Comment Re:Less "Worked-Hard" (Score 1) 104
Except as labor standards drop, your choice is another job that does the same thing. About 17% of American workers don't have fixed hours or guaranteed workdays, which makes planning for work/life balance a farce, and the old standby of getting a second job to make ends meet is impossible.
73% of young Americans live paycheck to paycheck, 20% of whom have no savings at all and many of them have to spend 50% of their income on housing. This means they don't really have the ability to quit their job and look for another job where working conditions exceed the minimum legally allowable standards. Which is why legally enforced minimum standards are important. We need those young people to step up and start making babies.
Fertility rates have dropped in the US from roughly replacement (2.1 children/woman) to a catstrophically low 1.6. The US population would already be contracting were it not for immigration. Now a lot of this is social changes -- women choosing to delay childbearing to start a career. But consider South Korea, which has the lowest fertility rate in the world at 0.8. They're a much more conservative society than we are so it's not changes in attitudes that's driving that. The reason their fertility rate is so low is that they take people in their prime childbearing years and work them like dogs, in return for little prospect of economic security.
Don't you think if those young Koreans would quit their job and choose a higher paying job that gives them more leisure time if they could?
When I started working in the 1980s, getting your first job was like stepping onto an escalator that would carry you up to higher economic status. It's not like that now for the youngest generation of workers; it's more like stepping onto a treadmill. When we start to look to that generation to replenish the US population, our fertility rate is going to sink like a rock. The only way to keep the country running will be to open the immigration floodgates.