“There’s just a lot of people in this country that don’t want to work, period,” Rep. Virginia Foxx said during a hearing about people who work too much.
House Republicans held a hearing Wednesday throwing cold water on President Joe Biden’s plan to give more workers overtime protections.
Even though the hearing was about employees who work long hours, the GOP chair of the House Committee on Education & the Workforce took a moment to argue that too many Americans don’t want to work at all.
“There’s just a lot of people in this country that don’t want to work, period … and want other people to take care of them,” said Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-N.C.).
This woman has worked in politics for nearly 30 years. She has no idea what work even is anymore.
Yeah, but see: she worked incredibly hard to
- defeat hate crimes prevention legislation
- prevent extending disaster aid to Kathrina victims
- prevent the expansion of the Voting Rights Act
- prevent the Armenian genocide from being declared a “genocide”
and she firmly stood her ground in telling everyone that Obamacare was a danger to the nation bigger than any terrorist attack on America ever could be.
That’s a lot of hard work, you see?
She’s working hard to please her corporate masters. Dance, monkey, dance!
It’s “showing up for a paycheck”
Just another reason to add term limits.
Give politicians minimum wage, the worst publicly available healthcare plan, dorm style living, prison food and 40hrs of mandatory office time and no overtime for floor time and they will all start singing a different tune.
They need to really walk in someone else’s shoes so they understand what’s really wrong in America.
Tie their pay to the median income for their district. Give them a direct incentive to increase the quality of life for the people they represent.
They don’t make their money in salary. They make their money in investments, kickbacks, and donations.
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I mean, we would have to start by making it illegal.
Little column a, little column b. Just cuz they make more money from being a shill doesn’t mean their salary is peanuts. Anyway, as long as we’re gonna crack down on politicians, give them the same rules as athletes in the NCAA: can’t make money off your position or image or else you’re out. Fire anyone who gets money from anything other than their salary or mowing the lawn.
Yes, tie their salary to the median income of their district and tie their insurance to what’s offered in their district. Finally, have them fined student loans and medical bills that match the averages of their district. Same people who say no free lunch? Guess what, pay for all of your own meals, no gifts, no per diem, get our politicians off welfare. Bootstraps and all that.
It’s not that their salary is peanuts, it’s that their salary is peanuts compared to what they make on the side. More than half of them are millionaires, and none of them got that way on a government salary.
I’d clutch my pearls, but I can’t afford any… *Grips bedazzled medical bracelet*
Part of that reason is that campaigns are so expensive and take up so much time that anyone wanting to run for higher office has to quit their job and probably donate a lot of their own money to help fund it. It keeps lower-income people out of office.
One solution I could see would be a stipend for anyone who got enough signatures to be on a ballot. That would still require the candidate to spend significant amounts of time campaigning to get those signatures, but they could likely still hold a job while doing it.
I’d prefer not to add another layer of “you live in a poor area so you don’t get shit” to the pile.
The point is that poor areas would drag down the lawmaker’s salary, so they’d be encouraged to properly support those areas.
Do you think the median wage for the rural part of Alabama could afford a shoebox in Washington DC?
Theres only three ways that would play out
Option 1: Representatives from poorer districts are literally homeless and dressed in rags, what a great look.
Option 2: Said representatives sell their votes to mantain any semblance of a dignified quality of life
Option 3: Only the already wealthy can afford to be in government
I wasn’t confused about the point I just think it’s a bad idea that won’t work and ultimately boils down to “you represent poor people, so fuck you.”
Nah, then you’re just gonna have even more people run for office who are independently rich. They’re already loaded so they won’t care about the minimum wages etc you proposed, they can afford what they want.
She is an expert on laziness however
perhaps it is so common because it’s true. I know I don’t want to work. And I even like my job and get paid plenty. I just have things I would rather do with the time, and noone wants to pay me for those.
We aren’t supposed to be working. Seriously. Members of hunter gathered tribes put in about 15 hours per week and a medieval serf worked about ⅔ of the year. Our lives are supposed to be filled with leisure time. We are our neurobiology evolved around having fun and doing the minimum necessary for the survival of our community. We aren’t supposed to be spending huge swaths of our life toiling to make someone else rich so they can have 100% leisure time. We aren’t supposed to live in persistent existential dread because we are one sniffle or broken bone away from homelessness. We aren’t built for our world.
Definately agree were it a choice between working and a life of leisure, I’d choose the latter.
That’s not the point of this article though - GOP rep. “Nobody-wants-to-work!!” in a meeting about overtime protections and unpaid overtime.
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She lives in a gerrymandered district that not only means she barely has to campaign or work, her district strategically cuts chunks out of two very blue NC cities.
Fuck her lazy incompetent ass and everything she stands for.
Source: my vote is specifically suppressed by her district.
These fuckers will make up anything with no data to back it up to whine about “laziness” when nothing short of abject slavery is what they want— and even then, they’d still complain.
