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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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[–] essellburns@beehaw.org 4 points 11 months ago

Disclaimer, not an American. I'm answering with my perspective for what it's worth and because no one else has.

From what I'm able to see here, there's a lot of Americans who are doing absolutely fine. Many of them. Seems there's enough who are that the ones who complain about their unreasonable treatment don't have enough voice to change things.

It's true that every human society has rich and poor, the ones with abundance and those who struggle. The weird part from where I'm standing is that not every Human society declares itself the Greatest country in the world.

I wonder how much that kind of propaganda impacts on people's ability to see the flaws and make the changes. Seems many Americans don't even see the systemic problems there as problems. They see the people struggling as the problem.

When I hear stories of things like children who refuse to swear an oath of loyalty every morning being shamed and ostracised I really do fear for their ability to be honest with each other.