This is my problem with this whole debate. Yes I acknowledge that young people face serious challenges starting out in the workforce. Yes I agree that we are importing foreigners to take American jobs and that is hideously evil and unfair.
Once we’ve agreed on that, what then? What is a young adult supposed to actually do tomorrow? What is your plan? Complaining about it incessantly on Twitter is not a plan. Calling for policy solutions is fine and I agree that we should work on those. But what about tomorrow? What is the demoralized young person supposed to actually do in his life tomorrow?
I say that he must get up in spite of it all, get the best job he possibly can, and work as hard he can to achieve what he can. He has a difficult road. Far from the most difficult compared to the vast majority of humans who have ever lived on Earth, but difficult. I acknowledge that. But he still has to get up and walk. What else would we have him do?
Listen Matt, this is very simple. You don't need to tell young white men to get up and walk. People learn how to do that by age 2. You need to start fighting to abolish the H-1B visa program.
Yes, you're one of the few Con Inc influencers who says H-1Bs should be stopped. But strangely enough, you spend your time defending the ones who think it's amazing? Why?
Get to work ending the H-1B, or shut up.
We can have that discussion after we have readily available, decent paying jobs.
Heck, some people couldn't work more than 40 hours a week even if they wanted to. In many fields, employers don't want you to, and won't even let you, even if the employee wanted to spend even more time working for shit pay as currency gets more and more worthless.
Some employers will lose their shit if you don't clock out right on time, because they're worried about regulatory nonsense and mandatory overtime pay. Back in the day my old boss would get really annoyed if I stayed four minutes longer to wrap up the day's work, even though I never tried to get paid for that time at all, much less at overtime rates.
Yeah, there's plenty of lazy people, and there's plenty of times "just work more" is the correct advice...but there's also plenty of times that following that advice would be for suckers. If you're already making shit pay with no path for advancement, but are making enough to get by...why on Earth would you trade the remaining limited time you have in a week for more shit pay work? The cost/reward caps out at some point, if the economy is shit. You're better off either pursuing your hobbies, or looking for different work if you can find it...not just more work.
Forget overtime, the current wagie meta is to get each employee below 40 hours so they count as "part time" and the employer don't have to shell out benefits. The fewer the better, though 35-hour weeks seems to be the "sweet spot".
"Just work two jobs, brah."
"Look at all the jobs we created!"
"He's not working 48 hours a week, he's working two 24-hours-a-week jobs at the same location!"
look at all the gdp we're beating Chyna with
I'm actually surprised that the government didn't catch on to that long ago. It's an easy fix to just make employers supply benefits based on the total number of man-hours their employees work.
I.E. if you have 40 full-time employees you have to pay them all benefits or, if you have 80 half-time employees, the government mandates that you pay at least 40 of them benefits. This would remove any incentive for employers to chop up full-time jobs into part-time, because they're paying the same number of benefits packages regardless.
Or we could do away with all that nonsense anyway, get government out of employers' business, get them out of healthcare and education, and pop the stupid regulatory bubbles.
Why is it an employer's job to pay for an employee's healthcare? The only reason that's a thing is because of bizarre government intervention. The jobs that wanted to were already doing that; mandating it just incentivized businesses to screw over their employees, while also making private healthcare costs shoot through the roof, making employees even more at the mercy of employers, government, and healthcare.
Just let employees and employers work things out, mostly among themselves. Same for education and healthcare/insurance.