I have a meeting this morning in the city and sitting in an almost empty café in a shopping centre, waiting. While I have been here, there have been several app delivery people come and go, picking up coffees to take to clients. I am old-fashioned and judgmental, but I find the majority of the app delivery mentality to be pretty terrible. The workers are underpaid and in Finland are pretty much all visibly immigrants, who are unable to get work in any other area - even when they are educated and have experience. As I see it, it is a type of economic slavery that preys on their lack of opportunity. None of them do it because they enjoy it.
Consider that for a moment.
Many people would choose not to work if they could, but most people in Finland get some personal value from the work they do, beyond the salary and will even negotiate better conditions that meet their personal desires for work-life balance and reward. Yet, the same people will knowingly and willingly subject others to work the 12-hour days at a menial job for terrible pay, just to make ends meet. And then say, at least they have a job. And then make sure they don't have to actually talk or thank the person bringing the delivery, by having it left at the door.
It is pretty disgusting.
But I believe it fits into the model of the day, where selfishness and personal wants take precedence over a healthy society full of opportunity. Opportunity is only for those who can afford it and the system is designed to keep the majority from ever being able to afford it, by reducing their opportunity. By limiting opportunity, it forces people into situations that make it increasingly difficult to get out of. Yes, some do get out by a mix of work and luck, but most do not. And as it goes for immigrants, because they are put into a situation where they are not treated as part of the community or afforded the same opportunities, integration is even more challenging and unlikely. And then they get blamed for "not integrating" into society.
Can you blame them?
For an experiment on discrimination and taking away opportunity, it might be worth having a read of an overview of the Blue Eye/Brown Eye experiment by Jane Elliot, which segregated children based on the colour of their eyes, where the blue-eyed children were treated as inferior and the brown and green eyed as superior. Very, very quickly the children transformed. The brown-eyed were empowered, the blue-eyed become silent - and angry. While racism and discrimination was the point, what I think it highlights clearly is how quickly can be elevated or diminished by the way we are treated, and how rapidly entitlement or disenfranchisement can become the norm.
Most of us like to believe we have certain moral foundations that we adhere to, often portraying ourselves in a flattering light, but our actions rarely fully align. And then when it is convenient, we will forego our beliefs altogether as we use systems, products and social habits that support the very things we say we stand against. The economy is broken, but what spending habits highlight is what we actually believe. We are against child labour, while fast fashion sales boom.
I heard once from a person here on this platform a long time ago, that he sees prostitution as a form of charity, including underage children, because it might be the only way the family can get income. That is not charity. Charity would be giving the money to the girl or family without getting anything in return except for perhaps a charitable feeling. It is disgusting. Yet, it is an extreme that highlights the type of entitlement that those with, have over those without. People like Epstein are even more extreme in this kind of this behaviour. But a killer is a killer, whether they kill one, or one thousand.
We like to fall back on a position that in order to be successful, people need to overcome adversity, but rarely take into consideration the types and levels of adversities amongst people. And then we will cite those who have overcome adversity as proof, without recognising the millions of people in the same situation, that couldn't overcome the challenges. The difference between those who succeed and those who fail, can come down to dumb luck.
Ultimately, I think that if a country such as Finland wants to improve its overall success, it has to improve opportunity across the board and create a culture of development, not entitlement. Companies shouldn't be rewarded for paying their labour the least possible and if a business model can't sustain itself and pay a fair wage, it isn't sustainable. This is why tipping culture is so insidious, as it allows for a business model to essentially double-dip into customer pockets to stay in business and push the risk to the workers, and the guilt on the customers.
But it isn't just about work opportunity that creates the inequality, it is all areas of the culture that would need to improve. What has been lost is the sense of community and the "all in this mess together" mentality that helps people not only improve their own situations, but help to improve the situations of others, and therefore the community as a whole. The "only in it for me" mindset is what takes the cheapest product wirthout considering the supply chain slavery involved. The one that says "at least they have a job" when supporting business models that take unfair and coercive advantage of their workforce. We could do better, couldn't we?
But many feel entitled enough, not to have to.
Taraz
[ Gen1: Hive ]
Be part of the Hive discussion.
- Comment on the topics of the article, and add your perspectives and experiences.
- Read and discuss with others who comment and build your personal network
- Engage well with me and others and put in effort
And you may be rewarded.
