A dude comes in my store every day to get gas and beer. On the weekends he pulls up in his giant RV. If I don’t see him for a week (pretty regular thing), when he does come back he’s been on vacation in that RV. His happy, healthy kids come in and get their drinks.
Recently he asked me if I knew anyone who could drive a medical taxi. He has a company which takes people to doctors visits. Insurance pays for it.
“I can’t find anyone to work. No one wants to work anymore. I have 10 vehicles parked right now.”
“What’s the pay? Do you do drug tests?”
MINIMUM FUCKING WAGE. DRUG TESTS.
I just told him, “dude, McDonald’s is paying $14.50 right now, starting wage. Paying people the bare damn minimum, you’ll either get them fresh out of prison or jacked up on meth. Like, holy shit man. Minimum wage? For a job that requires drug testing? You aren’t suffering. I see you taking your RV on vacation constantly. Fucking pay your employees bro. Those parked cars could be bringing in free money but rather than look at the problem, you think people don’t want to work. Pay 50 cents more than McDonalds and I’ll come work tomorrow.”
Nope. Stubborn, greedy bastard would rather have 10 cars parked.
Fuck that whole class of people.
If he owns vehicles, then he is entitled to exploit people to drive them.
The system has conditioned him to find a way to rationalize that he is victim.
He’s entitled to do whatever he wants with his vehicles. That doesn’t mean it’s a good business decision, he’s not entitled to succeed.
Well, among good business decisions is exploiting workers. In fact, historically, it is the very best kind.
Considering the person in OPs story can’t even find employees willing to work under the offered conditions, id argue it’s difficult to exploit a staff of zero.
as one CEO put it so nicely, “we need to increase unemployment, so the people learn their place”
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The observation that workers are exploited is one that is remarkably plain and simple for anyone to make.
Exploiting workers is entirely the purpose of private business.
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You are applying labels you obviously understand extremely poorly.
The observation that workers are exploited is one that is completely straightforward, and is broadly understood in any pro-worker space.
He probably started his business when there was cheap labour thanks to the recession, inability to change is the defining trait of these morons.
They are the exact ones sucking musk dick and think he’s the god of capitalism crying that “no one understands the owner of a company is supposed to be rich and everyone is supposed to be homeless but grateful to work for them bloblooobloo .”. Wondering why no one has any empathy for them.
“What’s the pay? Do you do drug tests?”
MINIMUM FUCKING WAGE. DRUG TESTS.
In a lot of cases if you’re driving a vehicle for commercial purposes, DOT requires a pre-employment drug test. Taxi drivers are one of those, and I imagine that’s the regulation he’s under.
I mean, yeah he’s not paying nearly enough to attract people, but the drug tests aren’t entirely up to him.
Yeah, it’s the combination that OP was taking issue with. You can’t pay like shit for jobs that require drug testing.
This right here.
Shit fucking pay can’t possibly be combined with a drug test. Who the hell (who isn’t a felon or a junkie) would be willing to work for so little?
We’re in the middle of nowhere too. The driver would regularly have to leave the state or drive across the state.
I don’t understand the mindset of these people. He’s losing money for every patient that doesn’t get a ride through his company and he’d seriously rather let the vehicles sit. It makes no sense to me. If he paid good he’d be doing even better. Not as well as he imagines he could be doing robbing people, but still he’d be doing better.
Some joker out there will do it for shit wages and that convinces him there must be more people out there that are ok with being paid so little. He imagines how much money he could have if he’d juuuuust find 10 more suckers to rip off.
Every time I see him coming since that conversation something locks up in me.
We’re in the middle of nowhere too. The driver would regularly have to leave the state or drive across the state.
How big of an area does this guy serve? Or are you close enough to a state line that this sounds farther than it is?
The area he serves isn’t huge as far as population goes, but when people here have to see a specialist, there are two options. Depending on the need it’s 80 miles away or 175.
I am a driver in a large metropolis for a medical diagnostics unit. I do not get drug tested, nor have I ever been in finding this employment. That “DOT requirement” is false.
I don’t know about the class of driver you fall under, but bus drivers, taxi drivers, truck drivers, airline pilots and railroad employees are all required by DOT to take a drug test before employment. There are a few other cases where they are also required to have a drug test, such as after an accident.
This case sounds like a taxi, so I’d guess it falls under the rules for taxi drivers.
You’re referring to c class drivers.
I am a class d driver and had no such tests. Ever.
You can look this stuff up before you comment if you’d like.
There’s a reason I said “in a lot of cases”. I never said “in all cases” or similar.
Taxi drivers (and this case is a medical taxi) are one of the cases where it is required. Hence why I brought it up, and then you argued I was wrong because as a driver for a different sort of service it wasn’t required of you. And then I named several examples where it was, including one directly relevant to this discussion, and now you’re doubling down despite what kind of thing you drove having nothing to do with the point at any point.
I can understand the pay point, but not the drug one. Why would anyone hire a testable drugs user to drive? Which employers are fine with hiring drug users in general?
