I Build Cars For a Living. I Can’t Afford to Buy One.

My company bills 1h of my time to clients at roughly what I make in almost a week.

🤯 I'm sorry to hear that.

I'm curious, do you work on exotic / ultraexpensive cars?
- Haha no, I just work in IT (datacenter environment) so it's not as if I can start my own company to work with these clients.

I didn't realize this but Hyundai, Honda, and Toyota don't have unions. I thought all automotive workers in the USA were in unions!

I'm the only employee of my business, so I AM the union.

Ah, but you're also the boss. Tough break, those are gonna be brutal negotiations.

Toyota executives was greedy and didn't continue paying their workers fairly and now they are unionizing. They fucked around. Here comes the finding out.

It's so weird to see this. Where I live, unions are a default. It should become the norm everywhere, not just in northern Europe.
- In which country of Western, Central or Southern Europe are unions not a default? Don't know about Eastern Europe.

While everyone should be able to afford basic necessities like a vehicle and wages need to be increased across the board, the title is weird. You can work at a factory making a thing you can't afford and not have much of a problem with that. "I build cruise liners for a living. I can't afford to buy one." would be a strange statement.

Is this video about something only large corporations can afford, or is it about something that is necessary for lots of families to have and seen as normal to buy?
- Please reread my first sentence.
Mate, come on. He makes Toyotas, not super yachts. I think you're missing the point.

I don't think his view here is "anything that I have a hand in manufacturing, I should be able to afford".

That's not the point of this video, and it's not the mindset that anybody is espousing.
- As I said in another reply, fair enough. I just read it in a way that inferred something it seems other people didn't.

at 0:05: "I totaled a car last week and I can't afford to replace it". I feel like there is a bit of undue entitlement in that statement. Should any worker be able to comfortably replace a car that they destroyed?

I have no love for Toyota or any other mega corp, and I think the bigger issue in this article is the very first statement in the interview: "I spent three and a half years building cars and I can't afford a home yet". That is a big problem, but I wouldn't attribute that to greedy corporate employers exclusively.

I wouldn't attribute that to greedy corporate employers exclusively.

I would, maybe not exclusively but have you seen how much the investor class profit and hoard?
- I would
  
  But not exclusively.
  
  You can point the finger to individual and foreign investors, but also to government policies (or lack thereof) that make that possible.