Mine is retail work. Yeah I get it. You hate it. There isn’t anything that I hadn’t heard before about it by now that hasn’t already been said. Yup, people suck.
But on the same token, I don’t really appreciate the level people go to, to dissuade people from getting into retail work. Job is a job and income is income. You’ll need both of these things. I’ve learned that a lot of the time, people just happen to be employed by shitty stores that are managed by power-tripping people or maybe the team they work with are annoyingly incompetent.
Yet if you manage to find a store that’s worth working in, it’s worth it for however long you want to be there for. I chose to work for retail. I don’t mind the labor. I don’t want a sit-down desk job.
And yeah I work for a big company that has questionable values and has destroyed communities. But that’s really out of my control and because that I work for said company, does not necessarily mean that I agree with it or side with the corporate standards. If I wanted to, I’d go back to school and find something else to do.
And that’s what I advise people to do if they’re so tired of their retail job. Go back to school, it’s really all you can do other than go to trade school to get skills and branch into different careers. Just bitching about it all day is not going to do a thing. I used to be like that but all it does was just make me hate everything and there were a couple points where I could’ve gotten fired over it. It’s not worth getting fired over something you don’t really have an investment in.
Unions.
Generally I’m in favour of them. Workers need to have a voice in how the companies they work for are run. It’s far too easy for management to screw people over otherwise.
However, sometimes companies need to take drastic action that could have a high impact on workers. Unions can stand in the way of such change because “They are protecting their members”, but undermining modernisation or causing wages to be higher than necessary can destroy a company.
At that point everybody has lost.
But you live in a world where there are few union jobs, and the middle class has all but evaporated. We can’t afford to buy things because we don’t make enough money, so companies stopped making products for us. Brands no longer compete to create the best value for the customer, but to make the most short-term profit they can.
While unions may not be the best solution, it is clear the working class having a voice is a feature, not a bug.
I live in a country where ¼ to ⅕ of all workers are in a union, anybody can join a union and the current party in power receives major funding from the unions.
Maybe that gives me a different perspective.