream – just what the share prices (and the incomes of top management) need. It’s high time we got rid of 125 years of communist ideas about fairness for the masses.
You can do it!!
posted by An Opinionated Woman @ 9:33 PM
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