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How poor is the average American? (lemmy.ml)

submitted 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) by Kushia@lemmy.ml to c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml

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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?

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[–] nitefox@sh.itjust.works 38 points 11 months ago (11 children)

Fun fact: America is arguably better if you are rich or with a high income, Europe is better if you have a lower income / are poor

[–] Atemu@lemmy.ml 4 points 11 months ago (7 children)

While this may be true today, note that European countries (well, the rich ones anyways) might just be behind the curve here. We're certainly on our way towards a U.S.-style disaster.

It's very hard to generalise this though as cultures here are very heterogenous here. You'd never in 100 years expect the Dutch to fall for the car industry's strategy of getting everyone dependant on cars to anywhere near the same degree as the U.S. has while you absolutely couldn't say the same about Germany; we love sucking on those exhaust pipes (especially our politicians).

[–] ctobrien84@lemmy.world 1 points 11 months ago (6 children)

Americans absolutely need cars due to the size of the country. We like our space. We're not being duped into buying cars for no good reason.

[–] GameWarrior@discuss.online 1 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

Cope.

It is absolutely possible to build infrastructure that is not car centric. Of course, they are always going to be people who need a car to get around but that doesn’t mean that we can’t design cities that don’t require cars.

The dumbest excuse for bad cities - Not Just Bikes

[–] PipedLinkBot@feddit.rocks 1 points 11 months ago

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The dumbest excuse for bad cities - Not Just Bikes

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