<retract statement after like 10 seconds of googling>
Definitely not sure I’m right about anything I say about the history of the labor movement wrt other countries. World History AP was two decades ago and that is definitely leaking out of my head.
Yes, well, is the fact that we didn’t start the labor movement make the country with the largest GDP in the world somehow still excused from being crap at labor standards with no mandatory sick time, health care, holiidays, or paid parental leave acceptable? no. it does not.
The labour movement started with them pinko commies, who were basically everywhere. People have been making pro-worker noises since the invention of people profiting off other peoples’ work.
It’s getting less great for casual and “unskilled”/low paid workers around here too
I used to get a penalty rate for working Sundays waaaay back when supermarkets were first allowed to open on Sundays in my city. I don’t think that happens anymore, or the rate is lower now. I’m not exactly sure.
I got Sunday pay (and holiday pay) at the 2nd supermarket I worked at as well. The old timers got time and a half, but I got an extra $2 an hour. I would try to take every single extra hour on sundays when I could.
(none of that was a government thing, just something that store did to try to keep workers happy since they were the last non-unionized grocery store in town.)
Yeah I am not too sure of the current rates, I know the retail and hospitality industry want to reduce it even more, I am not sure if thats what happened on the 1st July. They were talking about it on triple J last month but I wasnt fully paying attention
This stuff is making me so grumpy too. My aunt (mother of 3, in her 30’s) got ripped off by some super dodgy practices at certain stores that I probably should boycott for the ethics but they also sell most of the stuff I need for my backyard
Hello folks! I’m doing an updated version of this for livestream on 4th of July next week.
Anything that you’d like to add that seems different about the US financial system vs other countries?
Especially given how…well…different, the world (and US administration) has become since July 2019.
Things that I have noticed have changed
US has finally adopted contactless payment technology, spurred on by concerns about covid, but signing is more common than chip + pin, and checks are still used
Parental leave in the US still isn’t here, and covid drastically negatively affected workforce participation by women in the US
The US temporarily created paid sick time for employees during covid, but not via mandate to companies but through the Unemployment Insurance system, which was an imperfect way to do it. It’s not permanent but many employers have implemented paid sick time due to public pressure
The US’s student loans are still a mess, but with payments suspended for a year, there’s looking at a different model - meanwhile, other rich Countries with Pay-As-You-Earn interest-free student loan programs have been dealing with cost overruns and have restructured their programs (Australia HELP program) or seen higher education costs rise (UK)
Health care in the US - well, so much has changed here, and yet nothing structural has changed - like many other things in this list, temporary covid federal spending has propped up some of the holes in the system but the US system is still…structurally unsound. Some evidence that the US’s fractured private health care system was able to acutely respond to strains on the healthcare system from Covid better than some countries with socialized medicine like the NHS, but we won’t have real studies on that for years
in Canada you ask for the person’s email address, and you can send it through Interac (an org that was created as a way for the big banks to agree on protocols and manage debit transactions) generally for no fee. in Europe I think you can share a number (or QR code? maybe it is an actual bank account number because that isn’t worrisome in how they’ve set things up?). But US has venmo and paypal and other stuff afaict, and it mostly skips the banks themselves?
Yea, we mentioned that in the 2019 episode but in the past couple years, actually, person-to-person transfer through banks has become more normal in the US (not as easy or normal as I’ve experienced in EU).
But it’s just at the individual banks deciding to implement it level. Some let you send to anyone, some let you only send to other members of the bank. In Canada you have WAY fewer banks than the US so it’s easier to standardize.
And all interbank p2p bank transfers usually goes through the US ACH system (same system checks go through), which is rather…antiquated and slow still (can take 2-10 days to show up). Some banks essentially “hide” the slow transfers from the client and make them immediately available, but that’s handwaving on their side.
