Well, I think there should be dignity to any job that actually needs to be done. I’m reminded of a philosopher who recently claimed that society seemed to systematically reward the least-vital jobs. Garbage pickup? Absolutely critical. Hedge fund management? Maybe useful if you squint carefully. Let’s not even talk about philosophers…
Oh, it’s not just the stipend, that wasn’t what I intended to imply.
The stipend in this case is merely an enabling factor. It makes a system temporarily sustainable, where it otherwise wouldn’t be. It’s that temporary sustainability which fosters the festering of the problems stemming from the systematic xenophobia, and the segregation it creates.
I fear that a similar case would happen with the white rural population who can’t find work, and is left to live on disability and consuming Trump-esque nonsense that radicalizes them into fascist goons.
Come on, just make it so UBI requires some form of effort from the recipient, people will feel whatever it is they’re doing entitles them to the money
Not that I think UBI is practical in today’s society, not yet, still a lot of jobs that can use cheap labor and until those go there will always be “reasons” for UBI not to work.
One of the common complaints and ‘problems’ with assistance programs is the notion of perverse incentives. The idea that, at a certain point, making the effort to get a job makes your situation worse. And while I do think this is somewhat overblown, it is a real issue. For example recieving medicaid if unemployed, but get a low paying job without benefits and you lose it. That is a meaningful problem, and would be powerful disincentive.
So a form of UBI that lacks clawbacks would help. And it could be coupled with something that makes Tea Partiers cream their pants, a reduction of minimum wage. Because if everyone has a basic income and health insurance, then we don’t really need a minimum wage that covers cost of living. That’s already handled. Done together it could be something that really helps everyone though. Then, even the least paying job does improve your condition, you have more money available. Period.
Obviously it would get a lot of blowback from both sides, but really it could achieve things both want. After all minimum wage is not an end unto itself, but a means of achieving that (a minimum of financial stability).
Perhaps it would be possible to decouple a sense of purpose from a struggle for survival. I mean, that’s the utopian ideal, no? Freedom from want is what opens up the possibility to pursue creative goals, self-expression, etc.?
It’s hard to know how much of our current behavior and mindset is hardwired ‘human nature’ versus centuries of social and cultural conditioning.
Anyway, this all rather academic. American culture, at least, is miles and miles from any attitude other than ‘you are your job’ IMO. Can’t speak to how it is in European countries.
You have to combine Ubi with something like a big earned income tax credit, I think. That incentivizes even low income jobs.
I had the idea of bringing back the medieval corvee- have everyone get like 2 weeks a year, or one day a week they report and see if they have any civic duty/volunteering that needs to be done.
Also make voting for those eligible mandatory to get UBI.
I also agreed that UBI being tied into the elimination of min wage is a good thing.
Hillbilly Elegy author JD Vance meeting with Bannon about either joining the Heritage Foundation as a Breitbart ally or perhaps even becoming a Bannon-recommended candidate.
What is the source of this statement?
I’m just always going to think of the “Pepperidge Farm remembers…” guy when I hear about this dude.
Those were New Englanders, though!
I didn’t study in school, and now I work at a chicken plant, and I am mad that these people don’t speak English.
Gotta love the people in Pa. flying the confederate flag. That makes sense.
Gotta be a special kind of idiot to complain about being outnumbered by minorities when you live in a town that’s 95% white.
Did you mean racist?
Hmmm… I’ve mentioned before where I live. I’m in the city that the latino woman Salvador travels from for 45 minutes to get to work each day. I also grew up in Myerstown, which isn’t too far removed from Fredericksburg although quite a bit larger. We played Northern Lebanon in sports occasionally. I’m 100% familiar with everything in this article. I live here.
I think it captures the nuances of this area rather well. I also think the posts so far are overlooking the fact that Heaven isn’t raging at this, she’s trying to understand it, wants to be accepted, and has a language barrier that prevents it, same as the latino folks are not being encouraged to learn english by the plant owner and thus helping perpetuate a divide in the workforce.
What’s happening in Lebanon County right now is something that happened here in Berks County awhile ago. People are becoming more integrated with other races, and specifically latinos with whites as we have had a large influx of latino population here for quite a long time now. Berks is like ten or twenty years down the road from where Lebanon County is now. The mushroom plants drew them here to Berks first, but now there are more and more of those type of “dirty jobs” that have sprung up because it’s good land for farming and for chicken farms, etc. These are jobs that white people in this area prefer not to do, but latino people are doing because it’s the work they can get that pays enough to live.
This is not a simple problem to solve, and judging by the article, both sides are trying to solve it, but don’t know how to do so. Yes, there are racist angry people that live in this area, as there are in every State in the union right now. We’re no different here than elsewhere IMO. If you live in a big city then you don’t see this side of it and you can’t understand it. I’m lucky enough to be kind of on both sides of it being a white guy in a border community between city and suburb that’s got every color of the rainbow living in it. Trump has exacerbated the difficulty of all coming together because he hates brown people and he makes it easy to choose the easy route. Hate.
The hard path is the one Obama chose, and it was working, until it suddenly wasn’t. The time was right for an ugly hateful white man to tell white people to stop working so hard to work together. The only bulwark we have against that is the hope that people are nicer at the core and eventually will come to their senses and realize that change is inevitable and you will have to fit in (both latino and white) or worse things will come.
All of this is part of what Putin wants, too. He’s not dumb. He knew that getting Trump in would aggravate this condition. He has succeeded beyond his wildest dreams.
Anyway, I could talk a lot more about the area she grew up in, how the school isn’t the best, folks don’t know what they don’t know, and on and on… but really, this all comes back to Trump. He’s the one that’s stoking the fire.
They could be celebrating the Confederate highwater mark!
As a reminder: this isn’t a new or unusual phenomenon in the US. English-speaking poor folks have sometimes ended up with jobs in places where the majority of their co-workers speak something other than English for a long time.
It’s been happening so long as there have been places in this country where low-paying jobs are dominated by immigrants - which is to say, it’s been happening in places as long as this country has existed. A century ago those co-workers might have spoken Polish; a century before that, German.
Well, yes and no. I tried to see it like that, but there’s stuff in that article where she’s antagonistic toward the hispanics for not speaking english.
This stuff is on her. For that one part of her life, she’s being put into the position that a non-english speaker deals with for the rest of their time. And it’s hard, and she doesn’t like it.
Dave, for what it’s worth, the town where I went to high school here in North Carolina is very much like what you describe. There was a lot of manufacturing back then, namely furniture companies, but later as those moved overseas, poultry processing became a big employer. And … nobody wanted those jobs. Or at least, only a small minority of locals. Queue the late 80’s and early 90s influx of some South American immigrants to fill those slots. Initially they were from Guatemala, but that expanded later on to other countries as well. We aren’t talking about a large number of people either, but when the town is small, even a small influx of something new tends to shake things up.
And it was a process. Initially, there was the anti-immigrant sentiment. Later it turned into acceptance, and by now, there is a small community as part of the town that has made America, and that small town, its own.
I don’t throw shade at people in that situation, no matter how easy it may be to label them as rednecks or racists and move on. Because they are not. They are trying to learn how to live and work side-by-side with people they don’t know, and cannot understand.
It would be so much better if the entire country were more understanding of -legal- immigrants coming to this country for work. But changing perceptions is hard, and I fear that voting block is simply getting bigger, BECAUSE we don’t have leaders that talk about inclusion, and acceptance.