I am still doing it the hard way but vastly preferring doing it for myself, instead of for ungrateful bosses that pay penny on the dollar for the privilege to ignore their employees and only ever do something to fix unfulfilled promises when people have already been burnt and it’s too late. I’ve heard again and again from peers that bosses only come round to shitty situations when good working employees threaten to leave and by then it’s too late.
This time it’s the bosses drawing the short stick and they are complaining like they are entitled to employees. You want people to stay? Make it happen, don’t whine.
I have been in management, I know what it takes. Man up.
Yes, you can! At least for a short time. I went to New Zealand on a working holiday visa. I did a lot of odd jobs there. I did fruit picking for about one month. First I thought it will be boring, but it turned out really satisfying. You can start optimizing each step of the process, shave down a few seconds here and there, finding better ways to do things. In the end, me and my girlfriend were in the top 5 five with some Japanese people (they are crazy fast), and on average we picked and packed 2-3 times more than the average.
I just want to point out some seemingly boring jobs can be satisfying.
I read a lot of horror stories about Amazon. It won't work with the current way, but that is a good thing. Amazon will have to upper their workplace standard otherwise nobody going to work there.
You just sign up in the system and choose a shift. Some jobs need an introduction and your account is cleared for them once you attended. If you meet a certain amount of shifts worked you get a t-shirt and preference at next-year-ticket purchases.
What you usually see is even the people with the menial jobs getting really into them as well. The ushers will experiment with new routing to make it faster, the people running the checkroom will optimize the hell out of it and have a competition with the next shift.. it's good fun.
This works because a) they want the whole endeavor to be a success, b) they are allowed to freely fulfill the roles and experiment, c) nobody in particular and everyone in total profits from the work done, d) you can pick up one shift or 20, it's up to you and surely a couple more.
I think it is possible to be passionate about packaging items for sure, but not like this. So I wouldn't say it's impossible to run society with UBI, but it will have to look quite different.
While there are many other factors here that I don't want to get into (such as loyalty being a two-way street and so on), I often wonder whether the idea of "this is not a hobby, it's a job" might have a bit of truth in it. At the end of the day, honest work is better than no work, and we all have to be adults at some point at start pulling our weight.
Would I prefer everyone to have UBI and work only if they want to? Definitely. But not everyone can be passionate about what they do (is anyone really passionate about packing items for Amazon?) and I guess sometimes you draw the short stick.