Newest coworker is oddly elderly for his position, which is entry level laboratory stuff. Pressing a button on a machine and writing down the results basically. He’s nice enough and friendly. Not great at his job but he’s only worked for about two months so that’s natural, plus again he’s on the older side, at least late 60s or early 70s.
Just learned today that he was retired, he’s on a pension, and he knew the owner from some business connections or something. Owner invited him to spend time at the company a few days a week. Dude is cosplaying as a worker. He doesn’t even have experience in this role, he was an accountant or something for a similar industry, then management for decades, and now he’s doing grunt laboratory labor for fun or something? What the fuck is going on
Dude I’m super glad you can have a job out of boredom. Some of us have to work for a paycheck and pay rent. Really glad that your retirement is so unfulfilling you can mingle with people who have student loan debt. Really cool that you can use the workplace as your adult day care so you don’t have to spend time with your wife or grandkids.
I don’t know how to feel about this and it’s instantly made stuff super awkward. I’m upset at his mere existence. Like my workplace is a soul erasing facility where I begrudgingly drag myself so I have healthcare and an apartment. This guy has a pension and Medicare and shows up with his thermos and steel toes like “hello fellow proletariat”
Edit: ok to be clear, this guy in his own words, plus the testimony of other coworkers. He’s told me he’s materially comfortable, owns multiple houses, and has far more than enough money stay retired forever. He’s showing up at a job just to have something to do. Which wouldn’t be so off-putting if it were something more interesting but this is glorified data entry.
Like go volunteer at a shelter, dude.
This is kind of like the “continuing education” and many older PhD students. It’s a form of entertainment. Taken in isolation it’s not a bad thing at all. If you want to do something vocational or educational, glad you can do that. But when put into social context, this tends to mean a zero-sum displacement of some kind due to how academics is funded. A grant only has so much money. Should the person who doesn’t need a job get paid for a position that an undergrad needs and could develop from? If they become a volunteer, doesn’t that end up devaluing the labor price in aggregate (YES IT DOES)? Similarly, tuition is prohibitively expensive and financialized in the US, yet seniors get substantial subsidies so that they barely need to pay anything to take 1 or 2 courses at a time. While this does not need to be zero sum at the national level (tuition could be abolished with the stroke of a pen), it is often state or locally funded, which means hard trade-offs. Every state dollar spent on “continuing education” is one stolen from a school free lunch program and state-level austerity is constantly implemented while retaining these programs. It is a dramatic juxtaposition of priorities, particularly given how many people struggle.
I also have yet to meet anyone in this kind of situation that isn’t fundamentally a scab.
I don’t like this “taking our jobs away” mentality. Free school lunches, and tuition waivers, and jobs are limited only artificially. There’s no shortage of food, and there is always work to do, and there is mostly enough space for students, it’s just that the system is designed to starve kids and to keep 5% of people (mostly minorities) unemployed.