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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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[–] Guy_Fieris_Hair@lemmy.world 1 points 11 months ago

I am an American all aboard the "America has some serious issues" wagon, but dude not wearing ear protection was doing so against every single rule. If he got caught by the wrong person him and his boss would be in deep shit. Everything else you said is pretty accurate though. At least for big cities, the type of place tourists go. Just remember 90% of the country is not there. You visited the worst places in the country. It's still bad though. It is a dog eat dog country and very little help for the needy. The help that there is takes so many hoops to jump through that some people with any problems just can't do it and they don't have any advocates.