A lot of this is just "person who's had white-collar job for years doesn't get how difficult service jobs are", but making your already low-paid employees do unpaid overtime work is s-k-e-t-c-h-y, and actively illegal.
What's the solution? Mandatory severance for every job?
At the risk of opening a-whole-nother can of worms.... universal basic income.
Or, sitting at a desk for 8 hours a day is really, really easy compared to having to actually DO something at a service job.
Luckily, due to the "retailapocalpse" or whatever its called, soon virtually no one will have to labor under those conditions, because there will be almost no positions like that. Not that Amazon's warehouses are some kind of workers paradise.
I worked my way thru school in retail supermarkets roughly contemporaneous with the author's youthful experiences a couple decades ago. I see things have gone somewhat downhill since then...
> Not that Amazon's warehouses are some kind of workers paradise.
That said, if I was looking at the prospect of working in these shops long-term, I'd also be seeing what I could do to unionize the shop - they are a pretty crummy environment with abhorrent pay for anyone over the age of 16 (as the author points out).
I respect your optimism, but standard practice at big retailers for anyone who even breathes word of unionization is to fire them instantly. If that doesn't do it, they close the store. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Walmart#Labor_unio...
I'm actually impressed that we don't (yet) have a chorus of people saying he's overpaid or that he deserves it.
[1] Until now, I guess?
Apparently, Politico doesn't remove biographies of people they fire (he was fired two years ago).
(edited to add, reporting that the emperor has no clothes is not just a firing offense, but an economic death penalty, or if not an economic death penalty its at least incredibly harsh... I saw that fable as a theatrical play as a child, and have often thought the inevitable conclusion, as shown in this example, is more interesting than the play as portrayed.)
Which I don't think is racist. Presumably, he also could have said "they're men", or "they're middle aged", but would not have been accused of being sexist or ageist.
This while article adds weight to my opinion that the USA is not a civilized country. Sure, there are the trappings. But a society that can afford to, but does not, look after those on the margins, is not civilized.
If we banned people for life for saying dumb things, we would have no politicians, movie stars etc left.