I’ve been watching a few American TV shows and it blows my mind that they put up with such atrocious working terms and conditions.
One show was about a removal company where any damage at all, even not the workers fault, is taken out of their tips. There’s no insurance from the multimillion dollar business. As they’re not paid a living wage the guy on the show had examples of when he and his family went weeks with barely any income and this was considered normal?!
Another example was a cooking show where the prize was tickets to an NFL game. The lady who won explained that she’d be waiting in the car so her sons could experience their first live game, because she couldn’t otherwise afford a ticket to go. They give tickets for football games away for free to people where I live for no reason at all…
Yet another example was where the workers got a $5k tip from their company and the reactions were as if this amount of money was even remotely life changing. It saddens me to think the average Americans life could be made so much better with such a relatively small amount of money and they don’t unionize and demand far better. The company in question was on track to make a billion bloody dollars while their workers are on the poverty line and don’t even have all their teeth?
It’s not actually this bad and the average American lives a pretty good life like we’re led to believe, right?
It really depends on the location within the US. Each state really operates like their own country, connected through the federal government, so standards of living, and what constitutes poverty can widely vary. However, the broad trend is: minimal to no labor protections, employer or self-funded health insurance are the only way to begin to afford medical care (dental insurance is a rarer offer), and there are a lot of trade-offs in determining how to survive. There is very much a different reality for people with money compared to how a lot of others are forced to live. The reasons are historic and systemic, and there’s too much to fully unpack in a response to a post. However, it can be simplified to: rampant, virtually unchecked capitalism is used to extract all of the labor and wealth from the general populous. The “American Dream” is propaganda shoved down everyone’s throat to make people think that they, too, can work hard to become wealthy enough to not have to scrape together enough money to survive. Except that it’s all a lie built on generational wealth, servitude, and violence.
Tipped wages originated from business owners refusing to pay freed slaves a fair wage after the US Civil War. The US still openly practices economic slavery. The 13th Amendment to the US Constitution allows slavery as punishment for a crime, which is why prison populations in the US are enormous. Private companies operate prisons here. This country was built and is maintained by slaves. The wealthy segregate themselves so they don’t have to see or think about it, but that doesn’t make it any less true.