Ironically meth heads can pass drug tests if they haven’t partaken recently but marijuana lingers in your fat cells for a month or more. Don’t you wish you could weed (pun intended) out people who smoked a joint last weekend while hiring more drunks and crack monkeys?
maybe OP is alluding to marijuana when they mention drug testing.
Bingo. It’s legal here.
Drug users are everyone, alcohol, tobacco, coffee, some are legal, some are still detectable months after use, would you care that your cab driver got drunk last months ? I wouldn’t care.
Most any restaurant.
Depends on the drug tests but a lot of them are very bad at catching actual drug users or popping false positives, to being so lax on the actual sample collection that people are smuggling in clean samples rather than providing their own.
So the people following the rules are being penalized and often put under scrutiny they didn’t deserve, and those that are breaking the rules in an obvious way aren’t being penalized for it.
And there are some scheduled drugs that in no way inhibit your ability to drive or work, especially when they aren’t being abused and taken infrequently. And those are the ones most likely to get you caught despite being the least likely to cause an actual problem.
Drug tests don’t work like you think. They don’t test for the drug itself, they test for the metabolites.
A lot of the big scary drugs your D.A.R.E. officer told you about like cocaine or LSD or meth won’t even show up on a drug test a day or two later. So I can dive into the Bolivian Marching Powder on friday after work, and pass a drug test monday.
This falls apart when you get to marijuana, and marijuana causes a lot of issues because it will show up on a drug test weeks later, and these tests cannot determine if a person is high right then, they can only test if a person has used marijuana in the last month or so. This means if I get stoned with my wife on friday I could lose my job monday.
Marijuana is popular in the US. If someone can get a job working for conpany Y for $8 per hour, or a job working for company Z for $8 per hour, but company Y does drug tests, guess who isn’t going to get employees? If you want to drug test, you have to pay for workers who will pass it.
Well you can’t be eating those everything bagels.
Did you actually go on a rant like that or was that just in your head?
Oh no I definitely went on that rant.
Probably the latter
you are fantasizing
Not sure if this is a seethe or cope?
it’s just an annoying mess
Workers aren’t supposed to use the law of supply and demand. Only the employers can do that.
Many workers have seemed to feel just fine identifying with the beliefs and values of their oppressors.
This fucking kills me. The race to the bottom mentality to work more for less with less days off is way way too common and I will never understand it.
They seem to equate enduring exploitation with strong character I often see it as the opposite.
@franklin @unfreeradical I understand it. That’s exactly what they are doing. They want to exploit us as much as they can as our exploitation is their profits. Some of us have internalised their will, which is just another stride forward in the race to the bottom.
The master takes away the slaves’ identity, so that the only one they have remaining is the master’s, and the only cause they have left to pursue is to please the master.
Late stage capitalism. Relentless pursuit of higher quarterly profits and earnings that fuel CEO bonuses and shareholder dividends. All at the expense of the people people who actually create the value. Also. That first line ain’t paying for college loans.
Of course it is necessary to exploit workers while some of us are still alive. If a systemic collapse leads to massive destabilization, then elites will regret any missed opportunities for having extracted greater profits.
More like End Stage Capitalism, right now. CEOs and Shareholders have seen the approaching cliff and know that we all are about to fall right off of it. Rather than change course, they have decided that they should get to a point where falling off the cliff will deal them no damage. This means exploiting workers to the hilt to the point where they will be able to escape the consequences of their actions.
That huge CEO bonuses make my blood boil. They do not fucking deserve it.
I’m not sure if it second or third stage of enshittification.
What if we applied an enshittification quotient (EQ). Something like this:
The EQ represents the degree or intensity of enshittification at a particular point in the process. Efficiency Erosion (EQ1): This stage’s quotient reflects the initial decline in efficiency, measuring the deviation from an optimal state of wealth distribution and economic functionality. Inconvenience Amplification (EQ2): The second quotient gauges the increased inconveniences experienced by the workforce, highlighting the growing disparity between effort exerted and rewards received. Complexity Cascade (EQ3): The complexity quotient measures the intricate mechanisms contributing to wealth concentration, signaling the level of convolution in the economic system. Frustration Escalation (EQ4): This quotient represents the heightened frustration among workers, reflecting the emotional and psychological toll of perceived economic injustice. Longing for Simplicity (EQ5): The final quotient captures the collective yearning for a simpler and fairer economic system, indicating the depth of societal desire for a more equitable and user-friendly economic structure.
Or you could work at a restaurant and get a guaranteed $2.13/hr :D
What’s exactly like this except that everybody is in their own little box which they can’t see out of, and never choose to go around the side to look out of. And then low-washer boss says “nobody wants to work anymore” and “we need to make the poors suffer so our profits go up.”
Here I am being a wage slave at $12.20/h
School will help. Just with a AA went up to $33/hr
Thanks to personal issues with faculty I have not finished my degree because of the bureaucracy involved.
And that guy’s only hiring a few of them, so the rest are forced into the lower and lower offers until another high one appears
laughs in Pennsylvania