We're in the middle of the best economy in years. Why would a worker put up with that? Go someplace else. Whole Foods doesn't put stores in small towns. Anyone who works there has plenty of other options.
Yeah for sure, people living hand to mouth in a hyper competitive low-skill wage job definitely have the luxury of shopping around for better conditions where employers have their pick of any number of people desperate for a job. Totally.
This sarcasm does not move the discussion forward. There’s a number of things a person can do in the U.S to pick up a skill from a trade to medicine. With grants, loans, or any number of free/paid courses.
Also, it is truly impressive to see people work and succeed going from “not very much” to “boy he’s a force”. Just takes effort, go figure.
Yes, it is impressive to see people improving their lives, and we should work towards a society that helps people do that.
However, to just write it all off as if "hard work" is the only thing preventing a lot of people from improving their lives is very much blind to the reality that a lot of people are _already_ working very hard, just to stay afloat as is, and there are other factors beyond "hard work" preventing change.
Acquiring a skill takes money (if there's any kind of accreditation) and time. If you're living paycheque-to-paycheque and looking to change employers, chances are you don't have much of either. Not everyone has a safety net.
> We're in the middle of the best economy in years.
Best economy for whom? The U.S. economy as a whole has expanded greatly since the 1980s, but it's the individuals' economies that matter, and they haven't expanded much.
There have been umpteen articles how wages have not kept up with inflation. It's a tough sell telling parts of the country that swapped the first black president for man with a less than stellar morality record that this is the best economy in history.
>It's a tough sell telling parts of the country that swapped the first black president for man with a less than stellar morality record that this is the best economy in history.
I don't really understand what you're saying, but Obama had a despicable morality record as well. Kill list, 7 wars, drone bombed American citizens with no due process, dropped 26,000 bombs in 2016 alone, tortured people including Chelsea Manning.
Walking into changing rooms of teenage girls isn't indicative of moral character, or is being the focus of multiple sexual assault allegations.
And if that's just "fake news" given it has been reported in multiple sources, then I suppose I can just call any retort you make as "fake news" as well.
We’re in the middle of the best economy and wages still aren’t rising. Monopoly, monopsony, and free market extremism have crushed them for all but the very few.
