Comment by ura_yukimitsu
17 days ago
I really don't think it's fair to minimize someone's struggles just because their situation could be worse. Is only the most miserable person on the planet (by what metric anyway?) allowed to complain about their condition?
I also don't think it's fair to exploit people who are in terrible situations by pushing jobs we don't want onto them, pay them a handful of crumbs, and then say they should be happy with what they get because their neighbor who does another job gets half a handful of crumbs.
The women in this situation aren’t complaining. Very much the opposite.
Why the compulsion to paternalistically ‘protect’ everyone even to the point of making them unemployed? I assume they weighed their options and decided this was the best one. It sounds like you want to stop them from doing that?
Isn’t that the real minimization?
You're misrepresenting both what the article says and what I wrote.
The article explicitly mentions that the jobs aren't clearly labeled so they couldn't weigh their options beforehand, that concerns raised by the workers are being dismissed by management, and that several workers have developed mental health problems.
I'm not arguing that these women should be "protected" by taking their jobs away or that they can't make their own choices; of course they're weighing their options and deciding accordingly (the article even mentions that some of them decided to leave). But it's not unreasonable to critique a system where the only choices they have are all horrible in (often more than) one way or another.
I’m responding to the gp comment, which I thought was obvious