[fbonetti]

Adults are capable of deciding risk/reward factors when selecting a job. There are many jobs that are well known for being grueling, and yet people still sign up to take those jobs because they value the compensation more than other considerations.

[Barrin92]

In many regions Amazon and other large retailers with similar conditions are some of the very few employers left to even offer a decent income, to the point where local governments are groveling in front of these companies.

The classism of the managerial tech class is always on pure display in these discussions, because contrary to developers who can pick and choose their workplace in some free competitive market, unqualified blue collar workers are often more or less forced to work under these conditions if they even want healthcare or be able to send their kids to a decent school.

If healthcare and education was free like it is in other developed countries and not employer bound you could make the argument that they're free to work another job instead. In the US it's a facetious point.

[malandrew]

> In many regions

Then move. It's not hard. I've moved for better work five times in my life with nothing but what fit in two suitcases four of those five times. This includes moving from one country to another twice. In two of these five cases I knew nobody where I was moving to, In one I knew exactly one person and in two I knew just a single family. Both my parents did the same when they came to the US. They came alone and knew nobody in the US when they moved here.

[Barrin92]

Moving in the US virtually provides no wage premium for non-college educated people any longer. This is largely the consequence of breakdown of what would be considered 'good jobs', over the last twenty to thirty years.

"As the geographical pattern of work has shifted, so has that of wages. Economists have long acknowledged the existence of an urban wage premium: workers in more densely populated places earn more, in part because of the productivity benefits of crowding together that nurture urban growth in the first place. This pay premium used to hold across the range of skills. In 1970 workers without any college education could expect to get a boost to their earnings when they moved to a big city, just as better-educated workers did (see chart). Since then the urban wage advantage for well-educated workers has become more pronounced, even as that for less-educated workers has all but disappeared.

[...]

Most jobs in the first two of these categories are located in cities, open mainly to holders of college degrees and decently paid (frontier work is particularly lucrative). Only the last-mile jobs are occupied disproportionately by workers without a college education. They are better than nothing, but only just. Both wages and the quality of such jobs are typically low, which is just as well, since they are unlikely to avoid the creeping tide of automation for very long."

Bifucration of the economy, automation and the shift towards ever increasing knowledge sector and endemic housing shortages have largely destroyed the benefits of moving towards economic clusters for uneducated workers. This is not a solution in this day and age, it's a romanticised fiction. It may have worked for mom and pop who came to the US with nothing else but their clothes, but this is history. The world today is a different one, and it has largely left this segment of the population behind.

https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2019/01/10/t...

[malandrew]

Then move to another country. You can live a pretty leisurely life in China just by virtue of being a native English speaker.

I knew many expats there with no college education, teaching for a mere 16 hours a week. They were given housing as part of their contracts and they earned enough to eat out every meal of the weeks if they so desired.

With just 16 hours of work per week, you have plenty of time to learn a new skill and better yourself.

Being a native English speaker is one of the greatest privileges one can have in this world. It's usually a foundational skill for succeeding in many of the best jobs in the World.