Saturday, February 22, 2014

Day 1: Do You Care about Your Low Wage Job?



I was recently watching a Google Hangout from the
LIG channel on youtube (for those who don't know LIG or Living Income Guaranteed is a form of a basic income which you can read more about by following the link) called Bridging the Income Gap - Living Income Guaranteed in which an interesting point was brought up, about how for those of us who have less money, we feel left out of the system because we don't have a stake in it, we effectively are left out of it, and I saw how this could be one of the main components behind why we don't seem to care at all for our environment as the buildings and infrastructures that make up our town/city/local social environment. Like, when I look at what goes on behind say, vandalizing a bus stop or graffiti-ing up the side of a building, it's like we're trying to have an impact, an effect, to leave a mark and put ourself into our environment in some way, because we are essentially separated from it.We don't have a stake in, and essentially our only role is as a consumer to it.

So this led me to why do we tend to not care about the very physical buildings of where we work? The equipment we have to use, and even the building itself. We tend to allow things to go undone and uncared for. There's a tendency to do 'just the minimum' at our jobs. And my primary justification for doing so, was that I wasn't being paid enough to care anyway. I mean, if my job couldn't pay me enough to be able to pay my bills then why should I do any more than I absolutely have to, since that is all I have been given – as little as possible. It's no secret that so many of us employees get paid according to the least that is possible to pay while managing to retain employees.

So, essentially, our 'jobs' don't really care about us. We are usually quite expendable/easily replaced and so there's really no regard for you as an individual human being who is giving their labor to this company so it can make a profit. If you don't want to do the job, then you can just be fired and the next one brought in.

What happens then is that we take this lack of care for us and use it as the justification to do the same, to not care either. Where, if my job doesn't care about me, then why am I going to care about it. Why would I do more than I have to? Why am I really going to put myself into it and do my best, when it's perfectly happy to take the profits from my labor and not pay me enough, not pay me the true value of what I put in? I mean, you are not going to feel like a valued and appreciated integral part of something when you are treated like you can just be replaced. What's interesting within this is how many of those in more elite positions, such as business owners, would see employees as generally being lazy and ineffective, and using this behavior to justify paying low wages, but not even asking themselves, how would they be if put in the same position? The owner of a business is actually tied into the profit and gain of the company, so they have a stake, they care. But as a bottom-wrung employee, you make the same pitiful wage regardless of how much profit your labor brings in. And then when business is down, your hours get cut.

So, I mean, why would we feel any sense of caring for an establishment that just takes for itself without regard?

But this is really just an excuse, and wanting 'the job' to do something before I do it. How can I expect another to do something I myself am not even doing? This is quite a common a tendency, which holds us all stuck in a position of never changing, because we're always waiting for someone else to do it first, expecting others to change, without even changing ourselves. That's like wanting your reality to change for you, just to suit you and what you want without you having to do anything yourself. Which is a lot like employers wanting employees to work diligently and reliably, for very little pay. It's the same point. And so of course if we're all each waiting for our reality to change first, for others to change first, then no one is changing.

I mean, do we expect that all of a sudden our job is going to change and start caring? I mean, we have to look at, how did we even get here to where we are now, where our labor is undervalued and not properly remunerated, and our right to make a decent living is not even guaranteed, which puts us in the rather 'life or death' situation of being one step away from living on the streets. Literally, so many individuals are one paycheck away from financial collapse. And it is not so great for businesses either, where to be able to stay afloat you have to make everything as cheap as possible, because as consumers we can afford less and less, and so that's where our dollars go, to whomever can provide it for the cheapest. This leads to many small businesses being bought up by large corporations, practically the only ones who are able to survive anymore. So that's a vicious cycle going on, digging us a big hole in the ground.

So we need a solution that can work with all of this, and that's why I support a proposal such as the Living Income Guaranteed, which in a nutshell provides a living income for all who need it, that is who doesn't have a job or lots of money, which is enough to live properly with all the necessities, and also calls for the minimum wage to be double that of the living income, so that there is incentive to work, and you will actually get proper remuneration for your time and effort spent laboring. This would essentially eliminate the life or death situation of having to do whatever it takes to hang on to your job, even if it is an abusive job in some way, or worrying that you hours are going to be cut, and if you did lose your job, there is the living income to support you, so you will always be able to have proper housing, enough food, water, electricity, etc, everything you need. Not like the woefully inadequate welfare we have today, which I've seen the time it takes to get it set up has landing some people on the streets while they were waiting, something that is really difficult and unnecessary for anyone to have to go through, and can be hard to recover from.

Within the point of using the excuse that the job doesn't care so why should I – what I found was that if you do have that attitude you are setting yourself up to be more likely to get fired or given less hours. The best way to make yourself useful and valued is to really do your job effectively, because you can be sure that if you take every opportunity to slack off, you are really not going to progress beyond where you are. And within this, the time spent on the job is actually more stressful and unpleasant, when in that mentality of slacking off.

I mean, until we have a solution in place, we have to realize the situation we are in and we do depend on our jobs currently, so it's not to judge them but to use what support they do provide while working on a solution. So, with that, I will in the next post cover the topic of how it is that I managed to find a sustainable way to do a repetitive low wage service job, and not practically go insane, or get frustrated with the deadend-ness of it all to the point of quitting or getting fired and winding up in just another low wage service job. Because the fact we have to admit is, you just may have to do a low wage service job for a while considering that that is rapidly becoming the most popular job available in this country and the competition for higher paid jobs is so steep that even college graduates are working at McDonald's. So we'll continue from here in the next post.
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