“They sure don’t make slaves like they used to! Last batch of imports were dead on arrival from UPS. And the ones that we DO have want food. Like EVERY. DAY. I gave them food last Christmas, which I don’t REALLY have to do, mind you, but I’m all Christian Holy and shit, and they still just bitch and whine that they need food daily. Bunch of entitled freeloaders.”
“But Bob, you lost you last batch due to dehydration. You need to give them water every day, too.”
“There is a MOTHERFUCKING OCEAN only a TWO HOUR DRIVE from here. They have EIGHT HOURS A DAY they don’t work for me, but no, they just lie around napping.”
“But they are chained up and can’t drive. Besides, once the flies are living in their wounds, that isn’t napping anymore.”
“You sound like one of them liberals! Always spending brain power on an excuse instead of good, hard work.”
“OK Boomer” is literally designed for this.
Don’t we have a record number of people in the workforce and a really low unemployment rate?
Not to mention a lot of people with 2-3 jobs because pay is low.
Unemployment may be low, but a lot of those jobs are minimum wage and/or part time.
Yeah but we all hate our jobs so “no one wants work work” is accurate. We do it, but we wish we didn’t have to.
Anytime anyone says “Nobody wants to work anymore!” I always want to say, “Anymore? Nobody’s ever wanted to work. If people could just get paychecks and not work, the vast majority would definitely choose that over working. Congratulations on figuring out what everyone else has known since the invention of economics.”
That’s not entirely true. Work that’s fulfilling is something I want to do, and I would be willing to bet most people feel the same way.
Yes, but probably not as much as you work now, and definitely not overtime until burnout.
Is you got paid only for existing and you did something that now is called work, that “work” becomes something else: a hobby.
We all have hobbies but the vast majority of people don’t like to work.
She is the advocate of HR 1313. The bill that would allow insurance companies to charge more money to people based on results of genetic tests.
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Don’t underestimate the latent (and sometimes obvious) thread of eugenics in this country and it’s “leadership” class.
Surely this isn’t the same lawmakers that make 3x more money than the average worker while working 50% fewer days than the rest of the country….
And that doesn’t even take into account their “working days” where they do fucking nothing of value because they have interns and staff that actually do the work for them.
To be fair, congressional salaries are actually way too low. You can barely even afford to live in DC on the salary of a congressman ($174k). I make almost that much sitting in my boxer shorts fixing AWS issues. Most congressmen have to maintain two residences and if their home state is more than poverty levels of expensive then they’re kinda fucked.
It’s not hard to see how not paying our elected officials a wage high enough to live near their job could be an issue. Makes it way too easy to bribe them.
Or how about let stop thinking of federal politicking as a lifelong career that requires high pay. And besides the people getting bribed are the ones who have been getting bribed for years and are already independently wealthy because lobbyists know they are bribeable so raising congressional pay is no better than cutting a hig check to the wealthy again
It’s a complicated job that requires political experience, and being an effective congressman is essentially a full time job. If we don’t pay them well, then you’ll only have rich people in office because they’ll be the only ones able to afford being a congressman/senator/etc. As it stand currently, a lot of reps literally have to sleep in their offices because they can’t afford to live in DC.
I’m not a huge Matt Y. fan but this article summmarizes the situation pretty well: https://www.vox.com/the-highlight/2019/5/3/18311810/congressional-pay-salary-decline-andrew-hall
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Delicious irony coming from a politician. Their definition of “work” is tirelessly obstructing and shouting down the other side.
Be fair. Some of them tirelessly obstruct and shout down their own side.
I hope she gets that new respiratory thing going around. Fuck her and the horse that rode her in.
I’d feel bad for the virus
Just how much vacation time do lawmakers get?
Fucking loads
The House of Representatives has averaged 146.7 “legislative days” a year since 2001, according to records kept.2 That’s about one day of work every two and a half days. The Senate, on the other hand, was in session an average of 165 days a year over the same time period.
https://www.thoughtco.com/average-number-of-legislative-days-3368250
So they can shut the fuck up about people not wanting to work. And they get base salaries of $174,000 to not work half the year.
Can we collectively agree that the proper response to “nobody wants to work anymore” is “no shit” or “nobody ever did”?
People like Rep Foxx, they’ve got this image of an America gone by in their heads, of a nation made of calloused hands and workman’s coveralls, of nails and kneecaps, of fists and hammers, not necessarily hard-hearted, but with their egos safely tucked away behind the 6 inches of emotional boiler plate needed to sally the fuck forth into the wild blue bitchfest that is life.
Or that the vast majority of jobs that can be had are really not making the world any better. Like, we might actually have more resources as a collective species if nobody drove to taco bell or pac-sun anymore for any reason.
It’s not like we keep inventing tools to make work easier. The problem is capitalists then go, " Oh cool, now you can produce more."
Where is the data?
I don’t care about how you feel.
Says the bitch who tried to give herself a vacation in the form of a government shut down. Fuck alllll the way off
It’s always these out of touch assholes that claim people are lazy and don’t want to work. Naw fuck you. People want to get paid for their work you gasbag.
