Maker Of Shoes posted:

Cons:

• Canada

kissekatt posted:

Honestly, I find the concept of sick days more strange than only being granted 5 hours of vacation every second year (and only if you washed the boss' car). How exactly are you supposed to limit the number of days you are sick? When you are sick you are sick. "Welp, I already took a week off earlier this year when I came down with the flu, I guess I'll go to work with the plague."

seakindliness posted:

What usually happens to people who have medical emergencies and have no sick days to use? Do they not get paid for the days they had to take off?

seakindliness posted:

What usually happens to people who have medical emergencies and have no sick days to use? Do they not get paid for the days they had to take off? Are they let go?

abigserve posted:

Don't forget the ludicrously expensive housing market, though.

Maker Of Shoes posted:

What the gently caress?! gently caress you! Rolling? What's that? Cashing out? Sure buddy, if you're fired. Ugh.

notbitternotbitternotbitternotbitternotbitternotbitter
itsmyfridayitsmyfridayitsmyfridayitsmyfridayitsmyfridayitsmyfriday

Sir Spaniard posted:

I just downloaded and read that epic story about the SA member who was paid for pretty much nothing... Who was he, is he still a member, and does anyone know of the latest? And when did that happen? It's absolutely beautiful....

Error 404 posted:

That was forums user Moonshine if I remember right.
and here's the link to the archived stories in case anyone else wants them.

http://shii.org/knows/American_Dream

Sir Spaniard posted:

Does he still post? Here? I'd love to hear if he's still managed to hold the position.

quote:

Wages for large swaths of workers, particularly for non-college-educated workers who make up about three-fourths of the U.S. workforce, have trailed far behind growth in productivity over the last thirty years, and, for many groups of workers, wages have actually stagnated or even fallen in inflation-adjusted terms. While raising wages for workers at the middle and bottom is important, increasing wages will not be enough. Restoring real wage growth to the two or even three percent per-year rates experienced during the first thirty years of the postwar period would certainly help. But the main problems that U.S. workers face cannot be solved simply with faster real wage growth.

In my experience, European workers, even European economists familiar with the U.S. economic system, have trouble appreciating just how unprotected U.S. workers are; and it is not just workers in the low-wage labor market that are unprotected – even relatively well-off U.S. professionals work in a legal and social environment that almost no worker in western Europe would have to tolerate.

One key issue is job security. In the United States, with rare exceptions, workers are what our legal code refers to as “at-will employees” – that is, employees work at the will of the employer, with no legal claim to their job or to severance pay in the case of layoff. To be clear, in the overwhelming majority of cases, U.S. employers can fire a worker without reason or advanced notice and without any legal obligation to provide severance pay. The major exceptions to this arrangement are the percent of the workforce that is unionized and a small share of high-end workers such as company officers who negotiate individual contracts with their employers. One remnant of the civil rights and women’s movement is that employers cannot fire workers for reasons of race, ethnicity, gender, religion, or certain other characteristics; but an employer can fire a worker without notice for almost any other reason: for arriving late to work, for refusing to work overtime, for arguing with the boss about a schedule change, or essentially any reason, reasonable or not, that does not involve discrimination. The “employment at will” doctrine creates a profound structural imbalance of power between the overwhelmingly non-unionized workforce and their employers, and is a central cause of the problems facing the low-wage workers featured in Roger Weisberg’s superb documentary film “Waging a Living.”

When workers do lose their jobs, the social safety net has many holes. Historically, only about 40 percent of unemployed workers receive unemployment insurance benefits and these are stingy by international standards.

The large majority of U.S. workers also depend on their job (or their spouse’s job) for health insurance. With the typical employer-provided health insurance plan costing about $5,000 per year for individual coverage and about $13,000 per year for family coverage,14 higher wages alone will not go far in providing quality health insurance, particularly for lower- and middle income workers.

U.S. workers also suffer from a severe time squeeze, which is exacerbated by the lack of any legally required paid time off. U.S. law, for example, does not mandate any form of paid time off for any purpose. As a result, almost one-fourth of U.S. workers have no paid vacation or paid holidays, and the average U.S. worker has only nine days of paid vacation and six days of paid public holidays per year, with many having less than the average.15 Nor does U.S. law require employers to provide paid parental leave. In fact, the U.S. law that requires employers to provide 12 weeks of unpaid parental leave has exemptions for employer-size and job tenure that effectively remove a large share of the U.S. workforce from coverage. U.S. workers are not even legally entitled to paid (or unpaid) sick days. As a result, over 40 percent of U.S. private-sector workers have no paid sick days, and, given the “employment at will” doctrine, are at risk of losing their jobs if they miss work when they are sick. Higher wages alone would do little to give workers the time they seek to handle their many non-work responsibilities.

All of these non-wage issues – the lack of legal job protections, the lack of a safety net for most of the unemployed, the strong dependence of workers on their employers for health insurance, the lack of paid time off, and others – are major challenges for workers at almost all levels of wage distribution. But these problems are particularly acute for low-wage workers, who are not just the worst paid, but also the least likely to have union representation, the least likely to have employer- provided health insurance (or insurance of any kind), and the least likely to have any form of paid time off.

Matlock posted:

I just got a letter from the CEO of my Fortune 100 company congratulating me on finishing the Boston Marathon.

I've never been in Boston.

And by letter, I mean a part of the Boston Globe newspaper was thrown in an envelope with his business card attached and a short congratulations written on it.

Solkanar512 posted:

melon cat posted:

- Being forced to work with Windows 2000 (yeah, you read that right) and IE 6 because the IT department doesn't feel like doing a bit more work.

I am OK posted:

I never realised the US was that bad. When are you guys gonna get off your arses and loving revolt, because seriously.

kazmeyer posted:

As long as the average American gets to eat McDonalds for dinner while watching Survivor they won't do a god damned thing about anything.

kazmeyer posted:

As long as the average American gets to eat McDonalds for dinner while watching Survivor they won't do a god damned thing about anything.

I am OK posted:

I never realised the US was that bad. When are you guys gonna get off your arses and loving revolt, because seriously.

I am OK posted:

I never realised the US was that bad. When are you guys gonna get off your arses and loving revolt, because seriously.

the posted:

Maybe there are two Matlocks in your company?

Sundae posted:

I hesitate to use this expression, but it seems to be increasingly suitable to describe it:

Common workers in the USA are brainwashed. They think this is how it should be, to the point where they will protest against things that benefit them and vote against their own interests.

Robot Hobo posted:

And NONE of this is guaranteed by any laws here. Companies have no legal requirement to give any time off at all. (well, unless I became pregnant... not bloody likely) They can, and will, explain that they give this 'generous' amount of vacation time out of the kindness of their hearts, and that you should be thankful for getting anything at all.

seakindliness posted:

No, no, don't look at Canada, England, Australia or any of those other silly nations...

Robot Hobo posted:

Too late, I looked.
Here's the mandatory minimums as of 2006.

I am OK posted:

I never realised the US was that bad. When are you guys gonna get off your arses and loving revolt, because seriously.

Robot Hobo posted:

Too late, I looked.
Here's the mandatory minimums as of 2006.

babies havin rabies posted:

I believe there was a statistic published that claimed a fair amount of Teabaggers only have the time to protest "Socialism" because they got laid off and are collecting unemployment.


Found it
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/28/us/politics/28teaparty.html

2ndclasscitizen posted:

gently caress, my old evals were our supervisors coming along with the checklist of stuff we should be able to do in order to our job. Quick 1/2hr chat, and a few drills running through it all to demonstrate what we can do. Done.

Robot Hobo posted:

Too late, I looked.
Here's the mandatory minimums as of 2006.