Quote:
Originally Posted by Sierra
That's great for you. You have the ability to make extra money, earn benefits, get paid vacations and generally enjoy the benefits of being paid a living wage.
I live in the San Francisco Bay Area and our major industries - tech, manufacturing and banking - were hit HARD. Employers who did have jobs available took advantage of the situation and people were hired as independent contractors or part-time workers without health insurance, unemployment benefits, paid time off, etc. They used and abused people, paid them well below what anyone could live on, and discarded anyone who complained.
Why did they do this? Simple reason. Because they could. They took desperate people and treated them like shit - and the workers had to swallow it because there wasn't anything else.
That kind of abuse of power makes me crazy.
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I feel the pain, I do. I'm not a shill for The Man. I'm just confused at what people expect the government to do about it. A private employer is under no legal obligation to provide a full time schedule or medical coverage. There are regulations about how they can treat their employees, but there are no regulations regarding to what an employee is entitled.
Look...nobody wants to go back to the days when Rockefeller and Carnegie were shooting into crowds of strikers. But if the government starts mandating that every corporation of a certain size have X number of full time employees at X salary with X benefits, the effects would be detrimental eventually as most companies would not realize a profit margin to justify carrying a bloated payroll through difficult times. When economic times turned bad, more companies would simply choose to close their doors than be forced to pay 20 full time benefited employees to play free cell all day.