Two Valley cities among nation's hardest working !!!! (middle-class, sales)

[LBTRS]

Originally Posted by shiphead

I am your exception. I don't have the skills to be middle class or anywhere near upper middle class on one job alone. I worked two jobs because I had to. 40 hours a week is a cakewalk, try 100. The only way I could ever be in the middle class club was if I was walking Van Buren at night.

While you should be commended on your willingness to do what is necessary to survive, your posts illustrates the opposite point of what some are trying to make in this thread. Your need to work over 40 hours a week is caused by your lack of skills (as you yourself stated) required to make a higher wage, not because the area requires it of you. My point is that I'm glad there is the opportunity in the valley, for you and others who need/want to work more hours, to do so to get ahead or even to survive.

Your lack of skills in another area of the country may not pay you enough to be middle class but there may also not be the opportunity to find a second job to allow you to survive.

[kwhitegocubs]

Originally Posted by LBTRS

Hmmm...hard work not a good thing? I for one am glad that there is the opportunity in Phoenix metro for people to work the amount of hours they want/need to reach their goals. I'm also glad we have a population in the valley that is willing to work hard and not striving for the European model of vacationing more than they work.

I can't believe that there are people who believe this. Most people - based on surveys - either dislike their work or are not terribly positive about it. I'm lucky in that I'm moving to Phoenix to work in exactly the job I wanted to, but we work longer hours with less vacations than almost all developed nations. Is there something wrong with having a couple months to actually vacation? To enjoy life, visit the national parks, relax, and simply destress!?

I can only pray with most fervent desire that the European model of working to live (instead of working to death) finds its way to our narrowly materialistic shores.

[shiphead]

Originally Posted by LBTRS

While you should be commended on your willingness to do what is necessary to survive, your posts illustrates the opposite point of what some are trying to make in this thread. Your need to work over 40 hours a week is caused by your lack of skills (as you yourself stated) required to make a higher wage, not because the area requires it of you. My point is that I'm glad there is the opportunity in the valley, for you and others who need/want to work more hours, to do so to get ahead or even to survive.

Your lack of skills in another area of the country may not pay you enough to be middle class but there may also not be the opportunity to find a second job to allow you to survive.

You make it seem like I did it because of lifestyle choice,it was because I wanted to live it up. If not living in marysvale vs the east valley a lifestyle choice, then your f'in right I'll make that "lifestyle" choice. I rather pay 1/2 my check to rent then have my family harassed.

[LBTRS]

Originally Posted by shiphead

You make it seem like I did it because of lifestyle choice,it was because I wanted to live it up. If not living in marysvale vs the east valley a lifestyle choice, then your f'in right I'll make that "lifestyle" choice. I rather pay 1/2 my check to rent then have my family harassed.

While I am not quite following your post, I do think you misunderstood my post. I wasn't passing any judgement in my post, just stating that the reason you are working long hours is because you don't have a skillset that will pay you a high wage and you have the opportunity to work longer hours to compensate with longer hours to allow you to survive. You wouldn't have that opportunity everywhere in the country.

[cacto]

Originally Posted by LBTRS

Hmmm...hard work not a good thing? I for one am glad that there is the opportunity in Phoenix metro for people to work the amount of hours they want/need to reach their goals. I'm also glad we have a population in the valley that is willing to work hard and not striving for the European model of vacationing more than they work.

Being in one of the hardest working cities in the country is a positive in my book.

Working 60 hours a week is not a good quality of life. This study isn't something we should be bragging about.

[LBTRS]

Originally Posted by cacto

Working 60 hours a week is not a good quality of life. This study isn't something we should be bragging about.

Then don't work 60 hours a week and adjust your lifestyle accordingly.

[DetroitN8V]

Originally Posted by LBTRS

Then don't work 60 hours a week and adjust your lifestyle accordingly.

Or do neither. If you can't do so here, therein lies the problem.