My brother in law has a full time job, but he started doing Door Dash on the evenings and weekends when he has the spare time to help pay for stuff for his girls so they hopefully don't have to end up with insane student loans and stuff like that. He lives in a pretty populated area outside a big city, so he claims to do pretty well for himself. I don't know if he could do it as a full time job though. Maybe. I'm sure every region is likely different though. I actually think there are a lot of good jobs out there that people could be filling, but the somehow feel it is beneath them.
I think as a second job, it would be alright. I have a friend dating a guy who works full time at it as he can't get any other work, and he does insanely long days and gets less than working in a supermarket stacking shelves. But he can't get that job.
After a couple decades of poor government decisions, the unemployment rate is about 12% (worst in EU) in Finland. It is terrible. The response for the government is to offer more tax breaks to companies that are continually hiring less and less people.
He can't get that job because he is an immigrant or something else? It's also okay if it is none of my business.
Immigrant and Finnish isn't good enough.
Ugh, yeah, that sucks. I personally feel like there are a lot of jobs that immigrants would be happy to do, but others feel are beneath them (or other reasons like you mentioned), so why not let them do the work. It's better than leaving the position unfilled.
Delivery driving apps take advantage of people who do not understand the math behind the job. It takes a vehicle, gas, insurance, time and risk to do deliveries and one accident or repair can take them off the road for good. I worked as a delivery driver for a while, using my own car, and I would NEVER recommend this type of work for someone who wants to get ahead and actually earn a living wage. It's a hard way to make an easy living.
I don't know anyone who can earn a proper living wage on it. The people doing it seem to live, but their quality of life and living conditions don't seem to be anywhere near the local average.
I get your point discriminating on any superficial factors like skin color or eye color, etc is wrong and in my opinion dumb.
But delivery and Uber type jobs are going to be in the first wave of the jobs to be eliminated by robotics... There are already pilot projects for both...
Yep. As I have oft mentioned, everyone is going to get replaced, some sooner than others. What does the world look like then? Schools, restaurants, shops, gyms... Who is there?
Well we are mostly doing busy work as humans, might as well not do anything and let the robots do what is needed...
invisible chains.. funny that the blue-eyed were the inferior ones.. dont tell hitler that..
It was actually based on nazi experiments. I think with the kids, the next day they swapped roles. Again, very interesting. She also did it with adults later, tears and fistfights.
None can deny that app-based convenience out-n-out relies on absurdly exploiting vulnerable workers, who more so less lack better opportunities, lacking community responsibility and support.
You're right that opportunity belongs to those who can afford to reach for it. We love the stories of people who overcame everything, but we rarely ask about the thousands in the same situation who didn't make it.
Hmm, no matter how we want to look at it, human will still marginalise and take advantage of others. Whosoever has resources will certainly control those who have not whether directly or indirectly. Such is life anyway, those immigrants if their country is so good maybe they won’t have found themselves in such circumstances. Although, human will immigrate for several reasons. All that can be said is there humanity should be first in everything will do and always put ourselves in other shoes.
Just a random thought: Maybe the saddest part of life is knowing that some days can never be lived again.
it is wild how easily people detach themselves from the human cost of a service just because the transaction happens through an app
LoL I was very clumsily trying to allude to exactly that in my comment on your other post XD
I remember when I was at uni some students pulled the blue eyes/brown eyes experiment (from memory trying to force people to confront systemic problems that they either wouldn't know about or wanted to ignore/downplay because it didn't affect them personally), they blockaded one of the main thoroughfares and if you had brown eyes you could go through and if you had blue eyes you had to take the "long way" round (it would add all of five seconds to the trip for an able bodied individual and slightly longer if on wheels, crutches or generally unfit as it involved going down and up a ramp). They were also drama students so really played it up by having the "border guards" being really angry and stern and not quite getting in your face as they were checking your eye colour and a bunch of blue eyed "rebels" "tied" to a post yelling about how all eye colours are equal. I knew most of the drama crew so when I talked to some of them about it later they were saying how they made some of the blue eyed people cry when they had to walk around, if not re/traumatised from something (something that was only just starting to enter our radars way back when) the general consensus was it was the first time they had ever been confronted with discrimnination in their lives.
I have known some people who say this genuinely believing it to be a good thing, and they also anxiously keep supporting terrible business practices and shrilly scream about how but if they don't support it then those people in awful conditions would have nothing at all (and you cannot explain the voting with your wallet thing to them when they fervently believe that they're doing a good thing, and worse still it's everywhere so hard to avoid).
Posted via HiveSuite
Everyone is a slave, one with more money, one with less money