Sign the petition on change.org for a guillotine emoji.
America is a big place with lots of different employers so your statement really isn’t valid. Plenty of people get a decent amount of vacation even at lower wages. Certainly not enough which is why we need to keep fighting for worker rights. Sorry but statements like yours really make my ass itch because you’re using our suffering to prop yourself up when I’m sure you’ve got plenty of problems in your own country that you remain apathetic and inactive about every day. You’ll probably want to reply that you’re just trying to show some kind of sympathy but that’s not ever what it comes across as when anyone tries to speak about the lives of people living in a different country.
Things will never improve if we don’t point to something better and aspire to it.
It’s why Canada sucks so much. Every time one of our problems is being talked about, everyone compares ourselves to the US and shrugs. When you point to something better it’s unattainable, but at least we’re not as bad as america!! We’re a country of apathy.
What’s the point of this whole platform if we’re not exchanging experiences?
I know there there was a feeling by some back on Reddit that Europeans like pissing on the US without self-reflection. Maybe that is partly true, but you also don’t read any of the self-reflections because chances they are in our native languages.
But for me personally I have considered moving to the US as a skilled worker, which if possible is a privileged position to begin with. I’m in a field that pays much better in the US so I am still envious of colleagues in the US making 1.5 to 2 times what I do. But I just don’t love my job. I’m pretty good at parts of it, but I hate (read: am bad at) some other necessary parts of my job. So in the end my career options are somewhat limited. So yeah, there is probably a degree of cognitive dissonance involved.
Here is a list of things wrong with the Netherlands, just to balance shit
- Dutch childcare benefits scandal: Government falsely accused vulnerable citizens of fraud, leading to children being placed out of the house, bankruptcies, and even suicides
- Youth minimum wage (though being phased out)
- Labour exploitation through flexible contracts
- Terrible working and housing conditions for foreign slaughterhouse workers
- Nitrogen crisis
- Housing crisis, partly because of demographic developments (fewer people per house, slight growth through immigration) but now also because of the nitrogen crisis
- The government basically forced hundreds of asylum seekers to sleep outside last summer because of budget cuts which are probably popular with a certain constituency
- Earthquakes crisis in Groningen because of natural gas extraction, with a government turning a blind eye to people who saw the value of their houses tank because of structural damage
And that’s before you get to all the things you could say for any developed western capitalist nation.
