Americans actually have a very strong affinity for authority. Most will put up with quite a bit especially for something they perceive as high paying.
Americans will put up with it even when they're not being paid. Probably more so. The security theater of the TSA is a perfect example of that.
No it isn't. It's not "lazy" to insist on working contracted hours. Americans are entitled to choose their workplace, and leave if it's bullshit; Having the economic success to be able to do this is another thing - that used to be handled through unions.
> We see similar arguments in the agriculture sector
It not the same argument, but in any case; How many agricultural workers have the insurance of going off and founding a startup?
In your mind, you are thinking of the 10-15% working in Silicon Valley as coders with people skills.
Also, are you talking about Americans, or workers on visas? It sounds like the latter, but I was talking about the former, i.e. American IT workers can keep wages/conditions up by choosing startups if things start to drop, in a way I doubt agriculture workers could.
I'm from Ghana, and from what I understand Ghana and a lot of other countries with these immigrants share the common theme that when people say they're "supporting their family/people back home", "family" is not the meaning that the IRS gives for a dependent, it's very literally everyone who's back home.
For example, decades after moving to the US parents still support dozens of family members back home, not just siblings, but their own parents, cousins, nephews, even people from the same village who aren't necessarily family. Of course on the flip side those are the people who rally together to get them to the US (at least that's how it was for my parents and some other family I've known). It's a support system where people who come to the US are then able to fund things like education that will bring the next generation closer to the standard of living they left to the US for in the first place.
I suspect to workers supporting "family" in that position who don't even have financial security for themselves wouldn't even dream of something like packing it all up living out of a van and bootstrapping their dream startup. In all the years it took my parents years to even get to something considered financially secure, they still had people counting on them back home, I can only imagine the position of those counting someone who just got here on a visa, often at considerable cost relative to what wages are where they come from, meaning they needed help from family.
Why they can't start a start up?
Well then there are reasons hard to understand unless you understand the socio-economic context in which a lot of people grow up in India. Not the kind of ones who you see come to US universities for higher education.
But there are a lot of other exceptionally brilliant people who come from poor families, to whom any opportunity is precious. Parents come from poor families typically from rural setting having worked often in hard conditions all their lives and made unbelievable sacrifices so that their kids can get some decent education and a shot at working at regular job that pays well. The kind of poverty I'm describing doesn't exist in US, so it will be hard for you to understand. Its not the $40K/year working-at-walmart/McD poverty. Its way worse.
Now when you look at this from the beginning to the end. Such people have to work on whatever opportunity they get, at whatever costs. No matter how hard they have to work. No matter how many extra hours/day they have to put, No matter how many weekends they have to show up at work. None of it matters. Because its all an opportunity so rare people before you didn't get.
Which is why I find names like 'yes-men' or the kinds used in some parent posts in this thread offensive. Unfortunately there are a lot of upper middle class Indian who themselves don't understand this.
Some people just don't have the luxury to make decisions they way others have.
If you are in a position to afford education in a US university, or quit your job and work on a start up. Or quit your job and do something else because your boss asked to you put in extra hours at work. You are already in a very different plane of luxury and will likely not understand why its not easy for others to do the same.
It most definitely does. In the US there is "working class poor" (the kind you describe with the $40k/yr McJob), and then there is _poverty_: lack of adequate housing (e.g. shanties with pest infestations), lack of adequate clean water (not just occasionally, either, but consistently), lack of adequate food ("food insecurity", which is a terrible description for "we go without one or more meals regularly during the week, and sometimes have to beg for charitable food from neighbors or food banks"), and so on. These folks also typically don't have access to anything like sufficient education. The notion that "third world style poverty doesn't exist in the US" is a great propaganda victory for the wealthy elite here, but it's just not true.
I think you misunderstand my post. I'm saying Americans can found start-ups more easily than immigrant workers.
This is a two sided coin where American companies have abused this and American workers see themselves as I've heard so many times: "temporarily embarrassed millionaires"
Our country has become the equivalent of a second generation family where the kids are all spoiled and the parents threaten to give our toys away to the poor kids down the street every other week.
The danger of criticising this behaviour is that it is putting the onus on the employee to earn their money rather than the employer to pay their employees. Doing so is actually anti-employee, and given that most of us are employees - self-destructive.
While I fully agree people should have some self agency to earn their wage, it is naive to think companies don't hold most the power in the employee-employer dynamic wrt salaries. When they can't force competition amongst applicants to drive down salaries, they simply move their operations to foreign countries to use cheaper migrant work. The migrants are happy to work hard because they're seeing an effective pay-rise so it's a win for them. It's also a win for the employer as they're paying less for work.
So the loser here is the domestic worker. On a personal level, how would you feel if I told you to work harder at a pay cut? In most professions, this has happened - wage inflation has not kept up with the economy in both the US and UK so people have seen their effective quality of life eroded over the past 20-30 years. Governments exist to protect their citizens from precisely this kind of exploitation by business. But protectionism and regulation have become dirty words nowadays...
...at the slave wage being offered.
That's the part they never mention.
Regarding lazy and entitled - I am envious when poverty there is considered eating fast food and using safe, air conditioned bus.
If you are taking these pragmatic decisions at least have some self-deprecating humour with it.
I have. It really tweaks me when people compare poverty in America favorably to poverty elsewhere.
Like it or not, the statistics show that poor Americans don't work very much, they are well fed, and they have living conditions that are not drastically different from the rich and are much better than most of the world.
Feel free to try and prove me wrong. But I'm willing to gamble that all you've got is anecdotes, no stats.
> You haven't offered an argument to "prove wrong."
Prove the assertion wrong then. You're the one who atagonised originally:
> leads me to believe you haven't experienced poverty in America
What you do when you link like that is make a "shotgun bullet-point argument:" you're presenting a set of loose, possibly related facts as though they're all mutually reinforcing studies leading to the same conclusions. There's no "there" there.
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I am not sure how many proud Americans who would sign up for those positions.