[LBTRS]

People do not live in reality I see...it doesn't matter where in the country you live, if you don't have the skills/education/experience to get a decent paying job you're going to have to either, adjust your lifestyle to match your income, work more hours, or work on getting the skills needed to make a higher wage. At least here there is option number two, many places around the country you don't have that option.

I suspect we have a higher population in the area, due to the large Hispanic population, that are unskilled and work in landscaping, retail, food industry, call centers, etc. where minimum wage is the norm and it raises our average hours worked. These people have the three options I mentioned above and it is great they have the option to get more hours to make ends meet.

Way too many people think everyone, regardless of their education/sills/experience should be making a living wage.

[shiphead]

Originally Posted by LBTRS

Way too many people think everyone, regardless of their education/sills/experience should be making a living wage.

With this I wish there were apartments or homes restricted by income. No section 8. Why must the worst areas be the most affordable.

[kwhitegocubs]

Originally Posted by LBTRS

Way too many people think everyone, regardless of their education/sills/experience should be making a living wage.

Yes, in a country in which our GDP per Worker is $107,000, the idea of paying $25k or $30k to people who do productive, useful, necessary work is absolutely abhorrent isn't it? We must have a class of underlings who make the middle and upper class feel superior. If everyone was moderately well-off and comfortable in their lives, a real possibility given our national wealth, income, and infrastructure, then America as we know it would die! America is the land of fictional opportunity and back-breaking labor, consarnit, and we need to keep it that way! /s

We don't live in some starvation-driven dystopia, and there is no need for us to even countenance the kind of inequalities we have. I mean, I'm responding to a post by a man who applauds the idea that some people have to work 60 hours a week to not live in a slum, despite being one of the richest nations in the world at its richest epoch. Is this real life... or just a fantasy? Did you read The Jungle (or King Coal) by Upton Sinclair in high school and yearn for those golden years?

Not only that, but (as an example) roughly 90% of the studies of minimum wage in the U.S. and other industrialized nations have shown that the neoclassical economic assumptions about the negative impact of the minimum wage are unfounded. Even the very few (and, in one case, methodologically suspect) studies which show a minor negative correlation between higher minimum wages and employment ALSO conclude that poverty still decreases substantially from minimum wage increases. And yes, that is after adjusting for Cost-of-Living inflation.

In other words, this position is economic spite for its own sake. The "free market" is not some God to be worshiped, some alabaster statue that must remain unsullied by regulatory hands, but a tool for serving human needs and desires which often fails. The idea that the unskilled - who are overwhelmingly likely to have come from lower-income backgrounds themselves (a trait which is entirely unchosen) - must live in squalor or endless labor as Malthusian punishment for their supposed inferiority... is a destructive and useless conceit.

The fact that some tiny handful of people want to work 60 or 80 hours per week because they have a job they love or a business they run is no reason to support forcing tens of millions of others to work those soul-deadening hours against their will due to simple economic and social necessity. Yes, everyone who works - regardless of skill - should make enough to be able to force landlords to provide better housing than cockroach and bed-bug infested slums with failing A/C and intermittent water. They should make enough so that they can spend time with their kids and make them healthy meals (time is a big factor in junk food and microwave-food consumption). Etc... ad infinitum.

I also strongly oppose the idea that we (i.e. Society) should encourage or even allow some people to create a prisoner's dilemma of working hour competition, simply because those people have been driven by our shallow materialism to seek out gated houses and 50k cars (which do nothing that a 15k car could not). There is nothing natural or useful about it; it is merely the extreme end of the hedonic treadmill. We know from substantial data that people do not become happier the more money they make (Kahneman suggests about 32k per worker is the point where happiness returns become negligible), and yet seek out material purchases in the belief it will fulfill them or make them happier. And yes, a lot of it really is marketing; the creation of preferences which do not have a meaningful or positive end which flows from them.

We - in this country - have the resources and the manpower to end most of the poverty and iniquity around us, and yet we don't. We have the power to change our greed-driven and socially unproductive thirst for conspicuous consumption (what LBTRS was actually talking about with his "non-lazy" friends) and don't exercise it. It is maddening and depressing beyond the many words of this post.