Comment by newsclues 3 days ago
Should we be giving 25% raises to grocery store and retail workers who don’t have the option of WFH? Lots of people don’t work in an office and still have to commute, shouldn’t they get compensation if the office workers get this benefit?
Hardest job I had was a part time job working the cash register. Standing in one spot for hours on end, extremely repetitive, mind numbingly boring when not handling people, it was torture for me. I still get irrationally angry how most supermarkets don't give their workers a seat.
I was a cook at Sonic who occasionally helped with carhopping. I couldn't skate but tried to learn. It's hard work! I raise a cherry limeade in your honor.
For me it was newspaper delivery kid. You worked 7 days a week with only Xmas off - rain/snow didn’t matter. I got the papers at 5am, folded them and bagged them and was on my route by 545. Delivered them on my bike and then rode to school at 7am. And then once a month had to go door to door to collect the money, which was a pain. But no other way to make $100/month at age 11.
Moving everyone who realistically can work from home out of the offices benefits those who MUST commute as well. During COVID the roads where empty, cutting my commute in half, even during the later days where many was back at work.
For stores in particular, if people work from home, you can move stores closer to where people live, including those who work in the stores. It's country dependent, but there's no need to have all only huge supermarkets in the outskirts of town, when very few pass through those areas. Then smaller stores closer to the population becomes more relevant.
I'm of the opinion that actual hands-on labor is significantly undervalued, so yes.
er... you're not really following the logic of the parent comment.
Parent comment asked, should people who can't work from home be paid more?
Which seems like a specific case of the more general "we should pay people more if their jobs are more difficult", so your examples would more accurately be expressed as
"should we pay sewage workers more because they deal with feces" and "should we pay commercial divers more because they are submerged in freezing water for hours each day"
Is it so hard to understand the frustration of people who can't work from home, when the work from home people celebrate the joys of WFH including 2 hours not spent commuting (I used to sit on a bus 1.5 hours each way to work in retail).
If all the WFH people got this sudden improvement to their lives, what will society do to help out the people that can't? Is fairness and equality not important when it comes to the working class?
The disrespect to the lower classes from this community is unreal.
Well my take, having done retail and factory factotum work when I was younger, is that I'm not going to take one of those jobs ever again.
I've also done jobs where I had to commute into a windowless office and be at my desk at an exact time too.
I'm not going to work for in those jobs again either when WFH is a viable option.
It's a free market and I suspect that Amazon know this. I suspect that RTO is just a way to boost property usage and disguise redundancies. At the very least it means that Amazon don't know how to measure productivity properly if they only way they can ensure it is to force people to sit in a chair each day.
I would argue so what? There are low and high paying jobs that require people to be in person and low and high paying jobs that can be fully remote. Why should it matter to one group where the other group works? I'm sure the pediatric surgeon isn't complaining about having to work from the office.
The only people that actually care where others work are people who realize they are ineffective at their job/their job is pointless without being able to physically bully, the rent seekers, and people who built a business out of being near another business.
I feel a little bad for the small businesses that got lucky by being near a huge office space, but most of those small businesses have been replaced by corporations and small businesses close all the time.
Your grandparents favorite restaurant when they were a kid is probably long gone and it would be nice to have an eventual restructuring of convenience businesses near homes instead of suburban parking lots and office buildings.
Sure, why not? Minimium wage in California is still not a "living wage".
>shouldn’t they get compensation if the office workers get this benefit?
depends on the company, but they used to stipend transportation and sometimes even car gas and repairs as a benefit. I see nothing wrong with that idea.
I keep seeing this line of "reasoning". You realize that me being at home makes your life marginally _better_, don't you? There's one less car on the road creating traffic and pollution. There's one less guy in the line at starbucks. There's more real estate opening up for purposes besides mindlessly filling offices. But you'd rather make your own life marginally worse as long as it makes mine significantly worse.
Name 1 major employment shift that rolled out to everyone, across all industries, across all modes of work, across all tiers of employees, and across all geographic areas regardless of socioeconomic status — simultaneously.
We couldn’t even do it during a global pandemic, deeming all sorts of people “essential” without meaningful compensation.
Your assertion is not based in any feasible reality, at least in America.
The tone of this comment makes it sounds like the poster thinks the parent poster should have refrained from posting their comment. As if the point is invalid because of these facts. But how could one get that to change unless they suggest alternatives?
If anything, it’s a whataboutism, but still an interesting question to consider. What do you think about offering better compensation to in-person service employees?
To this day, I maintain that the hardest job I've ever had was being a carhop at Sonic. All the soul-crushing foodservice insanity, and oh, you're on roller skates too.
The hours I worked and the shit I saw in that job do not compare to any other foodservice job I ever had, let alone other jobs. The tips (which you only got if you weren't on shake duty) were the only part that made it worthwhile, which meant putting on a happy-go-lucky face even if it was covered in grease, shake crap, blood sweat and tears.