1y ago

GOP Lawmaker Laments Workers' Laziness In Hearing About Overtime Pay

www.huffpost.com Republican Chooses The Worst Place To Whine About Americans Not Working Enough

“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.).

76 comments

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.
- Somebody give the Grim Reaper another roll of quarters for the claw machine. Why stop at just Kissinger?
- She is an expert on laziness however
- ~~Grafting~~ Fundraisers and diatribes take a lot out of you at that age.

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.

- 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.

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 removed 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."

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."

"OK Boomer" is literally designed for this.

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.

No shit, that's why you have to pay them money to do it. An aversion to unnecessary toil is not a moral failing.
Sounds like this elderly woman is still pushing the American dream and welfare queen myths, echoes from political talking points of old.
- Yeah she pushing them because they still work on her dumb fuck boomer constituents.

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

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

Says the removed who tried to give herself a vacation in the form of a government shut down. Fuck alllll the way off

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 removedfest 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.

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.

Obama tried to do a similar move through an executive order near the end of his second term. My job at the time scrambled to give me a raise just above the proposed threshold. I declined and said I'll take the time and a half. Ibwas routinely working 60+ hour weeks at that time. Trump repealed that order early in his term, and I didn't get that raise. I left that job a few months later.

Boooo....oh shut up. Knew she looked familiar.

Why is politician even a career? It should be the lowest paying job.
- It shouldn't be a career, but it should also be paid relatively well.
  See, if you take away the pay, then only the very rich could ever afford to be politicians, and the very rich are not the sort of people you want in charge of a country...
  Case in point, this very article.
  Also, when you don't pay politicians, you end up paying them anyway through outright corruption. Which is already a problem, don't make it worse.
  The better solution is a consecutive term limit. You can be elected as many times as you can pull it off, just not in a row. You have to go spend a term in your home district every other term or so. So two on, one off.
  As a bonus, this two on, one off setup would result in a lot of turnover without forcing every single person in congress to learn how to be in congress every term.
  
  Case in point, this very article.
  But they are paid well. This happened anyway
- If you don't pay them well, only the wealthy can afford it.
- Maybe we should just have mandatory service and rotate through citizens at random every couple years like jury duty. Give me a N-week course on civics before they get started and let 'em do their best.

Great.....and what exactly does that have to do with people working overtime and not getting paid for it?
- I'm guessing she means "those lazy bums won't even work overtime without extra pay"
- Obviously, people who want to work would work for free. /s

Imagine taking 100k moneys to an investor. A year later you check in and they say "Great news, you have 100k moneys as of Jan 1st." You tell that person to piss off and you take your money elsewhere. They lament, "No one wants to invest anymore!"
If it doesn't pay to work, why be miserable AND poor? The next time you hear someone say no one wants to work just tell them to shut the fuck up.

People: Work overtime. Republicans: NOBODY WANTS TO WORK!!
- I like to whip this out everytime the "no one wants to work" line comes up. 😁

Oh yeah, I remember this repulsive bag of wrinkles. It's like Colonel Sanders and the Cryptkeeper had a love child.

What a bitter, delusional, hateful old lady.

I just can't wait for the day when all boomers are gone. Fucking ruined generations. (Not all are shit of course, just to be clear)

76 comments